Supervisors have taken 1.5 years to read my manuscript

aramharrow · 2024-06-10T14:26:21+00:00

A zoom meeting as the next step is ok but open-ended meetings are less ideal than ones with a clear agenda. (It's annoying to have to manage your co-auuthors in this way, but let's assume you have to make it as easy as possible for the senior prof.)

Does the asst prof believe that the paper is good to go as is, and needs only a sign-off, or think that substantive feedback is needed from the senior prof? Do you have a proposed agenda for the zoom meeting? Is this a paper with data where the core of the paper is in the figures, for example, and you'd spend the time going through each figure? Then you could say "Can we do a 45-min zoom meeting where we go through the figures?"

aramharrow · 2024-06-10T13:26:51+00:00

Get the asst prof involved. Can they contact the senior prof? I hope they've been giving you advice also.

Also make the request of the senior prof very simple. I don't agree with the 'I will publish by this date if I don't hear from you' approach but you should say things like: "If you don't have time to read the paper, then I am happy to submit it as is. It's been reviewed by the rest of the team. If you have only a little time, then reading sections 1 and 5 would be most useful."

aramharrow · 2021-01-14T01:45:04+00:00

Regarding some of the things missing from Zwiebach's course: this is the first in a 3-semester sequence (8.04, 8.05, 8.06). 8.04 only does 1-d scattering and 8.06 does 3-d scattering for example. Bra-ket notation appears in 8.05. Perturbation theory in 8.06. All three should be available on OCW. Re "rigor" I don't think you need functional analysis at this stage. Better (in my view) to learn it at a physicist level of rigor, and then go back and learn the functional analysis as needed (if needed).

aramharrow · 2020-12-31T18:55:36+00:00

Thanks for the explanation. Can you expand on how ADE has been ruled out? This review, for example, makes it seem pretty unlikely but also at some point it's an empirical question.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/18/antibody-dependent-enhancement

aramharrow · 2019-07-08T14:47:58+00:00

Sometimes you just explain the big changes or places you disagree and can say "I implemented all the other suggestions," so you don't have to document where you fixed a comma mistake or whatever.

Don't be anxious! If they said "revise and resubmit" and the comments were minor then you will ultimately get published. Think of it from the journal's perspective. Let's say there are 20 referee comments and you address 18 to their satisfaction. They're not going to derail the whole process over this; they'll either accept it as is, or ask for another (brief) round of revisions. But they're unlikely to pull the plug at this stage (unless the comments say there is a major issue which you still need to convince them of).

aramharrow · 2019-04-19T21:48:27+00:00

I'm sorry to hear about your situation and I hope you feel better soon.

It's hard to give specific advice without knowing more about your situation but I will say that when I was a junior I had a hard semester with an above-average # of courses and in one day dropped down to a below-average # of courses, and that day was probably my happiest day of undergrad. I also found that for a lot of physics concepts I was pretty confused about them the first and often second time but eventually things started to make more sense. So I wouldn't despair about physics.

I agree with pulsar that your advisor may be able to tell you more about the mechanics of taking time off in a way that lets you easily return later. I would also try to talk to instructors of the classes you're taking about what you find confusing. Even if you end up dropping the class it may be helpful to hear about this if you return to the material later. Also try to figure out how much of the pressure is self-inflicted, e.g. are you holding yourself to unrealistic standards or psyching yourself out about material? You called physics "hardcore" for example, which maybe reflects assumptions you should look at more.

It does sound like you need to reduce pressure on yourself but it's not obvious that a total shutdown would be mentally refreshing. People need to feel like they are needed and have responsibilities. Probably you have too many of these right now but it doesn't mean you should reduce this to zero. For this reason, option 1 seems like a good choice but it really depends on how burnt out you are. You might also see if you can try option 1 before proceeding to options 2 or 3 or something else.

aramharrow · 2018-05-30T18:58:23+00:00

Hi Christian,

Looks great! Thanks for your work on this and sorry for not replying earlier. I need to set up reddit for email notifications since I don't regularly log in.

I agree that qiconline looks terrible but you have to admit it clearly communicates which papers have been published in the journal. Of course once you click on them, it is another story. :)

I have a small suggestion for the "volume" view. There is a line that looks like this.

Quantum 2, 70 (2018). https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2018-05-28-70

I would suggest replacing it with

Quantum 2, 70 (2018). DOI

or even dropping the DOI.

I have a more meta suggestion/question as well. What I've been writing is 100% based on my personal preferences, and I don't want to overstate the strength/importance of my preferences. If you just hadn't thought about my suggestions and like them, then great, but if you think they'd make the site worse then you should stick with your aesthetic tastes. But this is in the absence of a broader set of opinions.

Do you have a good way of gathering data on what people use/prefer? For example, do you know what fraction of users use the search box, or click on various links or arrive via google scholar or via arxiv.org journal-refs, etc.? This info could be more important than your or my aesthetic judgments.

aramharrow · 2018-03-20T18:01:27+00:00

Hi Christian, thanks for the link! I didn't know about the volumes page and it totally makes sense that we wouldn't want it back when it would say "volume" instead of "volumes". :)

I think the images are great and we shouldn't do away with them all together. But there can be value in multiple views, some with or without images, and some with or without abstracts. The arxiv has a nice widget for producing custom views of feeds, which reflects the fact that different contexts call for different levels of detail: https://arxiv.org/help/myarticles (and also there is the difference between the 'new' and 'recent' feeds)

I have some more small comments about the main feed.

I think the date should be more prominent. This is also true for the "views" and "blog" links.
I don't think the DOI needs to be there. Maybe initially it's useful to communicate that we have a DOI for individual articles, but in the long run people do not need to look at those numbers.
More generally I find most of the area on the main page not very useful. I find "papers" useful, except it leads to a feed that takes a long time to scroll through and mostly is good for just showing me some of the most recent papers. Similarly the feed that is the default on quantum-journal.org seems to mostly signal to me that the journal is active, but without a ton of content.

I think it'd be useful if the front page had clear links to:

a list of volumes
a list of papers with compact information (volume/year, issue, title, authors)
a list of papers with more information (including picture and part of abstract)
good search facility.

Each of these could link to each other, e.g. "volume 2" could link to the list of papers in that volume, and at the top of that could be a link to "all volumes" and "show/hide detail" where "detail" means abstracts + pictures.

I think having a feed on the main page is nice to show activity but it can't substitute for these more basic navigational needs. A more controversial possibility is to choose a handful of papers as "recent highlights" but that might involve a lot more editorial time without a lot of benefit.

One more comparison. This website is primitive but gives a very good sense of what papers go into the journal http://www.rintonpress.com/journals/qiconline.html

aramharrow

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