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posted by cmn32480 on Friday March 16 2018, @07:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-didn't-sign-up-for-it dept.

A survey of U.S. government scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) was flagged as spam at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Computer Security Incident Response Center. UCS's Center for Science and Democracy director has attributed the low response rate at EPA and other agencies to a "culture of fear":

A periodic survey of U.S. federal scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) caused a bit of a kerfuffle at U.S. EPA last month. For the ninth time since 2005, the science advocacy group sent out a survey to more than 63,000 federal scientists across 16 agencies to gather information about what's happening inside the federal government in relation to scientific integrity. Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS, said his staff reached out to the agencies to let them know the survey was forthcoming: a memo EPA apparently missed.

"The unannounced, unauthorized, and perhaps illegal message found below this message was sent to me today," Brian Melzian, an EPA oceanographer in Rhode Island, wrote in a Feb. 12 email to EPA's Computer Security Incident Response Center (CSIRC) and others obtained by UCS. [...] Melzian continued: "Finally, if the message found below is legitimate and not bogus, these organizations have been grossly negligent and incompetent for distributing this message without first being authorized and approved by EPA." Rosenberg said while UCS did inform EPA the survey was coming, he is not required to do so and it's up to the agencies to choose whether and how they inform employees about it.

[...] While the survey will remain open for another couple of weeks, the response rate so far has been low — a fact Rosenberg attributes to fear of retaliation. "It suggests the climate and culture for scientists is really fearful," he said. "The culture we've seen more broadly in this administration has been either dismissal or hostility toward science." A spokesman for EPA said it didn't make sense to him that employees would be afraid to fill out the survey since it is anonymous but declined to comment further.

As of March 2, response rates for EPA hovered around 2 percent, with 296 completed surveys, compared with NOAA's response rate, which was 4.1 percent with 460 completed surveys. Still, in 2015 NOAA's response rate was 19.6 percent with 2,388 completed responses.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:50PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:50PM (#654105)

    A spokesman for EPA said it didn't make sense to him that employees would be afraid to fill out the survey since it is anonymous but declined to comment further.

    Its boomer to still believe in democracy and LARP it matters. Possibly the department has retiring boomers getting replaced by somewhat more reality based younger people.

    Its kinda like coupons, which were a riff off ration books during WWII, so the concept of coupons sold REALLY well to WWII-generation people, and younger folks are often WTF about coupons. Especially when there's too many layers of abstraction, so the sale on the facebook page if you follow the company so they can spam you is called a coupon, and a coupon is a ripoff of 70+ year old wartime ration books, which were probably an abstraction of something even older.

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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday March 17 2018, @07:42PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday March 17 2018, @07:42PM (#654193) Journal

    I modded you funny because of this:

    Boomers getting replaced by somewhat more reality based younger people.

    You're hilarious. :)