Epic justification of own actions...

Two weeks ago I received an invitation to write (and submit) a review article from a journal which thematically is very relevant for my research. Getting invitations to submit review articles don't happen every day - especially not for academics relatively new to the game. The person inviting me did so because she really enjoyed an article we published last year on the very subject we're asked to write a review article on.

Long sentence bonanza right thurr.

Anyhoo; I've actually had to think long and hard about whether we should do it, for three reasons:

1. The deadline is March 1st, and considering that I'm on 50% leave, and that pretty much my entire reduced workload stems from not having time to do research or write articles, I'm not sure this is feasible. Sure; there'd be three other authors, but they've also got plenty of schtuff to do before March 1st. Including writing articles and teaching.
2. The impact factor of the journal in question is significantly lower than what we usually aim for with our work. Of course, a review article is more likely to get cited than a "regular" research article, but I'm not overly enthusiastic about the impact factor-dealie. We'd work just as hard writing this review as we would if the IF had been four times higher, so realistically speaking, this is time we could've spent getting manuscripts ready for high-impact journals.
3. A colleague and good friend of mine has had some "issues" with the publisher of said journal, as has his boss. The publishing house in question charges quite a lot for teh "privilege" of publishing articles there, despite their journals not exactly being PNAS. I am definitely not desperate enough to pay in order for an article to get published in a journal with an unimpressive impact factor.

Still; I can't believe I turned down an offer to write a review article.

Slideworld.net experiment

I recently received an invitation to put one of my articles on slideworld.net due to the inviter's claim that the contents in said article is of general interest to researchers in medical sciences. The page looks like a lo-rent TED.org, but what teh hell - I think I'm gonna give it a try and see if I can adapt Presentation Zen to this format. If it works, I massively increase my odds of getting citations for my work, and if it doesn't work, this might just count as "Popularization of Science", in which case it counts towards my standing on the department publication list. So it's all good.

I'll get in touch with my coauthors and see if we can make things happen.

The academic year 2009 in review

Being that the birth of my son completely overshadowed anything else in 2009, I'll roll with a summary of how things went academically. Starting with the mother of all academic yardsticks:

• Publications: Very happy with the 2009 results in this category - only one publication short of my all-time high. Still, a personal best is there either to reminisce about or to beat, and since I've only just began my academic career, I'll do my very best to beat this number in 2010. We even managed to sneak one manuscript past the nefarious third reviewer in a fairly flashy journal - although that technically happened this year. 2009 is also the year where I surpassed my MSc advisor with respect to number of published articles, and matched her h-index.
• Public speaking: Especially during the Fall semester, I really did my part of public speaking at conferences and such, which I really enjoy. If only it wasn't for the effing going-to-conference part of it, this would be a good full-time profession for me. I enjoy the making of presentations, the talking bit and the discussions, but I abhor the travel, I detest the sitting through of days worth of potentially interesting talks ruined by poor presentation technique, and I loathe the small-talk during lunches like: "So you're in Norway, huh? That's pretty cold, isn't it? And the roads are bad?"
• Presentation technique: Alternatively put; before and after Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds (buy the damn book already). This book really changed my outlook on how to prepare presentations, and I've seen how it can be applied to others as well - this stuff really works. Still; the limitation is how it can be implemented into teaching, seeing as how students expect to have slides available as handouts, which is sort of what Presentation Zen strives to avoid: the presentation as document syndrome. The solution might be to make additional handouts with the material from the slide written out, but that is a project which is going to take time (more time than what I've got available this semester), plus this already exists - it's called the freakin' textbook.
• Funding: Not such a banner year - gov't funding has gone WAY down, especially for fundamental science. Within the fundamental science programs, only about 7-8% of the applications get funded, which is laughable compared to other countries without petroleum reserves and our strong economy. In an effort not to come off as too bitter, I'll cut it short..

Here's to 2010 bringing bigger and better things.

Scientific peer review ca. 1945

FAN-freakin-tastic. Thanks to Dr. H. for the link



..it's ALWAYS the third reviewer :-)))

Academic Friday Nonsense from PhDComics.com

..Because Anders is a hyooge "Peanuts" mark for reasons unknown...

Any NMR people in the hizzouse?

PhDcomics hit the nail on the head yet again. I've seen my fair share of these. For schtuff that has to be handed down pretty much before the experiments have been completed and any sound conclusions can be drawn *cough*conference papers*cough*, I might even have perpetrated some of this..

