Hopeless

The Dutch queen makes the Netherlands-Belgium round trip by airplane! I thought Europe was trying to spell the States a lesson in CO2-reduction??

Deep impact

Discussion topic nr. 1 in the lab today: the publication of the new impact factors (IFs) – I know, boring, isn’t it; you may skip to the last paragraph . This a yearly ranking of international scientific journals according to how much an average article in a particular journal gets cited (in other words, how important they are). Below is a list of the most common journals I read (hence, the most likely I will publish in one of these, if I ever get to publish…). Note that the first five are the ones publishing “break-through” articles, the ones insignificant researchers get their inspiration from. It is highly unlikely I’d get in one of these within the first 5 years, at least in my line of work. Investigators engaging in “popular, hot-topic” research (biotechnology, climate change,…) are likely to publish in IF 10+ journals… In plane text is last year’s IF, this year’s IF is indicated in bold.

Science	31.853	30.927
Nature	32.182	29.273
Ecology Letters	3.914	5.151
Journal of Applied Ecology	3.266	4.594
Global Ecology and Biogeography	3.242	3.576
Remote Sensing of Environment	3.185	2.833
Journal of Biogeography	2.329	2.804
Coral Reefs	1.828	2.398
Marine Ecology – Progress Series	2.052	2.315
Ecological Modelling	1.652	1.700
Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology	1.588	1.660
Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science	1.058	1.633
Ocean and Coastal Management	0.520	1.228
Scientia Marina (online open access)	0.527	1.036
Hydrobiologia	0.653

0.978

International Journal of Remote Sensing

1.128

0.925

I particularly like the online open access journals. Unlike the regular, copy-righted journals demanding extremely elevated subscription fees, these are completely freely available on the internet, thus providing a powerful tool for independent researchers and students. IF-wise, their benefit is two-fold: on the one hand, their current low IFs make it relatively easy to get a paper accepted (because they only recently started, they’re craving for papers), and on the other hand their popularity is increasing enormously (cf. open source software). This makes submitting papers to one of these journals a good investment: each year, they’re as double important

Other (at least as) important scientific news today: it is now proven that women and men are most attractive during spring (available for a short time only)! According to Psychoneuroendocrinology (IF=4.381), a cool journal describing emotional behavior from a chemical/physiological point of view, testosterone levels peak during summer and autumn and are lowest during spring. The low spring values cause hips to be relatively wider compared to the waist in women, and a relatively wider waist compared to the hips in men, both characteristics with a positive effect on attractiveness in women and men, respectively However, they didn’t mention any relation with sex drive, which I believe was thought to increase with increasing testosterone levels? So, perhaps spring is the proper season to “make a move”, while subsequently, summer is the best season to … ?

One small step…

I almost forgot to mention I got notified I succeeded the navigation permit exam by 86/90….. Again: one step closer to paradise! Today, I submitted my logbook, the last step in acquiring the necessary permits. Can’t wait… I’m craving for the Mediterranean (i.e. the same weather, minus the window blinds and a computer screen!).

Trainspotting

Since I live and work in the same city, I refuse to buy a car. Good old bikey gets me everywhere I want and often faster than a car could do. Provided with a couple of professional bike bags, I can easily take 30kg home from the store. Until I turn 26, I’m entitled to the youth subscription of De Lijn (Buzzy Pazz, to which my home town Nieuwpoort kindly offers 50% reduction, so for 75 euro I can take any bus or tram in Flanders for a whole year), and compared to fuel rates (not to mention maintenance of a car), a Go-Pass or weekend tickets on the train are dirt cheap. Every now and then, however, I like to vent my spleen on Belgian public transport, so here we go:

Sunday evening. Although the week-end has been Mediterranean, if not Caribbean, and ALL hotels at the coast were fully booked, De Lijn refuses to switch to summer schedule (every ten minutes) for coastal trams bringing tourists back to the four coastal railway stations. Result: each fifteen minutes, two trams were needed => a lot of confusion with slow, elderly people; still fully packed trams; and definitely at least 35 degrees on the tram, and a 10 minutes delay – 1 hour instead of 50 minutes from Nieuwpoort-Bad to Oostende-station, a 20 km trip! Yep, a bike easily beats this snail’s pace. 10 minutes late also means seeing the connecting train leave just as you arrive. The train leaving thirty minutes later had another 30 minutes delay due to a rupture of the electrical wires near Brussel. The train to Antwerpen was the first one leaving (in time) to Gent, but a lot of passengers didn’t realize this as no announcements were made.

Monday evening. I need to make a round trip Gent – Leuven. Like a good citizen should, I checked the online news bulletin board one hour prior to departure to check whether the rupture has been fixed: “All problems should be cleared by 2 p.m.”, was the last relevant message at 5 p.m., so at 6.50 I head down to the railway station, in an optimistic mood. Although the intercity to Eupen was announced 30 minutes in delay on platform 10 (thus supposed to leave within 2 minutes while it hadn’t arrived yet), the IC to Tongeren 4 minutes later, with largely the same trajectory, was announced on time (!) on the same platform (!). Mistrusting the communications, I take the first train arriving on platform 10, the one to Eupen. Once out of Gent, it slows down to about 20 km/h and an announcement is made that all trains are experiencing severe delays due to a second (!) rupture of the wires. At least, that’s what I understood from the French announcement. The conductor’s ability to say anything in Dutch beyond his memorized formulas was well below acceptable standards. Arrival at Leuven: 45 minutes late compared to the normal hour. The train itself was actually 75 minutes late.
Taking the train back was even more of a disaster: no-one, including railway station staff, knew what platform the train to Gent would arrive at. When a last announcement was made (and I helped some foreign passengers by translating, since the information on the screens was total crap), I double-checked with an officer to make sure this was an IC directly going to Brussels and Gent. “Yes, sure, of course!”. So 15 minutes later than normal ( = 45 minutes delay for this particular train), we leave. A conductor comes and asks me to present my ticket, with no comment or expectations whatsoever. Once in Brussel, we are stopped at the south station for 25 minutes, after which the decision is announced to stop at every village between Brussel and Gent (12!!!), to pick up blocked passengers. After leaving in Leuven with 15 minutes delay and riding for 2.45 minutes, I arrive at 1.45 a.m. in Gent.

