<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by rderosa</i>
<br />Random chance? Maybe, but it's awfully "conveeenient."<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Life is about forming hypotheses. But major coincidences can and do happen all the time. There is a simple prescription we use in science to prevent the premature acceptance of all kinds of hypotheses that will turn out to be based on coincidences: controlled testing.
In its simplest form, the "a priori" hypothesis says that, when you spot something that appears to be beyond chance, the first instance is <i>never</i> significant, but can only be used to formulate a hypothesis. I don't know what it would be in this case because so many good anomalies have not been censored, but sometimes merely the act of trying to formulate the hypothesis points up that the attention-drawing thing makes no sense as anything but a coincidence.
But assuming you can formulate a coherent hypothesis, you then design a test for it. This usually involves looking for other instances.
Then comes the part that even educated scientists often forget. If you just scan hundreds of images, your mind tends to easily remember the clues that fit your hypothesis and not to notice, or readily forget, clues that tend to falsify it. So you need controls in place before any search begins, with clear-cut criteria for what constitutes a "hit" and what is a "miss". And of course, you can't change criteria or hit-miss determinations after you know what effect they will have on the outcome. That would be allowing your biases to pre-determine the test result. It should be a <i>fair</i> test that allows both outcomes, not just the favored outcome.
If you begin the search and find you want to modify the hypothesis, that is only okay if you remember another form of bias that leads to false positives: You must throw out <b>all</b> the data up to the point where the hypothesis is finalized, and start the search from scratch using only fresh data not part of the hypothesis-forming work. You can't use the cases that convinced you to change the hypothesis as part of the evidence favoring the hypothesis in a test. The test comes after the hypothesis is final and the controls are in place.
If you do a controlled test of a coherent hypothesis, perhaps you could make a convincing case that data manipulation has occurred, starting with convincing the skeptic that should be alive and well within yourself. (Mine is saying right now: "Too much money is at stake if censors are caught, catching them is too easy with images from other nations' space programs, and bias is a sufficient explanation for JPL ignoring all the anomalies we think significant.")
Instead of allowing yourself to indulge in unproductive and side-tracking hypotheses and having to reality-test them (or worse, not reality-testing them), why not take a more pro-active approach, such as JP Levasseur has? Join the "request an image" program and ask JPL to take another image of any area you want one so you can find out what was in the missing data. If you don't trust JPL, ask ESA to take an image with Mars Express. (But you may have to wait a while because it is still working on its active mapping program.)
