Success!

Though for some reason, flickr either won't let me upload from work, or won't let me upload from my hard drive, or won't let me upload right now. I don't know which it is. But let's try Blogger's photo functionality:

Those are the three most "photogenic" of the critters I've been photographing. A beetle of some sort, what I think must be a protruan, and a hypogastrurid collembolan (aka "springtail.")

It took quite a bit of fiddling to get things sorted, but in the end, I am doing the identification and counting in my office, at a dissecting scope where I can swap out the camera on one of the eyepieces as needed. (I need to be able to use binocular vision to find these things or I wind up getting a headache.)

It's actually a lot more fun looking for stuff when you can photograph it.

I'm in a better mood now.

I got the "galley proof" (a .pdf file. Not quite as romantic as how they used to do it) of my most recently-accepted paper this morning. It's always so...I don't know, so heartening, or something, to see the thing you wrote finally typeset and in "real" form, rather than manuscript form.

I printed off a copy and tacked it up on our "bragging wall" - where we put up things like grant acceptances and newly published papers. I'm not QUITE self-promotional enough to stop people and go, "Hey, did you see my latest paper?" but hopefully someone will notice it up there.

This one was nearly 2 years in going to press, thanks in part to reviewer delays. (That said - I was spared Reviewer 3's comments, because Reviewer 3 never got around to it. And supposedly the old legend is that it's Reviewer 3 who always screws you over in the paper-acceptance process.)

A good way to start the day:

"It is my pleasure to inform you that your grant application...has been approved for funding."

It's not a HUGE grant (less than $300; most of that is prairie seed) but it means

a. I don't have to buy the stuff out of my own pocket
b. I'm on the administration's radar (the good kind) as being Someone Who Is Scholastically Productive
c. I feel like I achieved something
d. My grad student will feel like she's got a vote of confidence (this is actually her project; it's my design but she's going to do most of the work)


In a bit, I do need to go out and grab the soil arthropod samples for this quarter (I don't know how many I'll get; it's been uncommonly chilly and that usually drives things deeper in the soil - like, below my sampling level). But still, it's good to have something productive to do (I read journal articles when I'm not actively working on research, but frankly, I'd rather be GENERATING data than READING ABOUT it.)

(We have no morning classes today: assessment. I do have a meeting at 11:30 but I figure if I leave here by 8, I should be back in plenty of time. It's a pretty quick day in the field for this type of sampling.)

Oh, and a couple comment-responses:

Lydia, you might try Ngaio Marsh's "Inspector Alleyn" series. I think they are among the best of the Golden Era mysteries. And I don't remember any "woo." I've also heard that the Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy Sayers) is good too but I've not read any yet. (I have a couple of the Hornblower novels on the shelf, never got around to reading them. I tried to read one of the O'Brien novels and found I lacked a lot of the shipboard vocabulary and found that that bugged me).

Charles P, no I don't live in Portland. Powell's does mail order, bless them, and you can even find and order-by-mail used books from them, and in a way that feels more "secure" to me than from Amazon (ie., they do not use third-party sellers)

(I actually live in Oklahoma).

Well, I may have yet another paper to finish up and submit coming down the line. I e-mailed a former student of mine - currently finishing his Master's thesis - about a research project he did when he was a student here, whether he was interested in seeing it published. He did most of the up-front work, and I told him I could write chunks of it if he didn't have time, and then both our names would be on it.

As he's (almost) out on the job market, his response was fairly enthusiastic.

(I worry when it goes too long since I've submitted a paper somewhere; I keep worrying that someone's going to come up with the clever idea of making tenure retractable if a person doesn't keep to the crazy pre-tenure standards of churning out a paper a year and such).

I also have my potential grad student coming in this afternoon and a quick e-mail to a friend in the "business" (works for TNC) got a long list of potential projects on her site if the student doesn't like anything I offer. (And there are a couple things on there I'd love to do myself. If I only had time. The site is a good hour and a half from me, which means I can't exactly pop over there after a day of teaching to count plants or examine herbivore data)

Well, late in the day yesterday I did a sample that had almost a dozen things in it (a couple small beetles, a tiny worm, a weevil, and a number of what I think must be diplurans), so I concluded I NEED to go through all the samples, seeing as "a dozen things" might be the sum total that came through the funnel for some samples.

