Yasmin Said

From SourceWatch
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Climatechangewords.jpg

Learn more from the Center for Media and Democracy's research on climate change.

Yasmin H. Said co-authored the Congressional Wegman Report with Edward Wegman and David W. Scott, which was influential and has been widely cited by global warming skeptics. But subsequent analysis of the report, which was not peer reviewed, revealed poor scholarship including apparent plagiarism.

Academic background

"Said is a Visiting Fellow(1) at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge in England and is a National Research Fellow(2) from the National Institutes of Health. She earned her A.B. in pure mathematics, her M.S. in computer science and information systems, and Ph.D. in computational statistics."[1]

Said's PhD was done at George Mason University under Edward Wegman.

Affiliations

As of December 2010, Said was co-editor in chief and managing editor of Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics, aka WIREs: Computational Statistics or WIRES CompStat[1]; biographical information there dated Dec. 2010 reports she is also:

  • Co-Director of the Center for Computational Data Sciences in the College of Science at George Mason University.
  • Editor of Computing Science and Statistics
  • Associate editor of the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis
  • Board member, Washington Statistical Society
  • Member, American Statistical Association Presidential Task Force on Science Policy

Controversies

In May 2011 the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis - where Said was associate editor[1] - retracted a 2008 social network analysis by Yasmin Said, Edward Wegman and coauthors[2] (based on part of the Wegman Report[3]) because the paper used "portions of other authors' writings … without sufficient attribution".[4] The lawyer for Said and Wegman said they stand by their work.[5]

In October 2011, USA Today reported additional concerns that a separate 2009 review article, Roadmap for Optimization, which was authored by Wegman and Said, and published in WIRES CompStat[6], where both authors are editors-in-chief[1] - contained material copied without attribution from Wikipedia, introducing at least one error in the process[7]. Wegman's attorney and George Mason University declined to comment on these allegations.[6]

Articles and resources

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 http://media.wiley.com/assets/3002/50/WIREs_comp_stats_guide_for_authors12.10.pdf
  2. doi|10.1016/j.csda.2007.07.021
  3. Copy and paste. Nature : Nature Publishing Group (2011-05-26). Retrieved on 2011-05-28.
  4. Journal Retracts Disputed Network Analysis Paper on Climate, AAAS Science Insider, 2 June 2011
  5. Climate study gets pulled after charges of plagiarism, by Dan Vergano USA Today, article updated 5/15/2011. Accessed 6/6/2011
  6. 6.0 6.1 Vergano, Dan (October 5, 2011). "More Wikipedia copying from climate critics", USA Today. Retrieved on October 12, 2011. 
  7. Andrew Gelman (2011-09-19). Another Wegman plagiarism copying-without-attribution, and further discussion of why scientists cheat. Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. Retrieved on 2011-10-17.

Related SourceWatch articles

External resources

External articles