Thursday

I like this Jonah Lehrer piece on mind wandering:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/the-importance-of-mind-wandering/
I'm sure I'm more productive when I have space to think purposelessly. That's when I see connections or when new thoughts pop up, sometimes really obvious ideas that I can't believe I've never thought about before. These days such moments are rare.

Downloaded Andy Haldane's Wincott lecture (http://www.wincott.co.uk/lecture.htm) which looks at the history of banking. Added to the pile of interesting things to read.

Productive morning. Amended my funding proposal after some very helpful feedback from a colleague - it's always very helpful to get comments, it's surprising how one can miss the obvious by having spent a lot of time on the detail. The costs need updating but our wonderful research manager will sort that out for me. Then I went through the latest version of the bid that the team have put together. Emails have been flying about with each of them making changes so I called a halt and said I would deal with the final version. Again, it's surprising how many small things they all managed to miss. A detailed application form is also required so I filled that in and sent it all off to the research manager and the chair of the Faculty grants panel. Our new system requires bids to be circulated for comment to be fed back via the chair. I do hope this process happens quickly!

An email from the editor of a journal saying she is retiring from the role. The journal was set up about 15 years ago in an attempt to foster links between academics and practitioners. My first ever academic publication appeared in it. The original editor was very entrepreneurial and also a very convivial chap - editorial dinners were great fun. But he decided that there was life beyond academia and left, handing over the task to his colleague. She managed to keep it going for a long time, published by her university which meant she did everything from soliciting papers to posting out each issue, and with very little support, until recently it was taken over by Elsevier. The message prompted me to invite her to give a seminar next semester as her research area is CSR and we have people interested in that area.

Another reference request and an email from the former student to say that she has applied to six universities, so I can expect four more! I didn't copy yesterday's so I had to reconstruct something suitable, remembering to save it for the future. More emails asking for information, like how I have I linked my research to my teaching in the last year. This is to tick a box for the annual review. Takes me several minutes to go through my diary and then find specific module numbers. Perhaps I'll keep a note of how many similar requests for information I receive. Or perhaps not: it might be depressing.

Finish the afternoon by catching up with some ICAEW requests - a quick review of an outline research proposal and preliminary comment, and some planning for the next occasion I visit Chartered Accountants Hall in two week's time.

Dentist at 8 am tomorrow - hope she doesn't batter me about too much as I'm planning to get on with chapter 6 afterwards.