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Philemon and Baucis

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-12-30T15:06:43+00:00

As the embers of the current year die away, it is a time of reflection between these last moments of 2009 that are otherwise shared between finishing off a grant proposal to fund the next few years of my research and processing yet more manuscripts that await editorial decisions (it is perhaps not surprising that many reviews were submitted in these last days of the year). And as a part of that reflection, I reprint here a poem written by, of all people, my own father. Ostensibly, it is a poem about an old married couple, Philemon and Baucis, who, having given sanctuary to the god Zeus, were granted the wish that each should die at the same time. My parents are (I think, but cannot be absolutely sure!) 87 and 85. And I have learned much from them.

Philemon and Baucis

They no longer remember their actual age,
every night’s a new night on their hard bed.
They search for their old bodies and embrace.

Every night new, every night the same:
sharing of experience gives their love strength.
They no longer remember their actual age.

Time’s measure they now reject as strange,
the time that matters turns to love instead.
They search for their old bodies and embrace.

There is never in their love such careless haste
that forgets the affection of caress.
They no longer remember their actual age.

They now rejoice that they have learnt to tame
the youthful follies that helped create stress.
They search for their old bodies and embrace.

Their love does not seek greatness nor fame
but at last is all about and much more than sex.
They no longer remember their actual age,
they search for their old bodies and embrace.

I have never really understood poetry. Yes, I know that makes me a philistine. But this is one poem I do understand. I reproduce it here to remind myself that there is more to life than writing (and reviewing) grant applications, editing a journal, or coveting expensive bean-to-cup coffee machines...

poem © Simon L. Altmann

it's almost xmas...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-12-24T23:27:37+00:00

So... it’s that time of year again... Xmas is upon us. As is lots of chocolate.

Have a good one. And a great 2010.

cognition

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-12-22T17:15:56+00:00

Just in time for Xmas, I’ve cleared my queues at the journal. All the manuscripts I was handling that had received the required number of reviews have been cleared, and all the manuscripts waiting to go out to review have been sent out (or have been politely turned away through a process of triage). I even received one email today saying “this is surely the nicest rejection letter I have received yet.” Life can barely get better!

In the last two weeks I’ve accepted 11 manuscripts, rejected 29, and sent around 15 back to the authors for revision. And I only sent 9 out to review. At the very beginning of the New Year I’ll post more complete statistics about the journal, but it turns out I triage (i.e. politely turn away without sending to review) 40% of the submissions I deal with. This is the exact same number that I send out to review but then reject when the reviews come back. Pure coincidence, of course. Particularly quick-witted readers, or those that have a calculator to hand, will be able to work out that this means I accept 20% of the submissions that come my way. I can’t currently speak for the other Associate Editors - I’ll be calculating their combined accept/reject rates on New Year’s Eve... it’s something to do while listening to the year tick slowly away.

it's very, very cold...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-12-20T19:04:35+00:00

Last night it went down to -11C (that’s 12F). There’s an inch of ice on the pond. Or at least, there was until I dug a great big and unsightly hole in it...

Things I’ve discovered over the past couple of days:

Chocolate fountains and children do not mix. Or rather they do. All over the carpet: what goes down does sometimes come up again.
It’s actually quite pleasant doing absolutely no work at all over the weekend.
Delonghi have released the ESAM6700 - successor to the ESAM6600 that I really, really, covet. The new machine costs a few hundred pounds more, which makes it all the more covetable, and all the more out of reach. Anyway... I make a perfectly fine cappuccino each morning, and it’s almost as good as the cappuccino they make at La Colombe in Philadelphia. It’s true that I can’t do the Latte Art... but I want to drink the stuff, not hang it on my wall...

Things I’ve done over the past couple of days:

Turned the AMLaP 2010 page into a blog; I can now add information as I get it.
Almost nothing else.

life's ups and downs

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-12-18T09:12:42+00:00

UP: The snow is beautiful. It’s -2C and it snowed most of the night.

DOWN: We’re snowed in.

UP: My new contact lenses. I no longer need reading glasses! My left (dominant) eye is set to focus on distant things, and my right eye is set to focus close-up for reading. So wherever I look, one eye is in focus and the other is blurry... but the mind is an amazing thing, and I already am pretty much adapted, after just two days of the new prescription, and I barely notice the blur. Soon, I am told, I won’t notice it at all. Surprisingly, it takes no effort to switch from close-up to distant viewing. This is life-changing!

DOWN: The snow is indeed beautiful, but the burst pipe which flooded the kitchen and has left us with no water until the emergency plumber comes (at exorbitant cost) is not beautiful at all. It only took 90 minutes with two bath towels to soak up the water and leave the floor looking strangely dry (I have the central heating to thank for that).

UP: Morning coffee made with bottled water. Sparkling water. You just can’t beat a fizzy cappuccino...

unfinished Finnish coffee

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-12-13T14:59:26+00:00

Am somewhere in the skies over Sweden, or possibly Norway, on the way back from Finland. Evidently, the civilised coffee world has not yet reached these dark frozen climes. Nescafé was the best you could get. I decided I’d give the instant cappuccino a go. The technology is clever, and it is worth watching the stuff froth and foam. But before you go off and try it for yourself, you should know that powdered cappuccino tastes very much like the regular instant coffee, except for the shot of Gillette shaving foam they’ve magically mixed in. I can assure you it is completely undrinkable and best treated, and disposed of, like any other biohazard. Anyhow, am drinking far better stuff on the plane back. Foolishly, I have just eaten the very worst idea in airplane vegetables - finely chopped beetroot. Yes, the stuff that, if accidentally dropped down your white shirt, makes you look like you’ve been stabbed multiple times. And to facilitate the stabbing, Finnair provide you with the tiniest of plastic forks, a more adequate description of which would include the words ‘over-active’ and ‘slingshot’. Accompanying this vegetable equivalent of an indelible marker pen was some unrecognisable seasonal meat - I guess that means it was either reindeer or elf.

lucky Sam... unlucky me

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-11-28T08:01:52+00:00

It’s my eldest’s birthday today. 15. Bear in mind, now, that I’m a die-hard Mac user. I’ve been using Macs since 1988. So it was with considerable pain that I succumbed to his constant pestering for a netbook (at least it has Windows 7, rather than XP). The aforementioned pain was considerably eased, however, when he unwrapped the gift from his mum. Underwear. Ok, so it was high-quality underwear that requires a certain coolness factor to be worn. But even so... it’s underwear, for goodness sake! Of course, as a Mac man, I believe that his mum’s gift will prove the more useful in the long run...

I, however, am not as lucky as Sam. Despite the opportunity two weeks ago to return to my favorite coffee shop in the world (La Colombe, Philadelphia), and then to visit Boston, I have finally succumbed not simply to netbook-mania but also to some variant of the ‘flu. I took a cold with me to the US (I carefully hid it from immigration officials, lest they quarantine me), maintained it lovingly in Philadelphia and Boston, and then re-imported it, suitably mutated, back into the UK, where it returned in fuller force to bite me in the proverbial you-know-where. Yesterday’s rant/vent/post was written under the influence of that same virus, added to which was a concoction of paracetamol (Tylenol), neurofen (Advil), and caffeine (Illy) - you can tell that I feel better today. Not physically - just mentally. Must be due to having been woken by an excitable child at 6 in the morning (no, not Sam, his younger brother who seems to delight as much in other people’s birthdays as in his own).

The day before yesterday was Thanksgiving in the US (not in Canada, though - they wouldn’t want to share with the US their public holidays as well as their international dialling code). I did remember it on the day, but events overtook me (or rather, ‘flu did), and I failed to post anything appropriate. So despite feeling thankful most of the time for the various friends and colleagues I have scattered across the globe, I shall take the opportunity now not simply to feel it, but to give it also - thank you.

peer review

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-11-27T09:06:23+00:00

It’s been a trying few weeks at the journal I edit. It is not atypical for authors to complain about the injustices of the review process. For these people, I offer some consolation below, and a newly invested prize: the “Poke the editor in the eye with a stick” award. Identifying the winner has not been easy in the face of some quite considerable choice. This year’s winner of the coveted jab’em-in-the-eye award goes to the person who was unsure about the legitimacy of the concerns I had expressed when returning my editorial decision. In questioning their legitimacy, he listed a bunch of reasons why my concerns were unjustified, and then mentioned in passing that he had in fact reported the wrong data in the paper...

Regrettably, such complaints are typical. And increasing in number. And for each one of these that I receive, there are countless others that are no doubt discussed in coffee rooms and conference halls up and down the country (pick any country), and for which I and the reviewers are the minions of the Devil. The sad fact is that unless we hear about such cases, we can neither reconsider the facts (and perhaps change our earlier decisions) nor defend our decisions in the event that, like the case above, there is nothing to answer for except a rigorous and professional review process. One time, an author complained that the review process can’t be any good because after I had rejected his manuscript, it was accepted almost unchanged at another journal. With a little probing, the author eventually acknowledged that before submitting to the new journal, he had in fact added in the additional study that the reviewers and I had requested when the manuscript had first been submitted to us.

Each time I receive, or hear of, a grumble, it is my job to investigate it. It is inevitable that mistakes will be made, and regardless of ego it is our job to root out such mistakes and correct them accordingly. If authors do not believe that they have been dealt with fairly, the field as a whole rightly loses confidence in those it has entrusted to help the passage of its science. But we should not forget that editors and reviewers deserve fair treatment too.

For an accurate depiction of the typical author response to a decision letter, I advise all readers to watch the following instructional video. I do not know who made it. I do know that, last night, within the space of 30 minutes, I received links to it from two separate academics living in two separate countries. So my thanks to John and Ellen for making me realize I am not alone in the perennial editorial struggle...

hotel rooms

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-11-17T20:35:33+00:00

There is nothing worse, I've decided, than sitting in a hotel room, working. At least my office is *my* office - full of some of the paraphernalia that defines my existence, if not also aspects of my identity. According to tripit.com (which I use for managing my travel itineraries), today is the 54th day this year I've spent in a hotel room. By the end of the year I'll have spent 61 days in hotel rooms spread across 31 different cities, 9 different countries, and 72,000+ miles.

It's time to stop. And go home.

display configuration

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-11-10T19:50:21+00:00

For reasons unknown to me, more people are visiting this site than ever before. Have the TV networks stopped showing repeats of Friends? Is The Simpsons no longer broadcasting? The problem I'm faced with is that I now feel obliged to update this blog, simply to prevent the disappointment that would result, I suppose, from people coming back, time and time again, in the vain hope that it would have been updated. I can't blame these poor hapless souls as I do the same thing. No, not with this website, as I actually have inside information on the timing of its updates, but with the websites that currently interest me most... those that offer the cheapest price on the De'Longhi ESAM6600. Regrettably, those prices do not change, and if they do, rarely in a downwards direction.

I used to be a Gaggia man, but the machine in our lab is ageing even more rapidly than am I. And as I researched a replacement, I discovered that Gaggia were taken over by a bigger fish - Saeco - a company founded, oddly, in a place called Gaggio (Gaggio Montano, to be more accurate). But then the bigger fish was eaten, just this last summer, by an even bigger fish - Philips (you have to love their toothbrushes, if nothing else). So that just leaves De'Longhi as one of the last Italian firms making bean-to-cup coffee machines. Not that I really care about all this historical stuff (if I did, I probably would avoid wanting to buy a coffee machine from a company that in fact specializes in heating equipment and radiators...) - what I really care about are the resoundingly positive reviews that their machines tend to receive, and the even more resoundingly positive reviews that the 6600 receives. But it costs megabucks. So I continue to check the price comparison sites, and continue to dream of a day when I either win the lottery (unlikely since I haven't bought a ticket in years), or miraculously save the life of a De'Longhi executive who will reward me for my courage with precisely the machine I covet. It is a sad fact that winning the lottery without a ticket is probably the more likely of my two fantasies...

A more manageable fantasy over the past two weeks (since we switched from BST to GMT, or as our American cousins would say, since we came off daylight savings time) has concerned the clock in my otherwise fully-functional car (a Peugeot 207, which, I sadly realize, is a quite paltry vehicle compared to the BMW convertible that one of my colleagues has recently purchased... an extra heavy load of manuscripts will shortly be coming his way...). The fantasy was a simple one - to get the thing to show the right time. But the challenge proved too great. I failed to figure it out because no matter which buttons or combination thereof I pressed, I kept coming back to a menu item on the dashboard display which promised to "display configuration". This wasn't particularly useful as I didn't want to display the configuration, I wanted to change it. So eventually I resorted to the manual. It contained the following information:

In the event that you wish to change the time on the clock, abandon the prejudice you have to interpret "display" as a verb and "configuration" as a noun - instead, adopt the less frequent reading of these two words, with "display" as a noun and "configuration" as the second noun in a noun-noun compound. You will then have successfully found the one menu item which allows you to change the "display configuration" - on encountering this menu item, press 'ok' and you will immediately see a message offering to change the hours and minutes of the clock. If you are too dumb to realize that "display configuration" has two meanings, and that we the manufacturers will naturally have pre-selected for you the least likely meaning, you barely deserve to drive this car.

It really does say that in the manual! And I feel suitably ashamed at my linguistic prejudice. Needless to say, with such cognitive infexibility, the chances are slim of being able to get the coffee-machine equivalent of a BMW convertible to do anything as impressive as grind a bean. So it's probably just as well I can't afford it. Even better is that I will miss out on the joys of having to figure out, each spring and each autumn, how to change its clock...

Broken promises

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-10-15T21:02:57+01:00

So I made the mistake, in that last post, of promising to update this page with greater regularity. Yeah right. I instead, rather foolishly, decided to fulfill my obligations over the past two and a half weeks to:

NIH (7 grants reviewed)
Cognition (18 manuscripts sent out to review, 51 action letters written)
Carbon Emissions (3677 miles flown, 124 miles via train - I've still to take the return journey)
My stomach (dinner at Vidalia in DC and Amada in Philly were highlights of my gastric experience, as well as La Colombe which still serves the best cappucino on the American continent)
My research (and more specifically, a collaboration with a bunch of people in Philadelphia that will shortly culminate with a bunch of other people being stuck in an MRI scanner - and by 'stuck' I mean 'placed in' rather than 'unable to be retrieved from')
Hotels (3)
The Wine & Cocktail Industry (I think, but can't quite remember...)
Casio (I bought a new watch - radio-controlled from atomic clocks in USA, UK, Europe, Japan, and China; solar-powered; 200m. water resistant; and in many ways, though perhaps not aesthetically, highly desirable)
Amazon.com (various)
Marks & Spencer (underwear... what else?)

So details of my dare-devil attempts to windsurf in Turkey will just have to be left to the imagination. Sorry.

[UPDATE, posted from a Starbucks back in London...] The BEST pasta ever was served on Thursday 15th October, 2009 at Vetri, Philadelphia. It made one gasp. As did the wine, which cost as much as the meal...

advertising feature

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-09-26T10:08:09+01:00

After a period of abeyance, this blog is, once again, in a 'go' phase. Planned updates over the next couple of weeks include:

Turkey: windsurfing, ringo riding, and Jamie propelled at speed into the depths of the ocean...
Barcelona: conferencing, electricty blackouts, and a foolish offer to host AMLaP 2010 in York next year (dates most likely to be 6th-8th September, 2010. You read it here first!)
A publicity photo for a public lecture in which, miraculously, I had grown hair where no hair will ever grow again... (I did manage to intercept, and depilate, the photo before it went to press...)
Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass computer speakers - unbelievably good. Too good. Can't use them in the office without the entire corridor rumbling to the beat...
Ocado.com - grocery delivery via iPhone... geek heaven!
Bearded Dragons on the horizon, if Jamie has his way and I can't think of a good enough reason why we *can't* fit a 120cm vivarium into our living room...

Of course, anyone reading this won't care about what updates are planned. I merely put them here to remind me in the coming days to fulfil my promise and make public the memories I hope to recall in future years. Not even 6 NIH grant applications to review, scores of Cognition manuscripts to process, new data to analyze, two theses to read, experiments to be run (because I was so stupid that I need to re-run the last one..), and students to supervise, will get in the way. The only limiting factor, as that last sentence makes clear, will be my grammar.

Alan Turing

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-08-31T09:22:08+01:00

Excerpts from the BBC News website, Monday 31st August 2009:

"Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing.... In 1952 he was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself...”

To read the full article, click here (opens in new window).

To sign the petition (British citizens only - bizarre - does no one else have an opinion that the UK government is willing to listen to?), click here (opens in new window).

Many of us who spent time working on “artificial intelligence” will know Turing for his seminal contributions to that field (amongst others). It is fitting, to me at least (and the other signatories of that petition), that we acknowledge the mistreatment he suffered through the institutionalized discrimination of the day.

An update describing my windsurfing (and ringo-riding) antics in Turkey will follow...

[update - 11th Sept: Gordon Brown, UK Prime Minister, wrote the following in a statement to all signatories to the above petition: "[...] Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction [...] So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better."]

three months, three continents

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-08-10T23:30:01+01:00

I just realized, as I gazed wistfully at the Patagonian moon, that in the last three months I’ve been on three different continents. The two trips that preceded this one were:

Stockholm. The most expensive city in Europe, I believe. Even the cheapest-looking restaurants are just that: cheap looking. But you won’t get much change out of your month’s salary if you have anything more than bread and water. Admittedly the bread was fantastic... Almost as fantastic, but a definite tourist trap, was the Absolut Ice Bar - essentially a room that has been turned into a large fridge, into which they have fit a fairly standard-sized bar. It’s so cold that they give you protective clothing to wear and limit you to some small number of minutes. Not because they’re afraid that any harm will come to you, but to save the ice inside from melting from all that body heat... So the idea is you go in and marvel at the ice walls, the ice bar, the ice bench, the ice table, and the ice sculpture, and you then down a vodka that’s so sweet it makes a sugar cube taste bitter by comparison, and you then leave. The sugar, apparently, is to help you burn up the required calories with which to keep the frostbite at bay. I can attest to the cold, and the fact that if you do attempt to lick the walls your tongue will stick... Overall, the trip (to attend a conference) was worthwhile. Largely due to a couple of friends whom I went with, and various others whom I met over there. It’s just a shame that it cleaned me out financially.

Philadelphia. I went to the USA’s historical heartland to set up a collaborative project with a group there that do neuroimaging (brain scans, for any reader fortunate enough not to be an academic). The folk there were fantastically nice. Made me feel incredibly welcome. I guess they took pity on the visiting Brit who knew nothing about neuroimaging and had a bewildered look on his face most of the time... so the combination of friendliness and patience was much appreciated, as was the visit to the Barnes Foundation, which is an astonishing and unexpected place. The night that I arrived, I got off the plane, found my hotel, and made my way around the corner to a bar called Tria - the place for cheese and beer in Philadelphia. It was so noisy, full, and exhilarating that I barely stood out as the oldest person there by a decade or two. I did try my best to hide the fact that I couldn’t read the dimly illuminated menu without my reading glasses... but I failed miserably when it came to reading the bill... or rather not being able to read it. Or the pin machine that was thrust at me after I handed over my credit card. Someone recently told me that the best thing about reaching 50 (I’m not quite there yet) is that one ceases to care about such things. Yeah, right... The other thing I failed at, apparently, was being sociable.THE thing to do, I’m told, is to sit at the bar and just start chatting to whoever is sat next to you. I’m just too shy to risk anything as exciting as that. I also discovered on this trip, around a further corner just off Rittenhouse Square, the best café on the American continent: La Colombe. They don’t do sandwiches, or toasties, or fruit yoghurts drizzled on a bed of cereal and salad leaves... they just do coffee. Cappuccino to rival any cappuccino in Southern Italy. And the effortless way in which artistic patterns were poured into the froth was inspiring. So much so that I tried it myself when I got back home. It worked a treat - artistic patterns were poured, by an excited me, onto my coffee, the surrounding counter, and a substantial portion of the floor. Probably I shouldn’t have been quite so optimistic that anyone without years of experience could so instantly ascend to the level of a black belt barrista...