It's still hard on my eyes but I think if I limit myself to one or two samples I day I won't actually do any damage. (My father had a similar experience years back...in a class where they worked with thin sections of geologic samples (Crystallography, maybe? There are so many different classes out there). That's when he discovered he was prone to migraines.)

So this will be my theme song for a while:



Heh. Thomas Dolby. It had probably been ten years since I thought about him. He was steampunk before any of us really knew what that was.

(Edited to add: watching that video the whole way through for the first time in 20-some years - wow, the 80s were even weirder than I remembered. I remember thinking that was a cool, "deep" video as a high school student. I think this quotation from Calvin and Hobbes applies here:

Hobbes: "Maybe I'm just New Wave."
Calvin: "Maybe you're just stupid."

The line between "art" and "stupid random crap" was incredibly thin during that era.)

I really don't mind doing all the samples; I'm getting faster at it as I realize I don't have to be quite so painstakingly precise - if I put enough water on there, everything floats up and I can grab it without having to do too much scraping and digging.

Oh, and I keep getting spam telling me I'm "RECOMMENDED FOR A Ph.D!" or advertising "BUY a degree!" If I had five bucks for every one of those I got, I'd be able to go back to college and take classes in all the stuff that I never had time to the first go-round. (And every day, it seems I find some topic that I'd really like to learn more about. It's really not fair.)

Mai Berlese funnels: let me show U them:



That's what I spent my morning (well, before class, between classes, and after class) doing - making a home-brew set of Berlese funnel like objects for my soil invertebrate study. (There is another set on the bench opposite these).

They're pretty simple, but they fill the needed role.



They are those heavy foil casserole pans (something like a buck for 2), plus "liners" (you can just barely see it in the above photo) cut from plastic needlepoint canvas. (Craft supplies to the rescue again).

The idea on these is that the lamps (which we had already; they are used for photosynthesis-of-elodea experiments in GenBio) heat and light the soil. Soil "critters," having a natural dislike of heat and dryness, burrow down, fall through the grid (on a typical Berlese funnel it is a little wire grid, like window screen) and wind up in the preservative (actually ethanol in this case; most preservatives give me bad reactions but ethanol fumes don't bother me too much) that's in the beaker (which we also had on hand).

Total cost (not including the stuff already on hand): about $10.

On the one hand, this makes me really happy; I feel a bit like the spiritual descendant of both Angus MacGuyver and of those early-times scientist folk who "bash up" what they need for the lab (I remember in a book I read about the early development of penicillin, Dr. Heatley, one of the researchers, talked about how he "bashed up" some equipment they needed using wood from bookcases discarded from the Bodleian Library).

And it's also kind of nice to be able to do the research I want to to and that I care about - I could probably get thousands of dollars in funding to look at some weird soil fungus that might have antibiotic properties, but I'm really more interested in the little "critters" in the soil. But because they don't cure disease, can't be a new source of energy, or (presumably) are not greatly affected by rising CO2 levels, funding for them is harder to come by.

I've been involved with writing a couple grants for NSF. Never been on one that actually got awarded. That's because the overall success rate is something like 14% - and that includes the big Research I schools with lots of research equipment already. I've tried talking to folks about getting funding for, say, a growth chamber, and the response is kind of, "Wait? You don't have one yet?" and the light kind of goes out of their eyes and sometimes you feel like the response is "Why are you even bothering to try to do research, if you don't have such basic things?"

And the other thing with grantwriting at small schools - if you get one, YOU are the grants administrator. YOU get to do all the paper work. And it is (frankly) not worth it to me. Not even with the fact that I'd be able to hire a student, give them that extra experience, and get some of my work done for me. I'd rather spend umpteen hours between classes or after class sorting my own critters rather than spend that time filling out the equivalent of tax forms so I can hire a student to do it.

So I don't know. Again, I've gotten the response of some at bigger schools with more money that "If you can't get funding for it, it's probably not worth doing" and that kind of angers me.

I like being able to build my own stuff. It made me happy when, upon not finding funnels of the right size (or ENOUGH - that's my biggest gripe with having to get stuff from local stores; they may have two or three of something in stock when you need eight), I found the metal pans. And then thought of the plastic canvas (because I didn't want to work with cutting hardware cloth; that's too hard on the hands and too easily bent). And in a way I feel a bit like I'm in the same lineage as Darwin & company; they built most of their own stuff, because there were no governmental agencies to fund them, and moreover, there were few scientific-equipment houses to sell them a glorified funnel for $30 a pop.

