Rustling University - Interview Training

Dear Professor Turtle,

Thank you for the opportunity to participate in our online interview training. I can think of no other opportunity where I could have learned that the statement "everyone should be treated equally" was false. Apparently, by treating everyone equally, I would not provide audio format materials to a blind person. I had previously believed that equally and identically were not synonymous; now I know better.

Fortunately, I see that, as Dean of FANAS, you are making strenuous efforts to stamp out equality wherever it occurs, and I just wanted to say ... keep up the good work!

Your humble servant

Dr. David Pressed
Faculty of Non-aligned Subjects
Rustling University

Chocolate consumption and Nobel prize winning

I assume this article was written as a joke. It certainly made me laugh. Full article here

Goodbye David Routh

I went to David Routh's funeral yesterday. His death was quite sudden - I saw him over the summer and he seemed (and I think was) fine at that time. David was a much-loved figure at both the Bristol and Exeter psychology departments and he'll be sorely missed. I never knew much about his published work - I knew him as a research seminar contributor par excellence - but his most cited work was Routh (1971), which argued that transfer from short-term acoustic store to a more persistent memory store was passive rather than active.

Workload Models

Rustling University - Newsletter

It has been brought to my attention that some staff think that annual appraisal is a waste of time. To help with this problem, you are all invited to attend "Making The Most Out Of Annual Appraisals". It will be hosted by Justine Weiner. Although Ms. Weiner is not an academic, she does have extensive experience in sending emails to them.

- Prof. Turtle, Dean of FANAS (Faculty of Non-Aligned Subjects)

Maze of the eJournal

In both places I've worked recently, access to electronic resources is way more complex than it needs to  be. There's always more than one search system, and each system generally returns more than one way to access the journal, many of which are redundant (e.g. EBSCO provides 2003-2006 but PsycArticles provides 1982-2012).

It seems like it really shouldn't be that difficult to just provide a single text box entry at any given institution. You copy and paste the reference you have from a paper of WoS search into that box, and the system takes you straight to the full text, if your university has access to it, and takes you to an Inter-Library Loans page if it doesn't [Or, alternatively, move to Open Access journals, and let Google take care of it -- but that's a whole other topic...]

If anyone does have that experience, let me know. Similarly, if your experience is as maze-like as mine, feel free to use this as a forum to moan :-)