Joshua wrote: ". And a top academic career would be a chair at a university or director of a research institute."
Well, Josh, by your own definition, Dr. Robert Duncan, Vice Chancellor of Research at Univ of Missouri, would then most definitely qualify as "top academic career", and he was skeptical when CBS 60-Minutes asked him to be their expert on the Cold Fusion piece done in 2009. His conclusions are reasonable and in-line with the evidence: that something interesting seems to be going on and deserves a dedicated effort; which is CONTRARY to your position. Oh, well, he must have all of a sudden lost his objective faculties once he was infected with the LENR virus! Could be worse. At least he isn't infected with the pathological skeptics virus which would only keep us in the dark (or fossil fuel) age. Josh also wrote: "A science writer is a journalist. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not usually considered academic. Some people, like Sagan, mixed them successfully" You seem to be unaware of the fact that Mallove was NOT educated as a journalist. He was a graduate of MIT and Harvard with engineering degrees, so he was very well educated in technical disciplines; enough to know when raw data was deliberately manipulated. I think Mallove's career was very similar to that of Sagan; he just didn't live long enough to enjoy more journalistic successes. The following is taken from Wikipedia: "Eugene Mallove held a BS (1969) and MS degree (1970) in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from MIT and a ScD degree (1975) in environmental health sciences from Harvard University. He had worked for technology engineering firms such as Hughes Research Laboratories, the Analytic Science Corporation, and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, and he consulted in research and development of new energies." -Mark