On the other hand, I fear that when this eventually goes to press, some reviewer will gripe about "nonstandard methodology" or "substandard equipment" and try to sink my paper because of that. (There's a lot of undiscussed snobbery in science; some people believe if you're not at a Research I school you should not be permitted to do research; others believe that if you don't write for the "big" journals you're just a hack and should give it up, and on, and on. It irritates me because from my readings about earlier days, especially in ecology, none of that was there. And it seems to have come in - in ecology at least - because of what I call "physics envy" - the need to have the fancy flashy beepy tools that generate perfect numbers every time. The idea that the messiness and unpredictability of fieldwork makes it somehow less desirable to lab simulations or numbers crunched on a mainframe. And I LIKE the messy part of things. I LIKE the chance that I will find something sort of unexpected. I prefer being sort of a Jamie Hyneman of ecology, where I can go to my cabinets of stuff I've saved up and use my ingenuity to build what I need.)

So, I'm trying to read through some journal articles that talk about different modes of sampling. And it occurs to me: I wonder if someone has written up a standard protocol for sampling soil inverts?

by golly, they have!.

While I don't have the nifty fancy Hydropneumatic Elutriator (what a great name!), I CAN use Berliese funnels to get what I can, and will "float" the rest out in water.

So I'm all set for tomorrow afternoon's collecting. I'm always relieved to find that the basic idea I had of how to do something (at least getting the soil samples) was pretty much what an "expert" had in mind. I am not so convinced that my extraction method will work as well but you do what you can, in the absence of a Hydropneumatic Elutriator. (It's not a good time to write grants, even if I had a prayer of getting the NSF to look favorably on my little tiny research program)

When I pulled up into my drive this afternoon, I was able to confirm something I'd suspected for a while:

Hummingbirds have found my Turk's Cap hibiscus. I had periodically seen shadows swoop up into the leaves of the pecan tree when I opened the door of my house to step outside - shadows too big for a bee, and kind of too solid even for a hummingbird moth.

But when I pulled in the drive today, there was a hummingbird feeding from the plant. I'm pretty sure it was a female ruby-throat - her plumage was pretty worn (but that's to be expected this time of year). It was a neat thing to see and hopefully those plants are helping to sustain the hummers. (I've thought of getting a feeder, but honestly, the level of commitment to keeping it clean is large enough that I often think, "You'd be just as well off getting a housepet if you want that kind of effort.") Besides, I'd rather have plants that feed them.

Spent the afternoon doing fieldwork. This is a re-start of the prairie restoration project that kind of fizzled out a couple years ago (mainly because we couldn't get the grazing treatment set up the way we wanted). It was about the perfect day for fieldwork - low 80s, no humidity, the sun was out but there were enough clouds passing by to give relief, slight breeze. Unfortunately, none of the students who had "promised" to show up (even with the carrot of extra credit points) did, so I was by myself. But that was okay. It's actually pretty peaceful doing fieldwork alone; I don't have to give directions to anyone, or run over and identify some mystery plant, or tell someone how to spell the name on something. (And this "field" is on land a colleague owns, not far from his house - so some of the solo-fieldwork worries I sometimes have aren't an issue: it's private property so creepy people are unlikely to be hanging out there, and if they are, I can be kind of big and blustery and ask them if they have the landowner's permission to be there. And even if something bad happened - like I stepped in a hole or something - when my colleague or his wife came home, they'd see my car still there and wonder what was up).

So it was pleasant. I did half of the sampling because some of the students wanting extra credit were only able to go out on Friday, so I figured if I could do half of the sampling alone in just over 2 hours, if I have a couple teams of people, we can finish the other half about as fast. Or even if they don't materialize, it's supposed to be nice again tomorrow so it will be another pleasant day to work outside.

I forget how peaceful fieldwork is. It takes you away from all the stuff - all the demanding people, all the low rumble of bad news, the stacks of papers needing to be graded. It's very immediate: you are doing this NOW, and you can't worry about anything else you need to be doing, because you are doing this. And I'm good at identifying plants, there's some satisfaction in that, in being able to see something again that I only briefly saw a couple years ago on the same site and remember what it is.

