Sunday
Sep092012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Replicating Lew
Sep 9, 2012 Climate: Sceptics One of Anthony Watts' readers is attempting to replicate the Lewandowsky survey study, an interesting development in my humble opinion. Details here.
Also fascinating is Steve McIntyre's dissection of Lewandowsky's results.
Reader Comments (81)
I think that Geoff is very brave indeed to venture South of the Channel.
By now, after nearly fifty years of runaway global warming it must be approaching furnace levels by now in those parts.
And presumably completely depopulated as all of the inhabitants have joined the 500 million climate refugees that we are assured are teeming around the few remaining relatively cool parts of the planet.
Are there any damp parts of the Mediterranean left, or has it all completely dried to an arid wasteland by now?
Typical footbloggers - always complaining.
They also serve who only sketch and wait.
And where’s the script you promised for the scene where Moonbat in his lair sees off the hordes of crazed oil-funded astroturfers?
Those who are following the Lewpaper debate may be interested to know that Adam Corner has now posted a response to the questions I raised, on his Talking Climate blog.
Basically, everything is the fault of the Guardian or Prof Lew - nothing to do with Adam.
Yes Latimer - I wonder if they have climate activists in places like the Med & Florida.
It must be a bit soul destroying patrolling the beaches & telling all the Nothern visitors, stretched out in the sun with their pina coladas, "Go home you fools - don't you realise you're in mortal danger of thermal meltdown!"
Could well result in a punch in the mouth I think.
Latimer
Are there any damp parts on the Mediterranean?
Only the back of my shirt. (Raspberries and blackcurrants were a mistake, but the tomatoes and peppers were good this year). It snowed a lot in March and it does rain from time to time (late May if my memory serves me). There’s mountains with rivers coming down them so we can still drink water if we forget the 5L winebox, and bash our clothes on a rock in the pool twice a year as we have since time immemorial.
Foxgoose
I think you’re on a wild fox chase hounding Corner (or should that be a wild hound chase cornering the goose - I will ease back on the midday tipple) about his activism and Guardian writing. He has every right to publicise a paper passed to him by a mate. His answer was interesting though. He’s quite right that he has no duty to examine the raw data, given that the paper has passed peer review. He’s wrong I think to say that we have an issue with the factor analysis. The headline was a question, based on Lew’s title, so I see no problem there.
According to Barry, Monbiot tweeted about the Telegraph article, apparently unaware that Corner had broken the story a month earlier. I find this surprising that he doesn’t monitor what goes on at Guardian Environment, particularly as Corner’s article got 1300 comments, the kind of score Monbiot got in his heyday pre-Climategate.
re: Adam Corner and Lewandowsky
[a link directly to that thread]:
Adam Corner's blog thread on the Lewandowsky article
I accept parts of Corner's response but I also think he is evading or missing key issues. No, an op-ed writer of any stripe cannot ordinarily assess the data of a study, nor can they control the headline or sub-heading that a newspaper may give their piece.
However, raising critical questions and considering different angles is certainly a possibility, at least, even with only 700 words. Corner chose to embrace and promote the messaging Lewandowsky wanted, without question. Of course neither Corner nor Lewandowsky would ever swallow uncritically any message(s) that came from a "study" which did not tell them what they already wanted to say. There are major elements of socio-political and confirmation biases in jumping all over this study when its own headline equating moon landing conspiracy with implied climate hoax conspiracy was so tendentious and indeed fatuous. It took remarkable blinders not to see that Lewandowsky was doing something peculiar with his own title for the study (even the ideologue Tom Curtis of SkS could see this and still says it is the most problematic element of the study). One did not even need to see raw data to know the Lewandowsky title made an utterly extraordinary (indeed preposterous) assertion of implication.
Also, now that Corner is responsible for promoting the study widely and favorably to one of the largest news audiences in the English speaking world, he certainly does have a responsibility to update his audience when/if the study he trumpeted is shown to be severely flawed.