When I was a grad student back in good ol' NC, my advisor was infamous for assigning tasks which "would only take 15 minutes - tops". One such 15 min task handed to me took me a good couple of months to complete, and I was not the record holder. By far. This particular "advisor trait" was something I didn't hand down to my own grad students, but recent events - and to my defense: instrument breakdowns - may prove otherwise. Dammit!

How true is this............do ya recognize the TV shows in question? I love how on CSI - be it the original, CSI Miami, CSI New York, CSI Rome Wisconsin, CSI Lincoln Nebraska or the upcoming CSI Trenton New Jersey - some head schnuck can wipe a Q-tip across the floor of a crime scene, hand it to a former street thug/fashion icon/supermodel/gambler/Navy SEAL/astronaut. Said glorified gofer will promptly don a lab coat over his or her Vera Wang ensemble, and science ensues. The Q-tip is dipped into a plethora of test tubes, each yielding a different color. The test tubes are subsequently spun down in a centrifuge and placed in some form of advanced instrumentation which invariably ends up being defined as a GC-MS. Ten seconds thereafter, they show the results which in addition to the info you would expect from the instrument in question also gives you a recent picture of the suspect, his address, favorite colour and high school yearbook entry. Best of all; the same CSI guy who swabbed the crime scene gets to arrest, prosecute and sentence the guy (invariably) they determine to be guilty. Exactly like real life, eh?

Today is a good day

..to paraphrase 'Cube. When I checked my email this morning, I noticed that among the messages was one with the ominuous header "Decision on manuscript ID ..." from the very journal to which I submitted a revised manuscript on Tuesday. Incidentally, this is the result of the ~week's worth of lab work I managed to carve out for myself in late October. Since this was a very quick decision on a revision, I had some trepidations, as this pretty much meant that either the Editor bought our rebuttals and expansions hook, line and sinker....or he didn't, in which case the email would be a Dear John letter.

Turns out it was the first alternative, and we got our manuscript accepted. Today is a good day, and I'm not the least bit fazed by the discovery that someone has quoted another of my articles and taken our conclusions completely out of context in order for our hard work to support their pedestrian study.

A lesson well learned

I'm in the process of repackaging a "damaged" manuscript for submission to a new journal. Which, in case you're not familiar with the publish-or-perish deal, means that the journal we originally opted for put the kibosh on our submission.

The most obvious problem (or rather "challenge", "issue" or even "learning opportunity") the manuscript suffered from was that it was too damn long, and structured more like a straight-up dissemination of data than a real story. Consequently, there were blocks of text with a significant degree of overlap.

Enter one of the co-authors. After having struggled a while with minor improvements, he (probably got fed up and) ixnayed the entire "Results" section, decided that the more immediately descriptive sections of the "Discussion" part should be stripped of interpretation and re-labeled as the new and improved "Results". He also marked every large paragraph with "Can this be condensed?".

I have to admit that I was quite hesitant and sceptical at first. Also, restructuring the manuscript in this manner took quite a lot of work.

However, the manuscript went from ~11 000 words to ~6 000 words! Plus; so far all indications from the co-authors who have read the new and improved version point to the manuscript being easier to read, with all of the relevant information and interpretations intact.

What teh hell was I doing when I wrote the first couple of drafts?

Myths about myths about peer review

I recently peeped in a post titled Three myths about scientific peer review on Michael Nielsen's blog (by way of a post on Kjerstin's blog). Now; Michael Nielsen is undoubtedly a very smart and knowledgeable guy, and I'm taking nothing away from his professional accomplishments - within his actual profession of theoretical physics and quantum computing (a self-professed "pioneer of quantum computing") - when I say that this particular post failed to impress me in a most spectacular manner. With his post, Nielsen aims to "debunk three widely-believed myths about peer review, myths which can derail sensible discussion of the future of peer review." The three myths are as follows:

Myth number 1: Scientists have always used peer review.
While many scientists believe that peer review has been widely employed since early in the history of science, this is false, and worse still, most scientific journals didn't routinely use peer review until the mid 20th century, Nielsen states. He then goes on to mention examples to "illustrate the point" (which point is meant to be illustrated remains somewhat unclear), including the fact that most of the Great Albert Einstein's papers did not pass through peer review. As a matter of fact, it might be that only one of his papers went through a peer -review process, and this review came back negative. Outraged, Einstein wrote a scathing letter to the editor of the journal, and submitted his work elsewhere.