In its own way it's a bit like knitting or quilting - something you give a good part of your attention to, but it's a restful sort of attention - it's not the frantic working-with-one-eye-on-the-clock that comes with grading papers between classes, or the rolling-eye, heavy-teenagerish-sigh that comes when you have to take lots of work home with you.

Well, I looked up where I am on the roster at the prairie conference this summer (midafternoon of the second day...and there's not much on the first day which is good, it'll give me a chance to recover from traveling/check out the vendors/maybe wander around town some if Winona isn't too big and scary).

I have a half-hour.

I have never been granted a half-hour for a talk before (at least not in my memory). Usually it's 15-20 minutes, or if you're at the big prestige-meetings, 10.

I am wondering - having looked at the slate of presentations - if the high price of gas, sharply diminished university and agency travel funds, and the general unappealingness of flying these days has combined to reduce the number of people who are going out to conferences.

I continue to do it, because (a) this year I have something interesting to present and (b) I'm still kind of in "I'm not worthy!" panic-mode about getting Full Professor (when that issue comes up in a couple years), and giving a presentation (and hopefully getting a paper out) every year is a good way to show I'm not just deadwood.

But I am having to shell out quite a lot out-of-pocket for this trip. (As I did last year for the Chicago trip for the BSA meetings). Not that I mind; my traveling is mostly restricted to visiting family (cheap, once you've paid for transportation) and I don't consider going somewhere and lying on a beach for a week to be exactly fun. (But I do consider getting to hear about exciting research people are doing fun, and meeting with people who have similar interests, and maybe, just maybe, finding some neat bookstores or yarn shops or something while I'm there).

I looked over the roster of presenters for people I know. With the exception of one chap I know a little (spoke with him at some length at a previous conference about soil invertebrates), the only names I recognize are ones I know from the top of journal articles. So it may be a bit of a lonely conference for me, if there aren't some non-presenters I happen to know showing up. (And I'm not sure how likely that is, once again given the price of gas, the cost of travel [most universities at least won't give you travel funds if you're not actually presenting], and the general horribleness of flying.)

But whatever. It will be a chance to be in a new town and hear a bunch of talks and maybe meet some new friends.

I'll have to practice my little talk though and make sure it's "respectably" long enough; I think I was shooting for a time slot of 15 minutes when I planned it, but I can always add in more natural history and more management considerations at the end.

I wonder, if gas continues to go up and airlines continue to treat passengers like cattle if eventually scientific meetings will die out a little. Or if only the real high-powered types will go (which will be sad for me, because I have to recognize it: I am not a high-powered type. I am a teaching professor who does a little research on the side). Or if there will be some new kind of "virtual meeting" thing where people set up webcameras and give their talks from their home institution, or make online posters they put up and have live chats scheduled to discuss.

And while it's not the same as going to a new place and getting to meet people and go on real field trips and such, I have to admit I'd not be heartbroken to do my research presentations that way - I wouldn't have to worry about getting to the place, or finding a safe hotel for a woman traveling alone, and I'd get to sleep in my own bed at night.

Because I find the older I get, the more the "excitement" of travel begins to pale against the comfort of sleeping in my own bed. (Especially with what I've heard about bedbugs in some hotels, ew.). Of course, once they perfect teleportation, it will all be a moot point, because we'll ALL (well, at least those who can afford the teleportation fees) be able to travel ANYWHERE and still sleep in our own beds at night.

(And honestly? In some future Utopia? I don't care about the Jetsons flying cars or the replicators or the robot maids. What I'd really like is a teleporter...I'd be able to go to my old professor's retirement parties with no effort, I'd be able to drop in on my brother and sister-in-law on their birthdays and take them out to dinner, I'd be able to see Turkey without actually having to use the infamous Turkish toilets, I'd be able to pop in to Liberty of London or La Droguerie or Purl Soho and buy craft supplies in person...)

I AM THE TABLE-MISTRESS!!!!





Yup, got them all done. Five tables, including one tricksy one reporting the results of a 2-way ANOVA with significant interactions and those d____d "A, A B, B" letter-combinations for reporting significance.

The bad thing is my brain is utterly fried now. I need to go home and knit. I will let myself look at this again on Thursday. (I need a day, and besides, Wednesday is my busiest teaching day).

For those of you who work in or around labs (either as a scientist or teaching): if you have polyethylene carboys, check them.