So, no, Corner cannot assess the raw data of any and every study he wishes to comment upon (NOR does peer review do so, as we have seen time and again in climate issues). Yet, he can learn to think critically about the convenient confirmation biases which he and so many of his peers display. Indeed, since Corner is supposed to be an expert specialist in cognition focusing upon "motivated reasoning" he should be learning to put his own assumptions and biases under scrutiny. How about it, Adam?
p.s. I warmly applaud Geoff Chambers, Barry Woods, Foxgoose, and others for their skilled efforts in running down various leads and issues. I don't have the same appetite for engaging with the Corners and Lewandowskys of the world, at least at this time, but I do appreciate reading about it all.... and these efforts helped lay the groundwork for Steve McIntyre's critical post on the Lewandowsky study, etc.
A. Scott- I couldn't resist this quote:
"For supporters of an unregulated free market, regulating polluting industries to reduce global warming is so unpalatable that they are far more likely to reject that climate change is happening."
But if your theory is found to be against the laws of Human Action, I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
;)
Skiphil
Thanks for the kind word. Expecting more from Guardian Environment is unrealistic. The rot starts from the head, and once the enterprise finally dies I look forward with glee to reading the memoirs of the likes of Simon Hoggart and Simon Jenkins who have shown tiny twitches of resistance to the climate madness that overtook this once serious newspaper.
Interest switches to Psychological Science, not a warmist mag, but an apparently serious journal which presumably sent out for peer review a paper by a professor specialising in the psychology of climate belief / denial to other specialists in the same tiny field, and find themselves with a steaming pile of nonsense on their plate, and no clear way out. The paper is due to appear some time on their preprint page, where it will sit waiting for its turn to appear in print, normally an automatic process, apparently.
We could send in dozens, or hundreds of protests and create a stir, thus confirming Lew’s point. Or leave it to Steve or Lucia or someone. Or just let nature take its course.
I hope you won't drown yourself in the pool, from despondency and mortification, on learning I disagree Geoff.
Adam has every right to cook up whatever jolly activist japes he likes - in his private life.
But he has now said he wasn't doing that - he was commenting on the Lewpaper, as the work of an academic colleague, in his publicly funded role as a university researcher.
That's fine, but if the the paper he has selected to endorse & promote turns out to be incompetent, fraudulent garbage - he needs to explain himself and suffer the career and reputational damage that such poor judgement entails.
My only point was to try and pressure him into doing that - the damage will only be quantifiable when the dust has settled on the Lewpaper (if you can bear the analogy) and Adam seems to have acknowledged that now.
Skiphil, good comment at 7:38 PM!
Peer-reviewers need not check the raw data. For example, Phil Jones, according to his own testimony, was never asked for raw data during the review processes and later lost some crucial data. Also Briffa and, for instance, some other "team members" refused to give the raw data to "outsiders".
IF, for instance, Jones and other people had shared their data it is perfectly possible that not only ClimateGate had never happened but also that "sceptics" would have been able to write (the required) peer-reviewed articles a long time ago and would have been able to end all the hysteria and maybe the wasting of our time would have been ended away back.
A huge ROFL, the Lew is now demanding apologies from anyone who ever questioned his claim of sending requests to five skeptic bloggers to post a link to his survey.
Guess what, Mr. Lew, it is entirely 100% your fault that the public blog discussion unfolded with confusion and uncertainties about who may have received a link.
You, Mr. Lew (no longer worthy of being addressed as "Professor") are the one who ran an incompetent survey with grossly inadequate documentation. Then, when others are unable to readily verify what was done, it turns out that spammy emails without your name and position were sent by your even more obscure assistant.
Anyone would be well justified in ignoring and deleting the kinds of unsolicited SPAM sent out for your project. Thus, your fantasy that any blame resides with anyone but YOU shows a delusional set of cognitions. Let's us call it "The Lewandowsky Effect" for delusions of grandeur combined with grotesque inability to see how ridiculous you are.
Your notion that any recipient was responsible for documenting YOUR shabby survey proceedings long ago is as farcical as the "paper" which you produced.
Lewandowsky continues to evade the pressing substantive issues involved with justifying his methodology nd purported results, in order to spew bile at critics.
He is not behaving as a scientist (sic) even of the inferior psychological variety.
I propose that any interested BH readers help to refine and elaborate "The Lewandowsky Effect" as our potential genuine contribution to social science. I am happy to share credit of discovery with any and all who help to elaborate the concept.
For one thing, it might better be termed a "Lewandowsky Complex" rather than "effect" in order to connect more clearly with past psychological research.
