I’ve been dimly aware that physics in the UK was being hit hard by a financial crisis for a while now. It seemed to be a bit deeper than what people in other countries complain about, but I hadn’t given it much thought until I read this Physics World story on the latest cuts, which […]
Category: Funding
Poll: Cat Vacuuming
A purely hypothetical situation for today’s poll. Purely. You have agreed to read and review six grant proposals by Sunday. Today is Thursday, and you have not read them yet. What do you do?(poll) If anybody needs me, I’ll be in an undisclosed location not responding to email.
Total Proposal Security
The National Science Foundation uses a computerized proposal-and-report submission system called FastLane. When I first submitted a proposal, this required three things to log in: your last name, your Social Security number, and a password of your choice. Sometime in the last year, they stopped using the SSN, and switched to a randomly generated nine-digit […]
New Grants Program for Solar Energy
Whether because I’m a blogger, or because I’m a previous recipient of their money (I suspect the latter), I recently got email from the Research Corporation announcing their new Scialog 2009: Solar Energy Conversion program: Scialog will focus on funding early career scientists and building research teams to undertake groundbreaking studies in solar energy conversion. […]
Dinner with Martin Perl
Martin Perl, a 1995 Nobel laureate in Physics for the discovery of the tau lepton, was awarded an honorary degree yesterday at commencement. Perl actually has a significant Union connection– he started his career as a chemical engineer, and was working for GE making vacuum tubes when they sent him to take classes in calculus […]
Show Me the Pony
So, the President gave some sort of speech to a bunch of smart people yesterday (video, transcript), and hearts are a-flutter all over the science blogosphere, as President Obama promises great things for science: We double the budget of key agencies, including the National Science Foundation, a primary source of funding for academic research, and […]
Gravity Probe B Is in the Air
I no longer remember the context, but the Gravity Probe B experiment came up in discussion around the department last week, and nobody could really remember what the status of it was. It came up again during the “Physics: What We Don’t Understand” panel Saturday morning, where Geoff Landis was able to supply a few […]
Message from APS: Support Science Funding
The American Physical Society has sent out another of its email alerts encouraging people to write to Congress in support of more funding for science. Actually, they’re urging people to send two messages: a thank-you to Speaker Pelosi for the generous science funding in the House stimulus bill, and a letter to your Senators asking […]
With Advisors Like These, Who Needs Policy?
A few years ago, the after-dinner speaker at the DAMOP conference banquet was Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger. As I wrote at the time, I think it’s safe to say that he didn’t make a positive impression on the audience. It also sparked a rather lively discussion afterwards, that some people speculated was the reason […]
Marketing Science
Via FriendFeed, I came across an article by Deepak Singh on attention and science, which spins off a long rant by Kevin Kelly on the idea that Where ever attention flows, money will follow. Deepak writes: Attention can be driven by many mechanisms, marketing being the most effective one. The key is gaining sufficient mindshare, […]