January sunrise and rising smoke

A few days ago, I witnessed an exceptionally colorful and fiery sunrise. I snapped some photos as I often do, and right before I was to leave for work, the rising smoke contrasted against the sky looked as though it had caught fire. I got some photos of this as well. Thought you might like to see them!

Moments in time

This morning as we drove to work, we heard David Bowie’s new song, Where Are We Now?, on the radio. It caught my attention with its melancholy tone, and I commented to my husband that I would have loved the song immediately when I was a teenager, as I seemed to be drawn to all things sad at that time. Truth is, I loved the song immediately now too, so that tells me that I still am drawn to sadness, but in a more realistic way now than when I was younger. When I got to work, I found the recently-released video of the song on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9XsTnyN26Y&feature=share&list=FL4rKLincZWuFolZVFChzj5g. It is one of the most poignant, emotional and raw songs I have heard in a long time, and affected me in the way that such songs usually do. Got me to thinking about what he is singing about, which is his getting older and his reflections on his past. ‘A man lost in time’. But he is singing too about a moment in life and in time—‘the moment you know you know you know’--those fleeting moments when you are keenly aware of your own mortality, of time passing, when you know there is nothing you can do about it or about getting older, when you are aware of the paradoxes contained in life and thankful for them. They are moments when you are almost outside of yourself looking in—experiencing that moment when you know that you suddenly understand that you in fact understand where it’s all leading to. But he is also telling us that even though he is aware of moving toward life’s exit, he is also thankful for the sun and rain and fire—those things that tether us to daily life and which tell us that we are in fact still alive. There is hope as long as those things still exist for us. The song ends with him singing that ‘as long as there’s me, as long as there’s you’, that it will be alright, or at least as alright as it can be in the context of knowing that one day we will exit this earth. He is reminding himself that he can draw comfort from those thoughts and find the energy to go on, and hearing him sing that reminds me of the same, of the importance of love and of the support it can give us in dark times. A reasonably hopeful ending to a sad song. Art in all its many forms never ceases to amaze me, in that it shows us a way to live, a way to get through the bittersweet and dark moments that are part of life.

Living a balanced life

Apropos my last post--Finding Balance, the Adventure Center now has a blog, and one of their recent posts has to do with balance and living a balanced life. I encourage you to read the post--it's insightful and offers some ideas for how the future of our society could be shaped, starting with its children. If you'd like to read the post, you'll find it here: http://www.adventurecenterjourneysofwonder.org/1/post/2013/01/a-wish-as-we-enter-2013.html

Finding balance

It seems to me that the lines between our personal and work lives are becoming more and more blurred. They may not even exist for some people. I think much of it has to do with the prevalence of technology and social media and how easy these make connecting to others at all hours; we can be connected 24/7 to family and friends, so why not to colleagues and bosses as well? I know employees who can never let go of work, or vice versa--their bosses and workplaces can never let go of them. These employees leave their workplaces, go home, eat dinner, and work some more, sometimes right up until they go to sleep. Or they accept phone calls and answer text messages from bosses, colleagues and/or clients the entire evening. They never shut their phones off; they check their work emails constantly. They are on when they should be off; they are available to their workplaces when they should be doing other things. Those other things include having a personal life, a family life, a social life, a hobby or two, or doing volunteer work, or maybe just time out for meditation, relaxation, reading a good book or watching a film. The odd thing is that these people travel to an actual workplace each day; they do not work at home. Somehow they have a harder time physically and mentally separating themselves from their workplace than many of those I know who work at home or who work several days a week at home. I am not sure why that is; it would certainly be worth studying. It seems as though working at home forces those who do it to make rules for when they are available and when they are not, and they have learned to enforce those rules.

