Dear scholar,

We noticed that you have published an article in the journal Crime media cultere, so we kindly invite you to submit an article to our journal "Cross-cultural Communication" (CCC), which is a peer-reviewed petroleum journal published quarterly by Academic Journals (http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org). All the manuscripts are required to be written in English, and they should be submitted as attachment to ccc@cscanada.org or caooc@hotmail.com . The preferred format for the manuscript is APA, although the MSWord format is also acceptable. Note that the submission deadline for the first issue is May 20, 2011. Our objective is to inform author s of the decision on their manuscript(s) within four weeks. Instruction for authors and other details are available on our website: http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/ccc .

Ha ha.   There is no journal Crime media cultere.  A petroleum journal?   Who wold pose APA and MSWord as  contrasting members in the category of format?   

But:  what is the purpose?  This isn't sophisticated enough to actually be doing a pay-journal scam, and the web page above isn't even in grammatical English. Cui bono?  Hm... are they targeting foreign academics trying to break into English language publications?

Loss of a first language

For the last decade one of my research projects has been bilingualism.  A key question is  loss of fluency of the mother tongue for children of immigrants, and what family socialization and other practices lead to maintenance.  English almost always becomes rapidly the dominant language for children who arrive in the U.S. by age 9.   Mixed dominance occurs for arrivals between age 10 and 16, and first language superiority (and low acquisition of English) then is the most frequent (although not universal) fate of older immigrants.

I just stumbled across an interesting piece of short fiction which dramatizes in a couple handful of words events from age 5 to 25 and the disparate language learning trajectories of child and parents.  Enjoy! 

By Samuel Lee

my foreign mouth embarrassed the teachers. my jumbled words gave people sad faces. so wrong these words of mine. even the mentally retarded girl would not talk to me. just looking at my garbled mouth made her slap herself. and my writing. oh no. my writing made the teachers cry. shaking their heads. all the time.....

When Daddy's tour in Iraq is extended yet again...

Dear Dr. XX,

Thank you for asking me to consult on aspects of children's socio-emotional development relevant to the Department of Defense's solicitation titled, "Virtual Dialogue Application for Families of Deployed Service Members."

I was appreciative of the fact that the DoD opened with a historical perspective:

The ability to reach out and communicate with loved ones from areas of conflict is better than at any time in history. Nevertheless, the stresses of deployment might be softened if spouses and especially children could conduct simple conversations with their loved ones in immediate times of stress or prolonged absence. Historically, families have derived comfort and support from photographs or mementos, but current technology SHOULD allow for more personal interactive messages of support. Over 80% of American children between the ages of three and five regularly use computers, and 83% of families have a computer in their home. So, computer-based applications would resonate with children and capture their interest and imagination. The challenge is to design an application that would allow a child to receive comfort from being able to have simple, virtual conversations with a parent who is not available "in-person".


It's wonderful that the military is prepared to spend substantial money to improve the well-being of military families. They may hope families will be more tolerant of repeated and prolonged tours if they can speak with a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.

Still, I confess I am skeptical of the utility of an artificial intelligence program which mimics parental dialogue. Is there any evidence that children age 3-5 will understand that the avatar on the screen is supposed to be their parent? I wouldn't envy the job of a mother who has to train her 3 year old to comprehend this. (Just think of the bright happy forced energy required in "Let's go say good-night to Daddy!") And once children do understand, how will they sort out that this is an artificial intelligence, not really their parent? Recall young children's difficulty with the "appearance-reality distinction" (documented by Piaget and the American developmental psychologist John Flavell). This may create more confusions: where/what is my father?

Great background-story for a dystopian novel: In the early 21st century, when the protagonist was only three, he was beta-tested on a military AI project...

I saw that spouses were mentioned as possible beneficiaries of the proposed product. Would spouses really take comfort from an AI program saying the couple's tender phrases? Or perhaps the topic proposers are remembering a book they read in the 1970s, "Stepford Wives" -- the AI will be better than a human being because it can cater to the fantasies of the left-behind-spouse.

