The bulk of my day today was invested in conference planning. I was elected sometime back as a vice-chair of a division of a conference that we attend each year.

This means that in the summer I send out a call for papers. In the fall the papers role into my inbox. The scholarly work is then submitted to academics who read the papers under blind review, which is to say that the author never knows who the reviewer is and vice versa. The system generally works well, so long as you have enough reviewers. In this case I was fortunate.

So the reviews have come back and now I must determine the order of things for the subsequent conference. These papers go here, these go there and that sort of thing.

All of this being done under Outlook Web App, our new campus email platform, of which I am not a big fan. I’m sure others appreciate it more, but it has bugs — little tiny ants are crawling across my email — and the organization of it isn’t as intuitive to me as other email systems.

The archiving seems solid, and this is an important thing, though finding things at a glance is challenging. But, hey, at least I can use a cupcake theme! There is also a robot theme, cats, varying colors and other things. Microsoft Outlook could work on making the thing work in browsers — it tends to not be responsive to any clicks should it log out and force me to sign in again. That being too much to ask, they’ve offered me a nice leaf theme to run across the top of the page for autumn.

It is the little things.

Anyway, the conference paper scoring is done based on an intricate four point scoring technique. First authors are asked to evaluate the overall paper. Then seven separate criteria are pulled for individual scoring on a seven-point scale. After that comes a comparative evaluation of this paper next to other papers the reviewer has been asked to read. Also, the reviewer is asked for if and how the paper should be accepted into the program.

Doing this several times over for each paper, takes some time. And then each score must be evaluated. Then the numbers and results are triple-checked. After that the surviving submissions must be placed in some cogent order in the program. And then the format of the program must meet specific guidelines. The programmer must also get halfway clever with titles and then ensure that the various specific details are accommodated.

All of these little details take a while, and I was intent on making sure the numbers worked and everything lined up just so, no matter which way you considered the material. This is my first time to do one of these. Now I know why everyone wishes the new guy luck, and inches away if he starts asking too many questions.

That’s not true. People at conferences are generally very helpful. This is a neat little volunteer job because you meet even more people. It is good for me professionally and I read maybe a dozen more papers being submitted to this conference than I would have without the role. So I’ve enjoyed it. Now I can send the finish product off and move on to other projects. If I counted up the time I’ve invested in this particular task it would be close to a week, so far. Time well spent.

So I didn’t even leave my office for much of anything else today. Did see this story though, where we learn BP oil spill money is being spent on correcting a problem not in any way caused by the BP oil spill:

For the first time in a generation, Sand Island Lighthouse lives up to its name.

As of Monday afternoon, the lighthouse once again has an island of sand surrounding its base.

On Tuesday, a trio of bulldozers pushed sand pumping out of a big metal dredge pipe into a hill that rose about 8 feet above the surrounding sea. A team of surveyors staked out the contours of the still growing island, which will continue to increase in size for the next several weeks.

For decades, the lighthouse was a small island unto itself, a forlorn brick pinnacle perched atop a heap of rocks and concrete. Dredging of the Mobile Ship Channel had sliced through the natural sand delivery system that runs along the Alabama coast and prevented new sand from washing onto Sand Island.

Over time, the island — once large enough for the lighthouse keeper to graze a herd of cows — shrank beneath the waves. But now, thanks to $6 million in federal funding awarded in the early days of the BP oil spill, the island is back where it belongs.

This is an erosion issue, and new knowledge of hydrodynamics is supposedly being utilized to help keep the sand from being moved around by the nature currents in that area. But, still, if this manmade island disappears in the next few years — this sort of thing happens on the coast — it would be wasted money.

And, also, this on the ongoing saga of the new Alabama immigration law:

The Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told Congress Wednesday that her agency is not helping to implement Alabama’s immigration law.

In response to a question from U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., Secretary Janet Napolitano said the agency is instead working with the Justice Department in its legal challenge to the law.

As always on a divisive issue, the comments are especially insightful.

This evening I watched Captain America at the dollar theater. I was hoping for, as Claudia Puig wrote “A jaunty, retro style and stirring World War II story.” What I got was a polite mixture of Chris Barsanti’s “Little more than a dutiful origin story for a superhero” and a slight dash of Owen Gleiberman “Stolidly corny, old-fashioned pulp fun.”

But, then, I’m more interested here in the contemporary imagining of the 1940s — not enough took place in “New York” but rather in the woods of Austria, which doesn’t really say a lot more than “Trees!” I could care less about Hydra or the Red Skull character. The former has been done better in every incarnation and the latter should have been left in the comic books.

Let’s not even get into the “Look kids, steroids are OK if you’re heart is in the right place” subtext. I don’t care to read that deeply into this, though I’m sure some offended critic has. It doesn’t bother me, I’ve never been that impressionable, but it is in there.

So I’m left with those two bits at the end, the false finish and the post-credits tease. The best things these movies do is promote the next one — which is ingenious, mind you — meaning you’re paying to sit through the movie and wait for the next commercial. Why do we do that?

Also, I’m coming to the conclusion that Nick Fury is Han Solo. I don’t even know that character, as my comic book readings were limited, but I can see that the story without Fury is just OK. Everything seems to mean a little more when he’s in the shot.

Makes me worry about the Thor DVD waiting at home.