If a workplace expects the majority of its employees to be available at all hours or to finish work at home, I call that tyranny. Possible exceptions include high-level leaders in times of crisis. If employees cannot let go of their workplaces and must be connected to them and their work at all times, I call that idolatry, especially if there is a certain amount of arrogance attached to the worship of work. These are the people who could choose not to idolize their jobs, but they choose otherwise. Not being able to let go of work can also be a form of addiction. The latter can sneak up on employees after several months of taking work home because they are interested in finishing up an interesting project or because they want the answer to the question now. And taking work home every now and then, by choice, is much different than being forced to do so by your workplace. But over time, the results can be the same. Employees become slaves to their work and to their workplaces. They cannot put their work aside; it preoccupies them to the point of nervousness and anxiety, which is not healthy in the long run. This happened to me a number of times during the past twenty years, I would take work home and stay up to all hours in order to complete it. But what happened was that one project would get finished, and then two more would take its place, and so on. My point is that we will never be finished with our work. It will always be there waiting for us the next day. It is absolutely fine, totally ok, to pick up the next day where we left off the day before, after an evening of rest, relaxation and a good night’s sleep. It is important to have balance in our lives. More to the point, it is important to maintain balance in our lives, because it is so easily lost to or disturbed by workplace tyranny, idolatry, or addiction. And that means shutting off the phone, not looking at work emails, not 'checking in', and not being available; no matter how much it plagues us (or tyrannical workplaces) in the beginning. It means cutting the cord and not worshipping on the altar of work. The rewards are that we find ourselves again in the process of deprogramming ourselves, and we find balance in our lives. It does not mean that we no longer enjoy our work, rather that we enjoy it within the context of a balanced life. 

The future of scientific publishing

Open Access (OA) is in the wind these days, especially if you work in academia and publish articles as part of your research work. If you work at a university or are a student there, you will come across the term Open Access. What is Open Access? Wikipedia provides a very good definition; I urge you to read their page about Open Access—it will give you a good background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access. Open Access is ‘the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles’. Simply put, it means that if you as a potential reader (whether you work at a university or not) find a scientific or medical article of interest online that you’d like to read, that you can click on the link to that article and read it online or download it for future reading from the website of the journal that published it. You may think this is common practice and not problematic; neither are true. You may not have considered what underlies your being allowed to access an article online if you are a student or researcher at a university. Your access to those articles is not necessarily ‘open’, or traditionally has not been open. That is because most published articles are closed access publications in non-OA subscription-based journals; they have been published in a specific journal, and that journal restricts access to a published article by making individual readers pay for the privilege of accessing it, if you are not working at a university. Or they make university libraries pay exorbitant subscription fees in order to provide online access to those articles and/or print copies containing those articles to students and academics at all levels.

Many people know little to nothing about OA, or if they’ve heard about it, it’s not something to which they’ve paid much attention. That’s understandable, since unless you have a career in academic research science where your research work can be published in a journal of some sort, you’re not likely to care too much about the scientific publishing process or about how much it costs to publish an article these days or about how much it can cost to access that published article afterwards. There are even academics who know very little about it, taking for granted that their published articles are accessible to all who are interested, or that they will have access to published articles that they are interested in. What some of them haven’t understood is that the university libraries have ensured that they have had access to innumerable journals in their fields of interest—chemistry, biology, physics, medicine, geology, etc. up to this point. This is because the libraries have paid costly subscription fees to gain online access and/or to receive print copies of the journals. These subscriptions are part of their annual budgets. This system has been in place for many years.

As a scientist, I am interested in promoting Open Access publishing, for a number of reasons.  First and foremost, I believe it is the future of scientific publishing, and I’d like the future to be here now. (I also believe that self-publishing is the future if you want to publish your own books; it allows you to bypass traditional publishing houses that mostly reject first-time authors. I wrote a post about that in 2010: http://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.no/2010/08/publish-your-book-using-createspace.html). We academics already do most of the prep work before we submit our scientific articles, prep work that was previously done by the journals; we format the text and prepare figures and tables according to guidelines provided by the journal, we upload those formatted files to the journal website, and we edit the compiled version of the article that the journal provides to us after receiving the uploaded files. In other words, we now do much of the work that the journals used to do for us before; they are not doing us any favors. If you’ve ever submitted an article online for publication, you will know what I’m talking about; the process is not for sissies. In addition, we often pay just to submit our articles to a journal, even to a journal that the university library already subscribes to (e.g. Cancer Research) although not all journals have this requirement. We also must pay page charges if we want color figures, or if our article goes over the page limit. We must pay to get reprints of an article or pay to receive a pdf version of our article created by the journal that represents the final published version. If you choose to receive a pdf file of the published article, you are not allowed by the journal to distribute free copies of your published article to those who might want to read it. For that privilege, you are expected to pay for journal reprints. It’s a costly business for many scientists, whose budgets continue to dwindle with each year that passes.  

I chose to publish one of my scientific articles in the OA journal Molecular Cancer already back in 2004; that’s how strongly I believed in the future of OA publishing then, and still do now. Gold OA journals provide immediate access to your published article on their websites; Molecular Cancer is one of the journals offered by BioMed Central, which is the first OA science publisher (started up in 2000) and one of the largest in the world. You as a potential reader do not have to pay them to access my article; I do not have to pay them for permission to distribute my article freely to whomever I choose. In fact, I am including the link to my 2004 article here, if you’d like to read it: http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1476-4598-3-11.pdf.

