Your Grant in Review: The “Overambitious” StockCritique

Gerty-Z has a post up musing on the tiredest of StockCritiques™…”The proposal is overambitious…”.
The overall conclusion of the post, and the ensuing comments, was basically that this is totally meaningless and a grant applicant should ignore it. As Comrade PhysioProf put it:

This is pointless. The “too ambitious”/”not ambitious enough” shitte is a red herring.

I agree that this can be a meaningless, throwaway for a reviewer to put in the grant critique. But this doesn’t exactly mean that it is totally meaningless and can be ignored with impunity.

Blog Business: Comments off for a few days

aaaghhhh, this is killing me. We have to take new commenting offline for a few days.

See Christina, see DrSkySkull.

Sorry.

Yes, it has to do with our little hosting problem and we are trying to relieve server burden for the time being. Comments are going to have to take the hit for now.

If you have a pressing need to comment, you can do it over at this OpenThread.

Open Comment Thread

We’re having a leetle trouble with server load over at Scientopia.

See Christina, see DrSkySkull.

So if there’s anything you have a pressing need to discuss you can do it here.

Jeremy Berg Is The Shizznitt!!11!!

In response to my request on his previous post plotting impact score versus percentile for hundreds of R01 grants asigned to NIGMS, Jeremy has now posted a similar scatterplot of grants considered in the January 2010 Council with the dots color coded to indicate whether they were funded:

In case you are feeling sorry for the poor fucks with outstanding percentile who didn’t get funded, Jeremy points out the following:

Notice that there is a small number of applications with percentile scores better than the 20th percentile for which awards have not been made. Most of these correspond to new (Type 1, not competing renewal) applications that are subject to the NIGMS Council’s funding decision guidelines for well-funded laboratories.