In my experience, though, both as a reviewer and author, I have found this to be quite puzzling. I often find it very difficult to create an anonymous version of my own manuscripts. If I am going to remove every trace that could identify myself and my coauthors there wouldn’t be much left of the paper. One thing is to remove your own citations from the reference list, but in many cases then you may also remove the basis of what your whole argument is based on.

Another problem is if you have to remove information about the equipment you work with. For example: when writing a paper about some motion capture results, it would make sense to name the brand and type of motion capture system being used, as this may be vital for evaluating the quality of the data. The problem, of course, is that there is probably just a handful of music research groups in the world having e.g. a Qualisys or Xsens motion capture system.

Even though we managed to remove all names of people, equipment, location, etc., I think it still is quite simple to figure out who wrote the paper. A few searches on Google Scholar on similar topics usually reveal at least the research group, if not also the main author. As a reviewer you are supposed to find out about the novelty of the manuscript, and that basically means that you will have to track down the author and the author’s publication list first.

All in all, I have a hard time seeing that double blind peer reviewing is a good thing. In my experience it just makes it more difficult to authors to finalize their manuscripts, and it makes the reviewer having to play detective for a few minutes. I guess it might work in some large fields with lots of researchers, but in the world of music cognition and technology I don’t really see the need for it.

For more arguments against double blind peer reviewing, check out this blog post by Luc Devroye, a discussion on Wikipedia and an editorial at Nature.

• Sound theory 1 (in English)
• Sound analysis (in Norwegian, together with Rolf Inge Godøy)

In both courses I use Pure Data (PD) for demonstrating various interesting phenomena (additive synthesis, beating, critical bands, etc.), and the students also get various assignments to explore such things themselves. There are several PD introduction videos on YouTube in English, but I found that it could be useful to also have something in Norwegian. So far I have made three screencasts going through the basics of PD and sound synthesis:

I have written about interdisciplinarity on this blog several times before (here, here and here). In the new article I use interdisciplinarity to not only refer to adjacent scientific disciplines, but in a more general sense. I use some of my own work as the point of departure: the video analysis work that ended up as the Musical Gestures Toolbox started out as an artistic project, was later developed within my scientific PhD work, and is now being used for both artistic projects (e.g. by Victoria Johnson), research on ADHD (Terje Sagvolden’s group) and clinical use in the analysis of children with cerebral palsy (Lars Adde).

Unfortunately, getting support (economically, administrative, etc.) for such interdisciplinary research (including both scientific and artistic research) is currently not possible in Norway. In fact, the Norwegian Research Council does not fund artistic research at all, and the Research fellowship in the arts program does not fund scientific research.

In the end of my feature article I suggest three points to the Norwegian universities and the Norwegian Research Council for how to improve the conditions for interdisciplinary research in Norway:

1. Set up truly interdisciplinary committees for all research funding
2. Open for projects that contain both scientific and artistic research
3. Set aside 10% of all research funding (in all disciplines) to be used for artistic work

MS Works used to be a quite widespread office suite that came with a lot of machines back in those days, and it is actually still in sale. Therefore you would imagine that MS programs should be able to open files from previous versions. Strangely enough, I discovered that MS spreadsheet flagship Excel can’t open the old MS Works files.

I haven’t tried the Windows version of Excel yet, but if that doesn’t work I guess I have to start up an old computer that may have MS Works installed (or pay for some conversion program). Yet another reason for working with open file formats.

I just had to help out in trying to create a large document based on 30+ individual documents in MS Word. Word offers the possibility of creating a ”master document” for embedding multiple individual documents. This (in theory) makes it possible to create one large table of contents, internal links, etc. However, in practice this turns out to be a nightmare of dimensions: styles change, links disappear or stop working, the table of contents finds most things, but with wrong styles, page numbers don’t get updated properly…

I’m glad I don’t rely on MS Word for such things, and I feel sorry for everyone that has to go through so much pain to create a large and complex document. Unfortunately, the rather steep learning curve of LaTeX makes it difficult to suggest it to people that are not inclined for writing code themselves. But what other options are there? OpenOffice might work a little better, but it is based on the same idea of mixing content and layout as Word. Layout programs are usually not particularly good for writing text, not to say footnotes, bibliography, etc. Scrivener is good for structuring large portions of text, but lacks most other thing required in scientific writing (and it is OSX only). Adobe FrameMaker could have been a solution, had it not been Windows only and fairly costly.

Any suggestions for other software would be welcome, and I will pass them on to the next unfortunate Word user I meet.

These types of links have been around for some years, but many academic institutions seem to have been very reluctant when it comes to jump on the web 2.0 bandwagon. I don’t think adding a facebook/twitter button will change the world, but I highly support all initiatives that make universities more open.

Happy commenting!

Anyways, it is super easy to combine files: Just open in Preview and drag the icon(s) from one file on top of the icon in another (see demonstration).

Looking around for this solution I also discovered the free iCombiner application, which may be even easier to work with, and especially when having many PDF files that I want to combine (e.g. lots of chapters in a book).

So now I don’t really see any good reasons for upgrading my old Acrobat to a newer version any longer.