Away note

I’ll be traveling the next two weeks. First I’ll be going to a conference on “scholarly publishing” in the picturesque city of Tromsø. The “o” with the slash is Norwegian and the trip is going to beat my personal farthest-North record that is currently held by Reykjavik (or some village with an unpronouncable name a little North of that).

I don’t have the faintest clue why they invited me, to give a keynote lecture out of all things, in company of some Nobelprize winner. But I figured I’d go and tell them what’s going wrong with peer review, at least that will be entertaining. Thanks to a stomach bug that my husband brought back from India, by means of which I lost an estimated 800 pounds in 3 days, “tell them what's going wrong with peer review” is so far pretty much the whole plan for the lecture.

The week after I’ll be going to a workshop in Munich on the question “Why trust a theory?”. This event is organized by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, where I already attended an interesting workshop two years ago. This time the workshop is dedicated to the topics raised in Richard Dawid’s book “String Theory and the Scientific Method" which I reviewed here. The topic has since been a lot on my mind and I’m looking forward to the workshop.