From a research standpoint, the first step in phase 1, "1. Develop metrics to determine user acceptance, usability, and content requirements" should be completed before anything else is attempted. Indeed, a simple questionnaire for armed services personnel could be sufficient to find out whether an AI could "soften the stresses of deployment." I was surprised this hasn't been done -- but indeed, the references section was about what one would expect from an undergraduate term paper -- idiosyncratic, showing little awareness of background research in the relevant scientific disciplines.

One more question: Do you have any thoughts on why the DoD does not simply try to provide (more) real-time video computer connection (as is possible with skype and ichat)?

Sincerely,

HumanProject

Note: I learned about this project by receiving a request to be a consultant, but after googling saw that bloggers have already called it a "Creepy government project."

(And I really wanted to development AIs back when I was a teenager at the dawn of modern computing...)

Happy Year New! And use your card credit to pay those fees legal, you thank

A good friend who I knew when she was in grad school in Boston used to mess around with visual illusions of the wordy kind -- top-down expectations influencing subjective phenomenology. After 10 years that project got written up, published in Consciousness and Cognition, and now science bloggers are writing about it!

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-card-credit-and-you-thank-appear-as.html

Is homosexuality only "okay" if it isn't your choice?

As part of giving a lecture on homosexuality in my developmental psychology class, I looked up Lisa Diamond's new book, because in past year's I've had to point out that most of the work on homosexuality is on male homosexuality -- it feels funny to spend an hour on theories of why men become gay addressing a room of 70 students that is 85% female.

I'd read some journal articles by Dr. Diamond and knew she had a book coming out, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire.

The following blurb is from University of Chicago Magazine:

Is love "blind" when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.
This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked 100 women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: "I fall in love with the person, not the gender," say some respondents.
Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women's sexuality--and of the central importance of love.

See also this review.

While googling around, I stumbled upon the controversy regarding Dr. Diamond and NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality). NARTH has been citing Diamond's research as evidence that female homosexuality contains an element of choice, which supports their view that homosexuality can be changed. Diamond contests their misuse of her findings.

New project with students: Video games and language learning

In graduate school in cognitive science I studied artificial neural networks and language acquisition, a continuation of my interest in psychology and computer science from college.

As a professor, I became knowledgeable in several new areas during the 1990s. One of these is the question of why adults find it difficult to learn a foreign language, even in an immersion context. To answer this, I have been developing "multi-causal" theory: foreign language learning is difficult because of entrenched and routinized first-language structures, decline in brain plasticity, and decreased motivation to practice the second language because immediate rewards are so low. Adult learners may highly desire the end-state of fluency, just as they value other long-term goals like weight gain or smoking cessation; immediate rewards are minimal. The intervention I propose is a virtual reality learning environment. The virtual world is the place to learn and practice a foreign language with game characters providing language recasts and diverse skill levels. The immediate rewards of video-games (solving puzzles, finding clues) means that language learning is part of making progress in the game. After developing a prototype for foreign language learners, I want to extend the video game language learning project to the problem of literacy acquisition for deaf children. With my colleagues at BU, I argue that deaf individuals have difficulty learning to read because they are being asked to do something unprecedented: learn a second language (and sometimes a first language) via print. But can a language be learned just from print? Language learning is typically thought to depend on social-emotional interaction, which is absent when deaf children struggle to learn language from the printed page. Virtual reality environments can be used to immerse learners in a world where printed material can co-exist with interactions between characters, including interaction of the learner.

I'm currently looking for funding and collaborators and welcome suggestions.

Which one of these is not like the others?

Below is an unedited email I received from my university Office of Sponsored Programs. Take a look at items 1-4 (see italicized text below).

AGENCY: Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)/National Institutes of Health (NIH)

PROGRAM: Roadmap Transformative R01 Program (R01)

OBJECTIVES: This program, part of the NIH Roadmap Initiative, provides funding for exceptionally innovative, high risk, original and/or unconventional research with the potential to create new or challenge existing scientific paradigms.

