Peer Review, Again

Peer review can be exasperating, but also fun. A while ago I reposted some amusing reviewer comments from the journal "Environmental Microbiology". Well, just after that we submitted a paper for which one reviewer was raving about the work and the other thought it boring - chalk and cheese it was.

Of course I can't repost the above anonymous reviews here. But I thought it would be fun to compose two reviews myself, the first scathing and the other glowing.  Although fictitious, they are composed of actual reviewer comments about our manuscripts submitted over the last year or so. (And, yes, one of the reviewers, who presumably has a Ph.D., does spell the word "know" as "no".)

Reviewer I.

 Essentially, the paper either tells us what we already know, or makes novel assertions which are uncheckable and based on needless ad-hoc-erie. The authors should change the tone of their paper to be constructive rather than "criticizing" the work of other people - by comparing to such works (sic), the authors are doing themselves a disservice, as they should no (sic) that is really no longer acceptable. This submission will not help the reputations of any of the coauthors as it is really not at the level one would expect for three of the main authors. They should all provide a bit more guidance, mentorship and advise (sic)  to the apparently junior author, in the opinion of the review (sic) who is very familiar with the very nice high quality publications of Smith. The impression left on this reviewer is one of being cheated, as if only the first half of a fine review article was provided. Poorly designed and provides only trivial results, if any. The ball-and-spring model is too simplistic and I do not think that any of the conclusions can be reliable.

Reviewer II.

An important and sorely-needed contribution to the field and will have an impact, or should have, not only on practical strain development, but also in basic research into microbial physiology. The approach stimulates new ideas, is interesting and very promising judging from the results exposed in this manuscript.  The paper is clearly written, well executed, and richly supported by an abundance of supplemental materials. The work is thorough, complete and well written. This interesting paper provides new insights and suggests a scheme which has many interesting elements and should make an important contribution to the field. In summary, this manuscript is an important physical contribution to our understanding of conformational transitions in proteins.This is an outstanding piece of work: an exciting and unexpected discovery that may also be of importance to other biocatalysts. It is an important step towards interpreting neutron scattering data and obtaining quantitative agreement between MD results and neutron data. The simulations are carried out competently, the mathematical analysis is thorough, the results appear to be of very high quality and the presentation is clear. The work should be of general interest for all kinds of organisms. It provides a good example of this type of approach and has been carefully performed –

Hmm...accept or reject, I wonder?

UT Supercomputer Predicts Revolution

Well, I knew the UT supercomputers were good. After all, we have peered into the origin of life, probed biofuel barriers, helped design drugs  and done myriad other things with them. But I didn't know they were capable of predicting revolutions. Apparently so, according to this BBC report on data mining with the UT SGI Altix "Nautilus" machine. 

"S'ils n'ont pas d'ordinateur, qu'ils mangent de la brioche!":

Reasons to be Cheerful..Part 3

The productvity (in terms of publications) of the UT/ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics has doubled over the past year: from about 20 publications per year to about 40. And so we build, adding more bricks to the edifice resting on the great laws of science, laws that I see in "The Settle Bed" by Seamus Heaney (above):

"....an inheritance

Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked

In the long ago, yet willable forward

Again and again and again"

The Art of Splette

My ex-graduate student Thomas Splettstoesser is very talented in scientific graphics. The images below of his graced the front page of the ORNL web site and various other places. (If he sends me more I'll post them too). See more of his work here.

Dynamical Fingerprints

Mighty Microbes

Mighty Microbes (again)

Lignin and Cellulose

Americanese versus Britishese

Heads up, guys! (Take notice, everyone). While standing on the track (platform) in England a while ago I thought I'd spend a half hour (half an hour) or so writing about train travel. But in which language - Americanese or Britishese? Why not both?

Riding the train is an alternate (alternative) to the car in Britain. Trains run there 24/7 (all day, every day) and can be convenient transportation (transport), there being a million and a half (one and a half million) journeys per year. You do the Math (Maths) - that's a bunch (load) of trips. But riding on the railroad (railway) isn't always easy. Waiting on (waiting for) a train in Britain is oftentimes (often) the height of ridiculosity (can be riduculous) due to (owing to) endemic lateness, never permitting a sense of normalcy (normality), and sleeping passengers even risk being burglarized (burgled), but in the end train travel can be the least worst (just bearable) option (while not always the 'most best').