A couple of things with this example. First of all; I don't recall having ever heard anyone use "Oh yeah? Well..scientists have ALWAYS used peer review" as an argument neither for not against peer review. As a matter of fact, I fail to see the merit of using such an argument. The fact that something has been around forever (even though it really hasn't in this case) hardly qualifies as the sole reason for anything.

Second; Albert Einstein was a rare scientific mind, in all likelihood ranking among the most influential scientists in our history. While I'm sure that many scientists would like to think that they are close to his league, the odds are overwhelmingly against them being anywhere near his level. "Peer" means "one that is of equal standing with another". Let me ask you a rhetorical question: Do you expect a peer review system to work particularly well for a singular mind and statistical outlier like Albert Einstein? Personally, I would prefer a system which works for the vast majority of submitted work and has a somewhat lower reliability for values with large deviations from the mean. Pretty much anyone working with "real" data would know that an algorithm which is meant to include extremities and outliers is little more than a model of noise.

Third; the reviewer was correct and Einstein was wrong in this (rare) instance. So; this is actually an example of the peer review process working like a charm - even the work of Albert Einstein could benefit from peer review (not that I'm expecting this to be a robust trend). Using Albert Einstein in an example about peer review....unimpressive.

Myth number 2: Peer review is reliable.
Here, Nielsen starts off with the time-tested "every scientist has gotten bad reviews" in a slightly new wrapping: "Every scientist has a story (or ten) about how they were poorly treated by peer review - the important paper that was unfairly rejected, or the silly editor who ignored their sage advice as a referee. Despite this, many strongly presume that the system works “pretty well”, overall."

Ya think? Now; I have personally complained about - what I perceive to be - poor reviews on this blog. Funny thing is; I typically don't make a post every time I get solid, constructive feedback, which actually happens most of the time. I also tend to make blog posts about things which are at least slightly outside of the norm. Moreover, if every scientist has a story about poor treatment, then that represents a very small fraction of the number of publications said scientist ought to have if he or she is anywhere close to productive. And you know what; every student has a tear-dripping story (or ten) about getting an undeservedly poor grade. Every actor or musician can give you a tale involving unfair reviews. Most people feel they pay too much tax, etc. You can't please everyone, and every system is flawed.

Nielsen goes on to say that there isn't much evidence to suggest that the peer review system "works pretty well", and describes a rather famous example of papers about organic superconductors by German physicist Jan Hendrik Schoen in 2000 and 2001 which were published (after passing peer review) in very prestigious journals. Eventually, the findings appeared too good to be true, and it turned out that much of Schoen's work was fraudulent. Natch, a bunch of his papers was retracted, and there was a big hubbub. I remember this very well; early in 2001 my Ph.D. advisor put me - the newest addition to his research group - on a project aiming to investigate surface-immobilized DNA structures for their possible use as superconductors, based on these papers. For me, that was a waste of time to the tune of two months. To the grad student initially assigned to the project, it was the final straw and exit grad school by way of M.Sc.

Sure; it was really bad that so many manuscripts slipped past the reviewers. Good job it was caught. You know what, though? It wouldn't have caused a big stir unless such a slip-up happened very rarely. Every time some douchebags like Sudbø, the cold fusion people*, or Schoen get caught, there is a big media production, and an outrage in the scientific community. This - to me - is comforting. Does it mean that the peer review system has flaws? Sure - plenty of them. However, this does not amount to much unless you've got an alternative which has been reliably documented to outperform the existing system. When that time comes, I'm all about the new system. I'm highly susceptible to facts and logic. Bandwagon-jumping - not so much.

Myth number 3: Peer review is the way we determine what's right and wrong in science.
I don't really know what to say about this alleged myth, as I've never heard or read about anyone using this one as an argument pro or con peer review either.

