ak35

Yes, I’m half French from my mom’s side, I grew-up in France, so I have no ``merit” for being fluent in French, but I have studied several foreign languages (German, Russian, Italian etc.) and each time I travel abroad, I learn the bare minimum to get by: it helps me, but more importantly I consider it basic politeness to master ``Hello/Please/Thank-You/How-are-you” rather than assume that every human speaks English (or worse: COMPLAIN if they don’t…)
Since I’ve moved to the US, my French has worsened esp since my husband and I only speak English to one another: I’m still fluent, but make spelling errors, forget some words etc. This made me reflect on some difficulties we would encounter e.g.
my husband has difficulties communicating with my French relatives and when we eventually have children we’ll need to make sure they grow up bilingual, otherwise they won’t be able to talk to their grand-mother !

More generally, why do I think that speaking French fluently is desirable ?
First, I must make it clear that I do not suffer from the delusion that French is the best/most-spoken/poetic/most-perfect language on earth. But I STRONGLY believe that:
(a) Learning is always worth it, incl a new language such as French.
(b) Mastering ANY new language is positive because then you’re more likely to learn more about its country’s culture, history, people etc. And once you get to know and appreciate a country a bit better, you feel more empathy than you would for a place you don’t know. In the case of French, English speakers learning French (esp. Americans) and French speakers learning English can only help both people to understand and RESPECT their many conflicting opinions ande values…

After 9/11 when the US invaded Irak, I got VERY ANGRY everytime an American would go on bashing France, saying stuff like ``If it weren’t for us during WW2, you’d be speaking German”.
First, the French-basher has done NOTHING because 99% of the time he’s too young to have fought WWII. Worse, the typical basher lives in the midwest or elsewhere in Suburbia and wouldn’t have the guts to go to New-York: I got married on the Empire State Building in the fall of 2001, our guests from NY from the East-Coast and from Europe showed up (some were afraid of Anthrax, bombs, airplanes etc. But they have conquered their fear). Our all Republican guests from suburbia or the midwest – those bashing France for not supporting the invasion of Iraq – never reached NY: they were scared !!!

And on the topic of WW2, the French collaboration government has much to be ashamed of. But my French relatives on the other hand were all in the French undergound, manufacturing and distributing explosives, attacking Nazi headquarters, publishing uncensored pamphlets, passing information to Great-Britain, hiding and helping Jewish families escape or hide with fake IDs. My great-grand-mother was jailed in 1940; my grand-mother was arrested with her fiance and her sister in June 1942: she saw her fiance executed as a ``terrorist”, and was then deported to Auschitz along with 230 women, 180 of which died of starvation/forced-labor in less than 5 months !

Don’t get me wrong: I am very grateful to the courageous soldiers who went thru hell on D-day, at the battle of Bastogne and who liberated Paris but it is likely that Germany would have lost the war without the Americans, perhaps it’d have been longer but Stalingrad was the key battle. Suffice it to compare US casualties (a few 100 000 deaths) and Russian casualties (20 MILLIONS dead i.e. 20 000 000. That’s a conservative estimate and still 40 times more than the US !

So please learn French, just learn in general, because ignorance literally kills

I’m doing a PhD (Computer Science).
Very early on, I had the writing bug: the urge to submit research papers to peer-reviewed conferences.

Conferences are much more fun than journal articles or book chapter because you get to travel!

And getting peer-reviewed publications is much easier than it seems, esp. in `non hard-science’ fields. By that I mean pretty much all humanities, psychology, computer science etc. (roughly most fields except maths, physics and a few others).

Basically, it is a learnt skill: look at the existing papers for the field you want to publish in and go for it, imitating the writing style as much as possible.

A few rules I found helpful:
1-Forget any considerations about the worthiness of your contribution. Really, that’s the reviewers’ job !
2- Don’t be a perfectionist: there are no perfect publications! Even novels printed in large numbers still contain a few typos or spelling errors! Also remember that the majority of scientific publications are written and reviewed by non-native English speakers (this holds for ALL international conferences)!!!
3- Your first article will suck: get over it because Practice makes perfect (well, not quite… but it yields visible improvements)
4- Do not take rejection personnally: when you submit a paper it will either be accepted or rejected. In the latter case, use the reviewers’ comments (even `weird’ or plain nasty comments may help determine what the reader did not understand, which means you have to write the next version more clearly)
5- See it as a lottery: the more papers you submit, the better your odds of getting in ! And don’t get hung-up on the reputation of a conference: I’ve had paper rejected by minor local conferences accepted at the same time at prestigious international ones.
6- CITE RELATED WORK. That’s the number 1 problem for most papers: not knowing the state of the art, and re-inventing the wheel. Not to mention that reviewers don’t like it much when they read something closely related to their work which doesn’t acknowledge their contribution.

Of course, the best time is the first time one of your articles gets accepted, you see the final version in the conference proceedings side-by-side with reputable researchers, you attend the conference (hopefully in a fun place), you make your first presentation in front of an audience with butterflies in your stomach. And afterwards, you feel a huge relief !

But as the process repeats itself, like evrything else it becomes a routine. Once you establish your publishing rythm - whether it is one or ten papers a year - the excitement diminishes over time. Even the part about traveling to fun, exotic places: sure, it’s great to get to visit Japan for free, but not all conferences are in exotic fun places. If it’s your 5th trip of the year, you seriously start dreading airport security nonsense, jet-lag etc. and catch yourself thinking: ``wouldn’t I rather spend a vacation with my spouse or family? After all, nothing but money prevents me from taking such as vacation in Japan …”.

So I guess it’s a delicate equilibrium: it’s fun to experience having your ideas or work published,and to receive feedback, but viewed from the inside, it is highly over-rated !!!
Esp. feedback: the sad truth is that the more specialized the topic, the fewer people will have a clue, and even less than that the desire to give you constructive feedback. An overwhelming majority of researchers have the same priority list of interesting publications: their pet project, their own publications, and possibly the publications which somehow cites/discusses their own. Simple.

I suppose you can still brag about your publications if you’re so enclined,
but - contrary to traveling, diving and many other activities - bragging does not bring me much satisfaction.

If you write a novel, at least you have the satisfaction of entertaining a possibly wide-audience… not so for scientific/technical writing.

Some of my colleagues even publish just because they must for ex to get tenure: their paper gets in, and they hate leaving their family to attend the conference and present their work, it’s just a professional obligation (think ``flight attendant”).

I tried diving on a trip in Belize,
and re-discovered genuine happiness !

I’m not particularly fit: overweight, smoke,
don’t exercise regularly.
Yet, underwater, it’s magic !

Given how comfortable I was,
the instructor suggested I pass the full open-water certification. There was a small problem though: it was the end of our trip and we only had 3 days left …
Yet, I found motivation and energy that I thought I was incapable of: crammed the dvd, textbook and classroom material for the written test well into the night (and got a perfect score), got up at 6 a.m. to attend my `shallow-water’ training, until the morning before our departure, where I completed my open water check-out dives.
My proudest achievement for 2005, by far !!!

And a rewarding one too: this year, exactly one year after I obtained my certification, we went on a month-long diving trip
and passed our advanced-open-water-certification, which was a LOT OF FUN ! Can’t wait to go diving again !

So if diving is on your wish list: JUST DO IT !!!
As long as you’re comfortable in the water ie. you can swim and you don’t panick, it’s easy, fun,
does not require rocket-science knowledge and is very safe at the ``recreational level” , as opposed to, say, deep technical diving, which is another beast altoghether, closer to beeing a cosmonaut than a recreational scuba diver.