I chose to publish in Molecular Cancer again in 2006 because I had had such a good experience with them in 2004; here is the link to that article: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/content/pdf/1476-4598-5-20.pdf. This article, by the way, is a highly-accessed article (yes, you get to know the statistics for your article—how many times it’s been accessed/downloaded, and when—quite useful). That makes me feel pretty good, because I know that the work is solid and that the data are quite interesting.

I use the word ‘chose’; the fact is that my articles went through rigorous peer review before they were accepted for publication. There is NO guarantee that your article will automatically be accepted for publication in an OA journal; there is still editorial and peer review to go through. I have had a total of three articles to date published in OA journals (the third one a collaborative effort with Italian colleagues in 2009: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/content/pdf/1476-4598-8-55.pdf). But I have also had two articles that were not accepted for publication in this journal. That has not discouraged me. It merely reinforces my opinion that the OA system works just as well as traditional non-OA publishing; it is not ‘easier’ to get published in OA journals than in non-OA journals. There are good OA journals and poor quality OA journals, just as there are good and bad non-OA journals. The impact factor for Molecular Cancer is 3.99, pretty good—around the middle of the scale. But I don’t worry too much about impact factor, even though most of my peers do and even though we are encouraged to do so by our workplaces; I am more concerned with reaching potential readers and making my work accessible to a larger public. Because of course the potential reach is global. I probably should care more about impact factor, because it gets your research ‘noticed’ and funded by granting agencies—the more publications you have in high impact-factor non-OA subscription-based journals (like Nature and Science), the better your chances of getting your research projects funded. These are the ‘eye of the needle’ journals—only an elite few ever get to publish here. And the reasons for that could fill another blog post. To give an example of how non-OA journals make it difficult to get access to articles, check out this article in Science magazine; if you want to access and/or to download it, you have to pay for that privilege: 
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6117/303, unless you work or study at a university that subscribes to this journal. As far as I'm concerned, this is an incredibly old-fashioned and elitist way of doing things. 

Is OA publishing free for authors? Not necessarily, but it can be if the university or institution you work for is a member institution. I refer you to the ‘article-processing charges FAQ’ page on the BioMed Central website; it explains this aspect better than I can: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/about/apcfaq. The major and most important point for pushing for open access journals is that once research articles are published in them, they are immediately and freely-accessible to anyone in the world who wants to access them. That is not the case for non-OA subscription-based journals.  

If you would like to read more about Open Access, I recommend the following websites:

·         Open Access http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

·         Directory of Open Access journals http://www.doaj.org/

·         Open Access Directory http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Main_Page

·         The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020961

·         Video describing Open Access http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#015

Favorite songs from the 1980s

Rambling down music memory lane today. This time in the form of my favorite music from the 1980s. I have to admit that the 1980s was an odd time music-wise—disco, urban, pop, rock, jazz—each genre got airplay on the New York radio stations, if memory serves me right. So many great songs…..

Anyway, here are some favorites from that time; check out the many videos on YouTube if you want to hear them. I’ve tried posting video links before but they disappear pretty fast from YouTube and end up as dead links on my posts. I’ll be updating the list from time to time as I remember more songs, listen to them once again, and am thrown back to that time--where I was, what I was doing, and who I was with when those songs made such a lasting impression on me.

·         Street Life -- The Crusaders (released in 1979 but got a lot of airplay in 1980)

·         Off the Wall – Michael Jackson (1980)

·         Don’t Stand So Close To Me, Driven to Tears, When the World is Running Down You Make the Best  of What’s Still Around – The Police (1980)

·         Give Me The Night – George Benson (1980)

·         Are You Going With Me, The Bat – Pat Metheny (1981)

·         More Than This, Avalon -- Roxy Music (1982)

·         Stepping Out -- Joe Jackson (1982)

·         Thriller, Beat It, Human Nature, Want To Be Starting Something – Michael Jackson (1982)

·         Physical Attraction – Madonna (1983)

·         Burning Down the House – Talking Heads (1983)

·         One Thing Leads to Another, Saved by Zero – The Fixx (1983)

·         White Lines (Don't Don't Do It) – Grandmaster Melle Mel (1983)

