Apologies for the lack of posting recently.
You can blame the throes of teaching semester-time (into week ten, two and a half weeks to go…). Or perhaps the series of delightful illnesses the kids have been bringing home. Our three year old has had a jolly November, enduring a nasty case of antibiotic-necessitating bacterial tonsilitis and then chicken pox in quick succession… I blame his first year at the nursery. And as a family we have all had (the week before last) a rather unpleasant encounter with what my esteemed colleague Dr Gee likes to call “Effluvia”, but which I call norovirus.
Anyway – suffice to say that November has been one of those months we would rather forget.
Of course, apart from parental exhaustion, it may just be writer’s block. Or lack of ready subjects.
And then there are also those subjects that you feel you really ought to be writing about, but which other people have already covered… or which need far more time that you have to do them justice.
However, the main point of this little post was not to have a moan, or even to apologise.
It was to point UK-based readers to a fascinating documentary about the tragic chess genius Bobby Fischer that is on the TV this week. This is the documentary that I wrote about back in September. It goes out on BBC4 tomorrow (Wednesday) at 9 pm, and is well worth a look even if you know nothing about chess. The archive footage alone is fascinating, as is the Cold War allegory of Fischer’s 1972 World Championship match in Reykjavik with the Russian Boris Spassky.
Anyway, highly recommended.
And perhaps something more substantial than this on the blog in the next week or two.
Ah! Children. Those adorable little bundles of contagion. I hope you are all better soon. I contracted something like a norovirus in Vegas, of the variety that we medical professionals call the Galloping Shits, and gave it to the rest of the family. Let’s say it passed through the family with the ease and alacrity of a hot buttered ferret racing down a teflon trouserleg while being chased by a terrier with a chili stuck up its bum. Now I learn on the B. B. of C. that you can contract norovirus from oysters… and I am currently in Helsinki where I have just been taken out to dinner by a colleague who works on botulinum toxin, and who had many interesting food-related tales as we tucked into the reindeer. Is nowhere safe?
No.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwww Noroviruses. Not yet rampant here, but ’tis the season. All kinds of flu-like things going around though, Mrs. Ricardipus being particularly stricken at the moment.
When in doubt, blog about chess. It’s a subject that never tires of comment and analysis. But I think it must be a year or more since I last blogged about anything. There just never seems to be the time, even commenting and tweeting has become a rarity these past couple of months. And I don’t have the excuse of the family succumbing to assorted plagues. I hope the reason for my distractions will become evident soon – something of a magnum opus is in gestation.
Thanks for the comments, gents. it certainly is ‘the virus season’, as ‘Er Indoors calls it. We had a rather ghostly pale 7-yr old refusing to go out last weekend (this was a week after we’d all got over the noro) and I’ve woken up sweating and fever-y the last two nights. Though that could just be the prospect of having to go to work in the morning.
@Ricardipus – ‘Er Indoors gets a free ‘flu jab due to being a hospital doc, but I don’t think they’re doling them out to the rest of us this year.
@Stephen – Magnum Opus, eh? Blogging or scientific?
I must say I haven’t managed either this Autumn. Though I am a co-author on a just-accepted-today paper, which in these days of my declining involvement in research is quite pleasing. The paper in question has been round several (!) high-impact-factor multi-disciplinary journals without getting lucky (though I should say none of them begin with “N” “S” or “C”), but has now found a good home at J Biol Chem.
I do have a couple of chess-y things part done, but I hesitate to make the blog too repeatedly chessical. I was hoping to post up my Autumn’s League games (I’ve played six so far) with some basic annotation, and one or two other bits. But whether I’ll get to any of that before the Xmas hols I’m not sure.
The opus is scientific, and we’re roughly mid way through revising a paper that involves a truly absurd amount of work. A new sport, ‘extreme pipetting’ is now flourishing in the lab, and we’re steadily ticking off the 45 (not joking) additional experiments requested by the reviewers. And we are of course doing all this with no assurance of a happy ending.