There's plenty of room for improvement when it comes to the peer review process. For example, it's pretty obvious trend that the time between submission and acceptance of a manuscript is significantly shorter when big-shot scientists are present on the author list. Any ol' WOS search can confirm this. To a certain extent, this is due to the fact that big-shot scientists are very good at what they do. However, the productivity of some of these prominent scientists, and the rather large number of members in their research groups, highly suggest that their direct involvement with at least some of the papers emanating from their groups is minimal. Still, reviewers might be more likely to give the benefit of the doubt to a paper from a demonstrably excellent scientist from an Ivy-League university than to a work by Dr. Carlos Bandidos from the Dept. of mexican arctic and alien studies, Universidad de mexico. Is it fair? Arguably not. Is this particular bug fixable? You betcha'. A double blind system where the authors don't know the identities of the reviewers and vice versa is used by some journals, and unless it's a very narrow field with few players, I believe this evens the playing ground. When I act as a reviewer, I don't look at the author list until after I've read the manuscript and made up my mind regarding the quality of the work. I must admit that I've been surprised on some occasions by the abysmal quality of manuscripts coming out of some pretty famous labs.

There are plenty of unsatisfactory aspects in the peer review system. However, I have yet to see a system which outperforms it.

*Edit: By "the cold fusion people" I am referring to the famous "work" of Fleischmann and Pons in the late 80's which didn't turn out to be reproducible in any way, shape or form.

If at first you don't succeed...

..so we just got informed that the deadline for submitting a revised version of a manuscript to a good journal is fast approaching, and that the Editor welcomed our submission provided we answered all the reviewers' comments and met all their demands.

This would've sounded real good if it wasn't for said demands requiring ALL of the experiments to be redone in order to perhaps gain some complementary information which would only be fit to include if it supported the already existing data. In case it didn't support the existing data, the additional technique in question would not be powerful enough to debunk existing data. If we re-work the data completely and remove 1/3 of the data set and scope, it STILL means way more work than what is sensible to put into a study which has proven to be highly reproducible both with respect to trends and absolute values.

So we're finding another journal. In a way, we're taking a page outta' the business philosophy of Scott Adams. Specifically, we've taken to heart a Sunday strip titled "Bob the dinosaur gives wedgies to corporate people who deserve it", where a "marketing genious" talking about market segmentation being key gets a wedgie and the message "Don't improve the product - find dumber customers."

Poster Layout Win

Got the poster back from the printer just now, and for once it came out completely ok, despite the terrible twins of Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Distiller doing their worst.

Now all I have to do is stand next to it for about an hour tomorrow

Poster Layout Fail

I suck at making posters. Two or three years ago I made a poster template, and I can't seem to break free from that design. Today, I've spent way more time than I anticipated trying to find some snappy poster designs I could "get inspired" by - even to the point where Sondre and myself went scouring through the corridors of other departments looking for kewl posters.

On the plus side, I'm not the only one suffering from some form of poster design disability - as a matter of fact, there's a lot of unimaginative and plain ugly out there in the world of posters. However, this hardly helps us escape from our current predicament. The poster I'm making needs to be shipped off to the printer on Monday at the latest, and I'm apparently unable to do anything with the actual content of the poster beyond a planning stage until the design is up and running to my liking.

"Let's attend this thing and register posters - that way we'll get something to hang in the corridors to advertise our research. Much better than a talk." Yeah right - that's some epic decision-making skills right there. Writing a paper? No problem. Making a talk/presentation? No problem. Combining these formats into the form of a poster which doesn't look like a cross between "Wilhelm's House of Equations" and "Sesame Street: Ernie does Science" - big f*ckin' problem.

No es f*ckin' bueno.

Great idea........

Say; how about if we start using another spreadsheet package so as to be more compliant with (some of) our collaborators, thus facilitating a free exchange of data and figures? Wouldn't that be an awesome idea?

Only if everyone else switch to the software YOU'RE used to working with. Otherwise, a theoretically good idea turns into a big pile of steaming, infested, 100%, money-back guarantee, grade A monkey crap.

...enabling facile exchange of deliverables, my butt!!!!!!!!!!

Dealing with reviewers - addendum

As important as what you write in response to what you perceive as unreasonable and pedantic reviewer comments is what you leave out. Make sure to scour your response letter for four-letter words, and pay particular attention to the final phrase before the standard finale which typically goes a little something like this:

"Sincerely,
Your Name Here".

Avoid ending that final sentence with "..and the horse you rode in on", "..or brake for you if you cross the road" or similar phrases. In general, it's better to write a separate letter if you feel the need to involve the reviewer's mother in any way, shape or form as part of your reply.

