Publishing frenzy

When I was in school, which admittedly was more than half a life time ago, I had an English teacher called Dai Gealy. He was a small weasely fellow who was much more interested in talking about rugby than he was in teaching english. He had spent his entire life in the school, initially as a pupil and then as a teacher. For whatever reason he took a serious dislike to me and told me in no uncertain terms that my English was very poor and I would never amount to anything. He said so on several occasions and even blocked my path to study the humanities before I had personally decieded on a science track. As they say, that was then and this is now...

I just had to compile a summary of my academic output for 2008 which came to a total of 12 peer reviewed articles and numerous other bits and bobs. Twelve papers in a year is a personal record for me and brings my total to 75 in 17 years (or 20 depending on what you consider to be the start of the career). It should be said that I certainly didn’t write all of last years papers just by myself, 6 of them were part of a thematic set from a large EU funded project and the rest were written with various students and co-workers. However that tally still accounts for 15% of the total annual output from a University department which contains 110 researchers and PhD students. Some of those guys are co-authors on some of the papers but considering I only work there half time, it’s not bad going.

This year we have already had two papers published from Atle's Phd, one in AAPG and one in Petroleum GeoScience. In both those cases we got the front cover photo of the journal. The AAPG photo from which was taken by Simon (see below) shows use doing fieldwork in Canyonlands National Park in Utah - one of my favorite parts of the World. If you look really carefully at the photo you can just see me and the laser scanner on the rocks in the foreground in the bottom left corner - I made the front cover, fame at last!


On a non scientifc front UKC just published my ice climbing article "Feeding the Rat: fear and ice in western Norway" which was originally published on my blog a while back. It is illustrated with Mike Hutton's excellent photo of me from Bergsdalen.

I am certainly no poet laureate or Nobel novelist but I do think that Mr Gealy's total dismissal of my writing ability was perhaps a tad premature, but I guess that's why he spent his whole life in a small school in an obscure part of mid-Wales.