Projects in any area of NIH interest are encouraged. Areas of highlighted need that have been identified through an NIH strategic planning process include: 1) Understanding and Facilitating Human Behavior; 2) Change Complex 3-Dimensional Tissue Models; 3) Functional Variation in Mitochondria in Disease Transitions from Acute to Chronic Pain; 4) Formulation of Novel Protein Capture Reagents; and 5) Providing an Evidence Base for Pharmacogenomics

Proposals must clearly articulate (a) the fundamental issue to be addressed and its overarching importance to the biomedical/behavioral research enterprise, (b) how the studies will either establish new or disrupt existing paradigms, and (c) how the proposed rationale and/or approaches significantly differ from state of the art in the field.

DEADLINES:
Letters of Intent (optional): December 29, 2008
Proposal submission: January 29, 2009
______________________________________________________________

See why the Annals of Improbable Research say that "Soft is Hard"?

Why do people confess to crimes they didn't commit?

In a discussion of whether Dostoevky deserves to be considered a great writer, the blogger Jim H wrote:

does anyone really believe that Raskolnikov would cop so readily to the murder? Was he that weak? Was his conscience so overwhelming? or was this just a way for D. to end the story in a redeeming, sort of uplifting way he couldn't find it in himself to challenge?

Hm.... the question is a reminder that most people don't understand how easily people confess. Most people are surprised to learn how common is the phenomena of false confessions.

I just lectured on this in today's psychology class and can't get the topic off my mind.

I found I was unusually strident because my undergrads were staring at me with looks of disbelief and incomprehension.

One student said, "Because they want to protect their family?"

Silently... uh... no, that was Stalinist Russia.

The evidence that people confess to crimes they don't commit, and the reasons, were recently laid out by Saul Kassin (journal article, blog report), publication list).


Dear young things, only two in a class of 85 (yes, big classes sucks) indicated that they had heard of the "Central Park Jogger" -- the young female stock broker assaulted and left for dead in 1989. Media hysteria over teens going on "wilding" rampages meant that the usual suspects were rounded up and convicted. Five young black men spent the 1990s in jail and were finally released in 2002 when the real rapist, already in prison for another crime, bragged about the assault to an imate and was found to have been the rapist via DNA evidence.

They confessed because they cracked under the relentless pressure and just wanted the harassment to end.

It doesn't sound plausible, does it -- until you start looking at the data.

About 1/4 of DNA exonerations were for death-row inmates who were on death-row because of false confessions; once you make a confession, its not easily retracted.

Readers, what is the solution to the waste of lives mispent in jail and wrong convictions?

In which I am challenged to dig into my encyclopedic knowledge of scientific psychology

Dear Professor,

I am writing to you because I would like to have your advice on how to find literature or studies on a certain topic and I am having trouble finding them on my own.

When developing a new products/services, there is a phase of the user- based research where the researcher tries to assess the “consumer’s latent needs”. It is said to be more of an art than a science. It usually occurs during an observational session, interview or beta testing.

A “latent need” could be defined as a need that the user has but is unaware of and cannot define when asked. The user frequently only realizes the existence of a “latent need” when she/he is presented with a product which addresses/satisfies the need. In this moment everything becomes that there was an obvious need for this product in the past and it is seemingly “strange” that no one has invented it before. This term is frequently used in marketing terminology. Good examples of these “needs” are: the necessity of being able to store money in a place other than your home or under your bed (BANK), to buy an item for which you do not have all the cash on your person at the time (CREDIT CARD), the ability to temporarily stick notes on all surfaces (POST-Its), etc.

Therefore my question for you is, is there a “psychological term” for a latent need? Have there been any studies regarding this subject?

Dear Z,

Mainstream psychologists have not studied latent needs. However, your question could be rephrased to be a specific variant of a more general topic that has been well studied: the habits of mind which prevent us from being able to see solutions to existing problems. In particular, I recommend Howard Margolis' Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs

Innovative product ideas like those you mentioned (e.g., Post-its, or think about famous intermittent car windshield wiper) can be understood as creative breakthroughs similar to the scientific breakthroughs discussed by Margolis. You wondered if psychologists have studied latent needs, and if not, why not. You noticed that it is quite interesting and even puzzling why people frequently hadn't noticed their need until the solution was posed, and then apparently suddenly felt the need had been present all along, but had been unnoticed.

