Mailund on the Internet

Bayblab asks: Publish and/or Perish — When to Submit that Manuscript?

There is a trade-off between the quality of a paper and the  time it takes to get it done.  Not so much the actual writing — it doesn’t take much longer to write a well-written paper than a poorly written one — but the research that goes into the paper.   In the long run, writing high quality papers is what matters (the metrics on productivity such as the h-index include how many other papers reference your papers, not only how many papers you have) but the quantity of your publications matters as well, especially early in your career.

This is an important question to consider whenever you are working on a paper.  In my own case, I think I consistently err on submitting a tad too early.  My problem is that I get bored with what I am doing.

A lot of my research is methods development, and there it is exciting to get the first 80% of the method up and running — and that usually takes less than 10% of the time needed to truly validate it.  After I have convinced myself that the method works, I need to explore the parameter space where the method is applicable, I need to compare it to other methods to judge strength and weaknesses, etc.  This takes ages and is pretty boring work, so at some point I just give up.  At that point, I either abandon the project all together, or I submit a paper to a lesser journal.

With experience, I am hoping to get better at picking the right experiments up front so I don’t have to go through the long experiments phase that just bores the hell out of me, but right now I am really struggling with it.

Okay, so TDC Play is useless on my main computers ’cause they run Linux or Mac OS X, but I have a laptop with dual boot where I can run Windows.  This morning I tried playing one of the free songs from TDC, but this time Windows Media Player just tells me that access is denied when trying to get a certificate for the song.

I’m beginning to suspect that there aren’t any songs in the first place.  You could get away with just doing the PR and then make it impossible for anyone to actually play the songs.

Fuck this.  Back to ripping CDs and downloading pirate songs, I guess…

My internet provider, TDC, now offers a new service: for internet subscribers with at least 1Mbit/s, a large selection of their online music show is now free.  Great, you think, at least so did I, so I quickly went to their webpage and signed up (which was a bit of a hassle, but I managed).  Only to discover that all the music is in DRM protected WMA files.  Just great! Those only play in Windows Media on Windows, not on Linux and not on Mac, the two operating systems I use.  The service is absolutely useless to me!

I am used to Linux being ignored, but I thought I would be at least somewhat better off now that I am using Mac as well, but I guess not.

Today we (Carsten Wiuf and myself) held the exams for our Systems Biology class. This is the first time we teach this class, so we weren’t quite sure how to evaluate it.

The class was a theoretical introduction to systems biology — the full name of the class is Mathematical Models in Systems Biology – and we have covered some simple ODE modelling of systems, some stochastic modelling using stochastic Petri nets and implemented bits and pieces in R.

To test that our students knew how to do all three, we wanted to cover all three at the exam, so we did the following: each student got a small system to model, both deterministically as ODEs and stochastic as SPNs, and then they should explain what the system did (qualitatively, at least) and finally show that it behaved the predicted way by implementing it.

All in all I think it went pretty well.