Back in business

Having said goodbye to family and friends after a wonderful holiday in South Africa, and then endured a 20-plus hour trip (two transit stops) back to Norway with minimal sleep, yesterday turned out to be a surprisingly good one for yours truly. First, I discovered that I had successfully passed the last of my mandatory PhD courses and, then, that my paper on electricity prices and water scarcity had been accepted for publication in Land Economics. And it turns out that I got a salary raise. Yeah, baby...

The paper (a slightly older version of which is available here) is my first proper publication and LE is a good level 2 scientific journal on the Norwegian ranking system, so I'm pretty chuffed. The revise and resubmit process itself has been both an enlightening and frustrating experience. Our two anonymous referees had a tendency to mix very insightful comments with some more pedantic and confusing ones. However, I imagine that is something every author feels and is most likely compounded by the time it takes to make even seemingly simple changes. There is no doubt that the paper has been much improved by the reviewers' input and I'm grateful for that.

I'll try to write up a short summary of it on the Recon Hub blog within the next few days ... And hopefully get some other stuff up here at The Corral as well, once I catch up with what's been happening in the blogosphere over the last few weeks.