Blogosphere

The Impact of Blogs and the Blogosphere

The New York Times has this story about the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab and the impact of their blogging:

A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government’s premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, G. Peter Nanos.

Four months of jeers, denunciations and defenses of Dr. Nanos’s management recently culminated in dozens of signed and anonymous messages concluding that his days were numbered. The postings to a public Web log conveyed a mood of self-congratulation tempered with sober discussion of what comes next.

“Some here will celebrate that they have been able to run the sheriff out of Dodge,” Gary Stradling, a veteran Los Alamos scientist who is a staunch defender of Dr. Nanos, wrote Tuesday on the blog.

“It might be a good idea,” Mr. Stradling added, “to shut down the celebration and form a work party to clean up Dodge City, because the new sheriff will if we do not.”

The blogging comes at a delicate moment in the 62-year history of Los Alamos. The University of California, which has helped run the laboratory for the government since the days of the Manhattan Project, faces close scrutiny in Washington as to whether its contract should be renewed. And resignations and fears of a mass exodus have recently roiled the waters. Some analysts believe that now, given the public outcry, the university will have to abandon Dr. Nanos in order to make a credible bid to keep its contract…

Read the rest here.

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H/T: Instapundit