What do researchers do?

Most of my friends (and maybe even my colleagues) don't have much idea of what I do day-to-day. That's the subject of this blog. Modern research is quantified in terms of published articles, but that forms just a small part of daily working life, and the process from conceiving an interesting question or idea to published article is a long and tortuous one. Often articles aren't published until months or years after the research was conducted, and so there is a time-lag between what appears in print and what the current focus of research is. By that time the initial excitement of pursuing novel work is a distant memory, having been supplanted by several rounds of peer review, revision and resubmission.

So this is an attempt to communicate what I am doing now, to talk about what I think's exciting this week (or this afternoon) and to show what being a researcher means on a daily basis.