Re: [tlug] Journals, Authors and 'Free Peer Review'

[Benjamin Kowarsch <trijezdci@example.com>]

Hi

On 27 September 2018 at 17:05, Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com> wrote:

> Did you get the job?

No.  The back story is that my advisor was buddy-buddy with Nobelist
Ken Arrow and huge grants -- he'd fund really senior people for 8
weeks at an annual summer conference, to give you an idea.  So when he
said "you ought to interview Steve" they did.  But that was as far as
they were going to go, and this particular character decided to be a
jerk about it.

I didn't mean to imply that not getting the job was a reflection of your suitability.

I was thinking positive along the lines of had they offered you the job anyway

despite apparently picking apart some of your published work, it may have

been an indication that they didn't really find anything wrong with your work

but simply picked it apart to see how you would defend it.

If that had been the case, those articles would have actually contributed to

getting the job offer by providing discussion material for the interview.

But judging by your description of how the interview went, it seems not all

of the interviewers were as mature as I had assumed.

Good story!  There are so many like it about Einstein, though, I can't

be sure if I've seen it before.

There is a fake letter on faked University of Bern stationary that purports

to be the rejection letter sent to Einstein. It is circulating on the internet

every now and then and people always fall for it. It even has a faked

envelope with a USA postage stamp !!! And it's in English !!!

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/einstein-rejection-letter/

This is in itself a fun story, but every time this fake letter surfaces, there

are plenty of articles written that debunk it. And those often tell the

background story how Einstein had his first thesis rejected and the

second accepted.

Possibly you have come across one of those debunking stories before.

The backstory is also mentioned at:

http://www.einstein-website.de/z_biography/chronological_table.html 

 > When he applied for a position at Bern University, they rejected
 > the thesis he had submitted with his application.

Happened to a kohai of mine, now at Kobe.  They now accept theses
written in English, but at the time they made him translate to
Japanese, add a chapter, and pay to have 100 copies printed so they
could advertise it as a "book published by a University faculty
member". 0_0

:-O

Institutional plagiarism. Outrageous.

 > In those days, you needed a PhD from the university you were
 > teaching in order to be a professor there. Einstein had a PhD from
 > Zurich, but that was no good in Bern. It was thus customary to
 > submit a new PhD thesis along with applying for a professorship at
 > another university. The University of Bern rejected the first
 > thesis, so he had to submit another one, which was then accepted.

Either of them famous?  (If it works the way it does here, it's very
likely the first is much more widely known and cited! ;-)

Caltech has a page with the collected papers of Einstein at:

http://www.einstein.caltech.edu/what/index.html

regards

benjamin