Triumphs and setbacks

Exercising he old wrist muscle on New Year's Eve

The new year is bringing developments good and bad. To start with the bad: it seems as though I have to get back in shape all over again. After admittedly not moving much during Christmas holidays (the main exercise I got was for the old wrist muscle), my Yorkish habits demand that I run, pump and spin to my heart's content. (In fact, sometimes I wonder if my heart is content with all this workout: it is developing an unpleasant habit of changing gears at random moments of the day. But it's a lot more likely that cafein is at the heart of this phenomenon.)

On Tuesday I went to the Sweatshop Run Club, which I had tried out once (and liked) in November; afterwards, however, other activities got in the way. Now if I want to attain the shirt, which requires five stamps, I shall have to show up every week for the rest of my stay here. (If you miss a Tuesday there is an alternative run on Thursday, but the price is having to run 10km rather than 5km.) On Wednesday, despite the onset of some serious muscle ache, I picked up the weights again for a body pump session, which had me utterly exhausted as if I had never done this before. Today's spin class, under pain in various hitherto unknown parts of the body, felt as though I have never been on a bike before. This was aggravated by the fact that I had forgotten my top; rather than forgo the exercise I went in my regular shirt, which must not only have looked very odd but is much too warm, what with the collar and all.

SRC run: 5020 m, 11.5 km/h

Then the good: the paper we submitted after the Banff workshop (on benchmarks for bidirectional transformation) was accepted for presentation (and hence publication). The status of this publication is not the highest: we submitted to the Third International Workshop on Bidirectional Transformations, and in the pecking order of publications, workshops rank lowest; one step higher are conferences, the next step are journals. Within each of these categories there are a lot of further subtle differences, so that some workshops rank higher in the collective academic consciousness than some conferences, and some conferences higher than some journals. However, the nice thing about this publication is that it is on a topic that I knew very little about before I went to Banff, so it is indisputably a new direction for me, and this success can be entirely attributed to my trip to Canada.

It is a pity that I have grown a bit blasé about papers getting accepted. In some sense this is the single biggest peak in the life of an academic. I got my first acceptance in 1991, for the CONCUR conference, rated rather high - I got to present it in New York, which was in itself also very nice of course. At the time I celebrated by donating a crate of beer to the Friday afternoon get-together. You have submitted a paper, you know the date on which the decision on acceptance or rejection will be announced, and so you are waiting for the mail. The first line is either "We are happy to inform you" or "We regret to inform you"; in either case you might as well put off reading the rest of the mail (which will contain detailed reviews justifying the decision) since you will not take it in right then. An adrenalin boost for sure.

Come to think of it: might it be the case that in the academic context research is rated higher than teaching (do not let the official position about their equivalence deceive you) because teaching does not offer a comparable success experience? Don't get me wrong, I love lecturing and supervising students, but for different reasons: the feeling that you make them understand something that they did not grasp before, plus the interaction involved. Still, teaching is a slow process, and there is no natural moment (for the teacher) at which success becomes evident and worth celebrating.

Now, how shall we test that hypothesis? Is there a paper in it?