I was bemused to find this when I typed “non-binary” into Google translate for the Spanish version:
Sigh. This rather defeats the whole point of the word. Catalan, on the other hand, makes more sense…
On a more positive note, I have seen examples of the article ‘lxs’ instead of ‘los’ or ‘las’.
Time for a little tribute to a great figure in the world of jazz, Carla Bley, who passed away yesterday at the age of 87. Carla Bley was a pianist, organist and composer who I first came across through her 1982 album Carla Bley Live! that contains one of my all-time favourite tracks, the gospel-infused The Lord is Listenin’ To Ya, Hallelujah! featuring the superb trombone playing of Gary Valente. I decided not to make that one my tribute piece because it’s really a solo vehicle for the trombonist, but instead another track from another album. This is from the 1989 album Fleur Carnivore, recorded live in Copenhagen in 1988, which I also have back home. Valente features on this one too, with his unmistakable sound like a wounded bison, but it also features some fine examples of Carla Bley’s skill as a composer/arranger as well as other soloists including long-term partner and musical collaborator Steve Swallow. It’s called Healing Power.
R.I.P. Carla Bley (1936-2023)
Quite a few people have contacted me to ask about the Peer Review Process at the Open Journal of Astrophysics so I thought I’d do a quick post here to explain a bit about it here.
When a paper is submitted it is up to the Editor-in-Chief – that’s me! – to assign it to a member of the Editorial Board. Who that is depends on the topic of the paper and on the current availability due to workload. I of course take on some papers myself. I also reject some papers without further Peer Review if they clearer don’t meet the journal’s criteria of scientific quality, originality, relevance and comprehensibility. I usually run such papers past the Editorial Board before doing such a ‘Desk Reject’.
Once the paper has been assigned, the Editor takes control of the process, inviting referees (usually two) to comment and make recommendations. This is the rate-determining step, as potential referees are often busy. It can take as many as ten declined invitations before we get a referee to agree. Once accepted, a referee is asked to provide a report within three weeks. Sometimes they are quicker than that, sometimes they take longer. It depends on many factors, including the length of the manuscript.
Once all the referee reports are in the Editor can make a decision. Some papers are rejected upon refereeing, and some are accepted with only tiny changes. The most frequent decision is “Revise and Resubmit” – authors are requested to make changes in response to the referee comments. Sometimes these are minor, sometimes they are substantial. We never give a deadline for resubmission.
A resubmitted paper is usually sent to the same referee(s) who reviewed the original. The referees may be satisfied and recommend acceptance, or we go around again.
Once a paper is accepted, the authors are instructed to upload the final, accepted, version to arXiv. It normally takes a day or two to be announced. The article is then passed over from the Peer Review process to the Publication process. As Managing Editor, I make the overlay and prepare the metadata for the final version. This is usually done the same day as the final version appears on arXiv, but sometimes it takes a bit longer to put everything in order. It’s never more than a few days though.
Anyway, here are some “analytics” – it’s weird how anything that includes any quantitative information is called analytics these days to make it sound more sophisticated than it actually is – provided by the Scholastica platform:
These numbers need a little explanation.
The “average days to a decision” figure includes desk rejects as well as all submissions and resubmissions. Suppose a paper is submitted and it then takes 4 weeks to get referee reports and for the Editor to make a “Revise and Resubmit” request. That would count as 28 days. It might take the authors three months to make their revisions and resubmit the paper, but that does not count in the calculation of the “average days to decision” as during that period the manuscript is deemed to be inactive. If the revised version is accepted almost immediately, say after 2 days, then the average days to decision would be (28+2)/2 = 15 days. Also, being an average there are some shorter than 14 days and some much longer.
The acceptance rate is the percentage of papers eventually accepted (even after revision). The figure for ‘total submissions’ includes resubmissions, so the hypothetical paper in the preceding paragraph would add 2 to this total. That accounts for why the total number of papers accepted is not 50% of 388, which is 194; the actual figure is lower, at 105.
