Reviewing

I have had some discussions with colleagues recently to ascertain how many paper reviews you should accept each year. The figures vary widely - from none, to 1 or 2, to 15-20. I reviewed 10 papers last year, not including the second round reviews. Reviewing is another, 'requirement' when working in academia despite the fact that you get no financial reward (it is voluntary), kudos (you are an anonymous reviewer) or time allowance for (it all has to be done outside of your working hours). Of course you don't have to agree to do it, but people will do the same for your papers and it is unfair not to. However I only had 3 papers published last year and I reviewed 10, so I am in the red quite substantially!

An interesting development is Publons, which is a website that allows you to,

 "Record, verify, and showcase your peer review contributions in a format you can include in job and funding applications (without breaking reviewer anonymity)."

 I have received emails from journal publishers after a review offering this - but would anyone take it seriously? It certainly would be useful to get any professional reward (kudos again!) for the time we spend on reviews.

I reviewed a paper just before Christmas and despite the goodwill of the season (it was Christmas eve) I had to recommend rejection. The work was poorly justified, the assumptions could not realistically be made and the accuracy testing was almost non-existent. I gave a detailed 1 or 2 page summary listing the problems point by point which I can happily stand over. The other three reviewers recommended, 'minor revisions' or, 'accept as is' and gave a few lines of edit. Call me Scrooge I suppose. Amazed by this I started reading around and a good article I found on "peer review being a crapshoot?" by Elsevier is here. It also deals with foreign authors (mainly Chinese) and one interesting finding was this,  

"In their cover letter, authors from China sometimes request reviewers from China, presumably hoping that Chinese reviewers will provide more favourable or sympathetic reviews than will reviewers from outside of China. In fact, we found the opposite, with reviewers from China judging papers from China more harshly (43% recommending rejection) than did reviewers from other countries (with only 15 % of the reviewer from the UK recommending rejection)."

And I also found this great picture online, which I think sums the whole process up nicely. I must have been the guy at the back in the black cape. It will be interesting to see how the editors decide finally - I rejected it in the second round too as they made none of the edits I suggested.

Ireland and ESA

Great to see Ireland getting a mention on ESA webpage recently as An Taoiseach went over to learn about Ireland's role in EO. Irish companies are active in both the upstream and downstream parts of the process. Added to that, the recent announcement of the ESA Business Incubation Centre (support for 25+ Irish start ups) seems very promising for the future of EO in Ireland.

Watch this space.

Galileo - 12 Satelites now in orbit.

A pre-Christmas launch of Galileo 11 and 12 means that ESA have doubled the number of satellites in the Galileo constellation in just 9 months. Interestingly - they have now customised the launchers meaning that if successful, each subsequent launch will carry four satellites rather than two. Eggs, basket? Let's hope not. It will certainly help in getting the full constellation into orbit and operational alot quicker. 

12 satellites claimed to be in orbit - and with 2 satellites per launch - six successful launches are therefore implied. So what happened to the two who failed to make it into the correct orbit after a problem with a software error/frozen fuel line? Was the orbit corrected? Or does, '12 Satellites in orbit' mean any orbit will do...

New RPAS Rules, Acquisitions and People Carriers!

Happy New Year - I am a bit late getting started blogging in 2016 due to a house-move but will try to make up for it in the next three weeks.

New RPAS rules came in just before christmas, including compulsory registration for 1kg+  systems and also a reduced max operating distance from the pilot. I suppose this was partly in anticipation of the Christmas deluge of drones that people might get as a present (remember, a Drone is not just for christmas!) and having seen a number of large drones for sale in Eurosaver then this is probably a good idea. It will be interesting to see how many are registered and track the growth of the industry over the coming years.

Another piece of interesting drone info was the recent acquisition of Asctec by Intel. Asctec make the Falcon 8, and being the first UAV we operated at the NCG (and still going strong) I have a soft spot for it. Interestingly, a few months ago, TOPCON partnered with Asctec, so I am not sure if that is finished, or if the three are all combined in this project. We can wait and see. One thing I am sure of is that I do not like the yellow version of the Falcon and hope they go back to the original white.

And finally,

A new human carrying drone capable of carrying a human at 100kph has been announced  and although it sounds like a helicopter (if it is 'manned' how can it be a UAV?) the pilot is really just a passenger so it definitely counts.