To the extent that people don't recognize needs until the solution is presented, I propose that the reason why people apparently hadn't noticed the need before they saw the solution, is the same reason why the solution took so long: because people have mental habits which keep them thinking in a fixed routine. Their mental assumptions about the world entail that the problem doesn't have a solution, so they just keep stepping through their routine. I submit that they grumble, complain, and are annoyed, but the reason they don't look for a solution is not because they don't have a need, but because they haven't conceived of a solution being possible.

Let me illustrate my position with the case of post-it notes. Is it really plausible that no one had previously noticed the need to stick notes to any surface? I suspect masses of people had been annoyed at not having tape handy, were disgruntled by notes falling out of the pages of books or blowing off surfaces. But they assumed this is insurmountable because that had accepted long-standing and true generalizations about how glue works: glue is permanent and detaching a previously glued paper tears and wrecks the material. It was the accidental discovery of a very weak "glue" by chemists at 3M that led to the innovation of post-its.

I thus propose that your question is well-studied by psychologists, but they approach it from the angle of: what habits of mind keep us from seeing solutions to problems. The voluminous psychological work on creativity is only a click away.

Physiological reactivity to loud noises and threatening images correlates with political views

Science 19 September 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5896, pp. 1667 - 1670

Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits

Douglas R. Oxley,Kevin B. Smith, John R. Alford, Matthew V. Hibbing, Jennifer L. Miller, Mario Scalora, Peter K. Hatemi, John R. Hibbing

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

New directions in cognitive and affective science

Clinical doctoral students who wish to be licensed in Massachusetts must have training in cognitive and affective science, broadly construed. It is typical to gain this training by taking a class.

How to get this training? Why, start and maintain a blog on your readings on the topic.

I hereby announce a blog which has both a very specific, immediate purpose and a larger purpose. The immediate purpose is as a forum to discuss a set of important, mostly recent journal articles on cognitive science and especially the intersection between the cognitive and affective sciences. The blog is maintained by a student at Boston University, Kristen Ellard, who will be engaged in reading 3-4 articles each week and writing about her rections to the articles.

As Kristen's directed study supervisor, I invite any interested persons to post comments on her summaries and comments, or to post your own comments on the articles, or post questions about the general topic.

The larger purpose is to determine the usefulness of public blogging of this type. Traditionally, under directed study, a student discusses papers with a supervisor. The drawback here is that the student misses out on the dynamic interaction that accompanies classroom learning. Her writing becomes "writing for the teacher" rather than a broader audience of experts and non-experts. Yet setting up a full online course with multiple participants is not possible due to limited time and resources. The public blog is thus an intermediate step.

If you are interested in this topic and would like to see the readings and Kristen's postings thus far, please visit the blog site:

http://cognitionandaffect.blogspot.com/

I would like to volunteer in Research in your department

Dear Doctor,
I am Medical Student Graduate from India .I would like to volunteer in Research in your department .I can put 8 hrs daily and make commitment for a year. My sister is in [medical program in your city] doing her DMD program ,that is what fascinated me to volunteer in [your university].
My Crediantials are :
1.Degree :Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of surgery Dec'o7 from Government medical school ,patiala ,India.
2.USMLE Step1- 85 percentile.
3.USMLE Step2- 91percentile.
4.USMLE Step CSA- 9/30/08
5.computer skills :Excel,Microsoft Word ,Power Point presentation,Data management,Windows operting System,Trouble shooting.
With detailed knowledge in medicine , i can prove my selves if given opportunity in your research.
I promise for hard work,commitment and team work.
I am looking forward to hear from you soon.
Thank you so much,
In anticipation,
xxxx

I wrote back

Dear xxxx
I conduct behavioral science research and thus your expertise and interests are too far from mine.

