arshadk writes with this excerpt from the BBC about researchers at Oxford University who found that...
As an Englishman I may be biased, but I think the BBC counts as a major news company.
Considering PR and marketing is one of Apple's strongest areas and which pushes everything they do forward, they did some incredibly stupid decisions
Marketing is Apple's strongest area, but PR has never been been their forté.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a series of hacked emails and documents that were recently posted on Wikileaks are causing quite a stir in the scientific community. All told, more than 1,000 emails and 2,000 documents were stolen from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia University in the U.K. "The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with. [] Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We 'will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!' Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday."
"in academia, the issue of attribution and citation is very important" - true, but strictly speaking it's the attribution and citation of other research, not the research tools. After all, you don't find many research papers citing that they were typed on Microsoft Word with tables created in Microsoft Excel.
However, you've tried to convince them of this and they still want to go ahead, and it's your job to sort it out to their specifications. So...
The ideal solution would be to make the software so damn good that citing the use of your software in their publications is a good way for the external researchers to prove the integrity of their data analysis.
I might even suggest a reverse-psychology strategy with something along the lines of:
"You may only cite the use of {SOFTWARE} to guarantee the integrity of your data analysis if all data analysis has been done with {SOFTWARE}."
...and then provide a few suitable icons like this one:
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
