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I was in the tiny Kaaawa post officeyesterday morning when a woman turned around and announced that she thought I hadn’t been writing enough about the cats recently. Can this be true? It always seems like I have to fight off the cat tales in order to retain some semblance of normalcy, but now here’s someone telling me I’ve gone too far in hiding the exploits of the Haahaa Nine. No, I won’t jump back into cat land right this morning except to reintroduce Mr. Duke, our 16-pound wus. Duke was a product of one of those “hoarders” the legislature is now trying to craft a new law to deal with. Well, to be mores specific, his mother, Ms. Cybelle, was a survivor of a hoarding situation. Duke arrived a couple of months later. In the middle of my little office in town. Here’s the whole story as told soon after the fact.

Oh my goodness. It’s contagious! I’m talking about that visual clutter that has taken over the Honolulu Advertiser’s web site along with those of others in the Gannett chain. Now it’s taken over at West Hawaii Today, owned by the Stephens Media Group. The Hawaii Tribune-Herald, under the same ownership, so far has escaped this latest redesign.

I got an email yesterday regarding my reporting on the e-mails disclosed by the governor’s office in response to my request earlier this year.

Two staff members on that mailbox list have left the Gov’s communication team. The more I hear about what goes on behind the scenes with how things are handled the more I’m glad I’m not on the 4th or 5th floor at the State Capitol! These two wonderful folks who “used” to work for LK got tired of the uber micromanaging. Sad.

Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur reminds us that it doesn’t take a lot of words to produce good writing in this great example of a column that quietly hits home.

The Washington Post reports today on the use of ghost writers to write scientific papers for large drug companies, which then recruit academic scientists to apparently serve as “fronts” when the papers are submitted for publication. It’s the kind of revelation that is guaranteed to reverberate through universities across the country, where those articles then become the basis for hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions advancing the careers of the scientists whose names appear on the published versions.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a story available only to subscribers, writes:

In one example, the JAMA authors compare the draft and published version of a paper about a clinical trial; the draft lists only Merck authors along with “External author?” as first author. The published paper has three external authors: one from the University of California at San Diego, one from New York University, and one from a contract research organization. (The Chronicle was unable to reach the New York University scientist, Steven H. Ferris; the researcher from San Diego, Leon J. Thal, died last year.) An e-mail message from one Merck scientist to another said, “I think you should be the first author since you have done virtually all of the writing.”

In an editorial accompanying the article, Catherine D. DeAngelis and Phil B. Fontanarosa, the editor in chief and executive deputy editor of JAMA, respectively, call researchers’ guest authorship “unprofessional and demeaning to the medical profession and to scientific research.”

Just how far this will go remains to be seen, but it certainly looks bad.

And if you like to dig around in new pots of data, just to see what’s there, here a great source of leads to unusual data sources.

Finally, how about a few visual kibbles for all you dog people?

This is one of our daily favorites, Ms. Amedine. She’s a little neurotic. She doesn’t get along with other dogs very well. She’s prone to unauthorized barking while begging for her morning treat, as well as enthusiastic attempts to plant a sloppy doggy kiss on those delivering the treats. Just click on Amedine’s photo for today’s full gallery.