We had an old one (probably ~10 years old) that we had been storing DI water in (so we didn't have to run down to the taps - which, OH SO HELPFULLY have only been placed in the teaching labs - every day when we're doing research). It had not been used/ moved for a while, so while setting up my experiment (which is all done now, saints be praised*), I moved the thing to a place that would be more convenient for me to use it. Set it down gently. Heard, "crackle, crackle" and wondered, "What on earth could that be?"

Just as my mind was forming the word "earth" of "what on earth could that be?", the whole thing gave way - the back end of it just split and cracked all over the place.

And I was covered with water. As was the floor, the cabinet, the cabinet behind me, some old journals a colleague had stolen some of my bench space to store been storing on that side of the lab.

So I had to stop and mop it all up which believe me did NOT make me happy.

And then go down and order a new carboy - this time, NOT PE plastic.


(* is it OK for a non-Catholic to say that?)

Woke up at 3 am with one of those horrible, pit-of-the-stomach feelings of:

a. I'm not doing enough towards "productivity"

and

b. How on earth am I going to get done what I AM doing?

I need to avoid thinking about the fact that I will be applying for full professor in another year or so. That's what gets to me. While my productivity is probably sufficient, I look at it and go, "But there's so much more I could have done!"

And then I feel guilty for knitting. I feel like "maybe I should devote every waking hour outside of class to somehow pushing research."

And then that makes me angry. There's a lot that I do (the Youth Group, some of the volunteer work with the local beautification committee, some other volunteer stuff like work with the food bank) that is stuff that I enjoy and that I consider important, but it doesn't count on the whole campus-evaluation process. And that frustrates me. Because I don't like feeling like I SHOULDN'T be doing something I value because it's taking time away from something else.

So I'm making a chart of all the projects I have going on and what remains to be done on them, and I'm going to check the steps off as I finish them. (And remind myself that for some of the projects, I have to WAIT for the field site to 'wake up' before I can do anything this spring).

I did do one thing this morning - emailed a journal editor about a manuscript I submitted more than six months ago and hadn't heard anything back about. (That may mean it's lost in the shuffle or it may mean that just rejected it out-of-hand). But if they don't want it, there's another journal that might, so I need to know.

I was also somewhat cheered up by the fact that the little germination-under-allelopathic-conditions experiment I'm running is starting to show results. And they are results that, at least at this point, support my hypothesis.

But it's hard. Not having anything finished - having all these projects up in the air makes me unhappy. I like finishing stuff, I like being able to mark things as "done" in my mind and move on to the next thing. (And it's the old "How you do anything is how you do everything" - I feel the same way about the knitting projects that I should-not-be-working-on-in-favor-of-research right now).

I could also e-mail a coauthor on a long-stalled paper and ask him what's up with it, whether he's had a chance to look at it again. But I don't know. This is a co-author who, six months into another project (and a lot of work on my part) decided that it wasn't worth submitting anywhere. And since it's his data, I had to abide by that. So I'm kind of twitchy that it will be the same with this one. (Although in this case - the data are mine, so I could claim custody of the paper and insist on submitting it. I don't know if that's a fight I want to have.)

Some days, I think it would have been easier to have had flesh-and-blood children rather than these research-projects-as-children things.

I set up the WHOLE experiment (with a student worker's help) today.

Outside of teaching an hour-and-a-half lab, it was the ONLY thing I did today.

But it's done. And I'm glad. The hard part of it is over. Now all I need to do is monitor the seeds each day, record germination and growth, water them, and weekly give half of them doses of the putative allelopathic chemical, and half of them doses of deionized water (as a control; the chemical is mixed in deionized water).

I'm fairly proud of my design, considering I knew next to nothing about this type of experimentation a couple months ago. I did a LOT of reading of background, especially the controversies involved with this type of experimentation, and came up with a simple factorial design that will answer (hopefully) a couple different questions and yet is fairly applicable to the "real world" (in that I am using 'real' soil from a site infested with the plant, and from a site free of it).

And I even know the best way (I think) to analyze it: a simple chi-square. (I tend to think it's better to set up experiments so you know what analysis to do - and simpler analyses are better if possible, rather than setting up experiments and then agonizing over how to analyze the data in the end.)

If this gives interesting results, I'll present it at next summer's prairie conference. (Which will make 10 years' worth of prairie conferences - they are biannual - that I've presented at. It's a little thing, but I'm kind of proud of it.)

