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New Mashey Report Drills into Academic Misconduct

The 2006 Wegman Report to Congress, already under investigation for extensive plagiarism, also appears to be guilty of falsifications, misrepresentation and frabrications that could give rise to a charge of academic misconduct, according to a new report by computer scientist and entrepreneur John Mashey (attached, below).

Mashey and the Canadian blogger DeepClimate have analysed Wegman extensively in the past, primarily for the plagiarism of which Wegman is so clearly guilty. But Mashey digs deeper in the current report, questioning whether the numerous errors, oversights and misrepresentations in the report can be explained by inadvertence or incompetence, or whether Wegman and his prinicpal co-author Yasmin Said were intentionally distorting the information they were plagiarizing and, in the process, pointedly misrepresenting science.

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The journal Computational Data and Statistics Analysis (CSDA) has withdrawn a paper by George Mason University Professor Edward Wegman and his student Jasmin Said for plagiarism, USA Today has reported.

The newspaper quotes CSDA editor Stanley Azen (who is denying responsibility for what appeared to be a rushed, one-man review of the Wegman/Said paper), saying the journal’s legal team has decided to pull the study because of the evidence of plagiarism from Wikipedia and textbooks.

The Wegman work is part of a flurry of “analysis” (at least one expert derides this particular paper as “an opinion piece”), that Wegman and Said conducted on behalf of U.S. Congressman Joe Barton (R-Texas), who was using the material to attack the climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann.

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WegmanGate, SkepticGate:

Isn’t it Time to Slam the Gate?

George Mason University continues to fritter away its reputation for academic integrity by failing to act on plagiarism charges against Dr. Edward Wegman - but the indefatigable John Mashey has not rested in the long interegnum since the complaint was filed.

Mashey’s latest update is attached below and with his first edition, here. John recommends particularly the paranoic rantings of Dr. Donald Rapp (in the new Section 3) as well as Wegman’s own unfolding commentary (Appendix A 3), which continues regardless of a GMU directive that he not comment on his investigation until the beleaguered braintrust at his university decides to recognize the obvious - or cover up.

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Update: A new verion of the Mashey report is attached, with a whole new section of juicy emails

Plagiarism charges against George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman have brought the university’s administration to an apparent standstill, according to the latest report from John Mashey (attached).

Wegman actually stands accused of having committed a host of infractions with the “AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION” that he presented to Congress in 2006. The worst, however (and the easiest to prove) is that he or his co-authors plagiarized a huge amount of material from a book by one of their targets, Raymond Bradley. In many cases, the only differences between Wegman’s lifted quotes and Bradley’s original material occurred when Wegman (or his assistants) changed the text to change the meaning.

Per Mashey’s report, Rice University received a similar complaint against one of Wegman’s co-authors, David R Scott. Rice responded immediately, investigating the charge and clearing Scott as the culprit in nine days. Nine MONTHS later, GMU has made no finding. We wait with interest ….

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In a breathless update on the tawdry Wegmangate tale of plagiarism, mining promoter and amateur statistician Stepehn McIntyre (proprietor of Climate Audit) has tried to distract from the case at hand by imagining an earlier instance of plagiarism, allegedly committed by Edward Wegman’s victim, Raymond Bradley.

For those just catching up, the blogger Deep Climate and his research partner John Mashey have produced a document that shows just how extensively the once-respected statisitician Wegman cribbed from one of his apparent victims (Ray Bradley) in a report that Wegman produced for Congress. Mashey argues that Wegman’s errors and plagiarism were more than merely unprofessional: he says that they constitute a barefaced and illegal effort to mislead Congress. George Mason University is currently investigating the plagiarsim charges.

McIntyre has chosen to run interference on that complaint not by actually defending Wegman (whose shoddy work seems increasingly indefensible) but by attacking Ray Bradley, one of the authors of the iconic “hockey stick graph” that Wegman had been hired to attack. McIntyre points out in his post that Bradley had earlier used a series of figures from a 1976 book by H.C. Fritts and, according to McIntyre, provided inadequate credit.

This, however, seems less like plagiarism and more like an effort to build good science on a solid foundation.

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Rep. Joe Barton, already implicated in an effort to mislead Congress about the science of climate change, is obviously choosing offence as his best possible defence, renewing his slander of Penn State climate scientist and “Hockey Stick” author Dr. Michael Mann.

As then-co-chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Barton was responsible in 2006 for inviting the increasingly controversial statistician Edward Wegman to prepare a critique of Mann’s iconic hockey-stick-shaped graph illustrating a 1,000-year climate reconstruction. Although Barton has denied that he had a previous relationship with Wegman, implying that the subsequent report and hearing were not a set-up, John Mashey has documented the extensive direction that Barton provided to Wegman through Barton staff member Peter Spencer.