Apology accepted. I’ll admit I was somewhat miffed, but I know that such things happen and so I’m certainly not going to hold it against you.

Truce?

>> I might have jumped to conclusions, but then that seems to be a difference in our approaches to science.

Ah, but these are internet postings, which have a bit more to do with diplomacy and communications than science. I’ve made the ‘limited data set conclusion’ many times in my life and been wrong enough and burnt enough to try and be careful of such things nowadays. Prevents the added aggravation which may prevent further evidence from ever coming along.

I guess more of an “in the past” thing after setting up his own site, eh? I don’t recall running across a post of his since I started following BAB a while back, and I think we’re likely to visit the same kinds of threads.

At any rate, I was not insinuating he created an account just to get people to show up and vote, but rather to say I was amused to see his comment in the thread, and in general to point out that a Fark-mention is not likely to work out favorably. Hehe…

Is it a call for a Florida style recount I’m hearing? Cool with me.
But nix the hanging chad crap.
Have your lawyer contact my lawyer.

Indeed I did. I just saw 8 comments, none of them particularly vitriolic, followed by 2 saying “Don’t be so vitriolic!”. I might have jumped to conclusions, but then that seems to be a difference in our approaches to science. I think you can form a tentative conclusion based on 10 data points, and use that as a guideline unless later data shows you wrong.

Key to that approach, of course, is to be open to new data. I appologize for calling you a concern troll; that seems to have been a premature conclusion. I do not appologize in the case of some other posters, although I’d be happy to get new data in their case as well. If, say, papertiger were to call on CA’s mad statistikx skillz to be brought to bear on the voting patterns, that might be a good start…

Makes my heart sad. I voted for you every day, Phil!

I understand where you’re coming from and I don’t disagree. I do wonder though why it was directed at me when all I’ve been saying throughout is:

1) We can get through this without ideological vitriol

and

2) both sides have probably cheated.

*thwaps papertiger*

Okay, the childish gloating’s wearing thin. Worn thin. Worn to the bone.

BA you can still say VOTED SECOND BEST SCIENCE BLOG
on the book jacket.

I really like your pictures too. (psss-don’t tell anybody. it would ruin my rep)

What?

Oh right, I personally didn’t win anything.

But I still feel good.

I’m sorry, but BadAstronomy is one of my favorite websites, and something I check everyday. Even without this recent controversy I can honestly say I’d vote for him. I honestly never heard of climate audit before this, and in terms of accessibility and newbie friendliness BA’s blog takes the cake. Stylistically, CA is utter crap, whether or not he’s right. Meanwhile, BA is qualified when it comes to the science of his blog, and he’s good at presenting it in an entertaining way. It takes both of these to qualify for an award in my book. CA is getting votes because a bunch of political hacks started vote stacking, naturally people interested in quality science blogs have to react, and I’m sorry, but CA could be as right as rain, he still doesn’t deserve the award.

It might come as a shock to you that after a series of scientific consensus’,(new ice age, killer bees, bird flu, mad cow, fat is bad for you, no sorry fat is good for you, eating too much meatwill kill you, eating to many carbs will kill you, cell phones are killing the bees, cell phones are causing ear cancer, Aids is a problem for everybody not just gays and IV users, Asteroids are going to hit the planet, Y2K will cause civilization to end, climate change will cause drought, climate change will cause floods, climate change caused Katrina, Climate change caused record low hurricane activity) which all amounted to scientists pulling our collective crank, that people are sort of tired of being hoaxed.

Quit jerking us around.

Only a minute to go
Cimate Audit is still in the lead

Do

YOU

BELIEVE

IN MIRACLES?

YYYYYYEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

As for which group of cheaters is better… well, that ends up being sort of moot, doesn’t it? It still trivializes the whole thing (not that it was particularly important to begin with) and highlights the utter stupidity of the lengths ideologues–BOTH SIDES, MIND–will go to just to get a ‘victory.’

A victory from a bloody Flash application on the Internet, bastion of truth and individual distinctiveness, where men are men, women are men, and children are the FBI.

If that’s the case, though, then the BA cheaters are much better at it than the CA cheaters (or at least one CA cheater). Adding 2000 to the vote total in a chunk is pretty obvious.

>> Centipede, I agree with every word you have said.

Including the ones where I state I agree with AGW theory? *raised eyebrow*

The sad thing is that both sides are probably correct.

@Jacob:

Okay, they could have server-side heuristics trying to deduce when somebody is using a script. It’s tricky to find a good threshold, though. If someone at a company sends out an e-mail to his co-workers and says ‘Vote for this’, then you can likely see one or two dozen votes from a single IP in a couple of minutes.

Script writers, on the other hand, can deduce the threshold and operate just under it.

It might be more effective to just let the cheaters do as they will, then look at the voting patterns after the fact and disqualify their votes.

You would be pleasantly surprized at my comments regarding BA at Climate Audit I think.

“RESULTS ARE NOT FINAL UNTIL WINNERS ARE ANNOUNCED! Each poll is checked during the voting and after polls close for excessive voting from individual machines. If excess voting is found it is noted and the votes are removed.”

It’ll be interesting to see if some of CA’s huge jumps vanish after voting closes.

>> “You showed up at a blog”

I think you missed the part where I was posting on this blog long before the weblog awards.

>> “said that we shouldn’t cheer for that blog.”

I said no such thing. I said that other people and blogs should not be villified. Those are two distinctly different concepts.

>> “How can that make any sense?”

Admittedly, it doesn’t. I do apologize if my stance was unclear.

re: Cheating

This has been happening for days now, both sides. Recall the ‘computer lab’ comment last week?

It’s a flash-based web ‘award’ ‘competition’ prone to ballot stuffing. It’s like the All England Summarize Proust competition: because no one has fully encapsulated the deeper philosophical meaning of Proust into 30 seconds, the award goes to the girl in the audience with the biggest tits.

Here is Jacob showing us all how to cheat.

Be sure and back up your registry first, cheaters.

Jacob does your wife trust you?

It’s not a quick fix, but an algorithm could be written to monitor the flow of votes, while allowing a reasonable number of votes coming from one subnet.
Example:
If the monitoring application picked up >10-15 votes per second from a particular IP, it could flag that address as a possible illegitimate voter, and either block it, or set the flow control down to only allow a vote or two per minute.

That would still allow for large institutions like colleges to participate, but still block out the bots that are voting hundreds of times per minute.

The philosophical implications are a bit muddy, but it would work.

Note: I said relatively easy, not just outright simple.

Obviously somebody is already doing that. See my last post.

Also, how can this possibly be easy to secure? IP address tracking can be defeated in a number of ways, and suffer from the major flaw of punishing legitimate voters who are on NATed subnets.

Adding client side information like cookies, registry entries, or files, is also easy to defeat (of course, that’s exactly what they did).

So how can you do this?