One thing I forgot to say about the research stuff yesterday is that even though it was not hot (it got hot later on, but I headed out to the site before the sun was up), it was close to 100% humidity.

My body does not like humidity. Especially my lungs. Carrying the buckets (one by one) back to the car, I had to stop every ten paces or so (partly to shift hands so the bucket handles didn't cut off my circulation, but also partly to try to pull enough oxygen out of that thick air).

And whoa, am I sore today. My lower back (all that digging and lifting) but also my bum ankle. (I thought the ankle was just some early-onset arthritis - I have that pronation thing where sometimes one of my feet will just roll out on its side, spontaneously. It used to be a lot worse before I got orthotics - it would actually trip me sometimes. So I thought it was sort of RSI-induced arthritis. Now I wonder if it's some kind of a damaged tendon or ligament - I COULD NOT WALK when I first got out of bed this morning, but as I hobbled around the house, it finally loosened back up to "normal." This was the foot I was using to put weight on the shovel and I guess it didn't like that.

Yeah, yeah, I COULD go to a doctor, but as I said before, I once went to a podiatrist who basically told me to lose 20 pounds and THEN come back, so I'm often a little leery of going to "les medecins" for something that's not really that big of a deal. Also, a lot of the doctors around here have sidelines in "bariatrics," which I assume means either referring people for stomach-alteration surgery or putting them on scary drugs. And you know? As much as I dislike being fat*, I'm unwilling to risk side effects of surgery OR drugs in order to maybe become LESS fat.

And anyway: I may be fat but I was able to dig up and tote roughly 200 pounds of soil in about an hour's time yesterday, and after a little stretching I can still walk and move normally today. So THAT should count for something.

*The truth? I don't DISLIKE being fat so much; what I DISLIKE are the societal attitudes that say unless you're willing to starve yourself [if you have a naturally slower metabolism] and devote hours to worrying about the state of your body, you're somehow a slacker or lacking in self-control and you're "polluting the landscape" for the pretty thin people. Or that it's assumed we all sit on our rumps all day long eating Big Macs and Krispy Kremes.)

*****

Anyway. On to happier things.

I got one of those little salmon-colored "package slips" in my box the other day. I didn't see that it was for two packages - I was expecting one; I broke the "no buy new things" edict to order a skein of the new "Rainforest III" Opal because I REALLY liked the "Kasimir" color (red, blue, and yellow) and wanted to be sure to get one in case they sold out.

But there was another package waiting for me - one I didn't expect.

It was this book. Dragon knitter - saying it was Buy A Friend a Book Week - had ordered it for me and had it sent to me.

Yay! Thank you. Especially since yesterday was a hardworking day with its share of frustrations (like - difficulty in finding pea gravel, which I needed for the experiment, and then when I found it, all the bags had torn and leaked out a certain percentage of their gravel, but the bags were still full price).

I especially like the unicorn and may be making a version sometime. And the pirate is pretty funny, too - I might alter the design a little and make a GIRL pirate (well, the pirate doll as given is a little girly-looking, despite the embroidered five-o-clock shadow.)

****
Bloom is progressing. I have two "wedges" left to do, and the crochet edging, and it will be ready to block. I'm really happy with how the color blocking is coming out on it - it looks really nice. The yarn is a bit more "rustic" than what I normally use for shawls - this is going to be a "casual" shawl, I guess.

The colors are pretty, but to be honest, I'm not sure I'd work with Noro Blossom again - I don't mind thick-and-thin yarns, or yarns that look kind of "rustic," but this one is sort of EXTREME "rustic."

I just handed in my "what I did this past year" thing for tenure and promotion (but for me, it's still an 'off year' - I already have tenure and it's not time yet to apply for Full Professor).

I think the fact that I no longer feel like I want to throw up after handing one of these in is an improvement.

(Seriously: I used to - in the pre-tenure and immediately post-tenure days - have to do it at the VERY END OF THE DAY and hand it in and then go home and watch lots of cartoons or something to scrub the sinking feeling that I hadn't done ENOUGH in the past year out of my head.

Of course, it helps to be able to claim that you presented at an "international" (and heck, it is - if there are speakers from South Africa, and Thailand, and Denmark, and who knows where else, even if it's held on the soil of my own country, that counts as "international" in my book) conference this past year.)


(And I just realized - while doing Regular Vita Maintenance - that one of my papers is available online. Kind of cool.)