I love submitting revisions at 6:30pm on a Friday. I am certain that handling editors absolutely love receiving them at that time too.

I am currently in Hell (also known as the academic job market). Currently an assistant prof on a temp contract at UCD in Dublin, still working on babies, EEG, and motor development.

Give them the moral support they need to resist the impulse to caveat, hedge, and point out limitations.

You're saving the environment by not eliciting a load of additional useless emails. That deserves a Praise.

A picture of an information stand for the UCD Babylab with a tall banner, a large teddy, some jigsaws, colouring sheets and posters.

It's Science Week and the theme is "Then. Today. Tomorrow." UCD Babylab is at the Dublin Explorium to talk to parents about the past, present and future of infant research.

Nothing will quite beat the first day I saw that the mountain was out as I crossed Red Square.

It was idyllic (in a way) to be there in 2020/21. Lots of open green spaces, paths, and cycle routes for the daily mental health jaunt. 10/10, would pandemic again.

As someone who got the feedback "just a load of post-doc work" on a job talk (even after cutting out an entire series of studies on an adjacent topic), I can vouch for the editorialized approach. People love a straightforward narrative & a focus on a (supposedly) career-defining problem.

Do students utilise "utilise" because it sounds technical and formal, instead of using "use" even when it's more appropriate?

My tinfoil hat is telling me it's because they want you unmuted to maximize their recorded data for training voice/sound models.

Credentialism has been the word of my year on the job market. I knew that credentials were no guarantee of success, that they're more of an adversarial shield - you might not say yes, but you can't say no to me on this basis. I did not expect them to mean nothing & to constantly hear about "fit".

Congrats Karla and so well-deserved! Anyone brave enough to tackle measurement of EF in early life has my admiration 😅 thank you for sharing your journey - I've been having a tough year on the job market and it's reassuring to know that others have found success even when the horizon looks hazy.

UCD Babylab members have been regularly writing short blog posts about our work. Newest post from Florencia Sandoval Gomez, a MSc student studying the body schema in infancy.

Every time I return to code I wrote previously I think "WHAT A MORON, what was I trying to do?", change it, then realise there was a logic to what I did before and that the code worked correctly and as intended. Think of the hours of work I could save if I had a little self-belief!

Today at roller derby practice I got complimented on my visible trap muscles and on my scent (residual perfume from yesterday), and I'm going to be floating on those affirmations all weekend.

Such a clever idea to recruit from a population about whom there is already so much social and health data!

I miss spring at UW! The cherry blossoms, the bald eagles and herons, the increasingly distracting party boat and seaplane noises right outside my office window on the cut...

Many years ago I was at a seminar by a former policymaker whose message was "always be alert when doing research for policymakers because they are going to want to box your research in so much it gives them the answer they want".
This is going to be a tiny box, if there's even a box at all.

The change in REF rules is a boon to the procrastinators among us. All this data I've never got around to analyzing/writing up, those papers, it could all be yours for the low, low price of a job
(the complete dearth of available jobs notwithstanding)

My wonderful UCD Babylab colleagues are hosting an event for parents of toddlers, to talk about play and share ideas about it. Feb 17th in Dublin city centre www.ucdbabylab.com/world-caf-2025

I want to know how much they paid the aide who had to wrestle a cat, let alone one known for scrapping with a fox, into that get-up.

The biggest source of innovation in academic publishing has been fraud-related every year since 1950 or whenever Robert Maxwell bought his first press.
Actually probably before, I'm not letting scholarly societies off the hook.

If anyone has a keen and talented undergraduate student who would like to work on infant EEG and motor development in Dublin this summer, please pass this along. Lots of other interesting projects available too - but I'm plugging mine!

Text in black 'Founding Generation Summer Fellowship Program - Undergraduate student? Apply to be a mentee!' against a pale blue background, ICIS logo on the top left.

#infantstudies Founding Generation Summer Fellowship now open for student applications! The program pairs promising students with researchers from around the world who conduct cutting-edge science. Apply by February 14.
infantstudies.org/founding-gen...

Agnes Mary Clerke - Wikipedia

Irish astronomer Agnes Mary Clerke died #OTD in 1907.

In 1885, she published A Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century. This book became commonly used for its discussion of the spectroscope.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_M...

www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/searc...

#womeninStem

This better not provide any distracting haptic feedback.

Anyone else feel dirty uploading their tracked-changes manuscripts in the submission portals? I know it's encouraged but it really feels like inviting someone to look through the window at your madness.

Just finished my annual rewatch of Love on the Spectrum, sorry, I mean Pride and Prejudice (2005).

Maybe "the hungover postdoc" is a better name.

My mother calls hers the council-man because it takes off for a remote corner and makes itself busy cleaning the same spot over and over, out of sight of the boss who thinks it's actually working.