Category Archives: school

breaking a “rejection-spell”

The first thing to do, is to stop saying to our heart and mind: it is the busiest day of my life.

Because  busier days will always come, as a lot of work is needed to be done to make things happen. Work and humbleness are required for learning from the people who had walked the path earlier, and it is willing to share some of their time and experience with us to improve.

Here a small story showing how time can get busier and busier:

On July 14, 2010 @ 6 am – I got locked myself outside of my Finnish house, with no keys. In a warmer summer day I start early my days, however I was lucky enough to have my phone with me, then I could ask for help.

On July 14, 2010 @ 6 pm – I got locked myself outside of my office in Science Park, with no keys, no phone, nothing. Worse case scenario than at the morning of the same day. However thanks to Alexander Kolesnikov I was saved and finally got in.

Those were not signs of in-love process, but my mind is really elsewhere trying to finalize my PhD and doing its best.

On July 28 2010, while being at the Pielinen Museum, I got the email of a paper accepted with “significant revisions”.  I am still shocked. We worked with that paper per months with Erkki, and I think I had been working with it directly more than a year. Hope it makes it through the whole process…

On July 29, 2010. I got the information of other document I worked with Jan in June, which is also “accepted conditionally”.

Honestly, I do not believe it is possible to break the rejection spell, especially after a dozen of rejections in a row. I feel like being locked out: those things can’t happen to me.

The reason of the entrance in this blog is: I do not believe it, however clear evidence exists that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Now, as you can imagine it is busier as I had planned on Tuesday, but happily I received the work to be done if the spell is broken.

light

Image source here with CC.

rejection upgrade

In a conference of 34% acceptance rate, I was not from the lucky ones.

But this post attempts to make the best of my actual situation. If I do not look this positive, I will drive nuts. The positive fact is that the rejection of my paper has been upgraded. Meaning, my referees had NO problems with my focus. I should say HURRAY!!!!! 😉

Actually this is a HUGE step in science for me. I want to thank to those who are helping me to focus. Your patience and efforts are giving results 🙂  . Now my challenge is methodology!  Damn!

To keep me afloat, now I got these supporting referees comments such as:

  • …. it is a promising direction that would benefit from refinement and detail.
  • …the paper contains much serious work, so these are problems that could be rectified by a rewrite
  • The paper presents an interesting premise, etc.

I must keep cool and calm.  Things ARE moving sloooooooooowly, but  moving! 🙂

Let’s see how long can I survive.

no words

surviving!!!!

credits of image source here

score: 9 vs 1

Publications on January 2010: I got 2 new rejections and 1 acceptance.

When I got the acceptance, I wanted to believe it will be a change of trend and I will get more papers accepted. However, didn’t want to celebrate too fast, as I knew two more feedbacks should be coming this month. Today those feedbacks are here and showed me still I am not in the correct track.

Right now I admit I am NOT in a good mood and I am tired of this. —  What I am doing?. I love what I do and I doing my best, which  it seems it is not enough.  I wish to know how to improve this.

Then,  in 2010 I am changing my writing strategy according to the feedbacks gather in all 2009 and the resources that I have. I hope it works to advance on this. But, let’s see.

my advances in research publications

What happen in my summer 2009 ?

Mainly I had been thinking, writing, writing, writing and reading. Also, in less intensive mode, I have been designing, implementing and testing (questionnaires, UI, games, workshops, etc).

Conclusion: besides that my hands hurt a bit, I admire my loyal “ companion“, the summer gave me the understanding of gestation.

In our modern society, we are not taught to be patient and to understand the relevance to put “time” in our actions. Everything is for yesterday. In order words it should be fast without a delay and accurate at once. But looking carefully, everything in life requires its time to flourish. Yes effort must be put daily, that is where the discipline shows up, but nothing is over-night.

It is a fact I am “impatient” to deliver my work, to share it and grow up with others about it. And I want to do other things too from my dream-list that I am collecting, as I cannot do them right now. But I might be getting old while attempting to do this PhD because I know the work will be finished. I just need to keep on working with it, enjoying the ride.

The moment to deliver is approaching. It will take still some time, but light is at the end of the tunnel.

light at the end of the tunnel

light at the end of the tunnel

from interactivity to back-channel (2/3)

 

My believe is that all what surround us interacts with us at some level, but it is not that simple to listen to it or be aware about this. E.g. within humans we can find that some people is louder than others, then it is easy to hear (no necessarily listen) some individuals than others. The same happens with all what surround us. E.g. a flower can “talk” to us and tell us that it has not enough sun, it takes us some days to understand its message but it talks clearly about it. Of course a dog will be louder than a flower. Sadly enough, we humans are not train to listen to different frequencies and rhythms. We focus on our senses in a very narrow bandwidth (we make it even smaller than what it is).

Even with our lovely technology, we are not “train” to listen to it carefully, give time to it. E.g. when suddenly one of our applications is not working in a way I expect, (aka it is not being interactive and friendly with me from my perspective), I can say: it does not work. Then patiently Mikko and Teemu say: “what is the system telling us?”. We go to different (debug) windows to see what our system complains about.  Then the NO-INTERACTIVE system from MY perspective, actually is an INTERACTIVE system when we listen to it from another perspective.

This starts to be interesting….

Maybe even Newton could fit here. His third law is my favorite one: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. One of the main concept to understand within this law is friction. Btw friction is not a simple concept, but it is crucial in order to understand the balance of systems.

How Newton could fit here? Well, in a very naive way I would say: all action has a reaction somewhere, not only in “physical terms”. Then, can we call that reaction is interactive?  If interactive is “acting on each other”.

More in the last post of this sequel…

acting on each other?

acting on each other?

 

 

Credit of image: http://blog.dyknow.com/