During my last train trip I recognised the waiter so I reached out to (talked to) him, asking whether I could get (have) a couple (couple of) newspapers. He said that, no I couldn't get them, he'd have to get them for me, and, anyway, he hadn't wanted to be disturbed and couldn't care less (could care less) so I told him he was nauseous (nauseating) and asked whether I had to write (write to) him to get them, and told him that I had just wanted to touch base (chat) with him, but, being English that last comment must have sounded rude to him because he smacked me one up the bracket, Queensbury rules. I apologised and said it was my bad (fault). He soon perked up when I started talking about soccer (football), and especially about the two-time (double) European champions, Liverpool, and their winningest (with the largest number of wins) coach (manager). A team of much physicality (physical strength) they are, that, I said, going forward (in the future) in upcoming (coming) years will surely win again, but not with the deliverables (potential things to be delivered) expected to be gotten (obtained) from their American (Yankee) owners leveraging (mortgaging) their stadium. He sighed and said that it is what it is (it is what it is). And so indeed it was.

Stardom, Sex, Scandal, Shame, Suicide and Soccer..

While playing for the Norfolk U15 and U18 soccer teams in the backwaters of England in 1975-1978 we players had no idea we were at the birth of the making of social history concerning sex, racism and sport - only years later did we learn that we were witnessing the making of the first openly gay and the first million-pound black soccer superstar, and that our coach was perpetrating child sex abuse that would trigger a worldwide revolution in sports management.

Justin Fashanu (above) was in our U18 team, then became the first black million-pound soccer player, and was the third highest goalscorer in the English Premier League in 1980-81. He was also the first gay to out in the sport, suffered greatly for it, and committed suicide in 1998 after allegations of an improper relationship in the US with a 17-year-old (although the charges had been dropped).

Nick Baker is now writing a book about him, and this is what I communicated to Nick about the quiet, tall striker:

"Justin told me he didn't really want to play football - he was more interested in boxing as a kid, having, I believe, won the English Schools championship. At the time it struck us as weird that a kid with talent actually wouldn't want to play football.

Later on I wondered how many gay boxing champions there have ever been - to me that concept in itself invalidates the perception that no gays can be tough, aggressive and manly, a perception that I suspect underlies the public distaste for gays in the US military.

But in our games on rainy, windswept, muddy Norfolk fields, Justin wasn't the hardest fighter, and would sometimes lose enthusiasm completely, shivering, standing around with his arms folded while the rest of us were huffing and puffing. But then, before anyone noticed, the ball was suddenly in the back of the net and he had put it there. It was like he played in a different dimension.

I remember trying in vain to mark him in practice games (I was a defender). In one of these he twice just popped out of nowhere, stuck a foot out and the ball was in the net. The U18 coach, Graeme Morgan, knew what talent he had (and let the rest of us lesser mortals know about it!) - and within a year or so Fashanu was the Norwich City side in what is now the Premier League, and scoring profusely"

We were just tough, scrapping footballing teenagers.

We had no idea what a star Fashanu would become or that he was gay.

We had no idea what News-of-the-World style tabloid controversy would haunt him later.

And we had no idea that our U15 soccer coach, Paul Hickson, would go on to become Chief Coach of the British Olympic Swimming team, leading them to their best ever performance at the Seoul games. His record-breaking 1988 squad had seven Olympic finalists and included stars like Adrian Moorhouse and Nick Gillingham, who scooped three golds, and silver and bronze medals.

And we had no idea that while we were playing for Hickson he was abusing young female swimmers from our local schools, that he would be doing this for over ten years, that 15 years later, he would be jailed for 17 years for the sex attacks on teenagers in his elite squads, and that his conviction would trigger an ongoing worldwide clean-up.............

Scruffy, scrapping soccer kids unwittingly at the budding of a nexus of change, oblivious to the gathering storm that redefined homosexuality, racism and child abuse in sport....

Dreamland!!

I'm back in dreamland for a few days!! Southern Germany!
Sailed through the recession.
Unemployment 3.9%.
Low national debt.
No housing bubble.
Lipi graduating.
(625th birthday celebrations of venerable Heidelberg University. )

A beautiful wonderland!! With one exception: the ass-numbingly boring Women's Soccer World Cup taking place here. Why 16 million people would want to watch that drivel I will never understand. Only when the day comes that they make the effort to stop the pinball lottery and control and pass the ball a bit will it become worthy of a few more minutes of attention. The potential is there, of course, but they've got a long way to go.