Regarding the story mentioned here, Nature has published both a provocative and interesting article by Eugenie Reich about the larger issues raised, and an editorial. Sorry that these are behind a pay-wall. To summarize in a few sentences: Eugenie Reich points out that the misconduct investigation relevant to this discussion highlights important problems with the US Department of Energy's handling of such cases. To wit: There are issues of independence and chain of authority of the investigators, and lack of proper record keeping, documentation, etc. of investigation reports. The conclusion is that this is a powerful argument for the DOE to establish an Office of Research Integrity, like those in some other agencies. The editorial from Nature chastises the DOE along these lines. Interesting that the Nature editorial makes no mention at all of their own role in not publishing technical comments relevant to this particular matter.
In blogging news, there has been a drop-off in the number of active physical science bloggers. David Bacon's Quantum Pontiff has decohered. The Incoherent Ponderer has gone so far as to apparently delete his entire blog and blogger profile. Other blogs have not been updated in many months. It's likely that this is all part of a natural stabilization of blogging - people run out of things to say, and the novelty of blogging has trailed off. It will be interesting to see where this trend resolves. It'll be a shame to have fewer interesting voices to follow, though. (Clearly we should all switch to Twitter, since 140 characters should be more than sufficient to carry out detailed science discussions or popularizations for the lay audience. Ahem.)
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