The NMBS can be truly proud of their hi-tech crisis management and state-of-the-art communication skills in 2006. The conductor definitely knew about the oncoming problems. Still asking to pay is in my opinion a pure and unmistakable sort of fraud. The objective was to offer a way of transport competitive to cars? Try being competitive to biking in the first place!

2 down, 0 to go! (until next year)

Finally finished!

*Oops…Blogger.com seems to experience troubles in uploading pictures…I’ll try again tomorrow to get the colours right…*

Sailing stories

I’m posting the Ipswich story a bit later than expected – I was feeling too ill to get on with it yesterday night. A sinusitis struck Saturday night. I’m feeling better now, but my eardrums are still terribly under pressure, as if I’m diving at 30m without clearing my ears. I think I wouldn’t be able to dive down 2m in this condition… Not to mention temporary deafness: I constantly need to ask “sorry, say that again?”. I hate it.

Anyway: the sailing part! The piccies are online on the AF community (browse to “Afbeeldingen” on the left, but first scroll down to the bottom picture on the home page ), I won’t post them here again… The weather was lovely, especially on Monday, when a constant (chilly) 4-5 bft blew us directly from Ipswich to Nieuwpoort, and we finished the trip in 9,5 hours without using the engine, except in the harbors and on the river. Saturday too was lovely, at least as for the sun; in the afternoon the wind let us down. Trying to get there sailing all the way, we made a detour of 20 nautical miles, just to follow the wind, but it didn’t work. Finally, we used the engine for two hours to reach our destination…
As for the life on board: we had a fantastic crew of 7, and 14 paying passengers. The latter were all members of a right-wing Flemish radical organization, pleading dissolution of Belgium and formation of a “republic of Flanders”. They wanted us to hoist a huge flag of their organization and a Flemish flag (which we did, following the “customer is king” principle) and to replace the Belgian flag at the back of the boat with a Flemish one – which we legally couldn’t do. Also, some of them thought they were funny by asking if they could fill out “Flemish” in the nationality column on the passenger list. A remarkably high percentage of them were rich, old, arrogant bastards who’d thought they knew everything and who felt the need to constantly show off their extensive experience. Not by doing anything, mind you, all of them were just hanging around reading all day. They had no interest in sailing whatsoever. Particularly one of them got me reeeaaaaaallly pissed off. At the last barbeque night, the crew chattered and drank until 2 am. As we needed to leave at 7am, we decided to get up at 6. Since getting up after 4 hours of sleep is not an easy job when you’re starting to get ill, with a chronical shortage of sleep and a slight hang-over, I was waking up very slowly and eventually got out of my sleeping bag at 6.30 (as the first of the crew). I normally wake up in a good mood, but given the circumstances there wasn’t much needed to get me up on the wrong side of the bed. One of the passengers suddenly commanding me (not even telling me or joking!) that I had exactly 20 minutes left to take a shower sure as hell did the job, I can tell you. I think I’ve rarely ever looked so angry at someone. It didn’t get any better later on: as I was steering, he suddenly “asked” if I wouldn’t ease the sails as the wind was backing. I just shook my head silently, to which he immediately replied “Oh, I knew you were going to say that” in the most arrogant way imaginable. I wasn’t the only one of the crew disturbed by such a behavior: the difference in opinion was very clear at the leaving drink, when the passengers stood in a closed circle, separated from the crew.
The atmosphere within the crew was alright though. It might had something to with the fact that six bottles of water, milk, juice and cola was the only non-alcoholic supply onboard for 21 people for 3 full days. Everywhere you opened a door, there was alcohol in one form or another. And as sailors can’t drink on duty, we had to clear the supply in two nights That was probably the only reason why we could enjoy the night out in Ipswich, which was a tourist attraction in itself. The streets were crowded with girls wearing a tiny skirt, a revealing top and loads of make-up (no, nothing else), and guys in a jeans and shirt (to be allowed in clubs), strolling from pub to club and back. There was a hell of a noise everywhere, the police were patrolling and arresting drunk drivers and ambulances had a busy night… Competitive with Aalst’s carnival, if you ask me, even though I’ve never been there.

This morning was a bit more at ease in the garden of the Sint Pietersabdij for the open-air “biological” breakfast for students, in the framework of the “biological week”. Sometimes it’s advantageous to keep one foot in “student life” Besides, eating from the full trays on the sloping ground reminded me of eating onboard a sailing yacht…

Get ready for action

According to Metro, yesterday was the coldest 1st of June (10°C) since temperatures were recorded! I don’t care – the sun is shining, temperatures are expected to double by tomorrow, and I’ll be out and dry (?) on the North Sea, sailing to Ipswich and enjoying the dolphins (ahem). And… correcting a proof of A.’s dissertation somwhere in between

I discovered an additional advantage of a new computer: GTA has found its way back in and brings solace to the last, dull hour before bed-time on a late, cold and rainy working night like yesterday… With the same combined effect of an old-style action movie and a hilareous comedy, only better!!