Sox ~ma

Here, Sox. I'll take some too, if y'all are just *giving it away*(/Clay Davis)

::wafts excellent writing ~ma toward AZ::

::wafts time-for-revision ~ma toward Gud::

I wish I could share my time with you, Gud.

Much ~ma Sox.

::sends ~ma to Erika & Gud a time-turner::

Thank you all ::hugs ~ma close::

Here's a little more, Sox.

And time for Gud.

Take all the ~ma you want, erika! I'll make more.

I don't know how to make time. Sorry, Gud.

COG 5.0 has been release. A bunch of bug fixes and some new features. I was going to call it 4.6, but this definitely was worthy of a major version number change. I sure hope the next round isn't as extensive. The story feels like it's grown up a lot since the original draft.

My paper has been accepted by the peer review process, provided I do some revisions. Most of the revisions strengthen the paper. There is one I will have to be very careful of to make sure it does not weaken it, and I can use some advice.

My paper basically is criticizing a proposal making 1) an overwhelming case that the proposal is unfair 2) making a case that the unfairness will very likely lead to actions that undermine the goal of the proposal.

Now there is a third point that I wanted to submit in a separate letter to the editor that they want me to integrate. The problem is that I think including it in the same work actually weakens the paper. My third point is a warning rather than a critique. Certain aspects of the proposal I'm criticizing lend themselves politically to weakening the goals of the proposal if improperly framed. Now one obvious response to this "OK, I won't frame the proposal that way. Thanks for the input." It is constructive criticism, and I don't think it really belongs in what is otherwise a demolition piece.

So what I'm thinking of doing is putting it at the beginning, and mention that it is the weakest critique and saying that I mention it only because the author has published this proposal several times without ever showing any awareness, and that it seems to suggest that the author has not thought through the implications of his own proposal. But that seems to be moving from a critique of an idea to a personal attack. I guess my problem is that I have two strong critiques to make. How do I include what is fairly weak tea as a critique without descending to personal nastiness or weakening the paper? I thought of moving this to the end, but I don't like to conclude a paper with its weakest point.

Maybe I should start by saying that unlike the rest of paper this is a constructive critique, dealing with flaws that can be fixed, whereas the rest of the paper is dealing with flaws that I think cannot be fixed? People will still wonder why I'm including a constructive criticism in paper where that is not the main point, but maybe that is lesser evil. Any thoughts would be welcome. You can see why I wanted to make this separate. Fixable problems are very different from problems fundamental to a proposal.