Something like a "Napoleon complex" except that the subject in question is academic and scientifically pretentious more than power hungry perse.... But clearly ridiculous and delusional.
Skiphil forgot the link:
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyGof4.html
Things are really heating up there, from the earlier post:
Moderator Response: Please provide a link to support your assertion about MIT's funding. Or your comment will be removed.
Moderator Response: Please stay on-topic and in compliance with the Comments Policy. Further conduct in this vein will lead to a revocation of posting rights.
And even posts disappearing entirely...
Justice4Rinka ... your overall conclusions are pretty much correct ... there are however several very good direct control questions, along with several good nuanced controls as well.
One of the valuable benefits of this exercise is a large data set where we know for a fact there are manipulation attempts. As Steve McIntyre and Tom Curtis have shown you can look at the data and determine fraudulent responses - more data helps that process to become more robust.
And another project has been proposed - to create a bot that will take the survey multiple times automatically. We can then try to use what is learned abut identifying fraudulent entries to try and id the bot entries. Somnething very useful for the future.
I am unable to post at CA, for some reason:
Commenter a. scott reports he got this response from the Lew blog:
That's too funny.
A. Scott et al are being 'moderated' by the invisible hand of Skepticalscience, and not by the Lew blog. In all likelihood.
This is standard boilerplate moderation text from one of Skeptioalscience's moderators. See the similarity? (emphasis mine)
Compare the 'comments policy' - the euphemism for the b*****it excuses erected to deal with inconvenient and pesky skeptical comments - of the Lew blog and Skepticalscience.
They are copies of one another.
The Lew blog operation is another arm of Skepticalscience.
I probably would have been irritated by too many of the questions to waste time finishing such a survey.
Also, the last few questions might have led me to suspect the surveyor was trying to capture personal information, possibly for commercial purposes. That's not an unreasonable suspicion these days.
new Climate Audit thread this evening (Monday) on inappropriate censorship at Lew's blog:
CA thread "Lewandowsky Censors Discussion of Fake Data
Shub, I provided a portion of your quotes (with credit to you ofc) with a link back to this thread. The refusal of Lew & co. to allow any discussion of the potential problems with faked survey responses is so typical of "The Lewandowsky Complex" we are seeing.
I know some don't think these are important issues compared to "real" climate science issues, but I differ: Lew & Corner & friends are trying to establish this media meme of kooky "deniers" who believe the moon landings were faked and so naturally cannot believe anything climate scientists tell us. It is a vicious, calculated strategy to try to discredit and smear all of us. Lewandowsky is a leader in that contemptible campaign to shove all of us out of public debate.
Shub,
Totally agree. I predicted this would happen on the Lewpaper thread two days ago. John Cook posts articles himself on Lew’s site, so no doubt holds moderation privileges himself. So either he is helping out on moderation, or one or two of the SkS mods have now been given the keys and they are spending time over there as well.
Skiphill,
A leader that’s managed to stay pretty much below the parapets till now, satisfying himself with local skirmishes. Now he’s broken cover to lead a vainglorious charge, his leadership skills are found to be somewhat wanting and he appears now to be searching desperately for cover. His men are left on the field of battle fighting hopeless rearguard actions, cursing the calibre of their commander.
Geoff,
You put that post up a Lew's on purpose didn't you? Cookie can't snip it without revealing SkS involvement in the site. He's had to make a comment about stolen private correspondence first. You're an evil, evil person. No wonder CiF banned you. :)
Shub writes: The Lew blog operation is another arm of Skepticalscience.
Bob Koss has found this:
http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/10/lewandowsky-censors-discussion-of-fake-data/#comment-350524
harold
Thanks for the tip off about the moderator’s demand for a supporting link to my claim. I didn’t see it, but luckily Les Johnson and Ben Pile were on hand to provide the back up.
This whole saga has demonstrate a sea change in the climate wars, I think. Sceptical blogging is as chaotic and unpredictable as the weather, but sometimes informed commenters can reach a critical mass, there’s a tipping point, information passes from commenter to commenter and from blog to blog, and the warmists have to fall back on insults, censorship, and conspiracy theories. Lew should spend less time examining conspiracy theories and more on guerrilla warfare tactics.
