Wednesday 24 August 2011

Dropping the ball

Never mind dangling prepositions, dropping the ball is way way worse... I've just been looking at the statistics for the journal I edit (Cognition). In the past 12 months, I've made 316 accept or reject decisions, and of these, 61% were triage decisions (i.e. rejecting without sending out to review). That's steep. On the other hand, I've accepted 24% of those 316 manuscripts. That's above the journal's average of an 18% acceptance rate over the past 12 months. I clearly need to triage less and reject more. Hmm.

While I ponder how to simultaneously reject fewer, and more, manuscripts, I shall savour the irony of my dress sense this morning: I'm wearing a light-almost-faded-green t-shirt that I bought about 7 years ago at the Apple shop on the Cupertino campus. It is subtly embossed with apple.com on the front, and the apple logo on the back. I chose my watch, this morning, equally carefully - I bought it just recently (it hasn't yet gone out in public) and it has the same green color on the numerals - so I clearly score points for matching my watch to the t-shirt. The irony, though, is that the watch is made by a company called Android.

Tuesday 23 August 2011

Dangling my prepositions

Writers' block: I've had it bad.

Could be the conference next week I'm still analysing data for, the new journal submissions I'm trying (but failing) to keep up with, the adolescent hormones (not mine) I'm trying to make allowances for, the company I'm trying to raise money for, the teaching I'm trying to avoid thinking about, the camera I'm avoiding putting in an order for, or, finally, the preposition-dangling I've not avoided succumbing to (ok, so you'd need to have an idea what preposition dangling actually is if you wanted to know what the heck I'm talking about).

A week away (in Corfu, childhood home of "He who I am named after") just wasn't enough to recharge those metaphorical batteries. But I am the possessor, now, of yet another bag made of fine Italian leather. And it was way cheaper than that camera I lust over (doh! I just can't stop dangling those pesky preps). If only I could win the lottery... though that's about as likely as one of those emails offering me a huge inheritance being the real deal.

I will temporarily sign off so as to dangle my prepositions elsewhere.