Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

NIH takes a hard look at its grant system

Jeffrey Brainard takes an interesting perspective in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education on-line at the comprehensive review that is taking place within NIH on its granting system. The article is behind the firewall….here’s the key quote:

“Increasingly, reviewers are taking an adversarial stance — they think their role is to try to figure out how the applicant was trying to trick the government into giving them money,” said Keith R. Yamamoto, executive vice dean of the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine.

“That’s not exactly what we’re looking for in a healthy review endeavor,” said Mr. Yamamoto at an October meeting. He is a co-chairman of a working group overseeing the NIH’s evaluation of its peer-review process and a long-term member of a peer review panel.

Jim

Finishing up an NSF review panel

As always, it's been an interesting couple of days reviewing proposals
for the National Science Foundation. For me there is the additional
incentive of driving five minutes from home to get to the NSF here in
Arlington–a very short commute for Washington.

As we come to the end of November, the end of the Fall semester is
drawing near and with it, the opportunity to take time to think
strategically about where we are and where we are likely to go.
Certainly the uncertain state of the US economy is a factor. Likewise,
the urgent need of the National Capital Area for a dominant research
university of the caliber of say Penn, Chicago or Berkeley.

Jim

Bayh-Dole (British Version)

Financial Times’ Jonathan Guthrie waxes on the gulf between UK uber-scientists and their business counterparts. Not sure he’s right though. The best scientists think like an entrepreneur–just not with a dollar profit bottom-line.

Jim

Scientific writing

One of my students commented today in class on how hackneyed and boring scientific writing is (passive tense and all). I retorted that one might say the same thing about java code or C++, but we don’t because it’s understood that the rules and syntax are required to get the source code to compile. In fact source code that is considered aesthetically pleasing or beautiful gets its qualities, not from its “beauty of language” but rather from its clarity (documentation) and the underlying originality of the pseudo-code.

In the same way, scientific writing gets its beauty from an ability to convey scientific information (lit review, methods, results, discussion) in a clear fashion. The writing itself is not where the originality is. Rather, like iceberg lettuce (which is only a carrier for creamy salad dressing), scientific language is only a carrier for the underlying scientific expression.

Jim

Chronicle picks up the meme

This morning on-line: The Chronicle of Higher Education picks up the meme that mind-sciences is becoming mature and links to some very useful sites. If you have trouble linking, here’s the quote:

If you’re generally concerned about consciousness, check out MindPapers, a new online resource that bills itself as “A Bibliography of the Philosophy of the Mind and the Science of Consciousness.” It’s run by David Chalmers and David Bourget, of Australian National University, and boasts 18,329 entries, some of which are directly available.

Jim

Hamiltonian Blog

Check out Professor Paul So’s blog–only it’s about his new art space in DC on the historic U St. corridor, Hamiltonian Gallery. Paul is an esteemed senior faculty member at the Institute, while also a member of the Physics department. Who says science isn’t about art!

Jim

The decline of tenure track

A very interesting piece that my wife caught from the NY Times on the decline of the number of tenure track professors in the United States. I am concerned that the article misses the somewhat subtle distinction (at least in my mind) between “restricted” or “contract” full time professors and adjuncts.

Here’s the quote from the piece that gets at that classification question:

At some departments the proportion of faculty who are tenured is startlingly low. The psychology department at Florida International University in Miami has 2,400 undergraduate majors but only 19 tenured or tenure-track professors who teach, according to a department self-assessment. It is possible for a psychology major to graduate without taking a course with a full-time faculty member.

“We’re at a point where it is extreme,” said Suzanna Rose, a psychology professor who said she stepped down as department head in August, primarily because she could not hire as many tenure-track professors as she thought the department needed. “I’m just very concerned about the quality.”

Ronald Berkman, the provost at Florida International, disputed her numbers, saying the psychology department has 23 professors who are tenured or tenure track and 5 full-time teachers on contracts. The department is conducting a search for three more tenure-track professors, Dr. Berkman said.

Berkman, the provost, has a point: contract professors (who are full time) are getting added to the adjunct number which is then compared to the tenure-line number. In fact, the proper comparison should be between the number of adjuncts and the number of full-time professors (i.e. contract professors plus tenure-line).

Jim

Over the river and to the Woods…

This is the day when America seems to collectively travel in preparation for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving meal. We’re no exception: we head for the house at Wintergreen inside of the next hour, hopefully missing at least some of the traffic that will surely clog the interstate highways later this afternoon.

Among the things I give thanks for is the opportunity to lead an amazing institute for advanced study, where collegiality, an open mind and excellent research are in abundance. To all of my colleagues and readers, I wish all a very happy holiday.

Jim

Surfing and a shot at a Grand Unified Theory

A surfer (a sport I picked up actually on Cape Cod, not in California) claims to have solved the issue with gravity and a Grand Unified Theory.

Money quote from The New Scientist:

That hasn’t stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print archive this week (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770). By analysing the most elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered a relationship underlying all the universe’s particles and forces, including gravity – or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.

Pretty cool, even if it turns out to be a wrong turn.

Jim