I see Skiphil talks of a “Napoleon Complex” and Laurie Childs of Lew’s “vainglorious charge”. The military metaphors seem absolutely appropriate, for once.
If you read Shaping Tomorrow's World's "About Us" page - its principals are Prof Lew and a plant science colleague and its Editorial Board are a bunch of green academic & green business activists - including a lawyer who runs a carbon trading company. Usual green mafia in other words.
If you run the address through WHOIS however you get are rather different story.
The registrant is Stephan Lewandowsky pf UWA but the registrant email contact is John Cook at SkS. The Admin and Tech contacts are both given as John Cook at Sevloid Art (his old cartoon company) but with his SkS email address.
Effectively, Lewandowsky's site is administered and operated by John Cook at Skeptical Science - quel surprise.
Which brings me on to my own personal conspiracy theory (because all us right wing, baby burning, crazies need one of our own as you know).
When John Cook first started SkS, helped by his web-designer wife, he was, by his own account, a self employed cartoonist struggling to support a young family.
A couple of years ago however everything started to change. Editorials in internationally read news outlets like The Guardian were written - proclaiming SkS as the ultimate go-to reference for climate science. Apps were advertised for Ipads, and then other smartphones, offering true believers instant rebuttals to "sceptic lies".
Then SkS site itself started growing new pages and data at a prodigious rate - including translations into a dozen languages. New "staff" names started appearing, the most prominent being Dana Nuccitelli - a green blog poster and employee of a large US environmental consulting group.
John Cook started travelling to conferences and collaborating on books and papers - finally popping up with a university appointment as "Climate Change Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland".
If you look at SkS and compare it with BH, Climate Audit or WUWT - the differences are obvious. The three sceptic blogs are run on a shoestring by their proprietors, and it shows. The layout and web design are basic and the sceptic sites sometimes suffer from hosting problems. There are activity lulls when proprietors sometimes have to take a break for personal reasons - and the tech side is looked after with volunteer help.
Even Real Climate, which we know is run professionally by a PR company, exhibits nothing like the investment or professionalism of SkS.
SkS , on the other hand, has all the attributes of a commercially operated website. High bandwith, no speed or comment loading glitches, seamless page navigation and expensively produced graphics everywhere.
Occasionally, when Dana N has popped up here or elsewhere, I have challenged him to reveal the sources of SkS's funding. The reaction is always the same - it's run by John, at huge sacrifice to his little family, with help from dedicated public spirited volunteers and Paypal contributions only - and I should be ashamed for even asking about it.
I simply don't believe that. I think John Cook is running his, now substantial, network of propaganda activities with extensive support from either green business interests, university budgets or NGO's.
Time will undoubtedly tell.
Don't respond. Responding will only massage the ego of an idiot. There is too much idiot ego massaging going on around here recently IMHO. We need to focus on our target audience and maintain the moral and ethical highground.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just ignore him. A response elevates his position and reframes this into a negotiation between equals.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's no reason to even acknowledge this "modest proposal". We get nothing out of it, and no matter how we respond, it makes ***** look good, covering up his pile of manure website with a few daisies. No response is the only option.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No negotiation, no trading, no nothing. We just continue to do what we do. Maybe we do it more thoroughly or more cautiously or whatever.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is no response needed, both from the perspective that his head will inflate to massive proportions and also because his requests require no outward action on our part, but non-action.
This is just a sample of responses from the treehut logs from just one situation where Skepticalscience was a position of responding to a prominent skeptical blog 'across the divide'.
Whatever you may be, you are first and foremost a blog, right? One that interacts with visitors and commenters who roam the climate blogs? You would be wrong to think so. Skepticalscience users do not agree. They think the website is 'on a mission', 'occupies a philosophical and moral high ground' and an 'ethical high ground' (merely by spinning cobwebs with paper abstracts for the consensus position).
Consequently, whenever there has been an exchange where some flaw of SS has been brought to light, or someone takes potshots at SS, its reaction has been the same - a stiffening, and a deer-in-the-headlights response followed by complete radio silence and refusal to confront issues and participate in exchanges and/or display any form of reciprocity. This, they imagine as exemplified above, to be an expression of their Sun Tzu tactics and their high moral position. They fancy they are driving the opposition crazy while their own pristine image remains unsullied.
