Months after the hack heard ’round the world, the independent review is finished. A panel of 11 led by the University of Oxford’s Lord Oxburgh investigated the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, whose researchers were accused of manipulating data based on information gleaned from thousands of stolen emails. The panel’s conclusion: The scientists did not intentionally distort the truth, though their statistical rigor leaves something to be desired.
“We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it,” says the Oxburgh report. “Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention” [Nature]. This conclusion came after interviewing people within the organization and combing through the data in 11 of the center’s peer-reviewed papers published over the span of 22 years.
Oxburgh found the researchers “squeaky clean” in terms of their intentions—and that’s what this was, an investigation of the scientist’s integrity, not their results. But, the panel found their methods to be somewhat lacking. Specifically, the report says, “We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.” The university issued its own statement after the Oxburgh report’s release, including this response to the charge that they didn’t use the best statistical methods available:
Specialists in many areas of research acquire and develop the statistical skills pertinent to their own particular data analysis requirements. However, we do see the sense in engaging more fully with the wider statistics community to ensure that the most effective and up-to-date statistical techniques are adopted and will now consider further how best to achieve this.
Another area for suggested improvement is in the archiving of data and algorithms, and in recording exactly what was done. Although no-one predicted the import of this pioneering research when it started in the mid-1980’s, it is now clear that more effort needs to be put into this activity.
However, some of the panelists noted, even adjusting for newer statistical models didn’t alter the conclusions. David Hand, who is the president of Britain’s Royal Statistical Society and sat on the Oxburgh panel, dug into the infamous “hockey stick” chart of global temperatures by Penn State’s Michael Mann during his investigations. Hand agrees with Mann: he too says that the hockey stick – showing an above-average rise in temperatures during the 20th century – is there. The upward incline is just shorter than Mann’s original graphic suggests. “More like a field-hockey stick than an ice-hockey stick” [New Scientist], he says.
Related Content:
DISCOVER: It’s Getting Hot In Here, our interview with climate rivals Michael Mann and Judith Curry
80beats: Climatologist Steps Down As “ClimateGate” Furor Continues
Cosmic Variance: ClimateGate, Sean Carroll on the controversy
Bad Astronomy: The Global Warming E-mails Non-Event
Image: iStockphoto
DARPA, the Pentagon’s mad-scientist research agency, has unveiled new ambitious plans for a flying car called the Transformer (TX). DARPA has already started 
In the digital age, many of us are compulsive multi-taskers. As I type this, I’m listening to some gentle music and my laptop has several programs open including Adobe Reader, Word, Firefox and Tweetdeck. I’ve always wondered what goes on in my brain as I flit between these multiple tasks, and I now have some answers thanks to a new study by Parisian scientists Sylvain Charron and 
Charron and Koechlin found that in the switching tests, when the volunteers were only faced with a single task, both halves of their MFC were active, particularly the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex (dACC) and the presupplementary motor area (PMA). The more money was at stake, the stronger the activity in these regions.
A magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck China’s southern Qinghai Province this week. The death toll now stand at more than 600, and rescuers pulled more than 1,000 people from the rubble alive. But, geologists say, this quake doesn’t seem linked to the massive one that 
It was a green idea that boogied straight off the dance floor and onto the city streets. Residents in the French city of Toulouse are testing out a special stretch of pavement in the city center that produces energy every time someone walks across it.
Don’t be fooled by the name—Iceland is one of the hottest hotspots in the world, geologically speaking. The island’s volcanic legacy reared its head again yesterday as a massive eruption by a 
Despite the flight cancellations, scientists tried to assure people in Britain that the ash wasn’t heavy enough to be a public health concern. In fact, it’s nothing compared to the worst eruptions to happen in Iceland, according to vulcanologist Dougal Jerram. 
Before genomics, looking at the Duffy locus was one simple way that geneticists ascertained the proportion of white admixture in the African American population. The Duffy negative allele was nearly absent in Europeans, and present in frequencies of ~95% in West Africa. Therefore, the ~70% frequency in African Americans indicates what we know from other sources, a substantial minority European contribution to their ancestry. The people of Madagascar are similar insofar as they are a byproduct of admixture between African and non-African populations. The source of the non-African ancestry is rather easy to determine, unlike most African countries Madagascar has one language, Malagasy, and it is of the 
If the Duffy negative allele was viewed purely as a neutral locus, and so ancestrally informative, one would assume that the Malagasy were mostly African. In the figure to the left the red tinted portions represent Duffy negative proportions, the green Duffy positive, and the darker shade P. vivax positivity. The green star indicates a site where P. vivax positivity was only found among the Duffy positive, while at the sites with red stars it was found among both antigen state groups. As you can see at none of the sites was the Duffy positive allele modal, and at Andapa the frequency of Duffy negative was typical of much of Sub-Saharan Africa. In the total data set 72% of the individuals were Duffy negative. Going by the previous cited work this would underestimate Asian ancestry, which seems likely to be near parity, if not quite.
One of the mysterious aspects of the arrival of the Malagasy is that there aren’t records by the literate polities which fringed the Indian ocean of their movements. But why should there be? Open ocean traders were generally marginal to these states, who simply extracted rents from the activities of the merchants and migrants. It seems entirely plausible that many populations have been on the move throughout history, their impact in particular regions slowly being ablated by time. There is one aspect of Africa which makes it entirely plausible that the Barito presence would disappear or be marginal: the local populations seem biologically very well adapted to the pathogens on the continent. It is notable for example that the Arab and Persian cultural influence in East Africa never spread inland beyond the Indian ocean littoral. And yet these groups were present on the East African coast from the time of the Romans on. It seems likely to me that Africa is relatively resistant to “back-migration” from Eurasia on ecological grounds. North Africa is part of the 
Keith's note: My earlier characterization of the event at KSC as being a "flyby" was due in great part to the nearth total blackout in terms of what would be happening. PAO knew nothing and therefore shared nothing. Internal plans were constantly shifting around. Up until the other day, all that was known publicly was landing, departure, and speech time. Nothing else. Now we see that there was a lot more to this event. So I hereby rescind my "flyby" moniker. As far as what the agenda and intent of this series of events were supposed to be, at first OSTP held NASA back and then it started to leak stuff ahead of NASA. In the future, America's space program would be better served by making the nature of such events much more open that there be better coordination - by and from - the White House.
Keith's note:NASA TV has "special coverage" of todays events in Florida 
Keith's note: This is how urban news myths start. A single landing in Hawaii becomes multiple launches (presumably) in Florida.
