When I did my PhD I’d have weekly meetings with my main adviser and I would usually say something like “well I didn’t do much since last week.” What can you do with a week?? Depends on how hard you work I suppose.
Anyway I didn’t do much since last week. I am slowly getting a vague familiarity with relevant literature. The problem with academic literature is that there is so very much of it. People just keep writing papers.
I see people present these charts showing that the interest in whateverology is increasing rapidly as evidenced by rapid increase in number of whateverology papers in the databases. And I think yes that’s like every field?? Everyone has a chart like that! I’d like to see those charts adjusted for the number of active researchers year by year. My guess is that the per-researcher interest in whateverology rarely grows rapidly, but since academia is similar to a pyramid scheme you have to put all these new researchers somewhere.
While we’re discussing the metagame I was interested to read this blog post from the Journal of Open Source Software where they go into what it costs them to operate and what it would cost if they relied less on volunteers, etc. By their estimates a for-profit journal could get by with a $140 article processing charge, which seems very reasonable. I have paid 15 to 20 times this for the privilege of putting a pdf online, which seems excessive. Where does the money go? Clearly not to the reviewers.
I’m getting more familiar with my commute and the half-hour bike ride now only takes me 40-45 minutes. They have these deceptive hills in some parts of Denmark where it looks completely flat but in fact it a small incline that goes on forever. My thighs will be very strong after all this.
Backlinks: