Irony of all – Peer review

I received an invitation to a Symposium on Peer Reviewing, which is motivated by the following:

Only 8% members of the Scientific Research Society agreed that “peer review works well as it is”. (Chubin and Hackett, 1990; p.192).

“A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision and an analysis of the peer review system substantiate complaints about this fundamental aspect of scientific research.” (Horrobin, 2001)

Horrobin concludes that peer review “is a non-validated charade whose processes generate results little better than does chance.” (Horrobin, 2001). This has been statistically proven and reported by an increasing number of journal editors.

After a short introduction the invitation then goes on into explaining how one should go at submitting a paper and what the selection process will be. And this is what it reads:

All Submitted papers will be reviewed using a double-blind (at least three reviewers), non-blind, and participative peer review.

Some people have humor.

Not just “virtually” but literally annoyed

What is up with all the use and overuse of the word “virtually” in advertisement? Am I the only one to be annoyed by that?

I can’t say when it started but it seems to have become the norm. I hear it all the time and I find it really annoying.

Sometimes it makes sense to me. Like in this ad for some cosmetic product which claims to “make all skin defects virtually vanish”. This seems like a proper use of the word. The defects don’t show anymore but they haven’t actually vanished.

Most of the time though it’s used in the less common way (although this may no longer be true I guess) of meaning “almost”. Like in the ad for this air purifier that “virtually eliminates all odors” or this software product which is “virtually bug free”.

I don’t know but that seems just wrong to me. But I suppose in a country where superlatives are the norm in advertisement only a minority of people will actually be annoyed. Well, I’m one of them.

About my name and my struggle to get it said and written right

I’m French and have lived in the US for over 10 years now. Yet, even some of my closest colleagues still have trouble saying my name right. They usually get the first name alright but the last name often remains a problem so, I thought, as a small distraction from the OOXML raging debate, I would spend a few minutes talking about my name.

My first name is “Arnaud”. The way to pronounce it is “Arno”, or if you will “R-no”. Easy enough but many English speaking people keep wanting to say every letter and insist on saying the D when it is totally silent. In general the end letter is silent in French, and “au” is basically just like the letter O. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know, and I’m not especially a defender of the many irregularities and complexities of the French language.

When I first moved to the US and had to give my name in a restaurant to be put on the waiting list I used to spell my name so they would write it correctly. I quickly discovered that this was a big mistake because I would later fail to recognize my name when called. I now simply say “Arno”, which they often understand as “Arnold” (with the D I never say, mind you – it’s amazing how our brains want to always match what we hear to something known. -) But that’s ok, it’s close enough for me to recognize when it is called later, which is all I care about in this case.

Now that I’m done with my first name, let’s get to my last name. My last name is “Le Hors”. This one is tougher and in fact even French people have trouble with it. I’ll explain why later but first, let me insist on the fact that it is in two words.

This is actually not that uncommon in many parts of the world but for some reason people in the US seem to have a major problem dealing with last names of more than one word. It is a constant struggle to keep my name as two words.

People always seem to want to either attach it as in “LeHors” or as in “Le-Hors”. It’s neither. The fact that many names are spelled in one word even though they were clearly two initially, such as “McDonald” or “McTracy”, is a testimony that many did give in on keeping their names in two words at one point in time. Maybe my son will too one day, if he stays in the US, but I won’t.

A related problem I discovered while insisting on having my last name written in two words is that people reading “Arnaud Le Hors” then wrongly infer that “Le” is my middle name and address me as “Mr Hors”.

Of course, it’s understandable in a country where so many names are so common that people must use their middle name to try and differentiate themselves, but in my case it’s just another trap. To prevent that I now often write my middle initial, as in “Arnaud J Le Hors”, which clues people in. Some still get it wrong though.

I also try to put two spaces between my first name and last name, as in “Arnaud Le Hors”. But more than often computer programs collapse the two spaces in one, defeating my attempt [Update: looks like wordpress does exactly that as a matter of fact, I can't seem to figure out the right escape sequence to get two hardcoded whitespaces...]. In fact, computer programs that are developed in the US by people who make the same typical assumptions often garble my name one way or another.

Whether at the drugstore or at the car rental my name often reads as “Hors A”, “Le A”, or some similar variation, on the display panels. And because airline companies and travel agencies handle the two words differently I often have trouble with non matching frequent flyer numbers, etc.

Back to the pronunciation, the way to say my last name is “Luh Oarss”. It took me a while to figure this one out with help from a couple of American friends but having tested it on several occasions I’m now confident that, when said with an American pronunciation, it leads to the write sound. (Special note: Come on, Bob, try it a couple of times, I’m sure you can do it.

The H is silent and the S at the end is pronounced. That’s where the French too have difficulties. See, as I previously said “in general the end letter is silent in French”. So, most French people don’t say the S.

But my name is not really French. It is from the north west part of France, called Britany (“Bretagne”) which had its own language and my name used be spelled “An Horz”. After the French revolution, all the names from Britany were translated to French in an effort to unify the various regions of France. The “An”, which is an article just like the English “An”, was thus translated to the French article “Le”. In the process the Z was changed to an S and since then the spelling no longer quite matches the pronunciation.

