If you also look at Cornell's view of that image, of the perched birds wing, where they use the specimen placed behind the tree, it's an exact match.Cornell's Figure 1B was not, in fact, produced by photographing a specimen placed behind a tree. Cornell admits that this is montage of a specimen's wing superimposed behind a tupelo trunk.
Check out Sibley's Figure 1 (available here) and Fitzpatrick's Figure 1 (available here).
I see some big problems with Cornell's photo manipulation.
1. In Fitzpatrick's original interpretation of the Luneau bird's position (inset sketch in Sibley's Figure 1A above), the tree is shown leaning to the right. In Fitzpatrick's Figure 1B, near the "top" of the wing, the tree is now shown leaning to the left.
A cynic might suggest that the tree's structure was conveniently altered to "hide" much of the black anterior patch that would show up if an actual Ivory-bill was perched there.
2. A centerpiece of the believer's argument was that the Luneau bird was too large to be a Pileated, based on a crucial wrist-to-tailtip measurement derived from this very frame.
With the new tree structure in Fitzpatrick's 1B above, the wrist is hidden (and strangely, the tail is not even shown). How can you possibly defend any wrist-to-tailtip measurement in this scenario?!
3. Check out the odd angle used when photographing the specimen in Fitzpatrick 1C. A cynic might suggest that this specimen was deliberately photographed in closeup from a low angle (looking upward at the bird). Photographing the specimen this way might make the white wing patch look more extensive than it would from a more distant, more horizontal angle, as in the Luneau video.
4. I'm suspicious of the scale used when pasting a portion of the specimen wing onto the photograph of the tupelo (the wing looks too large). When pasting the wing portion onto the photograph, was the wing portion arbitrarily scaled to match Fitzpatrick 1A?
In my humble opinion, these photographic shenanigans are more evidence of Cornell's journey down the road to fraud.
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12 comments:
Conservation science is dead
Can’t you get that through your head
There’s no ivory billed
Lazarus had it killed
It was bad for Fitzpatrick’s cred.
Tom, Tom, Tom....You're not taking into account that this species has evolved into a super elusive creature.
Now anybody knows that a Super Elusive Creature has the ability to conform itself to a Tupelo in such a way as to hide the wrist and tail from view.
Ah, now could someone please find out how many times Science has published anything called a freakin "montage". I think it was a convienient way to get around the rules they have about altering photographs. Since they are really two different photos, cut and pasted together, one eliminating most of the "wrist", they really didn't conform to the new Science post-stem cell debacle photo rules. So, presto, Science or Cornell suggests...."Eureka, what about calling it a montage! Forget that one of our main points in Paper 1 was the wrist to tip measurement, we'll just cover up this wrist.... make it a bit too big...there, it looks perfect!
So, I wonder, how many montages has Science published, cause if they'll take more, we can get some good "Behavior of Garden Faeries" papers going.
The rules for modification of figures in SCIENCE (http://www.sciencemag.org/
about/authors/prep/prep_subfigs.dtl):
"Science does not allow certain electronic enhancements or manipulations of micrographs, gels, or other digital images. Figures assembled from multiple photographs or images must indicate the separate parts with lines between them. Linear adjustment of contrast, brightness, or color must be applied to an entire image or plate equally. Nonlinear adjustments must be specified in the figure legend. Selective enhancement or alteration of one part of an image in not acceptable. In addition, Science may ask authors of papers returned for revision to provide additional documentation of their primary data."
Clearly there was no attempt to delineate the cropped wing, or portion of it (that would have made this deception too easy to spot), and Tom appears to be correct that most of the black shoulder was "selectively" altered (i.e., cropped out). All one needs to do is compare the actual specimens in figure 1 of either paper. Both specimens show much more black in the "shoulder" and don't match frame 33.3 or 50 as suggested by Fitzpatrick et al.
Let's see, actual specimens versus selectively altered images...which better matches reality?
So, shouldn't Science have to retract these images, and Cornell admit that the measurements in Paper 1 were wrong?
see, models are good
This is incredible. Cornell has no new evidence (that they are willing to share)and has fallen back on manipulation of the earlier materials to bolster the argument that the IBWP is still with us.
I really think that is a huge revelation for several reasons. First, apparently Cornell knowingly manipulated images in a purposely misleading way, intended to distort the evidence to support their conclusions.
Second, even if this latest interpretation were "true" (which because of the way the bird was cropped it can't be) it invalidates their size measurements that "proved" the bird was too big to be a pileated. Surely they realized that, and it was incumbent upon them to admit it.
I can't really see Cornell coming out and saying "Sorry about that, we were wrong," although their support base in the world of science surely must be eroding rapidly. This has been a huge fiasco, and the good people at Cornell had better wake up and figure out a good way to extract themselves as gracefully as possible before even greater damage is done to their remaining credibility.
Basically, all that stuff sounds pretty stupid. You don't try photo manipulation because, photo 2D, bird 3D. A crude model would have been better. Size itself would seem to be fairly irrelevant. As much as they tout the difference in size, ivorybills aren't that much bigger than pileateds. The video is not to photogrammetric standards anyway, end of story. My opinion is, high probability an ivorybill, sure thing, no.
People need to go back to their statistics course. The odds of it being an IBWO is astronomical. That's a high burden of proof to get over.
I'm blown away that this is a montage. I must have breezed over it in the Science paper because I had already seen it on the Cornell's Detailed Analysis site. On that site there is absolutely no mention that it is a photo montage.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/rediscovery/support/launching
Relevant quote below referring to the montage (C) in the image sequence.
"This interpretation is further supported by examining the pattern on the wing of a mounted specimen of Ivory-billed Woodpecker, viewed from different angles (see image sequence below).
...
When the Ivory-billed Woodpecker specimen's wing is partly hidden by a tree trunk (C), a pattern results that is remarkably similar to field 33.3 of the Luneau video (D)."
Based on the above description I had assumed that they had taken the specimen and placed it behind a tree and photographed it . Why would you assume anything else? I was wondering at the time how they had actually accomplished it, so I should have been more suspicious.
This is good science? Offering photographic evidence on their "Detailed Analysis" presentation and not even mentioning that it is a montage?
People should read Richard Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science", don't know if that's been mentioned here before:
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/cargocul.htm
Some key passages:
"We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.
...
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
...
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen."
No, no, no! You've got it all wrong. Look and listen to this video (http://www.ivorybill.org/video.html) and you will hear the core message in this whole debate: [JWF on screen]: "We have conclusive proof that the the Ivory-billed Woodpecker has survived into the 21st Century."
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