What journals do you read?

As a scientist, one is defined by the kind of problems one works on, the conferences one attends, the journals one publishes in, and the journals one reads. All of these except the last are more or less publicly available information.

Only you know precisely which journals you choose to read, yet they're an essential part of your scientific identity. They determine the kind of new advances you're likely to be aware of and where your research may turn in the future.

I've made my Mendeley library public, so anyone can see in great detail not only what journals I read but which articles I read. But most of you are probably not interested in quite that level of detail, so here's a list of the journals I follow closely. I collect their RSS feeds (with Google Reader) and read at least the title of every article they publish. I've grouped them into 3 main categories, but otherwise they're in no particular order. Those listed in bold are journals where I have published; they also tend to be the journals most heavily represented in my Mendeley library.

Numerical Analysis and scientific computing:

• BIT Numerical Mathematics
• Journal of Scientific Computing
• SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing (SISC)
• SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis (SINUM)
• Mathematics of Computation
• Numerische Mathematik
• Applied Numerical Mathematics (APNUM)
• Computational Science and Discovery
• Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics
• Journal of Computational Physics (JCP)
• Computing in Science and Engineering (CiSE)
• International Journal of Numerical Methods in Fluids (IJNMF)
• IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis
• ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS)
• Computer Physics Communications
• Acta Numerica
• math.NA on ArXiv

 

I would add Communications in Computational Physics and Computational Methods in Applied Mathematics, but as far as I know they have no RSS feed.

Nonlinear waves:

• Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena
• Nonlinearity

 

Here I would add Communications in the Mathematical Sciences, which also has no RSS feed.

General applied math:

• SIAM Review
• SIAM Journal on Applied Math
• IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics

 

Although ArXiv isn't a journal, I've included it here. Indeed, I find useful articles in that feed much more often than for most of the listed journals.

What does your list look like?

Academic Work-Life Balance at KAUST

One of the great things about living at KAUST is that there's not much to do.

No, really. I mean it.

For me, one of the most pleasant parts of life on this tiny campus has been the lack of constant activity and busy-ness that surrounded me in Seattle. Like any small town, KAUST takes a slower, more casual approach to life.
That said, there's a danger to being an academic in a place like this. I love my work. Without the thousand constant distractions one finds elsewhere, it's easy to get completely lost in research -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And I believe that, except perhaps for short stints, and despite the fact that sometimes inspiration does strike at 2 AM, such obsession is not a good thing.
This tendency of mine isn't uncommon in academia; for a comical (un)celebration of it, see Uri Alon's Sundays at the lab. Indeed, many people seem to get the impression that you can't have a high-caliber academic research career without sacrificing your personal life, relationships, or sanity.
Though I'm still learning this dance, I can say that for me it's about balance: work hard, play hard, relax and sleep enough. How does one maintain that balance in the microcosm that is KAUST?
The work hard part comes easily enough. Outside of work, my two years here have been a journey toward doing fewer things, but better things with my time. Some of the things that have kept me on an even keel:

• Spending time with my family. This is the best part of the reduced busy-ness of KAUST. We all have more time for each other.
• Developing wonderful friendships. Living in a small community forces you to get to know people better. Surviving the initial chaos of living and working inside a construction site was a unique experience that forged some bonds of friendship that will last a lifetime.
• Starting to play music again. It's great to have a creative outlet that doesn't require the same kind of mental concentration as mathematics.
• Scuba diving, windsurfing, and yoga. You caught me -- that part about having nothing to do at KAUST wasn't exactly accurate. I grew up a thousand miles from the ocean and I'm discovering for the first time the benefits of living near the (warm!) sea.

Last but not least, I love to take quiet walks on the beach. These are a great way to reconnect with myself and what really matters.
Or to think up better numerical algorithms.
After all, a mathematician's mind is never that far from, well, mathematics.

The one thing I can't stand about blogger (and Google in general!)

Why, oh why does Google try to figure out what language I speak based on my IP rather than using my browser's language setting or my google account language? Any time I delete cookies and then go to blogger, I'm greeted by this:

The same goes for searching the web with Google -- it's always trying to send me to google.com.sa and give me search results in Arabic. Even if I type 'www.google.com' into the browser bar; it redirects me!
This even though I'm logged into my Google account, which specifies English as my native language:

It's maddening. And there are plenty of pages like this one on Google's own websites where people have pointed out the problem, but to no avail.

A tip for others who have this problem: I go to encrypted.google.com to search. That one's always in English (which also doesn't really make sense). I haven't found a good solution for Blogger, except to try all the available links until I get the right one. If this blog ever disappears, it's probably because I clicked 'flag this blog as abusive' by accident too many times.