Dealing with reviewer comments

This is a recurring topic for most if not all actively publishing scientists, I wager. For all it's demonstrable benefits, the peer review system can feel like a crap shoot sometimes, wherein the outcome of the review process depends more on the identitis of the reviewers than on the quality - in the sense of impact factor - of the journal. Bluntly put, reviewer comments can be really annoying and unreasonable at times. Which is not to say that my reviewer comments don't come across as vexing and preposterous to the recipient authors, of course. Still; I have compiled a mental note of what I personally feel constitutes purely annoying and unreasonable from my own experiences, and I try to make sure that I never include these types of comments or demands whenever I review a manuscript, and the list is ever-growing.

Whenever your results contradict earlier findings of other authors, or alternatively if your proposed mechanism deviates from what is accepted, by which I mean published in peer-reviewed journals, the probability of encountering a variation on the following Catch-22 reviewer comment is high: "The data/mechanism in section XY of the manuscript contradicts earlier findings on similar systems reported by D. Ouchebag et al. Please provide either direct experimental evidence or supporting literature for these data/this claim."

Already published data has by definition more credibility because the work in question has passed through the rigors of peer review. Your manuscript currently under reviewer scrutiny has not, and thus it's particularly difficult to get something published if it conflicts with earlier reports, despite the fact that a) earlier reports might be erroneous due to substandard equipment or analytical techniques, b) although the vast majority of said published work could be top-notch, the particular section or even paragraph contradicting your findings could be substandard, and c) new data/mechanisms/etc. replacing old hypotheses is how science is supposed to progress, dammit. Of course, the aforementioned discussion holds true with the caveat that your research is valid, your data reproducible and your discussions/conclusions sound. Without this trifecta, you're just another windbag Don Quixote.

The problem with this particular reviewer comment then becomes obvious within the context that many molecular mechanisms and such can only be addressed indirectly, and obtaining direct evidence could be somewhere between problematic and impossible, often closer to the latter. If so, you're left with the conclusion that if something is on the interweb, it's true. Which is somewhat suspect.

So what does one do? Include more random paragraphs in manuscripts for purposes of later citing, thus beating the system but violating ethical codes? Make an entry in Wikipedia for your obscure topic and refer to that? Or simply live with the fact that publising results which are not in complete agreement with other work is much harder than it perhaps ought to be.

On a related note, I've noticed that on the occasions I get poor marks for language or "clarity of presentation", the reviewer writes his comments in the most epic broken English imaginable for someone with a PhD who supposedly writes and publishes peer-reviewed research.

Good news/Bad news duality

Sometimes you have the distinct feeling that when some cool opportunity comes along in your professional life, there's a catch of at least equal magnitude. Recently, I was headhunted by a prestigious British university to fill a faculty position at a newly established institution of higher learning. The start-up packages were great, buildings and labs were brand new, and the salary they offered at this new university was - well - significantly higher than what I have now. Several other faculty members at my department were also contacted. The catch: This newly started university was in Saudi-freakin'-Arabia, and the London university in question had been commisioned with finding suitable candidates. Apart from this tiny detail, everything about the offer was both legit and good. Pretty big for a detail, though.

Yesterday, I got an invitation letter to join the Editorial Board of a scientific journal within my field. That's really cool for someone as fresh off the boat in the academic world as I am. So what was the catch this time? It is an open access journal, which for someone just starting up in academia means that it amounts to about as much on my CV as a photo of me in a do-rag and a sleeveless, white tux Hulk Hogan style. Not that such photos exist.

Actually; considering that being a member of the editorial board of a journal with no impact factor entails quite a lot of work without any upside, I think those photos might do my career more good than said offer.

Why do I never learn?

I'm in the very final stages of putting together a what's hopefully the penultimate version of a manuscript, and now I've got to face up to the uncomfortable reality of having to conform my manuscript to the specifications of the journal template. This is precisely the type of jumping through hoops that I absolutely detest, because in doing so, I am not learning anything new, it does not add or subtract to the quality of what I've written, it does not in my opinion facilitate better communication of the results and arguments contained in the document. It is nothing but time-consuming, mind-numbing, soul-draining nonsense.

The astute reader might now wonder - why didn't I just start writing the manuscript using the template, then I wouldn't have to worry about this nonsense, and it would save time, effort and frustrations? Not a bad question at all, and I'm presently asking myself the same. As a matter of fact, during grad school my US advisors encouraged us to do just that, and I believe most of my fellow students complied.