And now I am in Argentina, where I have been for the past two weeks. Next week I fly off again, after a day and a half in the UK, to Turkey for a week’s holiday with my kids (and most definitely without the journal). A couple of weeks later, I’m off to a conference in Barcelona. And then I’ll have an only-slightly interrupted 4 weeks before flying back to Washington. Maybe I’ll make a small detour and drop by La Colombe again...

Havana

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-08-10T19:27:15+01:00

Not the city. The café. Am back in Neuquén (still in Patagonia). One of the great things about Argentina is that many cafés and restaurants (and petrol stations - “gas stations” for the one N. American reader who I know will read this) have free wifi and internet connection. So am about to upload several entries to this blog, a chapter to a very patient editor (sorry, Simon!), and various emails to various people. All while downloading a system update for my MacBook Air, and various application updates for my iPhone. Needless to say, these updates could perfectly well have waited till I got back to the Northern Hemisphere. But where’s the fun in traveling the world with out-of-date software?

The drive back from Bariloche to Neuquén was stunning - with mountains, desert, huanaco (llama-like creatures that you can see by following the link in my last entry), condors, eagles, even an ostrich!

It’s now 4 days that I’ve done nothing for the journal. I feel like I’ve been given a new life. That’s not to say I haven’t done any other work. I have, and I enjoyed it. I finished the chapter that I’ve just emailed off, and that I needed to finish for a Handbook of Eye Movements (yes, such things do get published, and people even buy them!) It’s only about 6 months late. Probably that ever-so-nice editor will write back to say I’m too late and the boat has sailed (I’m hoping he didn’t forget I was meant to contribute to the volume). In which case you’ll shortly have exclusive access to the chapter here.

I’d best get back to the coffee. And I’d best just loosen that trouser belt a little more to accommodate the pastry...

what not to do when traveling

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-08-06T23:02:52+01:00

Fly Air France to Buenos Aires and uncomplainingly accept, despite checking in ages in advance (and apparently before three quarters of the other passengers), that the rude and unhelpful ground-staff will have no option whatsoever but to allocate you the two rear-most seats in the plane - the ones that don’t recline.
Squirt liquid soap onto your hands before checking whether the taps are more than just decorative and actually dispense running water. It’s not exactly easy to wipe the sticky stuff off with tissue paper.
Visit a sister (Silvia’s sister) who lives in the most idyllic spot in the Andes, by a lake, surrounded by trees, mountains, and astonishing peace and quiet. I now no longer wish to return home.
Bring work with you (or worse still, do the work you brought with you).
Bring your cellphone with you (or worse still, use the thing).
Gain three kilos in just 11 days. I so hope the scales are wrong - but the weight gain is totally plausible.
Climb up a modest mountain in freshly fallen, but rapidly melting snow, forgetting that if you have to scramble up the slippery slope to reach that very special rock from which to view the condors, the way back down will most likely end, or even begin, in an uncontrollable but strangely graceful fall that will remind you of the good fortune you had in taking out health insurance.
Buy more clothes in the local town than you need, can use, have space for on the flight back, have space for in your closets back home, or, perhaps most importantly of all, can afford.
Drive. Better to let your partner drive so that you can take in the herd of huanaco, the ostriches, eagles, condors, and miscellaneous horses, cows, and goats (those that you hadn’t previously eaten at an exceptionally nice grill) that can be seen on the drive to/from the Andes.

[update: I’m only writing this entry because I today stayed in, except for a quick limp to the lake, to finish those remaining manuscripts I mentioned in yesterday’s entry. I’m now officially on strike. Anyone expecting me to do anything for the journal over the next few days had better not hold their breath! And whatever work I do next week will be research-related and will not be in service of Elsevier, the journal, its employees, or their dependents. Terms and Conditions apply.]

under a pile of snow... and a pile of manuscripts

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-08-05T16:46:25+01:00

Am now in Bariloche, in the Andes. Snow everywhere. It’s amazingly beautiful. My calm is interrupted only by the occasional sound of the melting snow falling from the trees, and the incessant Tourette-like swearing that I hear emanating from a voice inside my head each time I think about the manuscripts that I’ve dealt with since my last entry and the ones still to do. My sense of well-being would be complete if I could just find that little ~~homunculus~~ editor inside of my head and shoot the bstrd...

The drive to the Andes was spectacular. The only problem with the Andes is the existential angst brought on by the contrast between their calm beauty and the unstructured chaos that is my life back home. Much of the drive here was through desert. Very low scrub-like bushes punctuated by the occasional horse or cow. As we got higher, what should have been a rainstorm became a snow storm, and seeing the desert covered in snow was a once-in-a-lifetime experience... unless, that is, you live here, in which case it’s a several-times-a-winter experience. But if you do happen to live here, you probably don’t have internet access so you won’t be able to contradict me...

Silvia’s sister lives just by a lake near Bariloche in the Andes. Bariloche is the equivalent of a Swiss ski resort (or whatever the equivalent would be in Colorado...). Except there are almost no Europeans or N Americans - the majority of tourists are Argentinians, Brazilians, and Chileans. The economic crisis is hitting hard, although Argentina is permanently in crisis - in part due to the corruption that is endemic amongst politicians. Apparently, the President and her husband, to take one example, bought a ton of state-owned land, near Tierra del Fuego (the southernmost point of Argentina), at a much reduced price of course, which meant that they made very many times more than they had paid for it when they sold it within some very short time. Anyhow... the economic crisis means that Bariloche is not heaving with tourists as it has done in the past (when I last visited, 18 months ago). So the peace and quiet is even more peaceful and quiet than usual. Nice for us, but not so nice for the people who rely on tourism for their livelihoods.

But I have done my bit to prop up Argentina’s ailing economy, and have bought not one but two leather jackets. And a rug. And the obligatory t-shirts for my kids. You may ask what I could possibly do with two leather jackets when most people only need the one... Undeniably a good question to which there is no satisfactory answer.

this is it...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-07-31T18:44:55+01:00

I know, I sound like a broken record... but here I am, in Argentina, and I’ve done nothing since I got here 3 days ago but work on the flippin’ journal. It’s not like I’d not been working on it before leaving for this trip; I had. But this is the peak season for submissions (of both new manuscripts and reviews of manuscripts sent out to review). So I got here with 44 papers to make editorial decisions on, and 28 manuscripts to send out to review (or to ‘triage’ if they would be more appropriately submitted to a different journal). So far I’ve managed to get through a meagre 37 of the 72 total manuscripts that require my attention (there are others too that require more minor attention, but I’m disregarding those for the sake of my sanity). Which means I still have 35 to do. So when I say, in the now immortal words of the King of Pop, that “this is it”, this IS it: Unless something changes, and Elsevier come through with the additional support I’ve requested, this most definitely IS IT. Otherwise the risk that I end up like Whacko Jacko is just too great. It’ll either kill me, or I’ll go completely whacko. Are you listening, Elsevier?

Once I’ve calmed down, I shall write a more interesting entry, including why I shall never fly Air France again, why an elasticated waistband isn’t such a bad idea, why you should never dispense soap before establishing that there is running water with which to rinse it off, and why going to Philadelphia and to Stockholm were recent highlights on my calendar. With a bit of luck, this trip to Argentina will also turn into a highlight. But for now, a pile of manuscripts beckon as dusk draws nearer in the Patagonian winter...

editorial mortality

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-07-19T11:25:37+01:00

I have neglected this page. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, whereas only 3 weeks ago the journal queues were cleared, and whereas I have been working on the journal fairly consistently despite a trip to Philadelphia in the interim (more of which in a subsequent entry), there are roughly 50 manuscripts on the queues now that require my attention. No amount of tranquilizers will help (though I suspect that a valium or two to the authors who are getting jittery might not be a bad thing!).

Somewhat disturbingly, when talking with another editor (of another leading Experimental Psychology journal), this other editor said to me, on hearing about my workload: It will kill you. He meant it literally. I fear he is right.

oops!

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-06-27T16:38:04+01:00

Damn! I’m meant to be somewhere else. Not here!

the piano

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-06-20T18:25:06+01:00

Two seemingly unrelated events, one in the northern hemisphere, 38 or so years ago, the other in the southern, about 25 years ago, finally came together this weekend:

1972. Oxford, UK. When I was around 12, I saw the movie If, directed by Lindsay Anderson, and starring Malcolm McDowell. As a British schoolboy, the movie was notably poignant. But more poignant for me was the soundtrack - the Missa Luba. I asked my parents for it, and somehow, they found a copy (an LP, in fact). On the reverse side was Grieg’s Piano Concerto - the first piece of classical music I ever owned, and still to this day my favorite piece.

1984. Neuquen, Argentina. About a month ago, Silvia received an email from an Argentinian living in Germany. Emilio Peroni. He remembered her as his first piano teacher, from when he was between 7 and 10 years old (i.e. around 25 years ago). She was paying her way through University in Neuquen by teaching piano at the local music school. He had found her web page, and wanted her to know that he was now a professional concert pianist.

2009. York, UK. This weekend Emilio came to visit, and we were talking about favorite pieces, and I mentioned the Grieg piece. He sat down, and started to play it. I cannot describe what it felt like to hear someone sat at my own piano playing that... It was like I’d been waiting 38 years in anticipation of that moment, without realizing it until suddenly, unexpectedly, these two unrelated events, one in Neuquen, the other in Oxford, came together.

I write about this here so that, in the future, I perhaps find this page again, and can relive the pleasure of that moment, and the intensity of the emotion that accompanied it. And because what happened to Silvia - a student contacting her 25 years later to say “look at me - you helped make this” - is what some of us can only ever dream of. And as I sit here writing this, to the sound of her student playing for her, I feel that something extraordinary has happened.

back for a brief stopover

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-06-06T19:51:50+01:00

For reasons that only an expert psychiatrist would be able to deduce, I’m about to leave for Stockholm having just returned from New York and Washington (DC). The flight over, to New York, was uneventful, despite flying an airline I haven’t flown in years: Continental. I used my remaining air miles with them to upgrade to Business, an experience that included, as a special treat, an in-flight cheeseburger that made me appreciate the culinary craftsmanship of McDonalds...

New York was, quite literally, legendary. We were staying with friends on Washington Square, in the exact apartment that was Will Smith’s in I Am Legend. The highlight of the trip was when a tour group stopped outside to be given a quick synopsis of the movie. I couldn’t resist, and stuck my head out the window and announced that this was indeed that apartment and that the owner would be only too happy to show everyone around.. ok, I exaggerate… I confirmed that this was that appartment, and that our host (let’s just call him “Brian” for the sake of preserving his anonymity) was also a legend. Regrettably, the entire tour group found this all too entertaining, and “Brian” is now expected to deliver an impromptu show each time they return.

Serves him right, I say. This is, after all, the same person who, seeing my roving eye on my home page, felt that my time would have been better spent doing something else. Or even doing nothing.

But in all fairness, we did discover that our legendary host had hidden a couple of rather nice jazz CDs in Silvia’s suitcase before we left. Seeing as her suitcase and mine were identical, and the only way to discriminate between them was on the basis of our respective tastes in underwear, I can only guess how he figured out whose was whose...

So anyway, I’m back, just long enough to cut the grass, outstare the ducks, feed the fish, process a few papers at the journal, grab a bite to eat, pack, and leave.

Bye, then.

another trip...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-05-24T15:18:02+01:00

Am off, almost. To New York, then Washington. Then back to (old) York for 4 days and then to Stockholm. Two weeks later, Philadelphia. No time even for a quick nervous breakdown. But here is my achievement of the week:

This is the state of play at the journal - I’ve cleared the queues ... the Associate Editors may still have some manuscripts on their queues, but for now, as a flight beckons, I barely care! What matters is that for the first time in about 3 years I can take a plane trip without taking with me a zillion manuscripts to make decisions on. Not that I can relax and watch the inflight movies - I have a chapter for a Handbook of Eye Movements that I need to finish.

Traveling with me will be my latest gadget (as well as various not so recent gadgets): a LaCie iamaKey USB key. Only disadvantage - unlike my other USB key that I’ve just given away to one of my kids, I’m not yet sure that this one will survive a 50 deg. 90 min. cycle in the washing machine. But I bet it would!

I’m sure there’s more I could say, but it’s a sunny 20 degs. outside, and there’s more to life than sitting here, typing this. At least, that’s what the self-help books say. Not that I’d know ... because if I had any, I’d not have the time to read them. And if I did, I’d probably simply scribble “not acceptable without major revision” on the cover and move on to the next...

soy sauce, sweetbreads, noodles...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-05-06T19:58:05+01:00

Have recently returned from two conferences, each at opposite extremes of the gastronomic experience:

The first was at the University of California at Davis. Davis is just down the road from Sacramento, famous for housing the Californian governor who is, of course, not Californian. The second was at the University of Lyon, which, unsurprisingly, is in Lyon (that’s France, just in case you needed a prompt). Culinary highlights included:

Davis: beer, wine, margarita, martini, noodles. not unreasonable coffee.
Lyon: beer, wine, steak, sweetbreads (thymus gland), kidneys, bone marrow, fish, duck, paté du fois gras, steak tartar (raw beef), rubbish coffee.

The soy sauce from the title of this entry accompanied a part of my journey on a train from Oxford back to York until I spilled it on my MacBook Air. I’m happy to say it licked up a treat. But seeing as I had only recently spilled my iPhone down a toilet, I’m worried that this is becoming a habit (the spilling, not the licking... the iPhone is definitely off-limits, now).

And finally, a confession to share: a friend recently complained that my emails were resembling this blog more and more. And yes, said friend had already heard about the food, the soy sauce, and the toilet before they just this moment graced this URL. So I admit it: Today’s entry has been recycled - my small but valiant attempt to make this a greener blog.

find of the day

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-04-12T16:06:27+01:00

I’ve just discovered TripIt.com. The following “blog badge” shows how many miles I’ve travelled since the beginning of 2008 (it updates in real time - if you visit this page while I’m away, it will tell you where I am):

Each time I book a flight/hotel/train/etc, I just forward the confirmation email to plans@tripit.com, and it automatically creates an itinerary that I can carry with me, or email, or check for last minute changes (e.g. flight times). The really smart thing is this forwarding feature. It’s effortless - it works out for itself that anything that’s been booked within the same period is part of the same trip (and if it gets it wrong, it’s almost as effortless to correct). So each trip will show the trains, hotels, flights, etc. all conveniently filed in a single place accessible from the web, or my iPhone. It’s so very easy that I got a bit carried away and forwarded all my trips from 2008. For no good reason, really.

I did think about putting the “badge” into the sidebar on the right, so that people could see when/where my next trips are. But... (a) I’m not sufficiently organized enough to organize all my trips in advance, (b) it’s too wide, and (c) I’m not convinced it’s stylish enough for this blog.

But then neither am I.

Happy Easter.

the good, the bad, and the ugly

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-04-11T12:11:34+01:00

The Good

submissions to the journal are slowing down – in the first 14 weeks of this year, we’ve received only 15% more submissions than we received in the first 14 weeks of last year. Phew. So at this more reasonable rate (after 10 weeks, we were up 30%), I anticipate around 825 submissions this year. We can do that. We can do that. We can do that (if I say it enough times, it sounds almost believable).
two new Associate Editors are due to join the journal later this year.
the ducks have laid three eggs in the garden.
I have never booked a flight for the wrong day, let alone for a date a whole week after I was meant to travel. Unlike some.
I have been working surprisingly effectively (for me), and even getting some research done, and a bit of writing.
my new pen.
my new car.

The Bad

I still haven’t cleared the queues on the journal - I’m about 10 days out of synch. Oddly the exact time I lost through going to a conference in the US. I’m currently down to four Associate Editors at the journal, which is why my load has been relatively higher in recent weeks.
The ducks didn’t actually sit on the eggs, and I now regret not swiping them instantly and cooking up a duck omelette...
It’s Easter, and I’m off chocolate (nothing to do with giving up something for Lent - more to do with not wanting to give up my trousers...)
Yeah well, I so wish that was my new car. The only thing my new car has in common with a ferrari is the color red... not that I have it yet - apparently no one is crazy enough to want the model with sufficient airbags to cushion anyone other than the driver, so mine’s a special order from the factory (somewhere in France).

The Exhausted

Yesterday, despite having slept almost 10 hours overnight, I was so exhausted I could barely work, and I in fact slept another 2 hours in the afternoon. My body (and mind) are telling me I need a break.
Equally exhausted is my bank account.

down the pan

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-03-31T07:48:25+01:00

I don’t know whether ‘down the pan’ will mean anything to speakers of any dialect of English other than the UK one, but if it doesn’t, recounting the details of how it is that my iPhone ended up down the pan will be of little interest to any readers from across the pond. Though now that I come to think of it, the details are probably best kept out of this...

But needless to say, aforementioned iPhone survived the trip intact, clean (perhaps even cleaner than before), and fully functioning (although early on in its recovery period, the screen would flicker on and off in a mesmerizing, but strangely troubling, way).

And just in case you’re thinking ‘what kind of idiot lets their iphone tumble freefall into the sewage system?’, let me tell you that I’m not alone. Or rather, I was alone when it happened, of course, but I’m not alone in respect of having suffered this particular kind of trauma – within moments of my advertising the calamity, a friend wrote:

“Glad I'm not the only one that has happened to. The first generation ones are apparently toilet-proof”

I can hereby attest that the 3G iPhone is also toilet-proof. Or perhaps it was simply that Starbucks offer a better class of toilet...

from nut crackers to garlic crushers

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-03-18T20:01:49+00:00

Actually, this has nothing to do with nutcrackers, except for the fact that I have today received what is to garlic crushing as my prized nut cracker is to nut cracking. I can absolutely guarantee that this garlic crusher is the bees’ knees. It is the Porsche of garlic crushers. I can further guarantee that were you to give one or other or both of the nut cracker and garlic crusher to your loved ones this coming Xmas, you would be the most popular person around the Xmas tree. Of course, you may wonder why I’m thinking about Xmas already when the last snowfall of Spring has yet to come, and the yuletide spirit has another 9 months to gestate. The answer is simple: the combined cost of these two items is sufficiently high that you need to start saving now. But you get what you pay for, right?

And let me add, the cost of the garlic crusher was as nothing compared to the intense pleasure it gave me to receive it this morning and parade it in front of various of my colleagues. And yes.... they gasped. They really did...

I know... I know... I’m going mad. Blame it on work...

30%

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-03-07T10:23:07+00:00

I despair. Evidently the credit crunch means that instead of going out and spending whatever little money they have, folk are sat at home writing up their data and submitting to the journal I edit. Currently, submissions are up 30% on the same 10 week period (since Jan 1st) last year (and this is not due to just one or two weeks - it’s a consistent trend as the graph shows). And traditionally these first weeks in the year are a quiet time! So I hate to think what will happen as summer approaches. Bear in mind that last year, we received 725 submissions - i.e. roughly 6 times more than we’d received in the first 10 weeks of the year. Which means that, if the same happens this year, we’ll be heading for 945 submissions by year’s end. Anyone know where I can get cheap supplies of Paxil (for the stress), Zantac (for the ulcers), and Ambien (for those sleepless nights)? Oh wait, forget the Ambien - I can take advantage of those sleepless nights and stay up working on the journal. Phew. I thought for a moment we were in trouble...

So anyone reading this who wonders why I’ve not replied to their emails, facebook pokes, or offers of money will now better understand the reasons. Of course, I should add that if I had received offers of money I most likely would have replied. So if you want a more immediate response, my PayPal account accepts all major currencies...

It's officially spring

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-02-22T19:56:06+00:00

Well... it’s not. But it ought to be: The fish are eating, the frogs are spawning, the manure's been spread, the pheasant are back in the garden, and the owls keep me awake at night.

