There have been some interesting developments on the Lewandowsky front. Firstly, Steve McIntyre has written a hilarious post about one of the sources Lew relied on in his Moon Hoax paper.
...nowhere in Wood et al 2012 is there any explicit statement that only two respondents purported to believe in the Faked Death theory that was highlighted in the abstract. Had readers been aware that only two people purported to subscribe to this theory, then they would obviously not expect “many people to give high endorsement to both theories”. Unfortunately when zero people subscribed to both theories, one cannot justifiably assert that “In Study 1(n= 137), the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered".
Secondly, the ethical approval for the second "recursive fury" paper has been obtained by Australian Climate Madness. This has been nicely summarised by Shub Niggurath
The approval was granted as a “follow-up” study to the ‘Moon’ paper. The ‘Moon Hoax’ paper was itself was approved under an application for “Understanding Statistical Trends”. As recounted here, “Understanding Statistical Trends” was a study where Lewandowsky’s associates showed a graph to shopping mall visitors and asked questions (link pdf). This application was modified to add the ‘Moon hoax’ questions on the day the original paper was accepted for publication. The same application was modified for the ‘Recursive Fury’ paper. Each modification introduced ethical considerations not present in the previous step. Nevertheless, three unrelated research projects were allowed to be stacked on to a single ethics approval by the university board. In this way, Lewandowsky was able to carry out covert observational activities on members of the general public, as they reacted to his own work, with no human research ethical oversight.
The University of Western Australia seems entirely untroubled by all this. To the best of my knowledge their only response has been a shrug of the corporate shoulders. But as one surveys the stories of the various scandals at universities that have been covered at BH it becomes increasingly clear that there is almost nothing a university researcher or official can do that will lead to disciplinary action being taken against them. The only thing that seems to happen to miscreants is to be showered with awards - named chairs, awards from the Royal Society, that sort of thing.
It's lucrative, this academic misconduct business.