Finally, the number of manuscripts “in progress” is currently 23. That includes papers currently going through the peer review process. It does not include papers which are back with the authors for revisions (although it would be reasonable to count those as in progress in some sense).
There we are. I hope this clarifies the situation.
Continuing with my aim of reading more books while on sabbatical, I’ve just finished Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang. The story, told in the first person, revolves around June Hayward, an unsuccessful young white author, who is present at the accidental death of Athena Liu, a Chinese-American author, a hit in literary circles, who chokes on a pancake. Athena has just finished a complete draft of a novel about Chinese laborers in World War I and while waiting for emergency services to arrive, June purloins the manuscript and passes it off as her own. She is immediately welcomed by publishers and offered a large advance, but that’s only the start as she has to then contend with accusations of plagiarism and racism as well as being haunted by what appears to be Athena’s ghost. I won’t spoil the read by telling you how it ends, but it did remind me a little bit of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
The author describes this as a “horror story about loneliness” in the highly competitive world of publishing, I found much of it resonates with academia too, but it’s really more of a satire about plagiarism and marketing hype than a horror story per se. I found it very readable, and interesting for someone who has recently quit Twitter to see how social media play such an important – and negative – role in the story. I was gripped by the story and read it in just two evenings, which is quick for me. Recommended.
I posted a poem by American poet Louise Glück when she won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature (“for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”). I was sad to read that she passed away just a few days ago at the age of 80. By way of a small tribute here is another poem of hers I like very much. It is called Telescope.
There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.
You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.
You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.
You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.
R.I.P. Louise Glück (1943-2023)
Don’t worry about what this is, I’m just testing to see what the video rendering looks like. If you want to know, it’s an attempt to run the collapse of a spherical over-density backwards in time!
It started raining yesterday and has carried on today. Yes, water is falling from the sky. It’s not raining heavily, but it has noticeably reduced the number of pedestrians visible. It’s a lot cooler today, too. Not exactly cold, at 21°C, but there’s definitely been a change. Whenever it’s been overcast previously in my stay here it has been very humid but not cooler, especially overnight when the cloud cover keeps the temperature high. Now it’s actually rather refreshing. We’re in for a bit more rain over the next few days too. Nice.
It seems more than a little overdue:
Today hasn’t been a great day so far. I was thinking of doing this morning’s scheduled Zoom call from home using the Wifi connection there. Unfortunately, there was quite a bit of construction noise from elsewhere in the building so I decided to come into the Department and do it here instead. When I got here Eduroam decided not to work for me, so I had no internet connection and consequently had to postpone the Zoom call altogether. I may have to miss a telecon this afternoon for the same reason.
Now there are intolerable levels of construction noise outside my office window too. Sigh.
On top of all that, my phone is refusing to send SMS messages. “Error 0” it says. I’m not sure how to fix that, so I’ll probably just wait for it to fix itself. My mobile data connection is working fine, so I have no idea what the problem is. I shall adopt my usual strategy in such situations of waiting for the issue to correct itself.
Annoying, though. It never rains but it pours…
I think I’ve settled in pretty well now. I went for a longish walk this morning and didn’t once have to use Google Maps to find out where I was! It’s a bit cooler today (although still 25°C) so a bit more comfortable walking around. Temperatures are forecast to drop to about 21°C tomorrow, and there’s even a forecast for rain. I might even change out of my shorts!
I’ve been here almost three weeks now, and in my apartment for one. It does feel like I’ve been here longer, actually, but I suppose that’s because so many nice and interesting things have happened.
Anyway, on my way around I dropped in at Come In, a very good English-language bookshop. You can see how good it is by the quality of the books it sells…
It has a very wide range: new books and classics, fiction and non-fiction, and books for children. I suspect quite a few of its sales are to students of English, as well as tourists and migrants such as myself. It’s definitely worth a visit if you’re here. The staff are very friendly and helpful too. I bought a couple of items there, of which more anon.
Oh, and I also passed by La Casa Milà, which is quite close to my place of residence…
In the Dark 