All my life in France, starting from primary school up to now, I’ve had to correct people’s pronunciation – “it’s not ‘Le Hor’, it’s ‘Le HorSS’” – and correct people who systematically write my name as “Le Horse” even when I spell it to them – “No E at then end”!

Sometimes I envy my cousins who live in Britany where local knowledge shields them from all these troubles, but I wouldn’t trade the Californian sunny weather for the rainy weather of Britany, even though the coasts of Britany are some of the most beautiful regions I’ve seen.

So there, you have the whole story now, and probably more than you care to know. Standard program to resume shortly. (pun intended)

Hotels’ environment protection program

If you travel a bit and stay in hotels you will have for sure noticed that most hotels around the world seem to have become environment aware.

Invariably it seems, you now found in hotel rooms a little sign, of one form or another, inviting you to help the hotel protect the environment by reusing your towels from one night to the next. In an effort to convince customers the sign never fails to explain how much laundry hotels make every day, and how the tons of water and detergents being used over time adversely impact the environment.

I’m actually completely fine with reusing my towel. Without waiting for hotels to educate me on the necessity to spare our environment as much as possible, I have always thought it was a complete waste to change my towel every day. This, along with the systematic change of the soap bar, has always annoyed me actually.

So I’m glad there is now a simple way to communicate my preference as to when to change my towel based on the very simple convention being typically used: towel on the floor means “please, change my towel”, towel on the hanger means “I’ll reuse that towel, thanks”. I did notice that sometimes it still gets changed even when I don’t leave it on the floor but it seems to work for the most part.

Now, despite this improvement, I’m still annoyed. The reason for this is that hotels aren’t being honest with us. I think hotels are using our willingness to spare the environment not so much to protect the environment but primarily to increase their profit.

This sentiment is ever so reinforced when in the very same hotels I find that they use disposable dishware in the breakfast room. How come they aren’t concerned about the environmental impact of throwing away tons of plastic utensils, paper cups, and styrofoam plates? They certainly know that this has a terrible impact on our environment, maybe even more so than doing all their laundry. Most of the time they don’t even appear to recycle anything because all they provide is a single trash bin in which food remains and used disposable dishware pile up.

The only possible explanation for this inconsistency is that hotels don’t care that much about the environment. What they really care about is their bottom line. When they gain from the program, such as from doing less laundry, they are happy to do it, but if it’s cheaper to use disposable dishware than washing dishes every day they’ll put aside any consideration of environment protection to ensure greater profit.

Granted it is still better that they have some program rather than none, but if their sole interest was to save the environment they could go one step further and pass the cost saving they generate from doing less laundry onto customers in one form or another, donate the money to some environment protection program of one kind or another, or simply use the money to wash dishes! If anything, I believe this would constitute an additional incentive for customers to participate in the towel reuse program.

Instead, it is clear that hotels merely see these towel reuse programs as an opportunity to improve their public image by endorsing an environment friendly attitude all the while increasing their profit. Now, there is nothing wrong with companies trying to increase their profit, that’s what companies are expected to do, what’s wrong is being deceitful about it.

Good chuckle

Because I was one of the editors of the HTML 4 specification my name and former email address are in the related HTML4 DTD files.

The DTD files are the files containing the formal definition of the HTML language used for web pages. As such they often are referenced from web pages and, although it’s normally completely transparent to users, occasionally people ran into one of these files. When they see my name in there some of them assume I have something to do with the page they are dealing with.

Usually, the consequences are rather mundane. The most common case is when they are facing some technical difficulty and they just send me (and my co-editors) an email asking for help. I’m used to that and these messages don’t surprise me anymore.

On the other hand, I was not prepared for the one I recently received. Below is the top portion of it.

From: Nancy ****

To: ‘RITA’; ’sales@ ****’; ‘lehors@w3.org’

Cc: ‘robert@ ****’; ‘dsr@w3.org’; ‘ij@w3.org’

Subject: RE: status call this morning

Dave Raggett, Arnaud Le Hors, Ian Jacobs , RITA, ROBERT,

ATTACHED IS A COPY OF MY BANK STATEMENT PROVING THAT I PAID FOR THE MIRROR 38917***.VIA PAYPAL . I STILL HAVE NOT RECEVED IT AND IT HAS SINCE BEEN 7 MONTHS. BELOW IS E-MAILS REGARDING THE MIRROR I PAID FOR.
IS THERE NOT ONE HONEST PERSON AMONGT ALL OF YOU? HOW IS THAT YOU STEAL FROM PEOPLE AND NOT HAVE A CONSCIENCE? I WILL KEEP REPORTING THIS INFORMATION UNTIL I GET SOME SATIFACTION.

Out of sympathy for “Nancy” and respect for the company this involved -which may very well be at fault but I’m not here to judge – I anonymized it a bit. Amazingly enough Nancy took the time to hide the balance amount from her attached bank statement but not her account number, address, etc.

This definitely beats every email I have ever received related to my involvement in HTML.