There’s an old Irving Berlin song…”Let’s face the music, and dance”. Science is not doing much dancing, but the mag is facing the music, playing loudly out of the report issued by a special study group convened by editor Donald Kennedy in the wake of the Stem Cell caper, in which two papers which appeared in the AAAS journal, dealing with purported breakthroughs in stem cell biology, were shown to be based on fraudulent results. The Dec 1 issue of Science contains a special section on the study group’s recommendations. It’s good news/bad news kind of thing. On the plus side, the investigators could not fault the way the journal handled the manuscript and the reviewers’ comments. On the minus side, obviously, a faked paper got through the defenses, with serious negative consequences. The study group makes several recommendations, including one to insist on the submission of more primary research data, especially in “high risk” submissions. This extra surveillance is going to cost and the group raised the possibility of “conflict with authors” as drawback. The Grouch is not impressed. It’s Science, remember? If Kennedy tells the authors to sit on a cake of ice with their pants down and stay there till he says it’s OK to get up, the authors will do it, and smile all the while. You think they’ll yank their manuscript and send it someplace else? Not bloody likely, as Eliza said. This story got a lot of play in the general media, so the BG is tacking it on to today’s new content in LibraryLink. A special site was created for a statement by the editor, for the report proper and for other related links. It seems pretty comprehensive.
SCIENCE report

No, I’ve got it right, thanks. That’s the name of a book by Charles C. Mann, a science journalist who has been following developments in the archaeology and anthropology of the Americas before contact with Europeans. It’s a lot of territory to cover, in both the strict and the extended senses of that word, but Mann does a good job of synthesizing the results of many individuals and research teams, stretching back some fifty years or so. It’s a big book, structured around three themes: Indians (he uses the term deliberately and tells why in an appendix) were many times more numerous than the Received Version states or implies. Many tens of millions may have died off as a result of diseases brought across the Atlantic. Indians were in the Americas far longer, and achieved a great deal more, than the previous histories suggested. And lastly, Indians did not live lightly on the land, but changed, altered, and engineered it to suit their own purposes. What Columbus and the others encountered was a human creation, managed over millenia by societies who didn’t like what they found in nature, and changed it. It’s a big venture into “almost everything you thought you knew was wrong”, and not surprisingly there are some who don’t buy it…at all, or only in part. One of the funny parts concerns Mann’s surprise when he discussess these ideas at major universities. People in the audience ask him how they can find out more about these notions, but the joke is that the auditorium is full of people who can do exactly that. Academic boundries are so tight and communication across them so difficult that even novel or even revolutionary notions don’t get much attention on campus outside the guild.
It takes an outsider to create something like a synthesis. Then too, Profs are afraid of being too good at talking to the Multitudes, for fear of being dismissed as a mere “popularizer”. Ho, Ho, Ho time is coming. Give Santa a hint. Tell him you want 1491.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Paperback)
by Charles C. Mann
560 pages. Vintage
ISBN: 1400032059

And his name was Peter…Peter Rabbit. He had some irritating siblings, who always obeyed their mother and always did the right thing. OK, we’re talking about the creations of Beatrix Potter. I doubt if there is anyone in North America, or anywhere on earth, unfamiliar with Ms. Potter’s menagerie of cute critters, so wonderfully depicted by the author herself. But Beatrix Potter’s skills went beyond illustrating kids’ books, though that is no small accomplishment. Get the book and look at the pictures again. They’re lovely, astonishingly lovely. She was an accomplished artist, and used her skills in botanical illustration. She was also a fine naturalist, devoted to the lowly slime and fungi, and would have made some original contributions, had she been allowed to publish her discoveries. But, late Victorian England was an iffy place for women seeking recognition in the sciences, and BP was a shy creature, unwilling to use the sharp elbows. She had her revenge in a way, in that her books made her a nice pile of change. She prudently invested this in land, expanded her holdings and found a realm for her interest in nature by exploring her own lands. There are several books about the lady on the market, including a selection of her drawings and paintings. She was another one of those annoying Brits, who get stuff done.
Beatrix Potter
(Be sure to go all the way down the page to Further Readings, and check out those links)

The New York Times Magazine for November 5 ran a long article on the current state of the Oxford English Dictionary, familiarly known as the OED. In this piece, the author concentrates more on the way the dictionary is managed today than on its history. Editors and lexicographers make intensive use of the Internet, and have created their own search tools and term candidate managing software to help in the preparation of the the Third Edition. In fact, the Third may be the last “edition”, since it seems very likely that digital publication will be the only way that the OED can be created and maintained. There may be only one, continuously appearing “edition”, and I guess in time the edition statement will just be dropped. No other language has anything like the OED and its editors are anxious to keep its reputation for flawless scholarship intact, while trying also to add new words as quickly as possible. Old words are often give new meanings, and obsolete or specialist words suddenly appear in new contexts. The Grouch’s favorite example is “parse”. The OED also tries to list the first use of a word or phrase in English, with quotation, but it often happens that earlier examples of the word used in that meaning turn up, so revision is necessary on that score as well.
OED