And snow is forecast. A sure sign of spring.

my first orgy

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-02-20T19:09:31+00:00

Ok so it wasn’t exactly an orgy. It wasn’t exactly ‘mine’ either. But it was taking place in my pond. Toads... going at it like there was no tomorrow. Ok, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration, as they were in fact completely motionless. But it was quite impossible to determine how many toads were piled up on top of one another without counting legs. I counted 5 pairs (of legs, not toads), from which I then managed to deduce three bodies in one pile, and two in another. So maybe in our world that wouldn’t count as an orgy. But in their world, I’m sure it won’t be long before the photos get posted on the World Wide Webbed internet.

San Francisco and back

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-02-08T19:29:34+00:00

Life never stands still. Wednesday I flew to San Francisco, where I stayed for less than 48 hours before flying back and catching an early morning coach to Oxford (where my parents and one of my brothers and his family live). And now I’m on the train back to York, with Silvia and Sam (Jamie has mumps... despite having been eagerly given the MMR vaccine by his parents!)

The flight to SF was uneventful except for the fact that, as usual, the United Airlines staff were incredibly attentive and helpful. I worked non-stop for almost 8 hours, and then managed 3 episodes of Heroes (I know.... but a bit of escapism never harmed anyone). I regret whatever personality defect I have that meant that I was embarrassed to be seen to be watching movies rather than working for the remainder of the flight. I have little recollection of the flight back, thanks to industrial quantities of Ambien (Zolpidem Tartrate). I SO love the pharmaceutical industry!

The last thing I wanted to do on the trip back from Oxford was work, but I managed to read a couple of really excellent papers (one a draft of a paper that I did not write but which I’m an author on, having been involved in the research, and the other a recently published paper by someone I’m hoping to collaborate with on some neuroimaging work). And reading these (especially the one I had nothing to do with) got me really excited again. So life isn’t too bad. I just wish I hadn’t received, last week, a quotation for a piece of equipment that would, if I bought it, cost almost £13,000... That’s £13,000 more than I had budgeted for! So I’m not sure what I’ll do about that, as I REALLY want that piece of kit. But the chances of persuading the manufacturers to drop their asking price by £5K is negligible.

So, with the jetlag receding (I did feel it badly this weekend), a new week awaits. Yum.

Mars Attacks!

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-02-01T20:05:08+00:00

Ok, so not Mars... but a flippin’ (and flappin’) Heron:

The pond in fact had about an inch of ice on it, which was thawing (there was water on top of the ice because of the thaw), so the Heron is in fact stood on the ice. The photo was taken with my Casio Exilim 7.2M pixels at 3x zoom from my bedroom window which is about 30 metres away, and was then blown up in iPhoto. I wish I could’ve blown up the Heron, because not content to be chased off, the assassin (yes, he did kill at least one fish on a previous fishing expedition) returned a few days after the thaw:

Here it is again, a little further away (but there was more light, hence less grainy) up a tree that overlooks the pond. I do admit to being torn, as they are quite beautiful. But I swear that if it eats one more fish, I’ll take countermeasures... Searching on Yahoo Answers reveals a range of options, including adding garlic to the pond, getting a large dog, or my favorite: “shoot the bastard”.

new archives!

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-02-01T14:00:05+00:00

I can’t take credit for the amazing tidy-up that has just occurred. The pulldown menu on the right is due to Mike Robinson, a contributor to the RapidWeaver forums.

my first time ever...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-01-21T20:17:43+00:00

As a child, I was hopeless at anything requiring physical activity - I couldn’t climb the rope, jump the vaulting box, or clear the hurdles. Inevitably, in any team sport that required two of my schoolmates to choose their teams, I was chosen last. Nice. So imagine my delight when, for an impromptu karate contest in my club earlier this week, I was chosen first!

Other highlights:

fantastic new postdoc in the lab, likely to revolutionize our eye-tracking facility
fantastic page proofs for my most recent paper (I’m being ironic, or is it sarcastic? - the wrong figures were typeset, and even if they’d been the right ones, they were in the wrong place - but the words were all in the right place, and seeing as I wrote them, I can attest to just how fantastic they are)
fantastic progress on the journal front (I’m being neither ironic nor sarcastic - just untruthful)
fantastic progress on all other fronts (if turning up 10 minutes late to a committee I chair counts as fantastic)
fantastic over-use of the word ‘fantastic’.

it's not fair...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-01-18T15:17:06+00:00

...that I feel guilty at only having dealt with 35 manuscripts in the past 5 days – which involved working on the journal today (Sunday) and yesterday, as well as each of the previous 3 days. I also wrote a couple of NIH reviews, ordered a ton of groceries (online), fantasized about buying a new coffee machine for my office, and a new multi-function printer for home. I did neither of the last two things. Am now thinking it’s about time I could stream music from my laptop to my home hifi. Easy in principle except that I tend to work in the kitchen and the hifi there doesn’t have aux input. Unlike folk I know who spend thousands of dollars on amps, speakers, and Sonos controllers, I’m more inclined to go for a low-tech solution - streaming music from iTunes via my wireless network. But that’s for another day, or more likely, another life, in which time does not slip away like water through a sieve. Hmm. I need to buy a sieve also...

the nutcracker suite

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-01-10T19:34:54+00:00

An assorted list of Xmas highlights and New Year realizations and resolutions:

My new watch (there’s a photo in last month’s post), branded by some as ‘pretentious’... I don’t understand why it is pretentious to have a watch with just one hand – surely having an additional hand is pretentious when one hand is just as good?
My new nutcracker. The nutcracker I am in fact referring to is not the one I received this year as an xmas present, which just happened to be the world’s worst nutcracker. In fact, words cannot express just how bad it is. So after a bit of research, I discovered this one, which I promptly bought. And believe me when I say it is the bee’s knees. You can buy it on Amazon, though I in fact bought it here (just in case you want to get it cheaper). I have thus far tried it on hazelnuts, almonds, and walnuts. Jamie’s addicted to it, and won’t put the thing down. This is the ultimate nutcracker - be very confident that I am likely to recommend all sorts of things to all sorts of people in the course of my life, but none will be as good a recommendation as this one.
Jamie’s remote control car that really does drive up walls and across ceilings (the link takes you to a video). I thought it would be total junk, but I was wrong, and it would certainly be high on my list of recommendations (though not as useful as the nutcracker nor as smart as my minimalist and unpretentious watch).
Clearing the queues at the journal just in time to have them fill up again as everyone submitted manuscripts or reviews in advance of the Great January Hangover.
Spending Jan 1st compiling all sorts of statistics about the journal: 725 submissions in 2008; 35% rejected without sending out to review; an overall 81% rejection rate; 2267 requests to review sent to 1439 reviewers, with 65% of these requests resulting in an actual review.
The sudden realization as New Year celebrations reverberated around the pages of Facebook that it (Facebook) is not all it’s cracked up to be: Sure, you get an immediate sense of a whole bunch of people doing a whole lot of stuff, but it’s a whole lot of stuff which you’re not a part of. Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
My New Year’s resolution to be the first to start up a Psycholinguistics Research Laboratory on Second Life. Perhaps others will follow suit, and then I can start up and edit the first Second Life Virtual International Journal of Cognitive Science (aka ‘Cognition’ in our first life). How cool would that be? I reckon almost as cool, but not quite, as my one-handed watch which, through freeing my other hand, gives me plenty of opportunity to ~~crack my nuts~~ deploy that nutcracker...

putting the eye in psycholinguistics

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2009-01-08T22:22:26+00:00

Don’t even ask how long it took me to figure out how to create this, let alone embed it on this page. In case you’re curious (in which case you’re too nerdy for your own good), it started life as a photograph of an iris around which the 3D eye was created in Maya by Andreas Argirakis. This was rendered for me as an HD movie, which I then embedded in a background, saved as a movie, and then converted to Flash. You’d think I’d have better things to do with my time...

A quick summary of my Xmas excesses will follow shortly. In the meantime, Happy 2009...

[update] Some folk have wondered what the eye is doing in place of the ‘y’ when it should, according to them, be in place of the ‘o’. So just to spell it out:

P-S-EYE-C-H-O-L-I-N-G-U-I-S-T-I-C-S

Xmas eve resentment

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-12-24T10:27:22+00:00

Yes, I shall admit to resenting, big time, that I had to spend an hour today working on the journal because of a problem with production that I was alerted to today. Today. Christmas Eve. Unbelievable.

geek heaven, and marijuana

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-12-20T17:37:21+00:00

Am in Geek Heaven. I recently purchased a wireless remote pond thermometer. These things are hard to come by (ok, so they’re a niche item...) and so when I found one, I couldn’t stop myself and I hit that ‘buy’ button like my life depended on it. Didn’t notice that the rest of the website was devoted to drug paraphernalia. Turns out, the guy sells all sorts of precision balances (you can guess why), and evidently thermometers and balances go hand in hand. You’d have thought I’d have been tipped off by the name of the website: www.marijuana.it (actually, it was linked to from the equally tell-tale site www.mariuana.co.uk). So it was with some relief that I actually received the thing. And now I can tell at a glance, and from the warmth of my living room, just how cold the fish are... I should add that I think that the canvas RIZLA+ bag is rather attractive...

More upmarket, but equally nerdy, is the watch that Silvia has bought me for Xmas. Titanium, and very thin. I fell in love with it the moment I saw it. Here’s what it looks like:

Yes: it only has one hand. How cool is that? I’ve not actually opened the box in which it arrived - I’ve decided to wait to open it in front of my family, so that they can gaze upon it in collective wonder... more likely, though, they’ll utter a collective ‘wtf?’

So Xmas is upon us. The tree’s up, the lights are on, the turkey’s booked (I so hate turkey, but hey... it is Christmas), and the presents are... oh. I guess I’d best go and buy some...

And in case I don’t actually do anything of bloggable interest between now and then. HAPPY XMAS!

396

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-12-05T17:19:25+00:00

It’s late Friday afternoon. After a marathon two weeks I’ve cleared a ton of papers at the journal. The queues had built up because of various trips (Chicago and Geneva/Lausanne). But as of a few minutes ago, there were no more papers requiring an editorial decision (accept/revise/reject/etc), and no more papers that needed to go out to review. Of course, come Monday that will all change. But at least I can breath a sigh of relief and look forward to a weekend during which I can remind myself of the other things in my life.

But before I do that: 396 is the number of manuscripts this year which I have designated “accept” or “reject”. So given that today is the 340th day in the year (apparently), that means that I’m making an accept/reject decision more than once each day. I have also made, in those 340 days, 194 “revise” decisions (some of those ended up coming back and becoming “accept” or “reject” decisions). Fortunately, help is on the way. There’s beer cooling in the fridge.

Not in the fridge, but cooling just as effectively, is the pond. The fish are enjoying a spot of hibernation, or whatever it is that fish do when it’s so cold that they just float motionless at the bottom of the iced-over pond. Actually, they don’t hibernate - their metabolism just slows down to a rate approximating my own... And in fact, the pond isn’t quite iced-over - it’s amazing how many holes can be poked in the ice by an over-active 11-yr old. Just as well, though, as a fully-iced over pond isn’t good for the fish. I’m not sure that all the noise made by banging through the ice is much better for them, though...

home & away, and home again

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-11-22T14:13:56+00:00

Ok - this is it. No more travelling for a couple of months. I’m fed up with it. Am on a train back from Geneva, having only a couple of days previously got back from Chicago. I’d gone over to Geneva to talk to a bunch of graduate students from three different universities about academic publishing, and how understanding the job of the editor and reviewers can increase the chances of getting a paper accepted. I really enjoyed putting together the talk, as it allowed me to describe my job as editor - the talks I usually give are all about my research, and yet the biggest drain on my life-work balance is the journal, so it was actually nice to be able to talk about that. They gave me a fantastically impressive bottle of wine as a ‘thank you’. Sadly, I couldn’t bring it home in my hand baggage (I always travel light). So whoever cleaned my hotel room last night will hopefully enjoy it on my behalf...

Chicago was good. Slightly traumatic as I have a problem recognizing faces and recalling names, and for some reason, I was particularly debilitated this time around. It had nothing to do with the 4 large glasses of wine, 5 huge martinis, 2 equally huge Margaritas, 6 regular beers, 1 medium Sake, and whatever else I can’t remember drinking over the course of 4 nights. And I’m glad to report that it wasn’t me who fell off his chair (his Jack Spade was undamaged, I believe - unlike his reputation...). There were several highlights: eating at Boka, having coffee on the 96th floor of the Hancock Building (which is cheaper than paying to take the elevator to the observation platform, which is only 4 floors above the café), meeting up with old friends. Oh... the science wasn’t bad either!

And to end this post on a sad note. The last time I went to Geneva, back in April, the hard drive on my MacBook Air failed. This time, the MBA worked flawlessly. More flawed, however, was my iPhone; the mute switch detached itself in my hand within moments of arriving. It must be something about all that alpine air...

TVs in lifts... whatever next?

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-11-13T01:29:42+00:00

Evidently the pace of life in Chicago is such that even the short ride in the lift (“elevator”) to the foyer (“lobby”) would be incomplete without all the latest news updates streamed to a small TV embedded into the wall. Or maybe folk get stuck in the lift so often that the TV is there to provide entertainment while a rescue team is put together. If it were me, and I were stuck in a lift, I think I’d swap the TV for a W.C...

Obama couldn't have done it without me.

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-11-09T15:32:47+00:00

That’s a complete lie. I’m just curious to see whether the number of hits to my page go up because I put the term ‘Obama’ in there. According to today’s Google statistics, there are 216 million web pages with ‘Obama’ compared to 230 million with ‘Bush’. Given that the word “bush” can mean countless other things, it’s not surprising that Bush outranks Obama on Google. But seeing as George Bush has been US president for 8 years, and Obama’s only been in the public eye for a year or so, it’s pretty telling. And to put this in further perspective: “Barack Obama” - 105 million pages vs. “George Bush” - 22.7 million pages. I’m not making a political statement here - I simply wonder why the US electorate felt compelled to go through all that effort, and all those dollars, when they could have just googled the candidates and gotten the same outcome...

Next week I get to experience the delights of transatlantic travel once again - traveling to Chicago for a big conference. And three days after I get back, I’m off to Switzerland. I do worry that the journal may suffer - I can make editorial decisions when I travel, but it’s impossible to send papers to review, so inevitable delays build up. I’ve been looking at this year’s statistics: This year alone I’ve sent over 300 papers to review, and have made over 500 editorial decisions. Collectively (myself and the Associate Editors), we reject between 25% and 30% of submitted manuscripts without sending them out to review, and we only accept for publication around 10% of submitted manuscripts. So fewer than 15% of manuscripts which are sent to review are accepted. It exhausts me just thinking about all this. I need a break. Or a medal. Or just a little more time in each day.

Not much else to report - the leaves fall as fast as I can rake them up and the fish are slowly becoming more and more immobile as the water temperature drops and the days become darker. I fear I am myself becoming more fish-like each day...

bruised, battered, and relaxed...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-11-02T22:10:20+00:00

Am just back from a week’s intensive karate training interrupted only by fine food, remarkably decent beer, and a bomb scare.

The training was inspiring, although I ended up with bruises on parts of my body that I don’t recall ever being hit. Other attendees included a computer vision scientist, a toxicologist, an airline pilot, a brain surgeon, a software developer, a builder, a PhD student, various children, and others whose professions I never managed to establish because I was too busy trying to hit them...

So now that I’ve been re-invigorated by all that adrenalin (and probably testosterone too), I’m ready once again to do battle with the ~~forces of evil~~ journal.

guilt...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-10-19T19:28:36+01:00

I’ve been unfaithful. To this blog, that is. I’ve joined Facebook. I’m completely confused by what’s public and what isn’t, what my ‘wall’ is, what ‘friends’ expect from their friendship with me, and what the correct etiquette is when someone invites you to be their friend but, not knowing who they are, you decide you don’t really want to exchange virtual hugs or kisses with them. Fortunately, I have a mere 16 friends; a rather feeble number compared to the 150+ that some of my friends have. But it’s still early days, and perhaps I can get that 16 up to 20...

In my occasional series of Tips for Prospective Authors at the Journal I Edit, I have the following advice to offer, based on a real-life incident: If at a dinner, at which I’m absent, you happen to meet any members of my immediate family, avoid berating them for any editorial misdemeanors you feel you may have suffered. It’s not their fault! Actually, it’s probably not my fault either.

Finally, things you don’t want to hear as you think you’ve just landed at Washington DC: “Welcome to Dallas”. Fortunately, it turned out that I’d landed in the right place, but with the wrong pronunciation. The airport’s called Dulles.

And now... back to Facebook, where I’ve apparently been ‘poked’. Yum.

I've joined the dark side...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-10-04T19:26:13+01:00

It’s finally happened. There I was, allowing a visiting friend to entertain me, when I was introduced to the marvel that is Facebook. So I registered. Well... I tried to register... the system sends an email to you to verify you want to register, and when you click the link, you’re on. Evidently, my presence on Facebook is not meant to be, because the email server I use, courtesy of my work, decided to call it a day, and shut itself down. So Facebook will have to wait...

Am still not convinced that Facebook is where I want to be. The idea that one has to beg people one hardly knows to become one’s “friend” fills me with dread. And what if the people one does know say “no”? So on the assumption that I would be the only person likely to look at my entry, photo and all, wouldn’t it just be easier for me to look in the mirror?

Who knows, perhaps the lure of a new technology will prove too irresistible, and I will become an addict - posting near-instant updates of my current activity for my imaginary friends to read.

But until then, am off to Washington (DC) for a couple of days. Bye.

of rain, iPhones, and Budgens

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-09-14T20:00:24+01:00

Am just back from yet another conference. This time, in Southampton. I’m sure Southampton has some redeeming features other than its university. Couldn’t find them, though... Mind you, it was hard to see anything through the incessant rain...

My last post, which detailed a bunch of significant life changes over the past 3 years, failed to mention my new iPhone 3G. I’ll forget my own children next... My mother, as it happens, did once forget me: Left me in my pram outside the local Budgens. Got all the way home (a few blocks away) before realizing. Needless to say, I have no recollection of that brief moment in which I was less memorable than a bag of shopping...

Not much else to say for myself... am looking forward to a couple of weeks’ stay in York before my next trip. A time to relax. And to manage the journal, and write reviews for NIH...

the human condition

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-09-07T16:01:32+01:00

The human condition (well.... my condition) is not unlike the pond filter that I cleaned out today. You fill up with gunk, and the only way to really get rid of it is to dismantle the whole thing, clean out all the festering sludge, carefully re-assemble it, and watch patiently as it starts to function again. And whereas before, what came out of it was a kind of soupy mess, what comes out now is clean and pure, and able to support a habitat the occupants of which are oblivious to the great cleansing drama that has just taken place outside of their immediate experience.

Yeah right. But I have stopped eating biscuits and chocolate, and I did today manage to do up the top button on a pair of jeans into which I haven’t managed to fit for way too long. The great cleansing has begun...

Five weeks ago (my last post) I was about to go on holiday. Which I did. It was fantastic. I came back all charged up... and promptly got depressed the moment I stepped foot into the office. But a few weeks later, and life is good again. The journal isn’t spiralling out of control, the kids are back into their usual term-time routine, the conference season has started again, and now that the summer is almost over it can finally stop raining and the sun can come out.

I’m in fact just back from a conference in Cambridge (the UK one - not the Massachusetts one). These days, going to a conference is as much about meeting up with old friends as it is about learning about the latest research or getting feedback on one’s own. So it’s nice to realize that I have a life beyond http://ees.elsevier.com/cognit (the website at which I manage the journal). And it’s nice to be reminded, as I write this, that there are a whole bunch of people out there, with whose lives my own occasionally makes contact, whom I wish I could thank... just for making that contact. Some of them, if they read this, would know who they are. But equally, some of them would have no idea that I include them also.