·         Heartbeat City, Magic, Drive, Why Can’t I Have You -- The Cars (1984)

·         When Doves Cry, Let’s Go Crazy – Prince (1984)

·         Dance Hall Days, Don’t Let Go – Wang Chung (1984)

·         West End Girls – Pet Shop Boys (1984)

·         Jump – Van Halen (1984)

·         Vidro e Corte (Glass and Cut) – Milton Nascimento & Pat Metheny (1985)

·         In My House – Mary Jane Girls (1985)

·         Don’t You Forget About Me – Simple Minds (1985)

·         Live To Tell – Madonna (1986)

·         Everybody Have Fun Tonight – Wang Chung (1986)

·         Dancing on the Ceiling – Lionel Richie (1986)

·         Word Up, Candy – Cameo (1986)

·         Tunnel of Love – Bruce Springsteen (1987)

·         Last Train Home – Pat Metheny (1987)

·         Chicago Song – David Sanborne (1987)

·         So Emotional – Whitney Houston (1987)

·         Sign o’ the Times – Prince (1987)

·         In God’s Country, Where the Streets Have No Name – U2 (1987)

·         What I Am – Edie Brickell and New Bohemians (1988)

·         Buffalo Stance – Ninah Cherry (1988)

·         Free Fallin’ – Tom Petty (1989)

·         Back to Life (However Do You Want Me), Keep on Moving -- Soul II Soul (1989)

The great divide

I notice more and more how purportedly classless (egalitarian) societies, like the one I live in, struggle with the reality that not all of its members enjoy materialistic equality. It becomes more apparent to me each day, especially as this country gets richer due to its oil money. All individuals living in this society have gotten richer during the past ten years, yes, but some individuals have achieved a higher level of wealth than others. Not all people make the same amounts of money nor do they own the same numbers and types of homes and cars. They are not equal in the materialistic sense, no matter how hard the government tries to make it so. And that will likely always be the case. A perfect utopian society on this earth seems unlikely (the notion has been around for many years)—a society where all members have exactly the same level of wealth, status, or material possessions. A society where all members have equal opportunities for public education and the same legal rights is achievable. But there is no guarantee that even if all children have the same opportunities from birth, that they will grow up to earn exactly the same amounts of money, or be similarly educated, ambitious, talented, hard-working, creative, innovative, or that they will behave in similar ways in any given situation. Society consists of unique individuals, and that uniqueness begins at birth. People will utilize their talents and gifts in different ways compared to all others around them, and that will inevitably lead to different career choices with the resultant income disparities. Not all types of work are rewarded with similar incomes; perhaps that reality lies in the future. Imagine a society with no salary differences whatsoever. That would change the way in which education is viewed, as well as how career progression is viewed.

But it is the definitions of rich and wealth in the materialistic sense that interest me. One hundred people gathered together in one room might not be able to come up with a working definition of ‘rich’ or ‘wealth’. Some people will define ‘rich’ or ‘wealth’ as owning one home and one car, whereas others consider themselves rich if they are able to rent an apartment and not own a car, but perhaps use their money to travel, while others require a home and a summer cottage, and several cars and maybe even a boat in order to feel as though they have achieved the requisite level of wealth. Some people will say that they are rich if they have freedom to do as they like and can come and go as they please; they may not be interested in owning many material possessions. So what then is the definition of ‘poor’? Individuals who rent an apartment and do not own a car, a vacation cottage or an expensive boat—are they to be considered poor if they are content with their economic situation? Can society force that definition upon them? To me these are difficult questions to ponder, let alone answer.

There seems to be a lot more envy now in society than I can remember from when I grew up. You need only look at a newspaper to understand that; if the rich open their mouths and tell the less rich how to live or what to do, or if they in any way go overboard in terms of flaunting their wealth, the less rich will tell them in no uncertain terms to shut up or try to take them down a few notches, again using the media to do so. But they do it in a way that smacks of envy.

Perhaps globalization and a relentless media have made us more aware of the haves and the have-nots. We again need only turn to the media for them to tell us how the rich live; all the gory details are there for our perusal. The danger is that constant immersion in the media-created focus on wealth fosters a false sense of reality--that all people can achieve wild levels of wealth, if only…….And who knows if this way of thinking has contributed to high levels of personal debt—in the craze to have as many material possessions as possible, even if it means personal ruin.

We've come a long way?