I advise you to read about the research of the different faculty you find in the Boston area. Then pick the faculty whose research you like and write a tailored letter to that person. The tailored-letter approach has a higher probability of success and will also result in a position that matches your interests. In 1999 I received such a request to volunteer in my laboratory from a scientist from Turkey who had recently received her Ph.D. from Istanbul University. She sold family property in order to fund her own way to the U.S., but after working with me for two years she had several English language publications and is now a successful researcher in Turkey. We now continue to collaborate and have a rich binational partnership.

My point is that volunteering can serve to give you valuable training, but established U.S. scientists may not respond to an indiscriminate letter, and may even view it as spam.

Also, you need to write in standard, professional English, which means using standard punctuation (no small i for I, use comma and period correctly).

Good luck with your search,

=================
Readers: How would you answer this mail? Ignore it? Are there websites with information to help foreign scientists make contact with a U.S. researcher? I was wondering how this person obtained my email since he didn't seem to know my name, he apparently only knew my university from the acronym before the edu on my university email. Do you think there are now services that sell the emails of researchers in a certain area?

Woman Stymied In Drive For 'Beautiful Viking Baby

Listen to Scott Simon's description of a woman who insists on using the same Norweigan sperm donor for her second child because she wants her first child to have a full-sibling.

I agree with Simon's view that it is laudable when someone wants to parent a child of a different race. But Simon might be interested to learn about a study (presented at last weekend's APA conference) showing that full-siblings have less conflictual relationships (less sibling rivalry) than half sibs. The authors claim this indicates that kin selection is at work: we are more altruistic to those who share more of our genes.

See:

Michalski, R. L., & Euler, H. A. (2007). Evolutionary perspectives on sibling relationships. In C. A.
Salmon & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), Family relationships: An evolutionary
perspective (pp. 230-256). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press


I wonder how the children know who is a half sib. Any thoughts, readers?

Should you try to cut into that 3 hour iphone line?

Lance Arthur stood in line to get an iphone, and stood-up to a someone who slipped in right behind him, thus not waiting 3.5 hours.

The cutter asked, when Lance challenged him, "How does it hurt you?"

Game theorists have shown in several studies that people will pay their own money to punish a cheater.

Exploring the Atheist Personality

" I love the idea of debunking or analyzing the veracity of the common stereotype of atheists. I think this is an excellent direction for scholarship. Furthermore, your results do provide some interesting preliminary evidence."

So wrote Laura King, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Research in Personality.

"Given the vast increase in public discourse about religion and atheism, and books like those of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris, this is indeed a good time to be doing scientific work on the types of questions raised in this manuscript. There are interesting questions about whether the stereotypes about atheists are true. Are they indeed immoral, immune to awe experiences, unhappy people? This manuscript therefore opens up interesting questions."

This was the opening paragraph of the review Dr. King obtained from an expert reviewer.

But alas.... research is hard. I think I'm gonna hafta file drawer this paper because I don't have the resources to collect more participants as both King and the reviewer felt was necessary (and I do see their point).

But if the topic interests you, check out the complete paper here, because "preliminary evidence" can still be worth a look.

On the route to publishing in academia, when do you celebrate your achievements?

The Chronicle of Higher Education "Careers"
column this week features the question of how the partners of academics may have trouble understanding what constitutes academic work. The author describes how the girlfriend of an academic jokingly asks him when he comes home from work, "Did you publish today?"


This got me thinking about a related question: How does an academic decide what type of publication-related accomplishment is worth celebrating? Is publication itself the main thing to celebrate? The Chronicle article made me realize that I've have been explicit about institutionalizing a process for myself and my co-authors. The moment to celebrate is submitting a manuscript to a journal. This is the day when you raise a toast, celebrate, send all the collaborators an email, "The paper is now submitted!!!" They should write back their congratulations and praise. I suggest awed statements like: "that response to reviewers' comments was masterful!" or "this paper kicks ass!" or "after this, people will either have to cite us or stop doing research on X completely!" This is the day where you benefit from rewarding yourself with emotional satisfaction at a job well done and exclaim to spouse, "I submitted a paper today!"

