What's New for Sep 27, 2002

WHAT'S NEW  Robert L. Park  Friday, 27 Sep 02  FENWICK ISLAND, DE

NOTE: Thousands of hopelessly misinformed activists descended on
Washington, DC today vowing, as they do each year, to disrupt the
annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. 
The APS Washington Office is closed as a precaution.  

1. MISCONDUCT: SHOEN INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE FINDS FABRICATION. 
A committee appointed by Bell Labs to investigate allegations of
falsified data in papers on which Jan Hendrik Shoen was the lead
author, confirmed the worst fears of the physics community.  The
Committee, chaired by Malcolm Beasley, concluded it was "a clear,
unambiguous case of scientific misconduct."  The panel cleared
Shoen's coauthors of scientific misconduct, but concluded, that
"by virtue of their coauthorship, they implicitly endorsed the
validity of the work.  There is no implication here of scientific
misconduct; the issue is one of professional responsibility." 
The panel noted that this difficult issue has not been carefully
considered by the scientific community.  It will certainly be
considered now.  Victor Ninov had as many as 15 coauthors in his
fabricated work on super-heavy elements (WN 19 Jul 02).

2. THE QUESTION: WHY WOULD A BRIGHT, RESPECTED SCIENTIST DO THIS?
In a prepared statement, Schoen said he believes his discoveries
are real.  He is not the first scientist to attempt to anticipate
what Nature will do.  Nor is he the first to go into denial if
the experiment shows that Nature has something else in mind.  

3. ISS: RUSSIA WANTS TO MOTHBALL THE SPACE STATION.  Just last
week, WN reported that a National Research Council panel, The
Task Group on Research on the International Space Station, had
raised serious questions about the value of continuing research
on the ISS (WN 20 Sep 02).  On Wednesday, it was disclosed that a
top Russian space official, Valeri Riumin, had written his NASA
counterpart, Bill Gerstenmaier, to propose mothballing the ISS to
save money.  Riumin called the situation "desperate."  It seems
there will never be enough celebrity tourists to make ISS pay.
Russia, of course, has experience, having mothballed Mir for more
than a year.  It looks like a plan the US should embrace.  From a
political standpoint, it's not quite the same as scrapping it.

4. INTELLIGENT DESIGN: NATIONAL ACADEMY JOINS COBB COUNTY FRAY. 
In Cobb County, Georgia, as elsewhere, religious fundamentalists
failed to get creationism taught in the schools, so they said it
was really "creation science."  When that failed, they pushed for
its thinly disguised twin, intelligent design.  They persuaded
the Cobb County School Board to adopt a sticker for high school
science textbooks: " Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding
the origin of living things." Bruce Alberts urged Academy members
in Georgia to lobby the Cobb Board to remove the disclaimer. 

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the
University or the American Physical Society, but they should be.