FSP, we need to kick this arrant twaddle to the curb, not give it a fair hearing!

Female Science Professor has been posting on a specific area of career mentoring frequently expressed to new faculty as “don’t get to big for your britches, junior!”. It is a familiar theme of internal departmental advice and a not-infrequent StockCritique of NIH grant review as well. In her posts, FSP has been promulgating this sort of harmful, fake helpful career “advice” that makes my blood absolutely boil. In not just one but two consecutive posts!
Even the doyenne of prof-blogging needs to be taken to the woodshed now and again…

Counting up the NIH porkbarrel spending

writedit is astonished! A “bombshell” Policy Forum in Science details the porkbarrel politics of NIH grant funding and finds that from 83-02, anywhere from about 3 to 6% of NIH funding was directly attributable to political effect.
Politics and Funding in the U.S. Public Biomedical R&D System
Deepak Hegde and David C. Mowery
Science 19 December 2008:
Vol. 322. no. 5909, pp. 1797 – 1798
DOI: 10.1126/science.1158562
My more consistent readers (which apparently do not include writedit) will find this all unsurprising. It is really cool, however, to see some workup of numbers. You know I love that noise.