http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35229

There was no reason to carpet bomb the issue. Your point was made when you referred to the destruction of primary data as a “minor blip”

What about apparent attempts to avoid freedom of information requests?



In some emails, Jones – who has stepped down pending a review of what went on – discusses ways not to fulfil requests made under the UK’s freedom of information laws. In one, he calls on other researchers to delete certain emails. While on the face of it this does not look good, whether any researchers broke any laws or breached any university guidelines remains to be determined.


In other cases, however, it is clear that researchers could not comply with freedom of information requests because they did not have the right to release all the data in question. There is also no doubt that climate change deniers have been using freedom of information requests to harass researchers and waste their time, with the CRU receiving more than 50 such requests in one week alone this year.


What’s more, individual researchers have little to gain from giving away data and software they have spent years working on. Scientific careers depend on how many papers you publish. If you keep data to yourself, no one else can publish papers based on it before you do.


This does not mean researchers should be allowed to hold onto their data. It is undoubtedly in the public interest for there to be full disclosure of the measurements upon which climate scientists are basing their conclusions. In fact, much of it is already freely available. But the pressures climate researchers are under does help to explain why many are so reluctant to make all data public.

Alright, I would agree that your possible motives might have some merit, but that you hasten to add you are not convinced that anyone hid anything is baffling. So all of these revealed Emails and their content is fabrication? Who is taking the leap here?

Personally, there needs to be a thorough investigation from an unbiased party, if there is such a thing. If such a thing took place it is no less scandalous for not being politically motivated as you might suggest.

The establishment outed Hwang Woo-suk for his fraudulence. It will be interesting to see what happens in this case. Stem cells are just as politically charged.

I would challenge you to point out how anything like this is happening with, say, the work of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (www.evoinfo.org).

Given its mathematical nature, there isn’t much room in the EIL for bias in gathering or interpreting data — not that you or Dr. Marks would be guilty of such anyway. If somebody were to apply EIL concepts to real-world phenomena, it’s in the modeling of those phenomena that fudging could occur.

BTW, congratulations on the publishing of the paper from the October conference. I applaud your forthrightness in footnote 12. I have a question regarding the section in which that footnote is found (IV.B): You seem to be defining the term intrinsic target as an outcome to which a given process is biased, eg Conway’s evolutionary endpoints. Am I reading this correctly?

Since every non-uniform distribution is biased to some subset of the sample space, it would seem that every non-uniform distribution has an intrinsic target and positive active information. And since this paper makes it clear that intelligence is the source of active information, it would appear that every non-uniform distribution has an intelligent source. Is that the position of the EIL?

I would hope so. Since bad science has permeated each of these areas with its false implications, why not have the objective of interdicting the bad science that has this effect. If one is logical about this and replaces bad science with good science then one would expect this as a consequence. It would be one of the expected results or ridding the world of bad science.

I doubt the ID community has a single view about global warming and humanity’s role in it. What many of us in that community have a problem with is the abuse of science to further political ends, which we find exemplified both among proponents of Darwinism and among proponents of AGW.

[emphasis added]

Does this mean that ID has abandoned one of the twenty year goals as outlined in the Wedge Document?

To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

[emphasis added]

-DU-