I like to think that the status of women in the world has evolved and gotten better since when I was a child. Certainly that seems to be the case when one looks at the number of women in the workforce at present compared to that number in my mother’s generation. 'We’ve come a long way, baby' as the old Virginia Slims cigarette TV ad used to tell us. We have much more independence and mobility than our mothers did; we are better educated, and many of us are financially secure and able to take care of ourselves. Marriage is no longer necessarily viewed as the best way for a woman to achieve financial security, and single women are no longer labeled as unsuccessful because they are not together with a man. However, old ideas die hard in some societies, so you will find men and women in modern societies who will defend the old ways of doing things—women should be married to men who are the breadwinners, and they should stay home and take care of the house and family. They should not be pursuing careers or earning more money than their husbands. Overall however, there has been progress since I was a child, and it makes me happy to see that; it gives me hope for the future.

But we are often lulled into a false sense of security concerning women’s rights and status; we assume that equality and balance have been achieved, when in fact they have not. Something happens to burst the bubble and forces us to face the fact that many women in this world suffer injustice every day of their lives, regardless of the society they live in—modern, aware, and flexible, or old-style and rigid. Psychological abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual harassment, rape, arranged marriage against their will, societal clamping down on the rights of women in the form of telling them how to act, speak or dress—all of these point toward a hatred of women that seems to be increasing in the world we live in. Recently, there have been several prominent displays of misogyny that have been well-covered by the media. I need only read about the recent rape, mutilation and murder of a young woman in New Delhi India, or about the young Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for daring to say that girls should be able to get an education, or about the fifteen year old girl whose parents sold her into marriage to a ninety year old man in Saudi Arabia. But it’s not just in these cultures where misogyny is rampant, even though these particular incidents are truly horrific. Take a look at our own ‘modern’ societies—women strangled by abusive husbands (as just recently happened in the town where I grew up); physical abuse of women (hitting, battering) at the hands of insecure men who do not want their wives or girlfriends to be better educated or more informed than they are; women married to abusive alcoholic men who destroy not only their lives but those of their children as well (in yet another tale of a young woman with a child who needs to leave her abuser but who ‘loves’ him and thinks he will change if only she loves him well enough). Psychological and verbal abuse in the form of mind games, emotional blackmail, sexual harassment, rude or threatening behavior, being frozen out, lack of praise or acknowledgment of any kind; this can go on in intimate personal relationships, but also in modern workplaces—I have witnessed such behavior during my thirty years in the workplace, and it is more frequent than you might think or want to believe. No matter how often I hear that women also abuse men, even if that is true, you need only take a look at statistics in order to find the truth—that far many more men abuse and kill women than vice versa. It is further proof that men retain the bulk of power in this world, that many of them do not want to relinquish that power, and that women have much work ahead of them before they have truly achieved equality and balance in personal and work relationships. I hope I see that day in my lifetime. It would make me incredibly happy to see that women become truly valued for who they are, not for their monetary worth as property to men or to their families. In the meantime, both men and women need to work together to create a world society that values women as much as it does men. Until that happens, the world will not be a safe place for women to live in. And a world that is not safe for women to live in, will ultimately become an unpleasant world for men to live in as well. We cannot rule out that perhaps one day, women will rise up en masse against their abusers, attackers, rapists and harassers. It will be interesting to see the outcome of such an uprising. I hope I see that in my lifetime as well.  

New Year's Eve in Oslo

At the end of each year, on New Year's Eve, Oslo inhabitants celebrate the arrival of the new year by setting off fireworks. This has been going on since I arrived in Oslo some twenty odd years ago. It's one of the highlights of New Year's Eve in my book. We never did this on New Year's Eve when I was growing up in Tarrytown. Fireworks were usually reserved for Fourth of July celebrations, but I know that you can go into New York City to watch fireworks on New Year's Eve; I'm not sure how long that has been going on. In our Oslo neighborhood, crowds of people, young and old alike, gather near the Akerselva river, on the bridge near the Hønsa Lovisa house. Some of them are there to watch, others are there to set off fireworks. Many people are holding bottles of champagne and glasses so that they can drink a toast to the new year with their loved ones and friends. The fireworks start right before midnight, and continue for about fifteen minutes. In later years, the city of Oslo has also sponsored a spectacular fireworks display down at the harbor, and that draws thousands of people. We haven't gone down to the harbor to watch them; we can actually see them fairly well, if the night is clear, from where we live. I enjoy watching the fireworks displays in our neighborhood. Here are some photos of them. Enjoy, and a happy new year to you all!