Saturday
Sep172011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Stirling's excuses
Sep 17, 2011 FOI H/T to Hilary Ostrov for this CBC radio show about the University of Stirling/Philip Morris FOI story.
Lots of familiar excuses are given as to why the university should not have to reveal its data. Is anyone really going to be convinced by the argument that publication in peer-reviewed literature somehow is a reason for not allowing access to the data.
Well worth a listen.
Reader Comments (19)
The argument seems to be 'Will nobody think of the children?'
and that's it. Pathetic.
It's the F...g Freedom of Information Act gitface! If you don't like it, don't take public money. Simples!
So, if I go to see my National Health Service doctor and describe all my embarassing symptoms my neighbour can issue an FOI to see what we said because the doctor is puiblically funded?.
I wonder if he holds the same views when its Greenapce of the WWF that comes calling ?
Graphic Conception if the study is in any way any-good there will be no PERSONAL information in the data as its requested , if its full of information which can identify individuals its s a rubbish study in the first place.
My feeling is that they have already destroyed the data. They are just fighting to keep that secret.
Which UK university will be the first to offer a degree course in "FOI Obfuscation" grants will be available.
The next step. Start asking meta FOI questions. Request all the emails about the FOI request. Since you know the trigger, they will exist.
Ask about meetings and minutes aboiut FOI requests.
...
The simple answer could be that there is no data - everything was made up to fit the agenda.
@graphic conception
Complain to Tony Blair, whose government passed the legislation 11 years ago.
Academics, not being always blessed with the most far-sighted vision, are only just waking up to the fact that they are public employees like any other...and that the old Spanish Practices of concealment and obfuscation can no longer be sustained. However much they dislike it, they cannot simply say 'I am an academic' and claim special priveleges that others do not enjoy.
That they squeal like stuck pigs when finding out ths unpalatable truth rather than try to find ways to comply with their legal obligations like any other folk says more about the corruption, weakness and self-regard of academia than it does about any deficiencies in the law.
In a nutshell sir, you have the quote of the day
'Everything was made up to fit the agenda'
.
Certainly Stirling seems to have taken a number pages from the Acton-Jones book of "responding" to FOI requests.
Considering their "concern" for the children, I wonder if Stirling is prepared to release the consent forms they must have obtained from those whose voices were heard in the interview clips aired on the program.
Graphic conception - get in first, file one on your neighbour. Please report back how it goes!
to misquote the Blair-Brown govt - if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. If you need to hide it then you are a terrorist...FACT
the sheer arrogance of Huhne:
17 Sept: Daily Mail: Crippling energy bills are YOUR fault, says Huhne as he claims families could treat themselves to a mini-break if they shopped around
Huhne's ex-wife (and THOSE penalty points) come back to haunt him at Lib Dem conference
Mr Huhne claimed families could treat themselves to a £300 mini-break if they constantly bargain-hunted among energy companies: ‘They do not bother. They frankly spend less time shopping around for a bill that’s on average more than £1,000 a year than they would shop around for a £25 toaster,’ he said.
‘If they got that in perspective and said, “OK, we are going to spend a little bit of time shopping around,” they could save very substantial amounts of money’...
The stealth levies, introduced to fund Britain’s investment in wind and solar power, are costing families an average of £200 a year – two-thirds of the amount the Cabinet Minister said they should be able to save.
This represents an increase of between 15 and 20 per cent on the average domestic power bill. The money is being used to help fund the building of 10,000 wind turbines and the proposed installation of £7 billion worth of smart meters in homes...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2038678/Crippling-energy-bills-YOUR-fault-says-Huhne-claims-families-treat-mini-break-shopped-around.html
Cute anecdote about sharing information for a Saturday evening or Sunday morning.
In the mid 1960s, there was a big push in molecular biology to work out the mechanisms of translation: the step in which the ribosome translates the sequence of a messenger RNA (mRNA) into protein using tRNA as the decoding molecules. Many labs were using artificially synthesized RNA for their experiments, and some of the basic mechanisms had been worked out. However, nobody had been able to purify a single mRNA, making experiments using natural messengers impossible.
A breakthrough came when one lab isolated a bacteriophage (bacterial virus) whose genome was RNA and functioned as a mRNA. Essentially, all one had to do was to grow the virus (easy) and extract the RNA from the virus (also easy). Obviously, everyone and their cousins wanted the virus, but the principle investigator refused to give it out, even after publication (something frowned upon by the community).
So one lab wrote to the PI with a request for a sample of the virus. In a few days, they received a letter back politely stating that they were not distributing the virus at that time. Well, this was way before email, so somebody in the lab cut up the corners of the rejection letter and was able to culture the virus from the letter. The lab responded with a letter thanking the selfish PI for sending the virus. They also sent it out to anybody who asked for it.
I thought when I heard this story that it could be an urban legend, even though I heard it from a reliable source (a grad student of Watson). However, when I told the story one time over a few pints, one of my older friends said that the story was true: he had been working in the lab that requested the virus.
Molecular biologists, particularly the old timers, have been on the forefront of open science and data/strain sharing. Even now, most researchers make their all models freely available once the paper has been published. There has even been a concerted effort to develop SBML (systems biology markup language) which allows exporting and importing of models across different computer languages and platforms. Such efforts to keep science an open endeavour has deep roots in the molecular biology and bacterial genetics communities.
Cheers
Nice story RandomReal. :)
Yes indeed. DNA/RNA is information - anyone running PCR can tell you - once an amplicon contaminates your lab - its everywhere, it sticks to everything.
I read a big fat book about how biology scientists in the 70s and 80s were so worried that they would play around with nucleic acid, create a 'superbug' accidentally, which would destroy the world. How naive we were, to imagine we would create something nature hadn't done the general likeness of, before.
For many years I sat on a board that considered the ethics of clinical research proposals. Confidentiality of the identity of individual subjects was always assured when the results were made public. Protection of the privacy of the subjects in any study was considered very important. It seems to me that the questions and the data from questions and questionnaires should be publicly available but great care should be taken that any individual subject can not be identified from the raw data. This standard should apply whether dealing with adults or children and with publication or FOI responses.
Graphic Conception
It is not about the patient. It is about the Doctor who said to the patients that according to the Doctor's research, everyone has health problem and should therefore pay through theirs noses for proper cure. The patients have the right to ask for and verify the Doctor's research data before complying. It is not a simple matter of trust me because I am a Docotor.
In the Climate field the Scientists are behaving as if they have something to hid, be it the presence of "doctored data", poor analytical method or lack of data.
It is understandable for Climate Scientists to err in statistic but it is quit another to argue and smear mathematicians who points out their error.
Climate science is being used to justify measures that affect lives in unpresidented scale. Transperance is all we ask. What is so unclear?
Although I hold no brief for Stirling, or for academic double standards on FOI, it is worth noting that anonymising personal data is much harder than is commonly believed. Read the first 25 pages -- and weep.