If you see Lewandowsky responding with tangential insults and comment butchery, please remember, it is because he has adopted the Skepticalscience approach.
While the Lewandowsky et al (2012) paper has been rightly faulted on grave failings in the collection and analysis of survey data, the single greatest weakness of the paper as submitted is the wild, propagandistic over-reach of the title:
I think almost all can agree with Tom Curtis of SkS that the title is the single worst aspect of the paper. Even if their data and analysis were basically adequate this title would be inept and highly misleading (I would add malicious).
The authors go from a very limited correlation of *some* respondents with what they call “conspiracy ideation” to trying to tar *all* skeptics with a conspiracy brush.
The “therefore” is the single most misleading (dishonest?) aspect of an already awful title. There is nothing in their paper to suggest the cause-and-effect of a “therefore” in the title. At most it is a loose correlation which has no causal explanation provided in the paper. This points to a much larger kind of issue with so much social science research, that correlation is not (necessarily) causation.
If Steve Mc is correct (as seems to me the case) that it is a specific sub-set of “skeptical” responses which have some correlation with the authors’ “conspiracy ideation” hypothesis then the “therefore” of the title is even more inept — for there is no possible causal explanation for all of the skeptics who do NOT show the “conspiracist ideation”.
NASA faked the moon landing / Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax:
An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science
based on 3 response, which appear to be scammed responses anyway
this alone should make the journal think they are being used, and should prompt it to be sent back for a rewrite/review..
------------
The journal is probably oblivious to the online debate (or just hearing ‘one-side’)..
If you let them know your concerns prior to publication, they may double check before publication.
The journal has its own reputation to protect (and don’t necessarily care about any particular article, or activist professors reputations, it is a big flagship journal)
http://pss.sagepub.com/feedback
Otherwise, once published it will be cited like Doran and Anderegg for ever (how ever many responses it receives.) and we will see quotes like ‘peer reviewed journal says all sceptics are conspiracy theorists’, also for ever.
Perhaps ask the journal if any peer reviewer was expert in online survey methodology? I bet nobody asked for the data.
The journal doesn’t seem to be that interested in climate change or sceptics.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/recent
So no skin off their nose (or loss of face for the journal) if they ask for an extra peer reviewer for methodology, interpretation of 3 moon landing results, and the title.
Perhaps the prof sneaked it into this journal, 2 years on from data collection (a red flag?) with recommended (small) pool of peer reviewers to choose from, (this field is quite small)
Lewandowsky does imagine he is now a climate scientist, or at least he expresses enormous confidence that he understands attribution, how "climate change" from CO2 will cause more extreme weather events....
Seems that the Univ. of Western Australia has an officially sponsored "UWA climate science group" which ties podcasts and articles by Stephan Lewandowsky and Kevin Judd into the website SkepticalScience:
[hyperlink] "Climate Science" at Univ. of Western Australia links to this at Skeptical Science
being a cognitive scientist means understanding that smoking-is-to-cancer as CO2-is-to-extreme-weather:
[hyperlink] UWA's Stephan Lewandowsky thinks he is now a climate scientist
cross-posting this with WUWT if I may, since this seems to be very significant material on understanding how closely Lewandowsky and his Climate Group at UWA are entwined with SkS and John Cook, but it's nothing secretive, it's all out there on SkS and linked from the UWA's Climate Group site. I simply find it peculiar and academically inappropriate for a university to enmesh itself with outside activists like this, but I'm sure they will claim it's all in the name of public education:
fyi, I haven’t seen it mentioned but Lewandowsky has moderator privileges at SkepticalScience — he is clearly the “SL” in the moderator responses on this thread because the first person “I” refers to the article and SL’s specious comparison of the future to driving into a brick wall at 80 kph (of course if the choice is hit a brick wall at 80 kph or enjoy “economic rewards” of drastically changing our economies then it’s an easy choice, but both sides of that comparison are highly tendentious at best):
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Long-Term-Certainty.html
==============================================================================
This seems to be the announcement in Feb. 2011 that the Climate group at UWA was about to launch the blog “ShapingTomorrowsWorld” in conjunction with SkS — it doesn’t mention a blog name but Lewandowsky chimes in at the bottom and describes what seems to be his conception of STW (and John Cook registered the domain shapingtomorrowsworld.org in the name of Lewandowsky on Feb. 21, 2011:
=======================================================================
==========================================================================
re: Kevin Judd at UWA, he definitely seems to be the other key player along with Lewandowsky, and they are closely tied to SkepticalScience:
http://www.uwa.edu.au/climate-science/news/media
I don’t know what Kevin Judd may or may not be a “whiz” in mathematically but his article about climate models and “predictions” shows an overweening confidence in models that few of even the IPCC’s most fervent defenders would claim (I thought we were told that the IPCC doesn’t claim such definite “predictions” anyway??):
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Confidence-in-climate-forecasts.html
Great work Skiphil, you're doing an excellent job of tying up all the loose ends of the Lewandowsky/Cook activist PR machine.