Two days ago was this blog’s third birthday. Looking back, it does astonish me how much my life has changed in these 3 years. The most significant of the changes, in no particular order, include:

the house
the pond (twice)
advancing through several grades at Karate
a new messenger bag, made from the finest Italian leather with the finest Italian craftmanship (but not a Jack Spade... so apparently I’m still not hip enough. But at $195, I’ll leave the Jack Spades to Brian...)
the journal
new friends (and some almost lost friends)
new students
new postdocs
new data
new publications
zillions of trips to Washington
and enough stress which, if harnessed, would power a small town...

pre-flight checklist

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-08-02T20:25:05+01:00

Things to get done before 12 days’ vacation in Italy with the family...

clear queues at the journal of all submitted manuscripts waiting to go out to review. done
clear queues at the journal of all manuscripts for which reviews are in and decisions to accept/reject are required. done
stop thinking about how much more I could have done if I’d not been going on holiday. done
stop thinking about how much more I’ll have to do when I get back from holiday. done
stop worrying about things I could have done better to prepare for the holiday. not done
stop worrying about things I could have done better. not done
cut grass at the last minute, before it rains. done
pack clothes, sun cream, hat, swimsuit, another hat. done
pack chargers for ipod, phone, satnav, camera, computer, and countless other gadgets that have now become essential accompaniments to travel. done
treat pond for algae, feed fish, show next door’s kids where the fish food’s kept. done
pick up kids. done
pick up kids’ passports. not done
pick up kids’ passports. now done

My in-laws are visiting

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-07-26T07:44:13+01:00

I think that says it all...

Martial arts in the office

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-07-06T18:10:19+01:00

Ok - it was a stupid thing to do. The likelihood that nothing would be broken was surely close to zero. But when someone asked me what the hardened conkers were for, on one of my bookshelves, I foolishly said that they were so I could practice dodging bullets, and even more foolishly said that if they were thrown at me I would be able to deflect them with the reflexes of a pouncing tiger (ok... so I did not say that, but it was something along those lines). Oddly, this person whom I would normally admire and respect proceeded to throw these things across the room at my head. By “throw” I actually mean “hurl at meteoric speed” - bullets would scarcely have travelled faster. But true to my word, I rather impressively deflected the things while I calmly sat in my chair (I was calm only because I didn’t actually have the time to quake with fear). It was only moments later, after these missiles had been deflected in all directions, that I realized that all the fragile objects in my office, including my computer screen (it was inches from my head), were miraculously intact and unbroken.

There’s a very successful social psychologist called James Pennebaker. He’s well known for showing that by analyzing the language someone uses, you can tell an awful lot about the writer - things like sex (gender, that is), age, social class, professional status, and state of mind (e.g. depression). I often wonder whether he, or anyone else come to that, has looked at the frequency with which people contribute to their own blogs and whether that correlates with anything. My guess is that the more frequent the posts, the better you feel, and that fluctuations in frequency reflect either ill-health (physical or mental) or (less likely for workaholics like me) holiday. So... when I’ve not posted for a while, feel sorry for me....

Unless I have misremembered who it was, I once found myself sitting next to James Pennebaker on a flight to the US. He gave me his copy of “Running with Scissors” (he’d just finished reading it - it’s not like he carried a stash of them around to give out to strangers). I’m ashamed to say I had absolutely no idea who he was until I googled him when I got back to York. But he’ll have had no idea who I was either. So we’re quits. Except that I guess, technically-speaking, I’m up one book. And a good book at that.

Friday the 13th

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-06-14T10:23:00+01:00

Friday 13th doesn’t sound like an auspicious day to fly, but that’s what I tried to do - didn’t quite manage it, though... Was about to fly back to the UK from Washington, DC, but no sooner had we all settled down on the plane than we were told that we had to ‘deplane’. Apparently they’d forgotten to do a security sweep, with the result that we actually took off on Friday 14th. Not that I’m superstitious....

I really like this constructive use of ‘deplane’. From now on I shall, when I arrive at work, ‘decar’; my students will ‘deoffice’, and my children, because they are tired of the responsibility of having to grow up, will be encouraged instead to ‘dechild’. And anyone I don’t like can just go decelibate.

oops, have I just overstepped the mark of decency? I don’t think so; after all, I was merely making a comment on the linguistic potential of United Airline speak.

Speaking of which (I shall leave the reader to figure out which of the above I am referring to), here is another tip for prospective authors submitting papers to the journal I edit: If you are asked to make changes, and you don’t, and you then feel sufficiently aggrieved at receiving a rejection letter that you feel an urgent need to write to the Editor questioning his professional competence, integrity, and maternal ancestry, do make sure that if you are going to sign your letter with the names of your co-authors, they are aware that, on their behalf, you called the Editor an incompetent imbecile of indeterminate genetic stock. They may not necessarily share your views, and may one day wish to submit something of their own to the journal, in which case it would be a shame if mud had stuck.

It must be the jetlag, but I swear my sentences are longer, more convoluted, and generally less comprehensible than normal. It’s definitely time to deblog.

Sample Cover Letter for Journal Manuscript Resubmissions

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-05-24T16:20:53+01:00

by Roy F. Baumeister

Dear Sir, Madam, or Other:

Enclosed is our latest version of Ms # 85-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the goddamn running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over helpless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren’t reviewing manuscripts they’d probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him or her to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers’ comments we couldn’t do anything about. For example, if (as review C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by Reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled “Review of Irrelevant Literature” that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews.

We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to your journal.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn’t, or wouldn’t, have done it without your input.

Sincerely,

[This was sent to me a couple of years ago, when I took over as Editor-in-Chief of Cognition. I wrote to Roy to establish the provenance of this piece (and to ask permission to reproduce it here), and he told me this was written over 20 years ago, "I wrote it to work out some of my own frustrations with the review process back then. I think it is my most widely read publication, and not even listed on my CV!"]

this isn't a blog - this is therapy.

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-05-15T19:28:33+01:00

Things I must remember to do when I have more time: damn, I've forgotten what one does when one has more time.

Various remedies I have tried with the intention of rediscovering the many uses of spare time: chocolate, a 32" HD LCD TV, an HD DVD recorder, more chocolate, the lawnmower, consulting to Nestlé to help them make chocolate more efficiently, looking through the local phone book with my children searching for people with funny names (our thanks to the Rev. W.Ankers), de-algaefying the pond, ice cream, making up words for removing algae from the pond, more chocolate (a lot more - thanks to Nestlé), beer, waking up way too early in the mornings...

Truth is, I spend too much time working. But, it has its rewards. So I shall indulge myself and just write down some statistics about the journal I edit: submissions are up 25% since when I took over 2 years ago. But most likely nothing to do with me. But it means that this year so far, I have sent around 150 manuscripts out to review, and have made around 220 editorial decisions. That means that, one way or another, I've dealt with almost three manuscripts each day, 7 days a week... boy, I so deserved that tv...(though I forgot, when I bought it, that I wouldn't have time to watch it...). I currently take on just over 50% of the submissions coming in to the journal, with the remainder being shared out amongst 4 Associate Editors (another will join soon). And their loads, although a whole bunch less than mine, are still above the industry standard. So it's hard work for all of us. Still, I do get some research done, so I have also, this year, written an article that I've just submitted (to a different journal), co-written an article which should be submitted within days (to yet another journal), and almost finished an article that's also going to go off soon (though this one has been on my desk for almost TWO years). So life could be worse. Though if it were, I wouldn't have the time to notice...

A tip for prospective authors sending in manuscripts to the journal: If it's a revised version of a previously submitted manuscript, make sure you turn off the comments facility in your word processor - if you don't, we'll get to see them; I very much enjoyed reading, recently, the comments in the margins of one such manuscript - evidently, the senior author didn't think much of one of the reviewers, and wrote this as a comment to the more junior author. The comment included the suspicion that the editor would in any case be unlikely to notice that they hadn't changed that section...

A final, serious, note. All this work does take its toll, and I think the people whom I am privileged to work with, and with whom I share so much of my life, have to put up with a lot. I wouldn't be able to do this without their support, professionally and personally.

postscript: I know.... another whiny post. But it was this or nothing.

Back's back...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-04-26T07:59:42+01:00

It's been a relatively quiet time recently. Interrupted only by the drone of the rhythmic mantra going round and round inside my head: work work Work work work Work work work Work. Occasional Sleep.

Back is better. Air is working (my MacBook Air, that is), and best of all, I passed my Karate grading and I am now a 1st Kyu Karateka ("Karateka" = Karate Dude). 1st Kyu means that my next grading will take me to Black Belt. But that next grading won't happen for quite a while!

Air-less and Back-less

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-04-06T12:26:20+01:00

What I failed to say, in respect of my journey back from Geneva being marred by all sorts of things (including religious fanaticism), was that I had also hurt my back very badly, and I am still on industrial-strength (prescription) pain-killers. Not helped by the fact that this afternoon I must suffer 4 hours on a train to Oxford, coming back tomorrow. I'm examining a thesis there. Tip to any prospective students intending me to be their external examiner: If you're going to refer to my work, spell my name right!

And for anyone who thinks I don't work hard enough on the journal: I've just seen that in the first 3 months of this year, I've made 145 editorial decisions (only 17 were 'accept'!). I love the journal, I really do.... but there's a cost to all this - I'm behind on a paper that's only 50% written, and a paper that's 95% written, and a paper that's 100% written (I need to revise the draft). I guess I'm also behind on another paper that's 0% written. So all this work enabling other people to publish is interfering with my own ability to publish. This is the supreme academic sacrifice. I really do believe that I deserve that 32" flat-screen TV that I secretly covet...!

Enough whining. It's Spring. The grass is growing, the fish are eating, the birds are mating, and it's snowing.

MacBook Air-less

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-04-02T19:35:37+01:00

So there I was, sitting at a desk in Geneva the afternoon before I was due to give a talk, preparing away, when the computer froze, never to start up again. The hard drive (or most likely the controller on the logic board) gave up the ghost, and ceased to function. I've run all the diagnostics, and so far as they are all concerned (and this includes some clever remote startup across a wireless network) there is no hard drive inside the machine. Funny that, as it still weighs the same... Still... it could have been worse. It could have died on me during the talk. I can at least thank Apple for that...

So the trip back was marred by being unable to work, and by the extra weight of all the chocolate I brought back. And the sight of two orthodox somethings-or-other asking to be reseated in the plane because their religion did not permit them to sit next to women...

I know... I know...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-03-29T14:44:13+00:00

Ok - so it's a long time since I had anything to say for myself. Since last having anything to say, I've been to Glasgow (UK), Chapel Hill (USA), Oxford (UK), Sainsburys (UK), and assorted other places. Made editorial decisions on 35 papers, and sent a bunch more out to review, and generally despaired at my workload. But the University eventually came through, after many many hours of argument, and agreed that the money associated with my 3-yr fellowship would be given to the department so they could replace me and relieve me of teaching and administration for the 3 years. So at least that's sorted. Unlike my suitcase, which is still empty, and needs filling before I leave later for Manchester Airport en route to Geneva. I must be mad. Not least because of the huge quantities of chocolate I have promised to bring back with me. If I wasn't so tired, I'm sure I'd have other stuff to report, but for now, I can only think that the kids are fine, the pond's working, the house is warm, Silvia's playing the piano, and I'm only about 20 manuscripts behind... that's not so bad, is it?

The really sad thing about my life? If Apple did the decent thing and released a 3G iPhone next week (which I will buy the very millisecond it's announced), I wouldn't have any time in which to play with the thing. Now that would be bad.

earthquakes and martial arts

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-02-27T07:35:28+00:00

Got woken up just before 1am by the house shaking. Jamie (now 10) got up too, so evidently I wasn't dreaming. Turns out it was the UK's largest earthquake in 25 years ('large' is relative - it was 5.3 on the Richter scale).

A number of people know that I'm an avid fan of Karate. So you can imagine my reaction, some months ago, when I read that the MP with responsibility for sport and culture believed that boxing should be introduced to all schools. Somehow, that's going to make children feel more empowered and put an end to the juvenile crime that is apparently sweeping the country like some unchecked viral epidemic. My personal view is that boxing is a brutal and ill-disciplined sport. It also causes severe brain damage, making deformed ears and noses the least of a boxer's concerns... So.... one Saturday morning, in a moment of boredom, I sent an email to this MP and suggested that boxing was not fit for said purpose, but that if he was serious about trying to teach respect and responsibility through sport, martial arts such as Karate would be better suited. I think that my email must have been misunderstood, because yesterday I received a long reply extolling the virtues of boxing over the marital arts.

MacBook Air

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-02-23T07:52:26+00:00

My MacBook Air arrived. It's so lickable. And it comes with a useful cleaning cloth with which to wipe it down after you've licked it...

If I weren't laughing I'd have to cry

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-02-20T19:59:36+00:00

So... I wrote a fellowship proposal 10 months ago than went to ESRC (one of the UK research councils). I was lucky. I was awarded the fellowship (all told, it's worth £370,000 over 3 years). The fellowship pays my salary and some other stuff. The expectation was that the money would pay for a temporary 3-year lecturer to take over my teaching and administration, and that the leftover could pay for a research assistant as well. There's also money in there for a 3-yr PhD studentship and a bunch of equipment. But here's the rub: The University of York (my employer) have told my department that none of the fellowship money will be passed on to them to pay for a replacement for me. Essentially, the university will keep the fellowship money, and my department will have to struggle on without a penny with which to replace me. Unless something changes in the next few weeks, I shall have little option but to write to ESRC and turn down the fellowship on the grounds that my department cannot afford it. It means that the university could lose out on monies that would have, in any other university, paid for that 3-yr replacement lecturer, that 3-yr research assistant, and that PhD student.

If I ever end up writing that letter, turning down the fellowship, a letter of resignation to my vice chancellor will most likely follow.

ok - I whine too much. I admit it.

UPDATE: A couple of days later, the head finance guy phoned me up to allay my fears. In all fairness to him, he was very nice about it all. Apparently, it will most likely work out ok, it's just not clear when the money will be given to the department. One hopes in time to employ my replacement and the research assistant... Still, I shouldn't have to deal with this kind of thing; it's bad enough trying to convince reviewers and grant agencies to fund our research without having to then spend even more time than it took to get the grant in the first place trying to persuade the university to pass the funds on.

my whiny blog...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-02-17T17:37:59+00:00

I admit it - my posts tend to be rather whiny, as a friend pointed out. And that same friend pointed out that I shouldn't feel guilty about the journal. After all, Since Jan 1st, I've made 70+ editorial decisions and sent 50+ papers out to review. I've also come back from South America, gone to North America, terminated one mole, installed the new eye-tracker, had my credit card details stolen, and been ill with influenza. What's there to whine about? That I haven't yet managed to write the paper that was due Feb 1st? A minor detail, that... Fact is, I provide a quality service and deserve a medal.

Perhaps if I repeated that last sentence a few million times I'd eventually believe it...

Actually: despite the odd hiccup at the journal, I think that I, and the associate editors, do a fantastic job. I genuinely believe that. It's just that I like to whine about all the other things I'd like to do but find hard to get done in the time that's left over. Perhaps if I spent less time whining...

someone's stolen my identity!

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-02-16T10:41:25+00:00

Well... not quite. But my credit card details. There I was, browsing my credit card statement online, as one does on a peaceful Saturday morning, when I thought to myself: "oh look, 9 separate payments over a 6-day period to EasyJet - I wonder where I'm going, and who with..". And then a couple of £700 insurance payments and various prepay minutes to phone companies I don't subscribe to... all totaling just short of £3000. Phoned up my credit card company, who were amazingly helpful, and didn't question even once the possibility that I might have simply forgotten that I'd made 9 separate payments to EasyJet... new card is in the post, old card is already cut up...

I wouldn't mind, really, but if someone's going to steal even a part of my identity, they could at least edit a paper or two while they're about it...

my immune system...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-02-15T17:23:31+00:00

... is on vacation - sadly, I am not on vacation, and I wish it would come back. Am in bed with 'flu-like symptoms. Can't possibly be 'flu as I had a 'flu jab in October. But hey - if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, flies like a duck, and tastes like duck, it's a duck, right? So it's 'flu. Plain and simple.

My first thought as I woke up with fever and aches all over (even my feet ached) was: it's Friday, and Fridays are spent working on the journal (as are weekends and Monday afternoons). This was a catastrophe. The thought that I might actually sleep the 'flu off didn't survive more than a few milliseconds, despite my body telling me that that is what it needed to do... so have been working from my bed, sending out papers to review, and dealing with various other issues. And I feel guilty that I haven't done more. It is a sad indictment of my life that I feel guilty that I am unable to work on the journal because I'm ill. And most likely, it's working on the journal in the first place that has contributed to the suppression of my immune system.

:( Hmph...

somewhere over the rainbow...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-02-03T18:09:33+00:00

... well, over the Atlantic (again). Have decided to write down my thoughts on the passing of time:

It's SO SLOW..

I've just looked at my watch, having written 6 decision letters, and there's still SEVEN hours of flight to go. I'm exhausted. No amount of coffee or United Airlines goodwill is going to get me through the next 7 hours. The guy sitting next to me has a very clever screen protector on his PC which means that he can see what's on his screen (and mine, I suppose, if he cared to look), but I cannot see what's on his from this angle. The fact that he has to insert a plastic passkey into the machine to use it makes me think that whatever it is, it must be really interesting, and just the kind of thing that, were I to read it, would make those 6 hours and 58 minutes pass all the quicker...

6 hours and 47 minutes to go... and time isn't speeding up. My eyelids are definitely heavier than they were before. The guy in the seat next to me is doing gymnastic exercises in his seat... Am curious about his screen... what's he got to hide?

6 hours and 32 minutes to go... I can't go on like this. Some turbulence would be good, just to break up the monotony of working on the journal uninterrupted. I have important decisions to make as I read through manuscripts and reviewers' comments: Should I keep listening to Chopin (soporific value: High; intellectual value: High) or switch to Sting (soporific value: Low; intellectual value: Medium; Carbon emissions: Excellent)? It's not easy being an editor... but I do feel I need to change the music, as the chap next to me is now doing some silent, headphoned version of the jitterbug... what's HE listening to??

5 hours and 17 minutes left... Finally! Some excitement: Mr. Jitterbug went to the toilet, so being the curious person that I am, I took the opportunity to surreptitiously open up his laptop (passkey still inserted) and take a look at what he'd been writing. Evidently, he's a civil servant of some kind (it was that boring..). And I think he could do with a bit of help with his grammar... OH COME ON.. do you really think I'd open up his laptop when he wasn't looking, let alone advertise that fact on my blog? Honestly.... what do you take me for? Get real - it was a PC, and as a Mac evangelist I wouldn't touch a PC with a barge-pole....

4 hours and 10 minutes left... current rejection rate on this flight, for 1st submissions sent out to reviewers: 70%. Which sounds like it's a little short of the journal's average rejection rate of 85% - but 15-20% of submissions didn't even get sent to review, so under one interpretation of these numbers, I'm rejecting about the right number of papers.

2 hours and 30 minutes to go.. I have a streaming cold. Tissues are insufficient defense against the floodwaters emanating from my nostrils. I guess you neither needed, nor wanted, to know that. Chap in the next seat has now graduated from gymnastics to a form of ballet. Very impressive, really... either that or he's just trying to avoid the nasal torrent...

Landed.