So what kind of moron am I not to grasp this concept? The kind of moron who's tried that approach on several occasions and was left holding the bag because a) it's not exactly uncommon to start out writing the manuscript with one journal in mind, only to find a better suited journal as the document really starts to take shape, and b) some of these journals are infamous for frequently altering their templates. Both a) and b) have happened to me - scenario a) has admittedly occurred more times - and so I'm sticking to using a standard double-spaced Word document and EndNote.

However; presently, the reasoning underlying this allegedly flexible approach appears to be flawed, as I'm copying and pasting away into the new format. Damn!

Grant proposal = submitted

FINALLY I got the grant proposal submitted to the Research Council, with 3 hours and 5 minutes to spare until the deadline. I wasn't sure there for a while, seeing as how various forces of administrative and bureaucratic evils conspired to screw me over something fierce the last two days, but I made it. Due to grant application writing being an extreme sport, I even had to skip the talk by none other than James Watson this Monday, which would've been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but I made it.

Now all I've got to do over the next three weeks is grade 15 undergraduate exams and one phD special topic assignment, make status report in the form of PowerPoint presentation, prepare my role as administrator for PhD defense, update web page, complete and submit two research papers, grade MSc thesis, write annual report and relocate to another office.

Tis the Season

Specifically, 'tis the season for writing grant applications, bitterly regretting having an open-door policy for students cramming for the upcoming exam, trying to comply with faculty deadlines for submission of dissertation statements, and for getting all kinds of last-minute assignments dumped on me from people higher up on the academic totem pole.

I've got a love/hate relationship to writing grant proposals, mainly due to the fact that the deadlines from funding agencies always coincide with the deadlines for other annual or biannual major deadlines, partly because of the fact that I'm forced to jump through ever-increasing levels of beureaucratic hoops in order to submit the application, but also in some part because during the process I am forced to do that which I do not want to do, a.k.a. budget projections, and due to the inherent uncertainty of the process combined with the infrequent submission windows.

Dealing with student questions in the last two weeks before the exam is part of the job, and often it's even a rewarding part of it, when well-prepared students ask questions forcing you to think through a derivation or a concept from a new angle. There's also, however, the dealing with the students who've just started looking at old exam questions, not to mention just started browsing through the book, and are trying to make up for an entire semester in two weeks or less. I am very familiar with this process - as a matter of fact I typically waited until the exam date was much closer before I bothered studying (right, Anders?), but this strategy worked out pretty ok for me. Far be it from me to preach about study habits. However; if you're not doing too well grade-wise, the cramming approach might not be the way to go for you, is all I'm saying. Also - there IS such a thing as stupid questions when accounting for circumstances and expected background.

In other news, pro wrestling is choreographed, the Atkins, ketosis and other lo-to-no carb diets are REALLY bad for yo' health, Clapton is the most overrated guitarist of all time and Elvis doesn't share a studio apartment with James Dean and Jimi Hendrix on the mothership behind the comet from the Planet Niburu...

Now it's back to looking at those budget projections, dammit!

The best laid plans....

It happened again. A study which originally was planned to result in a short article has now morphed into a 10,000+ word fiesta. But then we got some interesting results and decided to investigate some additional effects, etc., and before we knew it, the data set was too large to be contained within the original scope. Luckily we're only weeks away from submitting it to one of the better journals within or close to my discipline, but it's been a far longer journey than what I anticipated.

"Yeah; we'll just do this short study over summer and get it into the journal quickly, bro"....yeah right. I'm on the verge of accepting that I've got close to zero possibility of predicting within three months (or worse) how long a particular study is going to take from start of execution to finished manuscript.

Reviewer comment poll

Lately I've had the misfortune of reviewing some manuscripts which are immaculate in their misrepresentation of data, economy of content and an understanding of the English language which would have relegated the authors to last place in a third-grade spelling bee.

Consequently I've been toying with a stock phrase for my reviewer comments - or rather a shorthand version of a response, really, and it goes a little something like this:

I could eat a large bowl of alphabet soup and crap out a better manuscript than what the authors have presumed to enclose.

So; what do you think? Should I start to use it in an official capacity, or is truth once again trumped by political correctness and the aspiration to approach mediocrity from below?