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.