It's life.. but not as we know it...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-01-31T21:54:42+00:00

My life in 10 days:

Submitted my tax return with two days to spare
Tried to arrange for the new mortgage to start in time (it didn't)
Sent a bunch of papers out to review (but not nearly enough)
Made decisions on a bunch of papers (but not nearly enough - that'll teach me to take holiday over Xmas)
Submitted 7 grant reviews almost on time, but there never seems to be enough (time)
Set up most of my new eye-tracking lab (most of...but not all - you can guess what I ran out of)
Replied to one email, from someone I've never met, accusing me, as an editor, of gross negligence, unfair treatment, and unprofessionalism (I'd rejected their paper)
Replied to another email, from someone else I've never met, saying I'm possibly the best editor in the universe (not sure why this person said this, as I don't think I'd recently accepted anything of theirs, but they are a guaranteed friend for life...)
Worked till between midnight and 1am most nights to try and meet deadlines
Failed to meet all deadlines (except my tax submission - but hey, that'd have cost me dearly!)
Been elevated to Premier Executive status on United Airlines. I'm not sure what it means...
Replaced pump in pond, 'cos the old one (only 4 months old) broke. Well...almost... the new one is waiting to go in, but have to go to San Francisco first, for two (yes, just two) nights (for NIH). Thank you aquatics-online for replacing the pump in just two (yes, just two) days.
Wished I'd bought that bottle, in my dream, marked 'instant time - just add water and wait'.
Wished I'd bought that other bottle, in my dream, marked 'instant life - just add time and enjoy'

I wish I was still stuck in Sao Paolo...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-01-18T17:37:23+00:00

Title says it all....

But actually, it was good to get back to the children, the karate training, and the people I care about... I'm fairly sure it was (and still is) not so good to get back to manuscripts screaming to be reviewed or actioned. But one consolation... no more mole. Poor thing. RIP.

flight cancelled

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-01-11T04:41:20+00:00

It's 3am in Sao Paolo. Flight from Buenos Aires to London was cancelled, and we've flown with a Chilean airline to Sao Paolo where a British Airways plane is due to leave in an hour or so for London. BA arranged, in Buenos Aires, to take all passengers to a supposedly 5-star hotel. I'd have knocked a star off for charging us for internet access! Waited 4 hours for a room (they had very little notice in which to make up around 100 rooms, so I'm not complaining). Got to the room, and within 10 minutes received a call telling us to get on a coach back to the airport. Didn't even have time to steal the toiletries! Got to the airport, where they checked us all in very efficiently, but forgot to tell us to ignore what it said on the boarding card and to go to a different gate at a different time with a different airline. But hey, at least we got to Sao Paolo. And as I write this, I can see the BA jumbo right in front of me on the other side of the glass window. Life is sweet down here in Brazil.... could do with some sleep, though...

Day 12

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-01-07T21:49:40+00:00

Evidently, 12 days is all it takes for me to decide I rather spend time with my computer than with nature... Or, it could be that I've nothing better to do in the 40-degree heat as I wait to dry off from a shower and go out for a meal. So here are some photos of my excursion into the Andes. For the sake of speedy download, I am posting only 4 of the 558 photos that iPhoto tells me I have taken. Of course, there are some duplicates (you know... you line up the shot, and just as you take it, the mountain moves or the river blinks, so you end up taking another shot once nature has settled down again), so probably we're talking a more realistic 500 or so photos. You're not really going to be interested in the stories behind the photos (all you need to know is that I had an amazing time - as much to do with being in the Andes as with being away from my office!), so here they are. I might post some more once I've got back. These were all taken near Bariloche, in Patagonia.

Tomorrow, we're off to Buenos Aires. It's even hotter there than here (Neuquén). Silvia has to pick up her hopefully renewed passport, and there's still much meat to be eaten, shoes to be bought, and tangos to be danced...

The Andes

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2008-01-03T23:37:38+00:00

Am currently in a hotel in the Andes. I'd recommend the Andes, and the hotel, to anyone. Will post photos once I've decided I want to spend more time with my computer than I do with the Andes. Things I've done:

Driven 300 miles
Climbed the highest peak (I cheated - I took the chair lift)
Crossed one of the highest and deepest lakes in Argentina (I cheated - took a boat)
Bought ponchos for my kids.
Bought gifts for various friends.
Eaten more meat in a week than my stomach has had to deal with in a year. Thank you, Zantac, for seeing me through!
Drunk excellent wine.
Drunk lots of Maté.
Relaxed.
Relaxed some more.
Forgotten all those things that prevent me from relaxing.
Thought about all those people who make those things tolerable...

have escaped to S. America

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-12-27T17:55:57+00:00

I'm taking a short break to write this, as I put together a list of potential reviewers for a bunch of papers that were submitted to the journal recently. I should instead be enjoying the view of the River Plate as I wait in Buenos Aires to board a plane to Patagonia. I feel like I'm on the run... glancing over my shoulder lest anyone with a submission to the journal should have noticed that I've gone AWOL, or worse still, followed me here. But no one's hovering around suspiciously, so I think I'm in the clear. That said, and now that I take a look around me, there are an awful lot of suspicious looking people, and an awful lot of people hovering around. But no one that's doing both. Phew.

The flight over was uneventful. I slept until Brazil (a big thank you, again, to the pharmaceutical industry...) and then watched a rubbish thriller (Invasion - a remake of The Bodysnatchers) until Buenos Aires - actually, I watched it all but for the last 15 minutes or so... we landed before I could get past the climactic scene where Nicole Kidman is set upon by a mob... But experience tells me she'll have survived, saved her child, and then the world. I should've watched Shrek 3 instead. So the inflight movie was not exactly a highlight of the trip. Nor was spilling coffee on myself (turbulence, not Nicole Kidman...)

Ok. Enough's enough. Before guilt sets in, I shall get back to the journal... an alien invasion does seem a more attractive prospect all of a sudden...

I'm off...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-12-21T17:28:00+00:00

That's it. I'm done for 2007. I can look forward to Xmas in Oxford, and a Boxing day flight to Argentina. I've done only half the things I'd have liked to have done in 2007, but hey, that's life. There are, undoubtedly, a string of people to whom I should apologize for the things I did not manage to do in 2007, but hopefully I'll make good in 2008.... Although I expect that at the end of 2008 I shall reminisce about the things I did not manage to do in 2008, but which will be made good in 2009... and so it goes on.

A Happy Xmas to you, whoever, and wherever, you are. And an even better 2008.

Falling behind...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-12-14T09:11:10+00:00

Things I've not yet done in the lead up to Xmas:

failed to change the mole's status as a still-living organism
bought xmas presents for my family and myself (hey - I deserve something)
cleared the queues at the journal (am juggling between answering emails, catching papers that have been in the system since the time of the first printing presses, making decisions on papers, sending papers out to review, and managing the transition from one assistant to another)
set up the new eye tracker
marked exam scripts
breathed in and out with a rhythm that is not indicative of rising panic

Things I've done in the lead up to Xmas:

worked out the things I've not done in the lead up to Xmas
breathed in and out with a rhythm that is indicative of rising panic

3 metres and closing

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-12-06T09:00:50+00:00

That's the distance between the latest molehill and the pond liner.... Have called in the professionals...

At war with the mole

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-12-02T15:20:42+00:00

Have laid traps and sonic repellants. The latter are guaranteed not to work, but they were given to me, and I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Not sure what a gift horse is, but there you go... Current distance from closest detectable burrow to pond liner - 10 metres. If it gets through the liner, the only satisfaction I shall receive from having to repair it again is the knowledge that the mole will have been engulfed in the burrowing equivalent of a tidal wave...

While mapping the burrows (with a 6ft iron rod that I had for other reasons), I discovered a 'hole' in the garden that goes down about 5 ft. Not sure what's down there. Could be skeletons, or a septic tank, or both. Once the mole's gone to that great burrow in the sky, I shall map out the hole. If it's too big, I may need to open it up and fill it (the lawn is sinking a little where I found it). With hindsight, it would have been useful to find this hole before digging the pond at another spot in the garden. But another hole would be useful - I recall that the Italian post office, many years ago, were over-burdened with postcards that needed delivering. So instead, they buried them (perhaps they burned them, but the idea is the same). Am considering doing the same with all those journal submissions...

highlights of the week...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-11-30T19:17:47+00:00

Wednesday
It was Sam's birthday. He's now a certified teenager. Scary. That same evening, we drove to Sheffield to hear Jamie take part in a school singing-fest. Zillions of 9- and 10-yr old children (well, around 4000 of them) at one end of Sheffield Arena, and parents everywhere else (around 6000 of them). I was dreading it, but actually it was fun. Except for the drive - that was a nightmare. The highlights were managing to spot Jamie amongst the mass of children even though he was about half a mile away on the opposite side of the arena from us, and hearing the UK champion something or other who could, just with a microphone and his mouth, sound like a complete rock band. He could actually sing and provide his own backing music at the same time - I'm only a little ashamed to admit that it's the kind of thing I secretly wish I could do...

Thursday
A mole started to tear up the garden. There are no expletives that can possibly convey my feelings about this.

Friday
I only managed to process 14 papers this week, and today felt guilty that I just worked on making editorial decisions and did not catch up with about 3 weeks' worth of accumulated emails. I"ll have to sacrifice that paper I'm trying to finish before Xmas so as to work through those emails over the next couple of weeks. And just for the record, it's 8.15pm on a Friday night, and I feel guilty that I'm watching rubbish tv with my kids, while writing this, instead of working on the journal. But experience tells me that a glass of wine will soon wash away the guilt...

success, guilt, and snow...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-11-23T22:10:57+00:00

Success: Not mine, but it was grading night last night at Karate, and Silvia graded to Brown belt (3rd Kyu). So we're now a family of Brown belts (one at 3rd Kyu, one - me - at 2nd Kyu, and two - Sam and Jamie - at 1st Kyu). I didn't grade because I've missed almost two months' worth of training since the last grading 4 months ago. So I just didn't feel confident enough. But it was great to watch. One of the really nice things about our club is that when it's grading night, even those not grading come along to support the others. There's a real sense of 'family'. Even though we spend a lot of our time trying to hit one another...

Guilt: I only sent out 10 action letters today... and spent too much time staring out the window wanting to go outside and rake up all the leaves. For a moment, but just a moment, those leaves seemed so much more attractive than the journal...

Snow: Yes, it snowed today - the first snow of the winter. It didn't snow much, a quick light flurry for a minute or two. And it was cold. Very cold. Which may explain why those leaves never got raked...

at a Starbucks in London...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-11-19T13:03:10+00:00

... I'm just back, from almost 4 days of conferencing in California, sitting in a Starbucks near King's Cross, London, waiting for my train to York. The conference was good - managed to speak to way too many people... and went out a couple of times with some old (and some new) friends. But there's one thing I hate about conferences (well... I'm sure I can think of some other things too, but just one comes to mind right now). Soon after first coming to York, something happened (I don't know what) that left me almost incapable of remembering someone's face or their name. This means that from one day to the next I may fail to recognize someone I've been talking to the previous day. Or, I recognize them, but I cannot retrieve their name. And even with people I've known for what seems like forever, I will occasionally be unable to retrieve their name quickly enough to be able to introduce them to someone else. So at conferences, imagine the nightmare of so many people I see, whom I fail to recognize, and who must think I'm really rude for not saying hello to them. Of course, now I go to great lengths to tell people about this problem, so some of them come up to me and say hello and, seeing that I don't recognize them, explain that we've met etc. etc. I really appreciate that.

HIghlights of the conference (in no particular order):

An excellent Latino restaurant.
An excellent Italian restaurant.
A fantastic filet of beef at another restaurant (accompanied by a surprisingly nice red wine - I say 'surprisingly' because the wine was American - there, I've just revealed my prejudices about Californian wine).
A plentiful supply of caffeine.
An equally plentiful supply of largely interesting 15 min. talks (15 minutes is brief enough that you don't get bogged down in detail, or fall asleep).
A plentiful supply of shark (at the neighboring aquarium).
My publisher, who, contrary to widespread belief, is not The Devil.
A bunch of people whom I spent time with and whom I feel privileged to know.
The pharmaceutical company without whom I would not have slept on the plane.

Lowlights (what is the opposite of a highlight?)

The inconsistent quality of the coffee that accompanied the plentiful supply of caffeine (you can't fault Starbucks when it comes to the consistency of their coffee)
The speed of the internet service at my hotel for which I paid $25 (I couldn't read half my email because it would timeout). This said, nothing is as slow as the internet on a GNER train.
The quality of my room at the Hilton which, for the price I paid, should have been luxurious beyond imagination (I only stayed there because (a) it was a conference-recommended hotel, and (b) there was nowhere else - you think I would subsidize Paris Hilton by choice?)
The overly-abundant number of Apple iPhones being flaunted at me. (Yes, I want one, but not with the rubbish coverage provided by O2 in the UK - That said, if my publisher wanted to buy me one, and pay the monthly contract, I wouldn't complain....).
The 16 new manuscripts that have landed on my virtual desk at the journal

Things to look forward to now that I'm (almost) back

Zillions more manuscripts to process.
The challenge of buying a PSP for my soon-to-be (next week) 13 yr-old.
The challenge of buying a Nintendo Wii for Xmas, for both my 13 yr-old and my 10-yr old (don't ask me why I'm caving in to this perverse desire of theirs). If anyone knows where I can get one without selling my soul, you know how to contact me.
Seeing a bunch of people whom I spend most of my time with and whom I feel privileged to know (yes, that does include my two kids!)
Getting home.

somewhere over the Atlantic (again)...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-11-14T15:33:00+00:00

Stand back and gasp... I've been bought out of my university teaching and admin for three years, starting October 2008. I'm gasping, believe me, I'm gasping....

That and the following journal-related statistics: A bit of context - I was away all of August, and then ill some of September, and then away again (and away again next week, at a conference taking place at the West Coast of America's largest shipping port - who but a super-nerd would go to a convention centre located somewhere like that?) - the point is, it's been a real struggle to keep the queues manageable at the journal, and for a long time (well, since I got back early September), I've felt like I've been shoveling water with my hands (nothing to do with my pond, which, by the way, is fantastically leak-free, in case you were wondering). But as of now, the queues are back down to normal (a week's worth of papers). The Associate Editors handle, between them, around half the submissions to the journal, and I handle the other half. Which means that since the end of July, I myself have made 155 editorial decisions, and sent what felt like zillions of papers to review. The point is: Stand back and gasp!

I'm actually somewhere over the Atlantic as I type this. United Airlines have, evidently, been following the posts on this blog - during my last flight, I pointed out (as I wrote an entry for this blog) the stupidity of metal forks but plastic knives - someone took note and I can report that the knives are now also metal. I guess they realized, probably after watching a Jet Li film that I can no longer recall the name of, that metal cutlery are way less lethal than chopsticks...

I should add that United are, as of today, my even more favouritest airline than they were before. Two things are responsible for this newfound love in my life: First, the close to 30 minutes it took someone, working very hard at ticketing, to upgrade my ticket (the wrong fare code had been applied to my ticket - meaning that unless it was changed, I couldn't use my miles to upgrade). Second, the extreme attentiveness of the cabin attendants. One of them spotted I was working hard on my laptop as lunch was about to be served, and asked if I wanted everything to be served, and then cleared, as quickly as possible. As if by magic, the other two attendants who subsequently served lunch knew to bring me my meal first, and then clear it away before they'd even finished serving the others (I'm a fast eater!). What really impressed me about this was the way the first cabin attendant alerted the others to what I wanted (hey - they offered - I never asked!). If only I could get my research colleagues to read my mind, and discuss amongst themselves ways of making my life even more comfortable. Jelena, Xierong, Chris - are you reading this? Take note!!

Where would we be without eBay? And other things...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-11-08T20:56:55+00:00

Sometime ago (over the summer), I bought a new eye-tracker. It takes a 'snapshot' of your eye up to 1000 times a second and works out where you're looking. If you have a really fast computer screen, you can do really clever things, like change what's showing at some position on the screen as you move your eye towards that position (never mind why we'd want to do that!). I had one of those, but I wanted another for the new tracker. But I'd forgotten that we're all into widescreen flat-panel LCD screens these days, and that no one makes CRT screens anymore. And those LCD screens are even slower than the train I'm currently on (well... not quite as slow as the train, which is stationary). So what's a scientist to do? Use today's technology that is worse than yesterday's? Nope... all he has to do is search on eBay, and buy two super-fast computer monitors from the same person who, coincidentally, lives just down the road. How good is that? Thank you eBay, and thank you to the nice chap who does the stage animations for IQ and who had the good sense to replace his CRT monitors with space-saving LCDs...

Speaking of which, perhaps eBay ought to do the eBay equivalent of Google Scholar, and have a site for academics where they can post details of their surplus equipment - there's always some poor person out there who's got a use for an old Sinclair Spectrum...

It's been a quiet time on this blog, which has given me time to reflect on why I do it (by 'it', I mean post parts of my life on it). There are so many blogs out there that are really very much more interesting than this one. Mostly, reading these blogs, you learn what it is that their authors think. But what you won't learn, necessarily, is about the daily grind of their lives, and the trials and tribulations they have to endure (not that I actually know what a tribulation is). Or about the impediments they suffer to a healthy life/work balance, and which lead to chronic frustration/depression/insomnia. So this is why I write this - to give some sense to the future me, when I have the time to go back and read these posts, of what my life was like at this point in my history. So this isn't meant to be about what I think, but about what I do. Or most often, don't manage to do. (And I hope a future me does read this, as that would mean that I had survived into the future..) So I guess this blog ought to be dedicated to those authors brandishing their pitchforks and flaming torches whose inexorable march towards Cognition (the journal I edit) keeps me from having any kind of life/work balance, let alone a healthy one.

That was the first time in my entire life I have ever produced the word inexorable. Amazing. And liberating too...

Something to look forward to: my next post, which will be so incredibly positive that even I will stand back and gasp...

4 days in the life of a workaholic

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-10-13T12:53:31+01:00

Tuesday evening: Train to London. Write three action letters (i.e. with editorial decisions). Eat Sushi. Stay in hotel near Paddington
Wednesday: Take early train to Heathrow. Fly to Washington DC. Skip the movies and instead write seven action letters (and one blog entry - see below).
Wednesday evening: write two action letters in hotel. Walk to nearest RadioShack, but they're out of iPods.
Thursday morning: Wake up at 4am local time. Write two action letters. Walk to another RadioShack (further away). Buy iPod Nano. Cross road to AT&T store. Play with iPhone. Fall in love.
Thursday afternoon: write two action letters. Read other reviews of the grant applications I shall be speaking about at the grants review panel.
Thursday evening: meet with panel, then go for very decent meal and even more decent wine.
Friday morning: Wake up at 5am local time. Check reviews again for the grant applications I'm speaking about. Meeting starts at 8am. Lunch is brought in (we had a 20 minute break!). Meeting finishes at 5pm. Quick beer with a few colleagues. Taxi to airport. Write two action letters. Board flight. Sleep (those US pharmaceuticals work a real treat...)
Saturday morning: Wake up at 9am local time. Land, take train to London, then to York, on which I simultaneously upload all my decision letters, write this entry, and contemplate the need later this weekend to remind myself of the two lectures I'm giving on Monday. First one starts at 9.30am.

I think I need therapy.....or alcohol.

somewhere over the Atlantic

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-10-10T14:35:53+01:00

In my last post I wrote "...I can go back to my usual erratic blogging". I got an email from a friend who worries that it doesn't befit a serious academic to have an erotic blog... What's an 'r' and an 'o' between friends?

So... am cruising at 36,000 feet somewhere over the Atlantic. Have decided that a trip in Business Class (no frequent flier miles left!) is way better than a day at the office. It is actually more comfortable than the office, and there are no interruptions except for when fantastically nice people bring me coffee just as soon as I appear to need it. Not to mention bringing the occasional snack. How good is that? I emailed a couple of colleagues (the two who are least likely to take me seriously) and suggested that they could do worse than to take a leaf out of the United Airlines Cabin Staff Manual, Section D: Keeping Customers Happily Supplied with Coffee, Nibbles, and Smiles.

So between nibbles, lunch, and unlimited supplies of halfway decent coffee (Starbucks, apparently), I'm managing to make editorial decisions on a whole bunch of papers. Self-satisfaction knows no bounds...