The thing that needs to come out next is the funding source (or sources).
You don't run multiple commercial grade websites on commercial servers (as opposed to blog hosts), using commercial s/w packages - without a substantial funding stream.
The idea that previously self-employed cartoonist Cook (who hasn't advertised a cartoon for sale since 2010) does it all from his own resources and readers' Paypal donations is clearly absurd.
IMHO there is significant state support via university budgets - or "Big Green" business support.
Someone less biased (prejudiced) than Lewandowsky might also notice that the CYAIDS and CYOKLA conspiracies are held disproportionately by warmists (the former only by warmists). After Steve McIntyre's initial re-analysis of data there seems to be no reason to distinguish "skeptics" as conspiracy theorists, over very small and not disproportionate numbers, especially NOT over the "moon landing" conspiracy of Lew's title.
Also, what is the effect of the particular list of conspiracies he included vs. excluded? I recall seeing that he collected responses on an "Iraq WMD" question (whether the war was over something other than WMD) but has withheld the results?? Anyone know what is going on with that issue and why he withheld that data, if indeed that is the case? He seems to have avoided conspiracy questions that would be more likely to collect the more left-wing warmists as counterparts to more libertarian skeptics (I am well aware that libertarians don't fall readily into the traditional left-right spectrum). I'm simply asking whether Lewandowsky's questions are "scientific" and objective in relation to various political/socio/ideological frames that may exist, or does the specific set of questions tend to skew results away from "left wing conspiracy ideation"?
I can imagine a couple of conspiracy questions which the warmists would be much more likely to answer in the affirmative (given that there is indeed some amount of political/ideological split). Various "left wing" conspiracy theories which have kicked around which would likely look different for the "warmist" profile, e.g., Bush-Blair-Cheney secretly conspired to invade Iraq KNOWING there were no WMDs to be found, George W. Bush specifically allowed the 911 attacks to occur (a leftist variant of the "Truther" conspiracy view), the Bush admin. specifically allowed New Orleans to be devastated by Hurricane Katrina (a variant of this was propounded in a comment on Real Climate by no less than RC co-founder Ray Pierrehumbert, who thought that neglect of levies was some unique Bush attribute to harm New Orleans, compared to 8 years of Clinton/Gore, many years of Democratic local and state officials which also had not worked on the levies), etc.
In general, I can't see that Lewandowsky et al have given any rigorous attention to analysis of what cognitions about "conspiracy ideation" may be or how a survey could really account for different forms and aspects of it.
Important comment on a WUWT from a genetics prof at Univ. of Western Australia, who started the survey in autumn 2010 from a link sent to UWA staff, and was "appalled" at the poor quality of the questions. I'm cross-posting with WUWT if I may (in case anyone is still looking at this thread), because this is evidence that the survey received tough critical feedback from a scientist colleague, which was brushed aside:
btw, looking at the UWA website it appears that Richard Allcock is not some random admin asst (nothing against them really!) but a highly accomplished prof in biomedical sciences, specializing in genetics and genome research.
So Hanich and Lew (hard to imagine Lew wouldn’t have received that feedback via Hanich, although that’s another question) had highly critical feedback about problems with the survey instrument from an accomplished scientist in their own university. Of course by the time the link was circulated to UWA staff they may have thought they were nearing the end of their collection of data, but that does not give any scientific excuse for ignoring powerful objections from a colleague and highly competent scientist surely far more expert in real research methodologies and data analysis than either Lew or Hanich (ooooh but they are…. psychologists and know about psychometrics!).
Here is what Prof. Allcock said on the census thread: