Krasnow growth

As we gathered for the annual holiday party and group photo earlier this week, I was struck by how much the Institute has grown over the past decade–there are so many Institute scientists, students and staff now, one faculty member pointed out that it’s no longer possible to even recognize everyone. That growth has manifested not only in people, but also in a host of other ways ranging from space, shared instrumentation, grants and published peer-review reports. Not to mention programs: it’s a true pleasure to interact with doctoral students from two programs–social complexity and neuroscience–as I walk around the Institute’s spaces.

Yes this growth brings with it real challenges. How do we manage the increased administrative work-load with an already over-worked staff? If budget permits, of course, we add folks, but those new individuals must be trained and that takes time–time that is already in short supply. At the same time, we are faced with the challenges of providing the shared instrumentation that is absolutely crucial to asking the scientific questions relevant to “mind sciences”. Finally, there is the critical task of building upon the critical mass of institute faculty with new faculty lines and (this is crucial) adequately resourcing those lines to be both market competitive and scientifically viable.

All of this brings me to the real challenge: developing an endowment for the Institute’s core activities (as distinct from those supported by research grants). An endowment which can supplement the state funds which we are generously provided by Mason and ultimately the Virginia tax-payer. To build that endowment will require a combination of support from individuals and foundations at least an order of magnitude beyond what we have been able to achieve since Mr. Krasnow’s founding bequest in 1990.

Building that endowment will require a compelling narrative. Part of the purpose of this blog has been to help me frame that narrative (over time) and I have found the comments from loyal readers to be of great usefulness in that process. Certainly our centrality within the new “Decade of the Mind” project should telegraph something about that nascent “elevator speech”. Stay tuned.

Jim

Two trends

The NIH internal review of how it gives grants out is out: among the key ideas: funding paradigm breaking research, funding more first-time investigators and telling people honestly when they have no chance ever of succeeding (on the basis of their scientific creativity or lack thereof).

Additionally, there’s the notion of how funding small science is changing–imagine a future where big science (think National Labs and huge well-established research teams) create the data sets which are then mined by small-scale individual PI’s using computational tools.

Jim

Dyslexia and business talent

Advisory Board member Tom West clued me in to the run on dyslexia stories in the media recently. Here’s today’s entry (also from the NY Times).

Money quote:

“We found that dyslexics who succeed had overcome an awful lot in their lives by developing compensatory skills,” Professor Logan said in an interview. “If you tell your friends and acquaintances that you plan to start a business, you’ll hear over and over, ‘It won’t work. It can’t be done.’ But dyslexics are extraordinarily creative about maneuvering their way around problems.”

Ipoding academic lectures and the role of NSF in the net

There are two excellent articles in today’s Sunday NY Times business section. The first by Anne Eisenberg is about using ipods in academic settings. This is an excellent idea that now goes beyond simply recording the video of the lecture and making it available (as in much of what’s on I-tunes U). Rather the software indexes every single word during the lecture and essentially creates a very sophisticated database of the content to go along with the video (and slides). Read it, I think this points the way to the future in academic education.

The second, by NY Times veteran John Markoff is about the history of the public-private partnership that birthed the modern commercial Internet twenty-years ago. Centered in Ann Arbor while I was in grad-school (an outfit called Merit with IBM and MCI as collaborators), it was an incredibly exciting time. I remember the first time I was able to send an email from Ann Arbor to Champaign–Urbana over the Internet, it seemed incredible. This was long before the web. It’s a history of a great success: read it also.

Jim

Snow in Washington DC

We had our first substantial snow of the season yesterday evening rush hour. Naturally, there were few salt trucks and plows–we’re not Chicago! I had the adventure of the month with my rear-wheel drive car–we took one of our job candidates to dinner, got stuck, subsequently the entire staff of the restaurant pushed us out (with the help of one of my faculty members and the job candidate). Ended up doing more 4-wheel skating than driving.

Jim

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