Rebuilding the pond: Day 5+

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-09-28T20:52:48+01:00

Too much excitement. Spent so much time staring at the fish in their new, pumped, oxygenated and non-leaking pond that I completely forgot to attend to my basic ~~bodily~~ blogging needs. So it's done. And except for a few ferns that will go in at the weekend, there's not much else to do. So that's it. I can go back to my usual erratic blogging.

So what else did I accomplish this week? I cleared almost all the emails associated with the journal, but that took me all today, so my weekend will now have to absorb my target of 10 papers.

Next week: Edinburgh and London. The week after: Washington, DC (NIH grants review). And another zillion papers to process. Am beginning to sound like a broken record. My next post will be exclusively positive. I promise. But don't hold your breath...

Rebuilding the pond: Day 4

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-09-24T21:34:52+01:00

After an enforced weekend of inactivity, the working week started in the way that only us Brits can truly understand - under a deluge of water. But the skies cleared mid-morning, and the new liner went in, together with a bunch of stones, and all the fish. Pump and filter will be connected tomorrow, and paving stones and edging will be done - would've all happened today except that the skies clouded up and disgorged their contents all over us again...

On the plus side (as if transferring the fish back to the pond wasn't plus enough) I processed 5 more manuscripts, read half an NIH grant application, and went to Karate for the first time in ages (through being away or ill) - it was a great session (thanks, Nigel!).

So tomorrow there's more pond to look forward to, and then it's back to reality, the office, and my other day job...

Rebuilding the pond: Day 3

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-09-22T08:50:29+01:00

Progress on Day 3 (Friday): Zero. It rained all day. Am going to abandon rebuilding the pond as it seems now that it would be more useful to build an ark... But on the plus side, I did process 24 papers on the 'manuscripts to be sent to review' queue. My hope is, over Saturday and Sunday, to process a further 10 on the 'manuscripts with all reviews complete' queue. And you know what? I feel guilty that that 24 wasn't 25. And that that 10 will, in all likelihood, be just 5 or 6. Guilt flows through my veins too freely...

[UPDATE: I in fact turned the 24 into 25, and processed a further 12! Do I feel guilt-free? No... because I didn't deal with any of the journal-related email that I should have dealt with. If it's not one thing, it's another... guilt knows no bounds]

Rebuilding the pond: Day 2

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-09-21T07:07:59+01:00

Not much to report. Liner was taken out, together with two toads and one frog. An assortment of reasons for the leak (which was the reason we were doing this) were found, although the leak itself wasn't. Not helped, of course, by the fact that to fully drain the pond, we had to puncture the liner in several places to let the last few inches of water out. By the end of the day, the pond was reshaped (the deep end was moved, and it was widened in places) and a concrete rim was laid around the edge. We estimated the new volume at around 50% greater than the previous volume (though the previous volume was a bit of a myth, seeing as we never managed to fill the pond completely, as the level would drop so quickly). Most of the increase in volume is due to additional height - the water level will now come right up to almost the level of the surrounding grass.

And it didn't rain, well not until the night, when it bucketed down like there was no tomorrow (there was, as that's when I'm writing this). Despite the lack of rain, the very bad cold I've got - since yesterday - meant that I stayed indoors most of the time while John and Steve, the two guys doing the hard work, did the hard work...

If I wasn't so lazy, I'd post before, during, and after photos. They'll have to wait until the during's done, and the after's settled in...

Rebuilding the pond: Day 1

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-09-19T18:32:24+01:00

Today was a good day. I finished my administrative chores for this academic year, and took the afternoon off to start on rebuilding the pond (with help). So this afternoon was spent emptying the pond of its fish, plants, toads, and water. I'd anticipated around 100 baby fish, so I decided to count them as I scooped them out with a net and transplanted (translocated?) them into a couple of paddling pools pre-filled with ridiculously murky pond water. I lost count after around 150, and judging from the numbers that came out after that, there must be 200+ baby fish swimming around the two paddling pools (and around 9 adult fish, including one sturgeon that amazingly survived a pond to which it was quite unsuited). The pond plants, three large toads and one baby are in a third paddling pool.

While doing that, the real pond experts (John and Steve) dug out the larger plants around the edge of the pond, so that tomorrow we can lift out the current (rubbish quality) liner before rebuilding the edge of the pond in preparation for a new (high quality) liner. To help us along, the UK weather did its bit to ensure that we all got soaked through with the first rainfall in weeks. Apparently it will now continue raining until we've finished; so once we no longer need to work in the outdoors, the sun will come out, the birds will sing, and I'll be nursing a bad chest infection...

By the way, when I wrote that a baby was in the third paddling pool, I was referring to a baby toad... there are no human babies in the paddling pool. At least, not any more (they didn't like the pond water so they scuttled off...).

my new pond...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-09-16T11:32:56+01:00

I should be working, not playing (see my earlier post today)...

Move your mouse over the pond, and the fish will follow. Click, and you drop food into the pond which the fish will eat.

state of play

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-09-16T09:59:35+01:00

No time to play, sadly. This last week was spent preparing for a session I had organized at the British Association for the Advancement of Science. This is a once-a-year event at which non-scientists get exposed to a whole bunch of science. So I thought it would be a good idea to organize something on eye movements, so me and three others stood up and did our thing to an audience of around 100 people, which was exactly 88 people more than we had expected!

So you'd think that this would leave me with a warm glow of self-satisfaction. Nope.... it left me with a ton of papers still to process on the journal's queues. So yesterday afternoon (Saturday), and today (Sunday, for those of you still hungover from the night before...) were/will be spent on the journal. I have an image in my mind from one of those old B-movies in which the angry villagers march up a hill with pitchforks and flaming torches. Replace the word 'villagers' with 'authors' and you'll have a sense of my anxieties...

Things to look forward to this week:

re-writing whole sections of the Graduate (i.e. MSc.) Handbook
preparing for, and chairing, the graduate examinations committee meetings
reviewing at least two NIH grants
working on the journal (that's a given, 24/7)
re-building the pond

Things not to look forward to this week:

re-writing whole sections of the Graduate (i.e. MSc.) Handbook
preparing for, and chairing, the graduate examinations committee meetings
reviewing at least two NIH grants
working on the journal (that's a given, 24/7)

So all in all, not a bad week...

virus alert

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-09-09T14:48:19+01:00

Norton AntiVirus is all well and fine, but it's not much good when it comes to the real, non-cyber, kind. Whatever it was that I picked up on my travels is still with me. I didn't manage much this week, and I'm falling behind. I've got to prepare a talk for the British Association for the Advancement of Science later this week, and I've done nothing towards it. And I've done almost nothing for the journal this week (and editorial guilt knows no bounds). But each day brings some new symptom - some new ache, pain, strain, mild fever, and nonspecific feeling of pessimism.

And to compound the bad with the intolerable, I've been banned from buying a new iPod...

What I miss most about August...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-09-01T20:13:42+01:00

10 days in Italy. No computer, no journal, almost no psycholinguistics. My parents were there, one of my brothers and his wife and half their children (the lower half), a friend of ours (sleeping on the couch), a couple of friends from the US (psycholinguists) and all their children (both halves - parents and children sleeping in another apartment), and various other friends and jellyfish. The shiatsu massage on the beach (thank you, Anhui), the ice-cream, the food, the excellent cappuccino, and the fried fish were the other highlights.

What isn't there to like about 10 days' vacation in Sperlonga? I can tell you: getting back to around 70 papers waiting to go out to review or requiring an editorial decision. I've been back a week, and have got the queue down to just under 40... It was almost worth going on holiday just so that I could have the satisfaction of working my rear-end off to process all those papers...

The other major highlight of August: getting back after my travels (Nashville, Sperlonga, Potsdam, Berlin) and feeding the fish. I expected a few baby fish to come up for food; I did not expect a feeding frenzy akin to starving piranha. But that's what I saw - the surface of the pond bubbled with baby fish (each about an inch long). Not the 20 or 30 I thought there were, but at least 100! So given that we have to empty the pond towards the end of the month (to re-line it, and make various changes) it's going to be a challenge to get them all out! Can't wait. A frying pan, some salt, flour, hot oil, and a few of those fish... and so long as the sun's out, it won't be so different from Italy!

out of synch...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-08-30T00:05:53+01:00

So here's my plan: To post a summary of my holiday sometime this coming weekend, even though it took place before the Potsdam/Berlin trip (see my last post, somewhat limited due to ill-health).

In the meantime, I've managed to process a few papers for the journal (around 70 papers were waiting for me on my return, not the 80 that I feared...), and I've changed my photo gallery to the new Apple-hosted Web Gallery. This means that when you click 'gallery' in the menu, you'll get a new window onto the gallery that's now hosted by Apple. The big advantage is that I can update it from within iPhoto, with no messing around. And the viewing options are superb. Worth every penny of that .Mac subscription!

So... Google analytics tells me that since I installed the analytics software (5 weeks ago), I've had 301 'absolute unique visitors'. I've no idea what that means, because elsewhere it says I've had '225 absolute unique visitors'. It does agree with itself, though, when it says I've had 326 visits, of which 104 were people who'd visited before (you'd think they'd have learned not to bother). Oddly, 326 minus 104 suggests 222 absolute unique visitors - not 225 or even 301... 10 of these visits got here by searching on Google for "Jerry Altman" - I was surprised to see that when one puts 'Jerry Altman' into Google, my name ("Gerry Altmann", in case you didn't know) pops up #1. I bet Jerry Altman's really pissed about that.

up all night...[updated]

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-08-23T05:26:32+01:00

... with an ear infection, in my hotel room, in Potsdam. Not sure I'll be able to fly home. Ear feels like it will explode. Antibiotics and sympathy needed. In large quantities.

update: Went to a doctor, who said I should not fly and that I needed antibiotics. But rather than just write out a prescription, he wanted to refer me to a 'specialist'. So I crossed town to another doctor, who looked like a caricature of an ageing German doctor (he was all three of those - I can vouch for that, although to be honest, I did not solicit a translation of his medical certificates). Caricature was completed by the sight of what looked to me like the instruments of extreme torture. I quickly decided that if he so much as looked at, let alone picked up, the things that looked like the medical equivalent of pliers I'd run away. So I sat meekly as he picked up the plier-like things and proceeded to stick them up my nose. It wasn't so bad. He said my ears and nose were very nice, and that I could fly, and did not need antibiotics. So I proceeded to Berlin, and then back here to York, without antibiotics but with masses of (probably undeserved) sympathy. So it wasn't all bad, and have decided that sympathy is a good thing, and at least as good as beer, if not more so.

from planes to trains...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-08-05T14:35:08+01:00

I'm back. Well, almost. Actually, I'm sitting on the train back to York, after a surprisingly comfortable night on the plane (and 30,000 air miles' worth of upgrade again). But do I feel refreshed and ready to face whatever battles await? Of course not... I'm actually exhausted. I'd like to think I was looking forward to heading off tomorrow morning for 10 days' holiday. But I've got something like 13 papers that have accumulated over the past week and which are awaiting an editorial decision. And about 8 to send out to review. They're just going to have to wait. But that 10 day's holiday is equivalent to two working weeks... and because I'm going straight after the holiday to yet another conference, I can anticipate that in 3 weeks' time there'll be around 80 papers waiting for me to do something with when I eventually get back. So while I'm looking forward to my holiday, and even to the subsequent conference, a part of me is dreading the life that awaits me when I eventually get back from this travel-fest.

On the other hand, my leaking pond, which is currently responsible for ensuring a plentiful supply of water in the York area, is due to be 'fixed' towards the end of September. And somewhat selfishly, I also plan to take yet another week off from the journal to write a paper that I've been wanting to write for ages. Yes, these two things will interfere with my attempt to clear the backlog at the journal that will have accumulated during August. But there comes a time when the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. If I repeat that often enough, I might even come to believe it.

As close to real-time blogging as you'll get...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-08-01T14:56:15+01:00

The wonders of modern technology mean that I can add an entry while flying to the US. I'm taking a break from work. Yes... I'm working on the plane, sad individual that I am. Am flying to Nashville to give a talk to the Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, and I'm preparing the next talk I have to give - at the European Conference on Eye Movements. And even if I wasn't working, I'd have no idea what movies are showing, because today's 1st August, so the program in the seat pocket is showing the August movies, but the plane's movie system still thinks it's July...

Flying always reminds me of the knee-jerk reaction to terror threats. So here I am, in business class (thanks to a mileage upgrade), with plastic knives, but metal forks. So I'm wondering what the logic here is. True... I wouldn't be able to strip the plastic insulation from electrical wiring with a fork (I figure that's why I brought my teeth along). And I'm assuming it's nothing to do with the threat to flight staff (my guess is a fork can be pretty lethal). Who knows what the logic is, but no doubt it's been carefully thought through...

Two hours to go, and I've finished the talk. Now I can go back and finish the talk I'm supposed to be giving in a couple of days' time. Maybe I'll just take a sneak peek at the movies instead... someone in the row in front is watching a movie on her ipod. Tiny screen. But held up close it's still bigger than the tiny screens on the plane. And unlike those tiny screens, the image isn't flickering or blurry, she's probably getting sound to both her ears, and she can pause the movie to go to the toilet... but why bother pausing it? She can take it with her.

Those two hours came and went, and I'm now sitting in an airport somewhere waiting on a connecting flight to Nashville. A United Airlines official is just announcing that the flight is over-subscribed, and could volunteers please come forward and offer to take another flight 5 hours later. Am willing to use my highly-honed Karate skills (as if!) to get on that plane...

Sign in the baggage hall: "All passengers MUST collect bags". It wasn't clear what those of us who didn't have any bags to collect should do. After a few moments' indecision, I picked up someone else's bag and pretended it was mine. No one noticed, and they let me in to the Land of the Free... even the bags are free over here...

And finally, I arrived. The Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. An amazing place. Not least because my room had no bed. When I discovered that I was supposed to pull it down (it was a fold-up), and re-make it up myself (the bedding, or what there was of it, came away when the mattress stuck in the foldaway cupboard), I was surprised. All the more so when, having asked if I could have some pillows, they said "have you looked in the drawers"? I don't know... call me old-fashioned, but I do like a hotel room that has a bed in it that I don't have to make up myself. Only after three phonecalls, and some hours later, did they come and help out. And there's no desk, or bedside lights (essential if, as with most UK travellers to Nashville, you wake up at 3 in the morning and want to avoid stumbling across the room and fumbling with a desklamp). I just wish that, like others at the same hotel wishing the same, I'd decided to stay across the road at the Radisson. Maybe it's not too late to cross that road... UPDATE (the next day): despite being told there'd be no workmen renovating before 10am, my clock showed '07:18' when the hammering started. When I called up to complain (not that I'm the complaining sort, you understand..) they told me that 7am was the regular starting time. Somehow, they believe this is acceptable. Folks.... unless your life/career depends on it, do not stay at this hotel.

I know what you did last summer...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-07-28T23:23:05+01:00

Well... no. I don't. I don't even know where you did whatever you did last summer. But I do know where you are now as you read this. Well... no, not exactly. Rather, Google Analytics knows, and it tells me all sorts of useless (but intriguing) information about how many people read which pages on my website, which countries/cities they come from, whether they come via a search engine or direct, and whether they read more than one page or just leave the site as soon as they land on it. I don't get IP numbers, just countries. I discovered Google Analytics a week ago, installed the relevant code, and can now tell you that a staggering 41 different people staggered onto this site in the past week. They came from 11 countries. To the person from Manchester and the person from Sunderland - thank you for visiting more than just the one page on this site! Hmm. My Karate grading examiner is from Sunderland... I'm sure that's just coincidence.

So Google Analytics was my excitement for the week. That and running out of time in which to prepare the talk I'm giving next week in Nashville (so I can now look forward to all those anxiety dreams in which I discover I'm on stage without having a talk to give, or clothes to wear...). But the week after, I shall be in Italy, on holiday with Silvia and the kids. No laptop, no work. Just cappuccino, beach, good food, fabulous pool, wine, beer, mosquitos, heat, sun, sea, sand, sunburn, sun-cream, ice-cream, and all the other ingredients of a holiday that will hopefully make this the most relaxing 10 days of the year. And all manner of friends and relatives will be there also. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to that more than I'm looking forward to those inevitable anxiety dreams: preparing talks will be the last thing on my mind, and clothes won't be much of an issue either...

too tired to think....

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-07-22T17:24:41+01:00

Too much altruism in my life. I made editorial decisions on 31 papers in the past week (15 this weekend)*. Between now and August 1st I have to prevent the journal from accumulating any papers to be actioned or sent to review. I leave August 1st, and will be away from the office for almost 4 weeks. I'll be taking 10 days holiday in the middle, with a conference immediately beforehand (in Nashville, getting back on a Sunday, and leaving for holiday on the Monday), and another immediately after (in Potsdam near Berlin, getting back from holiday on a Friday and leaving for the conference on the Sunday). I plan to take a couple of afternoons at each conference to work on the journal so as to clear the backlog that will inevitably accumulate while I'm away.

*Some decision letters can be quite long, and others quite short. Disaster strikes when the quite short ones should have been longer. I've only had a couple of disasters so far (out of 653 decision letters written since I took the job last year - a 0.3% disaster rate).

And because of all this, I'm seriously worried about not having time to write up one of the nicest bits of data I've ever collected in my career. Is this a serious post or what?

If I had any energy left, I'd write about the algae in the pond; the advantages of having a BBQ in the pouring rain (tip: it's an even bigger advantage to have a massive garden parasol with which to cover the BBQ); the possibility that, no matter how unlikely, I may have developed some sort of allergy to milk (stay tuned..); the possibility that, no matter how unlikely, I may have developed some sort of allergy to my job; and the possibility, very likely, that I shall sit in front of the tv tonight, drink masses of beer, and wish that paxil and ambien were freely available in my local supermarket...

Shameless self-congratulation

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-07-19T22:31:04+01:00

Tonight was grading night at the Karate club, and Jamie (currently 9) progressed to 1st Kyu (next belt is black belt), joining his brother Sam (12). Silvia is now 4th Kyu, and I progressed to 2nd Kyu. To provide some context: there are 9 grades prior to black belt, with the most junior grade being 9th Kyu (one has to pass one's first grading to progress to 9th Kyu, so it's not complete beginner) and going up to 1st Kyu. After that, one progresses to 1st Dan, which is the first black belt grade. I never thought I'd make it this far (there's still a way to go, though!). So for tonight at least, life is good, and I can put my work frustrations to the back burner and just enjoy the feeling of having achieved something that I really care about. No doubt by tomorrow the feeling will be forgotten and unwritten data, unwritten letters, unreviewed papers, and unhappy authors will reach out and grab me by the metaphorical throat...

Just back from a conference...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-07-07T21:00:41+01:00

Just back from a conference in Edinburgh:

got rained on
ate too much
stayed up too late
got rained on some more
drank moderately but more than I'm used to
saw photographs someone took of me and noticed that the bags under my eyes appear to be an independent life-form
drank not so moderately, and more than I'm used to
learned some stuff that I shouldn't do (research-wise; not drink-wise)
learned some stuff that I should do (research-wise; drink-wise is a given)
wished that I felt more fulfilled (yeah, I know...)
wished that I could look forward to a weekend without doing any work
looked forward to a weekend doing lots of work

And when I did get home, I found

baby toads crawling over the garden
baby fish now twice as large as when I left (and many more now - probably between 20 and 30)
data to be analysed
a report to be written (due two days earlier)
data to be written up
papers to be sent out to review (12 of them)
papers to make editorial decisions on (9 of them)
a Patient Information Sheet (for some research with patients) to be re-written
a sense of impending despair
a strong desire to find another career

Wildlife report

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-07-03T07:50:39+01:00

pond: fish, baby fish, baby toads, assorted insects
garden: worms, mushrooms, cats, pheasant, assorted plants and weeds
out on the road: the usual roadkill, a very much alive badger, assorted children
office: me
coffee cup: mould

Of Hope, Hopelessness, and Despair. In no particular order.

