Wellington curiosities

Here are a few interesting curiosities from Wellington (NZ).

The most interesting is the "Tsunami safe zone" picture taken in the outskirts of Wellington. Have "we" not learned that sometimes nature stills surprises us. Take for instance the incident at Fukushima, engineers readied the structures for handling a large magnitude earthquake and they indeed sustained the earthquake with minimal damage, now what they did not prepare for was the event of tsunami as large as the one that eventually roamed the east coast of Japan. There is no such things as a "safe" zone, a smaller likelihood of the zone being affected by a tsunami may be, but a possibility nonetheless...

The second a cute female figure for walking close to the Wellington Parliament. Not sure why is that though...Interestingly the newer part of town has the traditional males figurettes. 

Aussie pics

The long overdue pictures on Aussies lands...this ones are around Wollongong.

@ Symbio wildlife park

@ Bald Cliff

Sea Cliff Bridge

Interesting sign @ Sea cliff bridge

Academic publishing

Now that I have come closer to getting my degree I start realizing how the game is played in academia. You see, there is an enormous push to get the research work published. And get published, is not often enough, it should be a high impact factor journal.

And the really sad thing is, that it comes to a point that the quality of the research you do is measured by how many top publications you have...not to mention that is the strongest factor in getting a promotion or a position in an University.

And how do we get our work published...You send your findings that you have put into a nicer scholarly paper and after giving copyright to the journal you proposed to get published in, then qualify to have your paper reviewed. After that, reviewers can either decide if is quality stuff or not, and you get published or not. Now the bad part about this whole process is that we give free information, which comes from research often supported by state agencies. This information is in turn reviewed in a volunteering basis by the so called  the experts on the  field, and get this....The journal charges costly subscriptions to universities all around the world, that are the ones feeding the journal papers in the first place.... its ridiculous

I leave you with a citation by Antonio Panizzi (1836) a librarian of the British Museum, ‘I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, … of consulting the same authorities, … as the richest man in the kingdoms,’

http://gigaom.com/2011/08/30/so-when-does-academic-publishing-get-disrupted/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/free-science-one-paper-at-a-time-2/all/1

Australia House Engineering....

Interesting design to say the least... Found this one during a walk somewhere close to Kiama.  These Aussies are very practical, like this there is no need for garage....And the funny thing is, that this design is somewhat popular in this area, I reckon we can give them high marks for convenience, as for stability...welll...

Curious housing style, (near Kiama, 2012)

The i-decade

Getting closer to the end of the year it seems appropriate to discuss this nearly finished decade! I was just reading today an article in the Australian Newspaper today about it today, about the the dificulty of naming the past decade. The writter point of view was certainly interesting, she argued that mankind, and quite possibly very much including her, have surrounded ourselves with electronic devices, who can leave home for travel without the cellphone, i-pod, PDA, and list goes on. I particularly liked this phrase:

"And then, where would we be? Far less unique in all likelihood. And uncomfortably aware that the self is formed more by the connection to others than to a portable media device." by Helen Razer in Sydney Morning Herald

So among my new year resolutions are:
- Write more often in the blog!!
- Keep all the eletronic devices close to me, but keep in mind that social interaction is what trully defines who we are :)

Happy 2010

China in its best!!!! On the left, in a mountain and on the right on Great Wall at Badalin!

Lock your wishes

I have meaning to put this picture in a post a year ago, soon after my trip to China. Impressive it took me a year to publish it! This is from a mountain close to Xian called Huashan! Its is a beautiful mountain, and its trademark beside the beautiful landscape, are these locks I found while climbing! For each lock there is a wish, there are all kinds of wishes, but the romantic ones are the most common, you can even see some little hearts on it!! The others...My apologies my Chinese is a bit rusty... i have seen this kind of thing in Japan in those little wood pieces or in paper for Tanabata occasion but locks was the first! I strongly recommend a visit if you are ever in the neighborhood!

Academic food chain pyramid

Last week I came across the academic food chain pyramid...

The society much like the in the animal kingdom behaves in food chains pyramids... Well we are animals after all! Sometimes, the law of strongest does not apply to humans though, it might have worked in the stone age, but not anymore...Nowadays the law of the smartest that holds power and influence rules the food chain pyramid in the society!!

The academic world is no exception; here as well the rule of power determines who gets to be on top and on the different levels in the complex food chain system... So moving along to my case...I’m a student, literally a nobody, so I would expect to be on the top bottom of the pyramid, the one that everybody seems to own... But guess what, it turns out there is someone even standing below me, the undergraduate students...Yes even in the student universe there is a marked hierarchy.

To sum it up, my supervisors are my predators like the lion chasing after its prey (that would be me) and I just became a predator for the students standing below me... Because I don’t like to see myself as predator I think I would be a vegetarian, maybe kinda like the Bambi!!