Even just a decade ago, the actual submission process took some hours to do because of printing and xeroxing. Today final submission may still take the good part of a morning because journals use websites like mc.manuscriptcentral.com, which have pages of forms to fill out and documents to upload. I used to celebrated when the manuscript was sitting in outgoing mail. Today, when I press the last "submit" button and receive the automated email of acknowledgment, I celebrate.

Now, why celebrate on submission, and not, say, when one receives the acceptance letter form the editor? The emailed proof from publisher? The journal in print?

Celebrate on your submit-button press because this is the culmination of the prior weeks and months of effort. You've been motivated by this moment -- by the desire to get this paper out of your life so you can make progress on your backlog of other manuscripts and so you can earn the gratitude of the co-authors who wondered when it would be done.

After hitting "submit" you won't hear reviewers' reactions to your work for 3 to 6 months. Even if the answer is "outright accept" (a rare event, as I explain below), it is hard to celebrate completion of project a you haven't worked on since that submit-button was pressed 6 months previously.

In the sciences (and I include the behavioral sciences; psychology is indeed a very "hard" science), out-right acceptance letters are rare. The first reviews may have as many pages as your article, and while they will generally be helpful, the reviewers point out myriad required improvements, new experiments to run, and even criticisms so devastating that at least that reviewer thinks the project should be junked. (Sample comment: "Now that you know how to do the experiments correctly, go and do them.") During the years of trying to publish academic journal articles, we learn that the editorial decision of "encouraged to resubmit if reviewers' objections can be met" is a positive move forward, even a victory. Emotionally, this is difficult to celebrate because of the mountain of effort ahead. Unless only minor revisions are required, I put aside the reviews and may not take them up for months given that by this time I've already been immersed in other projects.

A few resubmissions and possibly even a couple years later, you might get the final acceptance. Yes, celebrate, do. Raise a glass and/or breathe a sigh of relief. But there's been a lot of pain during the revisions, and you've probably been mostly involved in writing other papers, since revisions may not require the full-time effort in the manner of an initial submission.

The initial submission is the act that culminates our effort and is the one that we have direct control over. An acceptance hinges on editors and reviewers and we can't predict when it will occur or how arrdurous any revision requirements might be. Still, our nonacademic partners may not understand why we want to celebrate a manuscript submission rather than publication itself. Give them this essay!

I wouldn't want to be in the lifeboat with you...

"The bed covers slide more on to my side because of physical dynamics of the our positions, the down filling getting squished on this side, and who rolls over more!"

My husband snorted,"Yeah... but I'm not gettin in the life boat with you, baby".

"Well, the evolutionary psychologists say that that for women, its 'Staying Alive' that really matters -- there's an entire target article in Behavior and Brain Sciences defending this idea." (Readers: just google three words, Staying alive evolution)

"Really?"

"Men can do acts of heroism that have some probability of ending in death. If they die, their heroism will cause the community to heap rewards on their family members. Or they may need to attempt heroic acts to get a mate in the first place. But in life-or-death situations, women have to focus on staying alive, because mothers' direct caregiving is usually essential for ensuring their children reach reproductive maturity."

"Ha ha. That was then. Now, no way. Get out of that lifeboat bitch, I've got books to write!"

This made sense to me and I mentally entered a "score 1" for my husband. "I see. You're focused on an entirely different type of posterity -- the success of your memes, not your genes!"

Beginning my science blog

There's a lot of wonderful science writing out there. Is there a need for another science blog? Aren't we drowning in information? Are there science papers that aren't getting talked about or exposed to the public?

What can I do that is unique?

I've decided to respond to a plea by Dr Vaughan Bell posted on MindHacks, http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2004/12/vaughan.html, for scientists to discuss their own work.

In working with graduate students and far-flung collaborators, there's plenty of room to write down notes that could be of interests to other science lovers. My method wil be a short paragraph about a paper, a link to the published version, ideas for future research, and possibly comments such as what I had hoped would happen when I conceived the project.

But I'll also write about 'anything'...