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-06-21T07:30:18+01:00

Hopelessness. So there I was, walking round Washington after a National Institutes of Health grants panel, with one of the other people from the committee... and what do we talk about? Science? No. Existentialism? No. The state of world politics? No. The state of our pension planning? Yes. Hopeless.

Hope. It may be leaking (but not for much longer - come September, we're going to re-line the pond and change a couple of things about it)... but that hasn't stopped the natural (no human intervention) arrival of tiny baby fish. I counted four so far. Of course, counting fish is a sad reflection of how I like to spend a few quiet minutes.

Despair. A week to prepare, a week out there (Washington), and two weeks in which not much happened at the journal. It just happened to be the two weeks with the highest submission rates this year. So at last reckoning, I've got around 35 manuscripts to send out to review, and around 15 to make editorial decisions on. It's not like I did nothing in those two weeks. I did deal with the journal correspondence, and I did allocate the submissions to the associate editors (or myself), and I did write personally to a few of the more tardy reviewers (who all responded). It's not even like I was on holiday or anything.

That pension, and the time in which to enjoy it, is looking more and more attractive each day.

The thing I most would like to be able to do...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-06-09T12:29:42+01:00

relax.

Taking a break

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-06-03T19:01:02+01:00

Sunday... I decided to take it off, and do NO work. The third Sunday this year I've done that (there were a couple of Saturdays also). Yes, I'm counting... sad, really. So today was a fairly atypical day. Drove two hours with the kids across from where we are in York (East) to Kendall (West). Why? To train for 90 minutes with what/who are arguably (or rather, you can't argue with it) the two best Karate instructors in the UK (Andy Sherry, 8th Dan and head of the Karate Union of Great Britain, and Frank Brennan, 6th Dan). Was exhausted, but it was worth it. The kids thought so too (and before you think that I dragged them, it was the other way around - Sam wanted to go, then Jamie, and finally, almost reluctantly, me - but I'm so glad I went). Then drove two hours back. Worked a bit in the garden, loaded up Jamie's new iPod Shuffle with everything he could possibly want to listen to (most of which I wouldn't), and am now off to a BBQ and then to Bobo Lobo, a Latino bar in York where all the Argentinians meet up. Will I dance? Most likely I'll have fallen asleep at a smoky table long before anyone pulls me onto the dance floor. Believe me, I do a better Karate Kata than I do Salsa, and my Karate isn't that great!

So... no work. It's quite nice to remind myself what that's like. The fact that I have to mark 9 undergraduate students' final year projects this week, and also read and then comment on 5 grant proposals (for an NIH meeting in Washington the week after next) is something I'll worry about tomorrow. But today, I'm acting like there's no tomorrow...

UPDATE So I salsa'd... or rather Silvia salsa'd and I tried to control what might otherwise have looked like random muscular spasms... but I did learn something really important: it's all in the hips, and if I could only salsa some more, I might be able to move my hips better when practicing my Karate... Sadly, though, the evening was bereft of Argentinians, as word had got round that DJ Toro (I guess that translates as The Bull) was in hospital. Not sure who put him there, though...

A sign of the times

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-05-26T16:51:46+01:00

Yeah well... 6 weeks since I last sat down long enough to write something here. Not much has changed in that time.

The pond is still leaking (I climbed in today to look for the leak, but that didn't help).
The birds are still nesting in the roof.
I've made over 70 editorial decisions (it's been a quiet time at the journal).
I've applied for a couple of grants.
I've analysed a few experiments' worth of data (these are experiments where we monitor people's eye movements as they look at various things on a computer screen and listen to various things over loudspeakers).
I've upgraded to RapidWeaver 3.6 (with which I maintain this website).
I've upgraded to a MacBook (and almost lost the customized files for this website)
Silvia and I bought a piano (a Roland DP-970, which is a compact digital piano with a fantastic keyboard and a really good sound).
We bought, and used, a BBQ. And then it rained for the next two weeks.
I didn't buy an LCD television, despite wanting to.
I didn't write the paper I want to write - at this rate I shall shortly become an academic has-been.
I didn't reply to way too many emails that I should have replied to.
I think I took a weekend off, but I'm not sure - may have been more than 6 weeks ago I did that...
I was ill for a week and stayed home (and worked), except for my birthday, when I had to go to work to chair a meeting, but the consolation was that I got to eat chocolate birthday cake.

An uneventful 6 weeks...

A milestone is reached...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-04-16T20:00:17+01:00

A couple of days ago I made my 250th editorial decision since Jan 1st. And by the end of this week, I'll have made by 500th editorial decision since taking over as Editor-in-Chief of Cognition on June 1st last year.

Scary....

But a bunch of other decisions are being made, as I write this, by the four Associate Editors who now share the load with me (I take around half the submissions, and they share the other half between them). They are the editorial equivalent of these guys....

Have been thinking more about the action hero thing (see my last post). I wouldn't mind having an alter ego that, on receiving a new submission to the journal, ducks into an alleyway while ripping open my shirt to reveal the eponymous action hero's suit hidden underneath. But whereas I like the sound of 'Spiderman', 'Superman', 'Batman', or even 'Actionman' (I had one of those when I was little), I'm not so sure about 'Cognitionman' or 'Editorman' - neither of them conjures up the image I have of myself in my alter ego's mind. So until I can think of a better name, I shall hold off from ripping my clothes off each time I have to action a paper...

And still on the subject of action heroes, where are they when you need one? Take today: A typical day at the University of York. The power goes down to half the campus. And an entire wing of the Psychology building goes into lockdown - the magnetic locks lock, and no one can get in (apparently, one could get out, but that's just hearsay...so far as we know, no one was in the building yesterday when this happened). Short of literally breaking and entering, or flying through the skylight (hence our scanning of the horizon for someone in a cape and blue underpants) the building is unassailable. Not really sure what the point of this is - our offices/labs have mechanical locks, but it's access to the corridors that is prevented by this so-called 'security' measure. What I find amazing is that someone actually decided that this would be a 'good thing'. Humankind knows no limits when it comes to expressing its capacity for insanity.

Of Guests, God, and Lasagna.

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-04-08T23:55:04+01:00

It's my home, and I should have a right to determine who lives in that home with me. And starlings, despite their many abilities, are not on my list of preferred housemates. Not when they nest in the roof and start whatever orgiastic excess of nest building it is that they get up to each morning at 6.30. No doubt I'll go straight to Hell now that I've plugged every orifice on that roof with chicken wire....

Speaking of which (Hell), I discovered from reading some report or other that a member of the US Congress came out of the closet last week, and admitted he was ...... an atheist. Apparently, he is the first to have done so. Amazing. And when the American populus was asked (or at least, a small unrepresentative sample was asked) whether they could vote for a Presidential candidate who was an atheist, only 14% said they felt they could. Unbelievable. So 86% prefer someone who believes in God... I just wonder what those 86% would say if that someone turned around and said that they had regular two-way conversations wtih God each Tuesday morning at 10am.... Would those 86% be more inclined towards this candidate or less?

The US of A is in my thoughts because I was in California last week for a conference. La Jolla. I could imagine working in a place like that. The conference is an annual one that I go to each year if I can. I'd like my luggage to go with me also, but evidently that's just a little too much to ask. The last two times, my (or Silvia's) poster tube never turned up. I know they look a little like a rocket launcher, but you'd have thought the airlines would have learned by now how not to lose them. At least our luggage was returned to us (both with the zips and various other bits and pieces broken - thank you British Airways for taking such good care of our luggage - from now on I fly United).

Got back, jetlagged and tired (and minus the luggage), and went round to see the kids straightaway. Jamie wasn't too well, though. Greeted me by vomiting all over the stairs. Carpetted stairs. I had an instantaneous out-of-body experience as I heard myself say to his mum the most dreadful words I could possibly utter: "Don't worry - you sort Jamie out, and I'll deal with the mess". Lasagna. Tomato sauce. Parmesan. You get the picture...(and if not the picture, the smell...) The alternative was to utter something completely inappropriate that I had been taught to say in California by a Canadian of Portuguese extraction living in Edinburgh: "Hey - Suck it up... Deal with it". Believe me.... sucking it up was not going to happen. But what did happen was an act of supreme bravery in the face of a distinctly unwelcome lack of rubber gloves - and you'd never guess, now, that those three staircase steps had been a quagmire of vomit only a few days ago...

So... quite a couple of weeks; what with the conference, cleaning up the vomit, clambering onto the roof, and, when not doing that, clearing the queues, yet again, at Cognition. I feel quite the action hero...

What I'd give for a new pair of hips

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-03-23T08:31:13+00:00

Ok, so I made brown belt. But not without completely stuffing up my 'basics' (the grading is in three sections, and the first is where you do the 'basic' techniques of punching, blocking, kicking, etc. as a solo exercise). I was fairly relaxed (normally I get really stressed in preparation), but then I got up in front of the examiner and it was like I was transformed into an emotional jelly (I don't think I physically quivered...). How is it I can get up and lecture in front of hundreds of people, but I stand up in front of one very friendly (but exceedingly expert - 5th Dan) Karate examiner, and I go to pieces? In fairness, I did get through, and no doubt the examiner was being charitable, but I do know that away from the glare of the examiner's stare I can do the things I'm supposed to do. So probably I deserve the belt. But it would have been more satisfying to show my best on the night...

Anyhow, the main problem I have, apparently, is my hips... I need to be able to twist them like I was a hula dancer. I'll have to practice, although I'm not so sure about that whole grass skirt thing.

I'm leaking...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-03-19T22:54:14+00:00

Well.. not really me. The pond. I don't have time to leak: Since my last post I've made 106 editorial decisions (accept, revise, reject, etc.) and sent 74 papers out to review. I know all this because the journal's database is online, and it never tires of spitting out performance statistics (how many days I spend between receiving a paper and sending it out to review; how many different people I've approached as reviewers; how long it takes me to make a decision on a paper once I've received all the reviews; how many hours I spend asleep; how often I shower). I have no personality any more; I've become little more than a page full of statistics on a server somewhere in the Netherlands. No wonder my pond's leaking. Except it's not leaking. It's crying.

It's Monday. On Thursday I'm being graded for my first brown belt. If I get it I'll be amazingly proud: One small step for a man, one big step for Karate (actually, it's more a step, block, and a punch....).

New photo gallery

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-01-29T23:15:06+00:00

Well... it's not new in the strict sense of having new photos never before seen on these pages. But it is new in respect of the webdesign. I've put it together rather inefficiently, but I liked the 'thumbnails' (made with collage) - it's inefficient because each thumbnail has to be linked by hand, so to speak, with its 'parent'. But I've not found a photo gallery plugin for RapidWeaver that's as nice as collage, so I suffered the pain for the sake of my sense of aesthetics. Pathetics, more like...

Editus Satisfactus

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2007-01-28T19:04:58+00:00

Life-changing events over which I may or may not have had some control: being born; having children; taking over the editorship of Cognition...

All three are ongoing projects. The latter has caused me most anguish in the past 9 months. A continuing wave of submissions meant that more submissions were coming in than I was able to send out for review, and more papers required decisions each week (to accept/reject/revise) than I was able to deal with. So although I was processing around 20 papers a week, it still wasn't enough. But the good news is that since Xmas, I've managed 30 papers a week, and the queues are now clear. A milestone by any measure. So I celebrated by taking yesterday (Saturday) off and not doing any work. How good is that?

Not so good... Why should I feel guilty that I took ONE day off (today, Sunday, I worked again). What kind of life is it that we are such slaves to our work?

Big week coming up: Dentist (fixing a cracked tooth), Ophthalmologist (fixing my bursting eyeballs), Heating Engineer (fixing our thermostats). The bursting eyeball thing is probably an exaggeration. My head's likely to burst long before any of my other vital, or not so vital, organs go the same way. But hopefully nothing will burst before I fulfill all my other obligations that are still on my way-too-long To Do list.

So... now that Cognition is under control, and my eyes, teeth, and heating will hopefully bend to my will also, what else is there to do? Aside from work, that is. Even YouTube has lost its brief attraction (not that it was attractive for more than a whole 5 minutes) now that I believe I have found the genuinely funniest thing on it, ever. It must be no coincidence that the film-maker who made this is from Argentina.

Am stuck for something witty and poignant with which to end this post. I'll have to save it till next time.

Editus Interruptus

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-12-23T20:41:16+00:00

Now that I've moved one of my labs to accommodate the princess and her pea, with the result that the occasional blind patient now has to negotiate a concrete stairwell in order to move from the interview room to the eye-tracking laboratory (apparently a price well worth paying in order to accommodate all those mattresses with which to cover the pea), I've got on with trying to manage more important things. Still, it's interesting how minor irritants can prove so annoying. I guess I too have my metaphorical peas.

So what's happened in all this time? Not much. Work, work, and more work. I've been to Washington for an NIH meeting and to Houston for a conference (where I ate the best steak ever); I've finished teaching a Masters-level statistics course and an advanced course on language processing (taught with Silvia); and I've processed another hundred or so papers for the journal Cognition. I really enjoy the editorial work. But it gets me down that there's such a huge backlog of papers waiting to be processed. I manage around 20 papers a week (sending out to review, or making editorial decisions such as 'accept', 'revise', or 'reject'). But that doesn't do anything to reduce the backlog, as no sooner do I process one paper than another is submitted to the journal. My current estimate is that it won't be until next Easter before the lag between receiving a paper, or receiving all its reviews, and processing that paper, comes down to just one week. I'm too embarrassed to say what the lag is currently! It built up over the summer (due to vacation and conference time), and I've never managed to get it down. Things will improve now that the associate editors are coming online (so a big thank-you to Rebecca, Vic, Steven, and Andrew), but it's a slow process. And each time I get an email from an author asking why it's taking so long, I feel a pang of guilt. My ideal Christmas? Two weeks off in which to work uninterrupted on the journal. My actual Christmas? Two days off in which to work, probably interrupted, on the journal... like its birth control counterpart, editorial control by editus interruptus is not particularly efficient.

My New Year's Resolution? To write a couple of papers, write two grant proposals, collaborate on a third, be a better father, be a better partner, be a better karateka and get my brown belt (3rd Kyu) and hopefully my brown and white belt also (2nd Kyu), and be less stressed. It's really very tempting to take up all those offers that my spam email brings me each day (I get on average 200 spam a day). Though it's not clear to me whether Viagra, a cheap mortgage, an imitation watch, stock options, and a share of someone's Nigerian fortune would really make me that much happier. Maybe the fortune... and yes, the cheap mortgage.. and probably the stock options (I still regret not buying shares in Apple...).

So, in the spirit of Xmas... the Christmas tree is up, and lit. But outside the front of the house our 2 ft. Monkey Puzzle tree has provided a more natural seasonal decoration: It's been very frosty, and foggy, so all that white stuff is cobwebs covered in condensation from the fog that has frozen. Maybe next year I'll rig up some lights. So... for the two people who I know read this (one of whom kindly sent me the link to a much more interesting blog than mine), very best wishes for the holiday season, and may next year bring you less spam, less stress, more satisfaction, and a big lottery win. Happy Xmas!

The princess and the nobleman

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-10-13T22:12:26+01:00

There lives in a place not so far away a nobleman with lands producing the finest of wines, from vineyards bordered by a winding river as deep as it is wide. Life used to be good for the nobleman and his loyal supporters. But one day, a princess from a distant land entered the kingdom. The King invited her to live amongst his subjects and decreed that until her palace could be built beyond the river, she should inhabit an ivory tower overlooking the nobleman’s vineyards – a tower that the nobleman would shortly have converted into dwellings for the newest of his artisans. With the passing of summer her palace was ready, and the princess’s entourage awaited their mistress. But the princess had grown used to the tower, and she told the King that she wished to remain. She did not care for her entourage on the far side of the river, and she did not care to leave her ivory tower. The King denied her, but she locked the doors, blocked her ears, and started to scream. She screamed and screamed. The screaming would not stop, and the King was powerless. His courtiers suffered as the wailing echoed down the valley in which they all lived. And soon neither they nor their King could stand it any longer. There was no alternative but to request that the nobleman move his vineyards to the far side of the river, and in their place build dwellings for his artisans who could now no longer aspire to live in the tower from which the screaming continued, day in, day out. The nobleman acquiesced, and a harsh silence descended over his vines.

To this day, his loyal laborers take the long trip far away and across the river, to reach the lands they now toil. And to this same day the princess lives in her ivory tower, unseen, unheard. But the nobleman remembers, as do his loyal servants. They remember the screams and their echoes, and the life they had before. And they look up each day at the ivory tower, occasionally glimpsing through its high windows the princess, locked away by her own hand, her presence now neither felt nor heard.

∞

Scotland

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-10-03T21:02:41+01:00

That's where I've been. Talking to collaborators (past, present, and future). And examining an MSc. at Edinburgh. Great course. Great people.

The train trip was interesting. Wi-fi is now standard on GNER trains. The Wi-fi works well. It's just that the router it's connected to doesn't. Not often, anyway. On the way up, it was barely speedier than a dial-up connection. On the way down, a carrier pigeon would have been more effective.

So, still on the train, and having finished a bunch of emails (offline), and reviewed a grant (I should have reviewed three, but in the spirit of this blog, I have to highlight my failures more than my successes...) I'm now adding this entry. I do so with the satisfaction that it will be read by at least one person. She thinks I should allow people to post comments. There are, she says, only two reasons not to: The first is that people will ask me why I think it is worth wasting valuable bandwidth on these sad reflections on my life, or worse still, they'll tell me it's not. The second is that no one would post any comments anyway. Ok, Jelena, now tell me two reasons why I should.

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our new water garden

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-09-27T23:28:56+01:00

Ok, so water garden it is not. But pond it most definitely is (it has water, a dead water-lily and 15 live fish, including two sturgeon). Previously, the garden was a rectangular thing with some old fruit trees at the end near an equally old shed. Now it's a rectangular thing with some old fruit trees, a pond, a new shed, and flower-beds liberally covered in horse manure. And worms. They make the horse manure not horse manure.

And now for the product placement. Tetra. They make TetraPond products (fish food, pond pumps, filters, and all sorts of other things pond-related). Why the product placement? Because a nozzle was missing from the pressurized filter they supplied. So I emailed Tetra; a complex process which involved joining something called the Tetra Members Club. I guess it's a club not unlike any other, except that you never ever meet anyone. Sad really. But, joining them afforded me the privilege of an email address to which I wrote to ask what to do about my missing nozzle ('go out and buy another', I hear you say.. but it was a non-standard size. Although seeing as it was non-existent, it's a moot point as to whether it had a size at all). So I emailed on Saturday. On Monday morning I received an email from someone saying they'd send me one. On Monday evening I received an email from someone else saying they'd contacted head office to check they had it and could send it to me. And today, Wednesday, it arrived. Now that's what I call customer-service. And unlike Apple, I didn't have to return the missing nozzle to them before they'd send out a new one...

And in case you now wish to rush out and buy anything made by Tetra, I can recommend www.aquatics-online.com - because, returning to Saturday night, I'd assumed that Tetra wouldn't ever respond to my original email, and so I also emailed aquatics-online (they'd been really efficient when I'd previously bought some stuff from them - amazing stuff, as it happens, but that's for another post ). And on Tuesday, I received an email from them (aquatics-online) to say they'd been in touch with Tetra who said they had everything under control. I mean... is this service or is this service?

Ok, just so everyone knows.. I realize it does not reflect well on me that on a Saturday night, Saturday night, I'm emailing not one, but two sets of people about a missing nozzle. Sad or what? I deserve to be a member of that Tetra Members-who-never-meet-anyone-because-they-never-go-out-on-a-Saturday-night Club.

