Yahoo!!!


Ultimately THE PAPER has got accepted in Immunology. I worked on it for last 2 years. It was rigorous experience. Doing calculations, reading a lot of diverse papers, writing codes, writing the article and repeated polishing of the draft. Then getting painful rejections. Opps!!


It all started in a very funny way. I applied for a poster presentation in a conference on mathematical biology in IIT Kanpur. They changed my category into an oral presentation. I was just dumb. What Am I going to talk? That was my first question. And then I started this work.
Then I hit another roadblock. After giving a preliminary shape to the work, I was wondering. I am challenging a silly mistake that has been repeated by scientists for almost in 200 papers. How could they do that? I must be missing something very important!!!


After checking and rechecking, we are at the simplest conclusion: scientists, just like any other human being, love to follow cults. Chang and Casali formulated the statistical method. It is easy to use. Every one started to use it without even bothering to check its correctness. Although Dunwalter challenged it, every one kept using it. It seems no body go through literatures thoroughly.


Working on this paper was a nice experience for other reasons too. I posted questions all over the Internet. Even I posted a SOS in our JU alumni yahoo groups. And the response was enormous. Even one Pittsburgh statistician advised me to have a teacher in statistics, as my basics are so poor. Yes, I know am badly in need of a teacher. Rather a mentor. Thanks to Tapan, he helped me a lot to understand the basics of the likelihood estimation. Dr. Rath from NII gave us the most important review of the article. And thanks to the referee who went thoroughly and made some beautiful corrections.


Phuuuu…we should celebrate now. Definitely with Bacardy.

Publication or pain! (continued….)

They want 600 USD. Publication fee (page charges) for one of my papers. Hey! that’s equivalent to 3 month's salary of mine. Every one knows that we are always at fund crunch. But ...But. What else can we do except paying the money? If we don’t pay it, the whole process will get delayed. Publication of another paper depends upon it. So...I don’t know...I can’t help ....but keep my fingers crossed.


There is lot of discussions on new models of science publication. There is a fierce debate on public access to science. But where will the money come from? One can say that every article should free to access. Then the authors have to pay the publication fees. Are we in position to pay that? Definitely not. Not for all our articles. Our funding agencies do not provide us that much of money. BMC waive the publication fees fro authors from third world countries. However other journals don’t. We are always at disadvantage.


Any way, the good news, in all this mess, is that the computational paper have got a good review. Hope this one will get published soon.

Publications or disasters??

Last month I communicated two papers. Two more papers are ready. I am waiting for the permission from my boss to post them. It’s the worst time. A time of incubation; when all the hard work of last 5 years will be judged through these papers.

It reminds me some mails that I exchanged with one of my friend few months back. One night he wrote me a mail. It was like this:

He was preparing for his professional exams while sitting on his bed. The table lamp was kept on the bed. All on a sudden he realized that the bed sheet had caught fire from the heat of the light of the table lamp. So he was amazed. He saw such an incident for the first time.


So I shot back a mail immediately to him. It was like this:

Ok, you do a few things. First, look into literature databases to know whether some one has already published such incident or not. Then you change the bed sheet of different colors but made up of same material. Then check, whether they are catching fire or not. Then use bed sheets of different materials. Try the same thing. Again do the experiments with various types of lamps and with varying exposure time. Repeat all those experiments at least thrice. Then jot down the data. Do factor analysis or cluster analysis which one you find suitable. Dig out the statistically significant observations. Then write down the whole story in a scientific paper format. Let your friends (?) read it and scratch your back. Then send it to a journal.

Now you wait. Wait another month. Mean while you can open your author account every day, just to make your day ugly. Then on an auspicious day, you get the reply from the editor with referee’s comments. And the fun begins now. One referee has raised really good questions. You get stimulated. You can even write down a new grant application based on this idea.

But hey! Wait. Read the comments of the second referee. He has asked, what happens if you spread cow dung over a bed sheet and then keep it bellow a lamp? Now you are in soup. Where does this cow dung come from? You scratch your head. Got agitated, then depressed. Any way, after two three days you start exploring the literature databases. This time your search command is: Cow dung AND bed sheet. Pfuuuuu….. After three four days of toil you write down all the answers to referees comment and re-write the whole paper a bit. And then re-submit it. Now pray again. Pray early in the morning and even before you go to sleep. If you are lucky you may get the article published just before your next promotion.

So it got published. And you are happy and excited. In the evening you ring up your girl friend and break the news: honey I have got a publication. Her reply: “so what?”
You cannot help. When rape is inevitable enjoy it.



Hey I don’t say that; neither the story. HA HA HA!!!!