I'm sitting here thinking "What is a summer salary?" Like...if you don't get a grant one's summer is just not paid? The university doesn't pay research time...but gets credit for that research?

About 20 years ago I was going to a club in Germany and the bouncer was sitting there reading that book. I told him "OH! I'm from there!". He looked at me with some degree of horror. "I used to work at the theater that Baby got shot outside of, it's a real place..."

Frankly I'm surprised that I didn't know about this already. Also, this is not what I am supposed to be writing about this afternoon...

The internet tells me that "Rexy" is a thing for Coach. If anyone knows of something written about Coach's association with T. rex, please share! I need to read this.

Hi @tetzoo.bsky.social, did you take these photos? Would you mind if I saved them for my research? I can check with you/cite you if I would like to publish them. I've been writing about T. rex at high end auctions and art fairs, now they are at the luxury handbag shop...

Wow, look at that rant. I guess I'm even more put out about this than I thought. Every poor paper I have to peer review is time that I can't get back, and it is time that I'm not writing about these postmodern agentic fossil teeth.

And look, I'm no saint. My papers are crazy. I pity the people who have to peer review what I am writing now (I'm wading through Deluzean assemblages of megalodon teeth towards scarcity signals and buyer desire). But I always believe that there is a (bonkers) value to what I submit. I stand by them.

This means that I mostly know who wasted my time by submitting a poor paper that I had to spend time to look at as a peer reviewer. It is hard to fight off that bad impression.

I guess one more dark aspect of being in a small field is that even with double blind peer review reviewers can usually tell who (or what project) produced the paper at hand. I find myself quite put out by these weak papers (especially ones riddled with deep errors and mischaracterisations).

I can imagine someone now saying "the editors should be stepping in", but editors are not experts in all things: they can't always see what I see (i.e. that this is regurgitated or lacks rigor in my field). I guess I wonder, did people just not submit before? Did some social pressure hold them back?

Meanwhile we are in a "peer review crisis" where journals struggle to find adequate reviewers willing to look at any paper, be it strong or weak. And who can blame the peer reviewers? They aren't compensated for their time and these papers make you feel like your time has been wasted.

The resulting publication is useless and will never be cited or read by anyone, but it doesn't exist to be read, it exists to tick the funder's box during the midterm and final reviews.

The other issue: 2. the number of EU-funded consortia projects that have something like "8 peer reviewed academic papers" as a deliverable. To tick the box, it seems, the projects might be tempted to package and repackage junk and try it on at journals until one publishes.

And it's true: it is hard to get a job post PhD without a publication history. But on the other hand, I look at the publications of everyone I consider hiring and read them: bad publications would ensure you aren't hired by me. So...why isn't the supervisor helping? Where are they?

Maybe this isn't an uptick for anyone but me (I could be being asked to review more), but I wonder if this connects to two things. 1: a growing belief that PhDs and even MAs must *publish*, and a weakness on the part of their supervisors to tell them whatever they wrote isn't publication worthy.