An unexpected post

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-09-12T21:05:51+01:00

It's only unexpected because I've just noticed that it's almost exactly a year since my first blog entry here. Aside from that, not much to report in the last few weeks other than 2 weeks' holiday, a few days' conference, a new pond in the garden, 15 new fish, countless new plants, a surplus of sweet plums from one of the two (old) plum trees we have, and my first 100 days as Editor-in-~~Crisis~~Chief of Cognition.

self-centred and depressed

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-09-08T00:04:01+01:00

Two colleagues offered their views on this blog. One said it was depressing because it was simply a list of things I hadn't accomplished (hey, that's life!), and the other accused me of being self-centred (hey, it's my life!). I can think of nothing worse than being self-centred and depressed.

Today's the first day that's certifiably autumnal (there... a certifiably not self-centred post... because I've deliberately not written down my feelings on the subject of autumn, leaf drop, damp dark cold evenings, heating bills, etc. etc.)

I've just upgraded to RapidWeaver 3.5 - and have added archiving. Previous posts, now archived, need re-formatting. But this is nothing to do with the archiving, or the upgrade - it's due to a previous stupidity on my part; if I intermingle photos, I need to set the page to fixed width (otherwise the width of the text varies as a function of the width of your browser window, in which case I can't control the relative placement of the text to the photos... obvious, really!) So when I've got a moment, I'll do that. The problem is, though, that I've already set it to fixed width, in which case I need to spend some time figuring out why the style sheet controlling the width isn't. But that's for another day. A cold, damp, dark, day.

Yes it is (as bad as I feared)...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-09-03T23:48:40+01:00

Boy was I optimistic! Two months have gone by since that last post. And in that time I did a pretty good job (as the new Editor of the journal Cognition) - sending papers out to review, writing to the occasional author... but then I made a mistake. An ENORMOUS mistake. I went on holiday.

Just two weeks. Immediately before a conference. So by the time I got back, three weeks had gone by without me doing a single thing for the journal (except write the editorials for the first issues of next year - each morning I'd get the laptop out before the kids woke up...). I'd cleared the queue before leaving. But now, there are roughly 60 papers waiting to be sent out to review, and 30 papers on which I need to make a decision (to accept, reject, or recommend revision). So I have to work out how to clear the backlog.

And that's the problem... Suppose I wanted to have everything cleared in the space of 4 weeks. I'd have those 60 papers already on the queue, and then another 80 or so that would come in during those 4 weeks. To clear the whole lot would require that I send out 5 papers for review each day (7 days a week), and with the 30 papers in the queue already requiring decisions, and another 40 (I'm being pessimistic now) accumulating over those 4 weeks, I'd need to 'action' (i.e. make editorial decisions on) between two and three papers each day (7 days a week).

Yes, I'm exaggerating. I know for a fact that the highest submission rate is over the summer. So I can relax. I can probably get away with sending out just 4 papers for review, and actioning just 2 papers, each day. 7 days a week. For 4 weeks. No worries...

One month into the job

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-06-27T18:46:59+01:00

It's not nearly as bad as I feared... Hey, if I've got time to play with graphics like this, things must be pretty good! AND I've written a paper (which may or may not be pretty good...)

Wow - look at all that I've accomplished!

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-05-28T19:27:59+01:00

Yeah, as if. I just thought it would be nice one day NOT to have a title such as 'oh no, look how little I've done in the past X weeks'. I've only got myself to blame, after all. But it's funny that over a month ago I thought I'd be updating this page much more often, and yet it's only now that I load it up (and only because I'm waiting for Silvia to finish up so we can go to the pub!). But I assume I did do something over the past month, after all. Now what was it? I did start a paper (that has to be submitted by July 1st), and I did some work on the impending transition of the journal I shall be editor of, and I analysed some data, and I pulled out a bit of hedge in the garden, and laid some turf, and went to the 40th National Karate Championships where I ~~won~~ watched the main event with Silvia and the kids (they thought it was fantastic... and I have to say I did enjoy it... though one of the highlights was using the new satnav to get us there... quite amazing!). And then it was Silvia's birthday (bought her a bike), and then it was mine, and then it was today, and we went for a 2 hour bike ride, and that bit of my body that would have sat on a comfortable saddle if I had one is sore as hell! Other highlights included starting to go to the 'senior' Karate sessions on Thursday evenings (so that means that on a good week I'm doing just under 3.5 hours training), which was a fabulous, if strenuous, experience. And I must have had too much time on my hands as I also spent more time than necessary working on our lab's new logo, which will be something like: The eye happens to be my son Sam's eye. For those that may read this and wonder what his eye is doing there, my research focuses in part on how language can direct visual attention and, consequently, eye movements. Actually, the logo looks better when vertical (scroll down on this page to see it). And I guess the accompanying slogan ought to be 'putting the eye in psycholinguistics' (you have to say it out loud to realize that there already was an eye in psycholinguistics...). Childish, I know. But I've never denied that streak in me...

unbelievably slow progress

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-04-22T11:23:22+01:00

Spent too much time negotiating with Elsevier on taking over the journal Cognition from its previous editor, Jacques Mehler. I can't decide wether it's a privilege or I'm just the mug who said 'yes'. I'd like to think the former, of course, but realism leans me towards the latter. Jacques used to be a student of my father's when he first moved to Oxford from Argentina, so I have personal reasons for wanting to do this, as well as professional reasons.
Spent too much time battling with the University finance package to work out costings for Elsevier that would be acceptable to them and the university.
Spent too much time figuring out how to launder money in ways acceptable to all that would allow me to fund a really good student.
Spent probably not quite enough time managing the Experimental Psychology Society - went to one of its 3-times-a-year meetings (in Birmingham) and have only written about 14 of the 30 or so letters that need writing...
Spent less time than I'd have liked on the ground floor of Selfridges in the Bull Ring (Birmingham). An amazing place that I'd recommend to anyone interested in good food, drink, cooking equipment, japanese food, etc. etc. The Bull Ring used to be the armpit of shopping centres (that's a "mall" for US readers - but who am I kidding, as the only person who reads this is me), but it's really nice now...
Ate too much chocolate over Easter (so far the only thing I'm not complaining about)
Got invited as a guest to the 40th National Karate Championships (in Birmingham, again!) by my Karate Sensei. Am really looking forward to that.
Redesigned our research group web pages. Also using RapidWeaver. Took me the day to convert it from handcoded html to something that's a lot nicer, if still very simple. Along the way, I 'met' someone who used to be a psychologist but now earns a living on the internet doing graphic design and art. So we now have a piece of art on the website. May not appeal to everyone, but it appealed to me.
And I got 7 of the things from the last list I posted done. And a few other things too. Not bad, really.

Not much to show for two weeks' salary...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-03-03T23:02:12+00:00

Yes, it's been another of those weeks, or two, when not much happened. Supervised student projects, attended various committee meetings, and found yet again only a few moments when I was alone in the office staring into that abyss they call 'backlog'. Here's a list of things I need to do, in no particular order:

• Make changes to a paper an ex-student wrote
• Make changes to a grant proposal my ex thesis advisor wrote
• Make changes to a paper that I and an ex-postdoc wrote
• Write a paper about some experiments that I and an ex-postdoc (the same one) run about 3 years ago
• Write a paper with a different ex-postdoc about some experiments that we run about 2 years ago
• Write a paper with a colleague in the US reviewing work we've done with all our ex-colleagues
• Write a chapter with a current colleague for another current colleague reviewing work we and others did even longer ago
• Co-write a grant proposal with a hopefully future colleague that is due in 3 weeks
• Write a book review for THES that was due today
• Mark 10 3rd year literature surveys (marks due yesterday)
• Write a letter in support of a US academic seeking (well-deserved) promotion
• Review at least two papers still outstanding
• Try not to think about the 2nd edition I need to write of a book I once wrote but which I don't have time, now, to write (one chapter of the new edition does exist, though)
• Try and remember all the other things I need to do but haven't yet done, including, no doubt, replying to many emails languishing in my inbox...

Is it any wonder I despair? Probably not. Just as well, though, that I got through my Karate grading this week. I am now a modest 5th Kyu, as is my 8 yr-old and as is not my 11 yr-old, who is now a fully-fledged 1st Kyu (which for the uninitiated means that his next grade will be black belt). I've still got a couple of years to go. At least a couple. I can't wait, as then I'll really kick @ss!

From Washington to Monkey Puzzles

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-02-19T19:21:27+00:00

There's something mildly frustrating about flying from London to Washington on a Wednesday, and leaving Washington to fly back on the Friday. You never quite get a decent night's sleep. So I woke at 3am the first night, and 4am the second. The meeting I was at (an NIH grants review panel) started at 8am each morning, so I could have done with more sleep. Still... I'm told that the advantage of your clock not resetting itself is that when you get back, exhausted, you sleep like a baby the first night, and then feel right as rain. Whatever that means – Am still exhausted. So evidently right as rain I am not.

The meeting went well. As someone told me the first time, people 'leave their egos at the door', and all one hears is constructive and serious discussion of the merits (or otherwise) of the grants. It reminded me how cooperative academia can be (elsewhere buried on this website is a complaint I have regarding how uncooperative it can sometimes be). Even when a grant application was weak, those weaknesses were discussed at length so that a consensus could be reached.

Anyway, now that I'm back in York, a big thank you to United Airlines, whose engines kept going the full 7.5 hours to get me back. This despite their planes seeming to be amongst the oldest aircraft gracing the skies above the Atlantic. On the way over, the movie was projected onto one of those old-fashioned screens like you used to get at school - an oblong box that opened up to reveal nothing more technologically sophisticated than a roller blind. I didn't realize planes had those anymore.

Not much had changed in the 3 days that I was away from home. Except for an interesting but rare atmospheric phenomenon that I'd not experienced in ages. Locals with far more experience than I tell me that it's called 'the sun'. Amazing. So off to the garden centre we went, to buy a selection of ferns, ivies, and a monkey puzzle tree (Silvia's national tree - see below for examples from our Argentina trip). We bought what my children would call a 'tintsy' one - all of 18 inches high. We shan't wait with baited breath for it to grow - they're very slow-growing. Planted it sufficiently close to the house so as to cause problems after one or two hundred years' worth of growth. Monkey Puzzle trees are the most primitive living conifer (or so a Google search revealed), and they get their name from the fact that monkeys can't climb them. Bizarre. Especially as there aren't any monkeys near where they grow. Why not call them Armadillo Puzzle trees? Or Llama Puzzle trees? Or Psycholinguist Puzzle trees?

Another week flies by

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-02-11T18:25:01+00:00

Things I did this week:

Version One, listed in order of importance to other people
• Reviewed 7 grants that will be discussed next week, in Washington DC, at the National Institutes of Health grants review panel for Language and Communication (I'll be there).
• Completed one journal article review
• Made an editorial decision on another article for another journal
• Was reminded that I was asked last October to make an editorial decision (another one) for the Editor of a journal who had to deal with a paper by a friend of his. But being human, I forgot (in my defense, I was teaching that new statistics course, and moving house, etc. etc.). I feel particularly glum about that. Is 'glum' a word in the US? Must be, as my spell-checker hasn't picked it out. So am writing this as a few more trees make the supreme sacrifice in service of yet another print run.
• Was made an offer that I'd be idiotic to refuse (more about that some time in the future, if I don't refuse it).
• Set up a new home wireless network, using an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station and an Airport Express to extend the range. Am using WPA2 encryption and access control (so only computers I authorise can join the network, and wireless info. is sent encrypted). It was a breeze. Still, the instructions were next-to-useless, which is unusual for Apple products. So the home network now consists of a new iMac Intel Core Duo, an iBook, a PowerBook, a printer, and a mass of cables that are still required whatever kind of (wired or wireless) network you have. Not sure whether the iPods count as part of the network...
• Learned, almost, my new Kata for my next Karate belt (Heian Yondan, for anyone that cares).

Version Two, listed in order of importance to me
• As above, but with the Karate and the wireless network occupying the top slots. I know, sad really...

Hmm - hardly an inspiring list. But a list nonetheless. What IS inspiring is the new eye tracker that we now have in the lab. And what's even MORE inspiring is the new postdoc/colleague in the lab who's making it all work. Coincidentally she's a friend and ex-colleague of Silvia's, from her Madison days. My kids, by the way, continue to inspire.

So not a bad week. But as ever, I'd be happier if I had the time in which to enjoy some of what I do, and some of whom I do it with... I'd also be happier if I had one of these.

Woa...where did all that time go?

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2006-02-04T23:25:50+00:00

But 14th October 2005 (my last blog entry) was only YESTERDAY... where have I been? What have I done?

taught a new course
applied for a small 1-yr grant
bought a house
moved up another belt in my Karate
moved into said house
survived Xmas
applied for a larger 3-yr grant
taught another course
been awarded that small 1-yr grant
started reviewing a pile more grants for NIH

and decided that if one can't write even a few minutes' worth of blog each week, one's life is, evidently, no longer one's own...

3 days and counting...

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2005-10-14T20:27:23+01:00

Three days to go. Or rather, two, as the lecture starts at 9.15 on Monday morning. Research Design and Statistics.

I wish I could sit here calmly thinking of what a great lecture I've prepared. Perhaps if I had actually prepared it I'd be able to at least sit here calmly. I wish. It was another one of those weeks - induction talks to the new students, feedback to give out to the old students, and various crises that needed resolving.

I remember in another life I used to be a researcher. Not sure where that life went.

And while I worry about finding that old life again, I have to worry about how I'll manage to prepare Monday's lecture when I've got to take the kids to football Saturday morning, and Jamie to a rugby match (of all things...) on Sunday. help.

Where did the summer go?

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2005-10-07T20:22:14+01:00

I've been back a week. Term starts after the weekend, and have I prepared a single lecture? NO. I did feel fantastically virtuous carrying a massive statistics textbook around Patagonia (and yes, I did read a few pages), but I would feel much happier if I was a little more ready for the impending course (A Masters course on research design and statistics). Still - I've got all next week, and I'm nervously hoping that hardly any students will want to see me (surely Week 1 is way too early to go and see your tutor...)

So what I have I accomplished this week? I wish I knew. They always say it'll be all right on the night. I'm not so sure..

Argentina (Wk 3 - Neuquén)

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2005-09-30T19:55:22+01:00

We drove back to Neuquén the long way, via the Andes. The route was spectacular, not least because of the Monkey Puzzle Trees growing everywhere, and snow-covered plains stretching out towards the distant mountains. It felt like we were at the edge of the world. Our route took us over a pass that wasn't quite ready for cars yet. But after a half hour the snow ploughs had dug us out...

Back in Neuquén, and we were faced with our second major challenge of the trip: The first had been to find an armadillo, but now the second challenge was to figure out what to do with the one presented to us in a bucket, alive and kicking, as it were. We resisted the numerous calls to fatten it up and eat it (apparently, the meat tastes fantastic, and we were SO tempted..). But it really was extraordinary - everyone we mentioned the armadillo to would ask how fat it was, and offered a different way to cook it. Fortunately (for the armadillo) our sense of compassion prevailed, and we drove out into the desert and set it free.

It was called 'Palito' (little stick), and we do wonder what became of him... I fear he ended up a tasty snack...

Two days before flying back to the UK we went to Buenos Aires, and saw, amongst other things, the apartment block in which my father grew up - we had, in Neuquén, visited the house where Silvia was brought up, and both visits had strong emotional overtones. And after two days in Buenos Aires (where you really do see Tango on the streets!), the trip was over, and it was back to reality.

Argentina (Wk 2 - Bariloche)

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2005-09-23T22:38:00+01:00

We spent the second week in Bariloche, which is what can only be described as an alpine village located in the Andes, complete with chalets, ski resorts, and its own Atomic Research Centre. Which is why we were there, as that's where Silvia's sister and brother-in-law work, and where their two children (Leandro and Sabrina) are growing up.

The drive from Neuquén took about 7 hours, though mainly because we kept stopping to look either at dinosaur bones or the view, which was spectacular

But even so, several hours were spent driving along the Patagonian equivalent of desert, where one half hour's worth of view out of the window is just the same as the next half hour's.

Bariloche itself is on the shore of a lake. It could just as well be Switzerland. The lake is fed from close to the Chilean border (the border itself is, more or less, defined by the highest peaks - and when there are no peaks, which way the rivers flow - if they flow to the Atlantic, they're Argentinian, and if to the Pacific, they're Chilean).

We took a boat trip towards Chile which was spectacular. Saw Condors... or at least, a couple of massive birds flying so high that we could only assume they were Condors. We walked through something very much like rain forest up towards a lake near which is a 1500 yr-old tree. Or so the plaque said. If we'd had more time we'd have gone into Chile. Maybe next time..

Argentina (Wk 1 - Neuquén)

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2005-09-16T21:12:00+01:00

My parents were brought up in Argentina, so landing at Buenos Aires was of some emotional significance... just as well, then, that the first things to greet me, once through immigration, would make me feel so at home - a massive advertisement for Kit-Kats (originally made in York, UK!) and another for the Citroen C3 (I have the C2)...

The first thing to strike me as I stepped out into the streets of Buenos Aires was the smell; there are no restrictions on exhaust emissions, and on some streets (those to and from the main port area) the fumes are almost overpowering. But in most other respects, the city looks very European (with what looked to me like a strong French influence).

After a brief 3-hour stopover in the city, we boarded a plane to Neuquén, and 90 minutes later we were in Patagonia. Neuquén is a sort of oasis in what would otherwise be a desert-like environment with just very low vegetation sparsely covering the ground. But it's at the confluence of two rivers, and some very clever dykes and dams ensure a vast amount of water flows through irrigation canals that support a substantial orchard-based industry.

Silvia's family are of Italian descent, and like many Italian families (and, so far as I can tell, Argentineans more generally), food plays an important role in the family. Specifically, meat and red wine (and, in my case at least, whatever indigestion remedies were to hand). Much of the first week was spent seeing relatives, friends, and various local eccentrics who, we had been promised, would realize Sam and Jamie's desire for ... an armadillo.

We had made the mistake of asking my kids what they'd want from Argentina. For reasons I'm still unsure about, Sam said 'an armadillo'. I of course said 'no way', or words to that effect. But Silvia rose to the occasion and pointed out that armadillos are the hedgehogs of Patagonia,

that they run around wild, and that of course we'd be able to bring one back (!) - or at least, bring back the scales. Big mistake... as we were now committed, no matter what... Fortunately, Silvia's mother knew someone who knew someone, and within the week we found a variety of armadillo plates (generally, years old, and forgotten in dusty corners). Little did we suspect that we would, before leaving, be presented with a live armadillo!

Why a blog

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2005-09-05T14:09:00+01:00

No reason, really. More like a weekly diary of the things I can recall that stuck in my mind from the week before. And more for me to read, in future weeks/years, than for anyone else.

3 weeks' holiday

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2005-09-11T13:59:00+01:00

It's now too late to do anything about all the things I should have done, but didn't have time to do, before leaving on the first 3-week holiday I've had in possibly my entire academic career...

Of course, 'holiday' means taking with me 4 grant proposals and 6 journal papers that I'm meant to be reviewing. And in my suitcase, Andy Field's SPSS book (2nd edition) - that will be my light reading at night time...

Karate on Monday was extremely difficult, but extremely satisfying.

Had to miss Thursday's session as I was meeting up with a bunch of ophthalmologists to set up a research project with them. At the last count, the 'team' consisted of myself, 3 consultant ophthalmologists, an ophthalmology registrar, a Health Scientist (who studied in an Optometry department), and a Neuroscientist (specialising in visual dysfunction). The project came about through a chance discussion in the pub one evening after badminton (myself and one of the ophthalmologists), and a chance meeting with one of the other ophthalmologists in the swimming pool (with our kids) a few days later.

Things on my mind today:

gerry_altmann@mac.com — 2005-09-05T21:27:00+01:00

My kids, as they're in the office right now, after the childcare arrangements fell apart on their last day of the summer vacation, which is why I'm working on this... as there's not much chance of getting anything serious done.

Karate (am going tonight)

Argentina (am going next week)

MSc introductory statistics course (need to prepare it)

Money (need to win some)

Food (need to buy some)

Research (need to find time to do some)

This website (need to stop fiddling with it)