Monday, January 14, 2008

Rocks & Deadlines

The not-so-minor minor revisions to my publication(s) continue. Today my co-author refuted (with very good cause) one of my rebuttals to a reviewer's valid comment. Damn, damn, damn!

We require additional data.

So my co-author emailed a person of ultimate authority at our medical school, requesting the additional data. The response came back to us six hours later: we regret to inform you that we cannot release such information because it may impact on our student selection/admission process were it to be released into the public domain; it is confidential information made available only to the Deans of the medical school.

Alas, I am not a Dean. No information for me. (Reminds me of the No Soup For You! Seinfeld episode.)

The not-so-minor minor revisions are due in eight days and they regret to inform us that they cannot release the data required for successfully addressing a reviewer's valid comment. Damn, damn, damn!

Rock? Meet hard place. Hard place? Please provide us with a solution. And please do so quickly because I also need to deliver a lecture on Friday (for which I am horribly unprepared due to your rocky hard place) and update my CV by the same day in order to apply for a merit salary increase this year. Baie dankie.

P.S. For the love of everything that is good would someone please teach me how to use my iPod?? I have no idea how to do anything with it and simply keep pushing buttons until it does what I want it to do.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

LOL. Dr. K, it's best if you have iTunes installed on your computer and then add music to your iTunes. Once you have your music in your iTunes library all you have to do is plug your iPod into your computer and voila! It should sync automatically! Hope that helps.

Also, how does a medical student go about asking for a research position? Like work under a professor/researcher in hopes that he might get published by the end of his medical school career and then get into a competitive residency :) :)

Anonymous said...

Best of luck with all that Dr K, that does ineed sound like a hell of a lot of work to get through.

Once you mastered your iPod, you could start learning how to post your lectures as podcasts!!

Midwife with a Knife said...

Your institution doesn't have a mechanism for the (perhaps annonomyzed) release of that data for research purposes? Or, could you get the Dean on board as a collaborator, as he/she has access to the data?

Dr. K said...

Adam: thanks for the advice. I do have iTunes on my computer. That's not the problem -- the problem is that I am such an idiot that I can't figure out how to use the actual iPod. I push things and nothing happens and then when I finally do get it turned on, I need to continue pushing things randomly to get it to play songs. As for the research stuff: before answering your question I need to ask you why you think it necessary to publish at all? The majority of medical students are not published and still compete well, so a little clarification of your question would be terrific.

Harry: my medical school frowns on podcasts (which is great news for an idiot like me who wouldn't be able to figure out how to make one!).

MWAK: The data in question was data that the medical school does not want "out there", period. So it wouldn't matter who I had on board, the medical school was not willing to release the data. Which, yes, is very interesting information on its own.

In the end the work did get done and the revisions to the manuscript are now under revision. I wonder if I will have to make revisions to the revisions as I randomly push iPod buttons?

Dr. K said...

Err, typo in that last sentence: the revisions to the manuscript are now under *review*.

Gregory House, PA-C said...

Middle Button - Select

Menu Button - Back to previous screen

Touch Wheel - Scroll Up (Counterclockwise), Scroll Down (Clockwise)

Play/Pause - play or pause song regardless of the screen your on. automatically plays from the most recently played playlist

Left/Right Arrows - go to previous/next song

But hopefully you figured this out by now.

I can even teach you how to make a playlist RIGHT FROM THE iPOD!

Questions? You know where I live. (On the internet at least)