The next time I blog, it may well be to tell the story behind this study, which I think some would probably find more interesting than the study itself.
Goodness.
Actually, my (anecdotal) experience/sense is that, over the last 10-15 years, reviewers have started to demand more and more extra experiments. The paper just accepted in J Biol Chem required four to five ‘person-months’-worth of extra experiments to do enough of what the reviewers asked for (not by any means all) to make it acceptable.
It is also notable that this has happened over the same period when many journals have put time limits on how long you have to prepare re-submissions… though I think those are there mostly to reduce the ‘apparent’ time-from-first-submission-to-publication statistic for the journals.
Ah. We all get (and have gotten) flu shots courtesy of our
fabulousreasonably functional healthcare system in Ontario. What Mrs. Ricardipus has is nasty, but almost certainly not “real” influenza. Although it could be some strain that the shot doesn’t catch, of course.@Stephen – that’s an awful lot of extra work. From my perspective as an editor with everyone’s weekly etcetera beginning with N, my feeling is that the whole syndrome of referees’ demands is all part of the secular change in science over decades to become more ‘professionalised’. There are more scientists, more papers and more journals, and everyone is required to do everything in a tearing hurry. There is also more compettion, so people submitting papers have to make a very fine judgement about whether to submit a paper as it is, rather than doing more work, running the risk of being dismissed as too preliminary – or doing more thorough work and getting scooped. There are two solutions to this in my view.
The first is a much more diverse ecology of science publishing, in which scientists will be able to choose between a variety of publishing models from subscriber-access to posting raw data on the net, from open peer review, anonymous peer review and everything in between you can imagine. I don’t think any single model of publishing suits everybody – indeed, here at Nature Publishing group I don’t think I’m being a corporate drone by saying we’ve been trying out all kinds of models. At EMBOJ, whch is one of ours, we’ve been publishing referees’ reports along with the papers. This is a move that seems popular with scientists and the more I think about it the better it seems.
The other solution is that we editors shouldn’t be afraid to make our own judgements on manuscripts. Of course, we’re never in the right. If we follow the reports of referees to the letter, we are thought of as having no imagination or initiative. If we take our own thoughts and view into consideration, scientists damn us for being unprofessional, and not individually expe in the particular field discussed by a manuscript. My view which comes from many years of experince is that good editors should be able to trust their instincts, overruling referees in the cause of a manuscript they instinctively feel is good (and saying ‘boo!’ to demands for extra experiments that seem unreasonable) and standing firm elsewhere when they think authors are trying it on. Editors shouldn’t be seen as functionaries or pen-pushers but research brokers, who have a part to play in making sure that research gets treated fairly in the painful process between submission and publication. Of course, you can and should be free as a scientist to put your research straight into the public domain without having to endure this process, but my guess is that most scientists will go for some form of pre-publication selection process, for the simple reason that – fallible though it might be – it tends to be right far more often than not.
Very interesting, Henry.
I suppose that, as more and more papers get submitted (both due to ‘salami-slicing’ and because the number of people doing science has risen inexorably) ,there is inevitable pressure on reviewers to reject more papers, which might manifest as their becoming fussier.
A new element to this fussiness more recently, which makes me a bit uneasy, is reviewers wanting absolutely everything in the paper to ‘fit together’. It was pretty common in the 80s to see anomalous results reported in papers with the comment:
Nowadays I think reviewers would typically use this to reject the paper, or at least to tell you to go away and not to come back until you had it all sorted out. The dangers of this approach are pretty obvious.
With regard to editors, in my experience (as an author) it is indecisive ones who are an author’s worst nightmare, which chimes with what you say. I have a story or two on that topic which might even make a post of their own.
Though I’ve never been on journal editorial board, this indecisiveness (as in ‘once a reviewer has said something the editor is incredibly loathe to overrule or even ignore it’ seems to be a rather common trait, judging by a lot of trade gossip as well as my own experiences.