As you know I am not a super big fan of NIH grant review sentiments which boil down to “tut, tut, Dr. Junior Faculty, let’s not get too big for your britches. Try this small starter award and see how you do with that before you get to play with the big kids.”
I believe things like size of grant and number of grants (and relatedly, overall total direct costs) should be taken on a case by case basis. And I believe that modern “junior” faculty are pretty old, phenomenally broadly experienced and generally pretty capable compared to junior faculty minted in, say, the early to mid eighties.
The question of the day, however, has more to do with lab size and specifically to do with the number of academic trainees.
Is there a limit to the number of grad students, postdocs or grad students plus postdocs that most junior faculty should be training?
My gut take is “heck yes”. I don’t know that I’ve ever had to act up this. I can’t recall a time when I ever had to judge a R-mechanism or F-mechanism where the PI or supervisor (respectively) was seemingly overburdened with trainees. But my gut says that this is possible. There would be times where I might raise an eyebrow about how many concurrent trainees a junior (or senior, but that’s another argument) PI might be proposing to have. Whether that be due to taking a look at the “training environment” for a F32/F31 application or in looking at relative commitment levels for a new Rproposal there are seemingly times that this might come up. Conceivably.
My gut feeling on this is guided by my own experience which, as we know, is wildly out of touch with y’all.
We have had one or two conversations about what people think of as a small, medium or large lab. My takeaway from these is that people think a 6-7 person lab is average, medium, normal and basically expected value.
To me this is “on the larger side”.
I have run anywhere from 0-4 concurrent academic trainees and when I am at 4 postdocs I definitely feel a bit stretched.
I have been doing this gig for some time now. When I was a wee newbie PI I thought that two concurrent trainees was pretty much good. Three was not something that I thought was sustainable.
Whatcha think, Dear Reader?
Can most junior PIs handle 5 or more concurrent academic trainees? Should they just take as many as possible?
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*I solemnly swear this is not a troll to further complain about the training of too many PhDs.
Finishing projects
December 30, 2016
If you are paid by the taxpayers, or generous private philanthropists, of your country to do science, you owe them a product. An attempt to generate knowledge. This is one of the things that orients much of my professional behavior, as I think I make clear on this blog.
If you haven’t published your scientific work, it doesn’t exist. This is perhaps an excessive way to put it but I do think you should try to publish the work you accomplish with other people’s money.
Much of my irritation with the publication game, prestige chasing, delusions of complete stories, priority / scooping fears and competition for scarce funding resources can be traced back to these two orienting principles of mine.
My irritation with such things does not, however, keep them from influencing my career. It does not save me from being pressured not to give the funders their due.
It is not unusual for my lab, and I suspect many labs, to have thrown a fair amount of effort and resources into a set of investigations and to realize a lot more will be required to publish. “Required”, I should say because the threshold for publication is highly variable.
Do I throw the additional resources into an effort to save what is half or three-quarters of a paper? To make the project to date publishable? I mean, we already know the answer and it is less than earth shaking. It was a good thing to look into, of course. Years ago a study section of my peers told us so to the tune of a very low single digit percentile on a grant application. But now I know the answer and it probably doesn’t support a lot of follow-up work.
Our interests in the lab have moved along on several different directions. We have new funding and, always, always, future funding to pursue. Returning to the past is just a drag on the future, right?
I sometimes feel that nobody other than me is so stupid as to remember that I owe something. I was funded by other people’s money to follow a set of scientific inquiries into possible health implications of several things. I feel as though I should figure out how to publish the main thing(s) we learned. Even if that requires some additional studies be run to make something that I feel is already answered into something “publishable”.
First rule of Science Mentor Club
December 14, 2016
The very first rule of PI/mentorship is get your trainees first author publications.
This is the thing of biggest lasting career impact that you can determine almost with absolute control.
Yes, things happen but if you are not getting the vast majority of your trainees first author pubs you are screwing up as a mentor.
So. 2017 is about to start. Do you have a publication plan for all of your postdocs and later-stage graduate students?
Obviously I am in favor of active management of trainees’ publishing plans. I assume some favor a more hands-off approach?
“Let the postdoc figure it out” has an appeal. Makes them earn those pubs and sets them up for later hard times.
The problem is, if they fail to get a publication, or enough, their career takes a bad hit. So ability to grunt it out isn’t ever used.
Overtime rules
November 30, 2016
So. A federal judge* managed to put a hold on Obama’s move to increase the threshold for overtime exemption. Very likely any challenge to this will fail to succeed before a new Administration takes over the country. Most would bet there will be no backing for Obama’s plans under the new regime.
NIH is planning to steam ahead with their NRSA salary guidelines that met the Obama rule. Workplaces are left in a quandary. Many have announced their policies and issued notification of raises to some employees. Now they are not being forced to do so, at the last hour.
My HR department has signaled no recent changes in plans. Postdocs will get raises up to the Obama threshold. There are some other categories affected but I’ve seen no announcement of any hold on those plans either.
How about you folks? What are your various HR departments going to do in light of the de facto halt on Obama’s plans!
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*activist judge
Today in NIHGrant Special Flower Pleading
October 24, 2016
It started off with a tweet suggesting the NIH game is rigged (bigly) against a “solo theoretician”…
https://twitter.com/cryptogenomicon/status/789118235182526465
interesting. Then there was a perfectly valid observation about the way “productivity” is assessed without the all-important denominators of either people or grant funding:
https://twitter.com/cryptogenomicon/status/789124227706281984
good point. Then there was the reveal:
https://twitter.com/cryptogenomicon/status/789177870027329536
“It’s her first NIH application”.
HAHHAHHHAAA. AYFK? Are you new here? Yes. Noobs get hammered occasionally. They even get hammered with stock critique type of comments. But for goodness sake we cannot possible draw conclusions about whether “NIH grant review can handle a solo theoretician” from one bloody review!
This guy doubled down:
https://twitter.com/cryptogenomicon/status/789196033653780481
Right? A disappointing first grant review is going to “drive a talented theoretical physicist out of biology”. You can’t make this stuff up if you tried.
and tripled down:
https://twitter.com/cryptogenomicon/status/789208927904862209
See, it’s really, really special, this flower. And a given “line of critique” (aka, StockCritique of subfieldX or situationY) is totes only a problem in this one situation.
News friggin flash. The NIH grant getting game is not for the dilettante or the faint of heart. It takes work and it takes stamina. It takes a thick hide.
If you happen to get lucky with your first proposal, or if you bat higher than average in success rate, hey, bully for you. But this is not the average expected value across the breadth of the NIH.
And going around acting like you (or your buddies or mentees or departmentmates or collaborators) are special, and acting as though is a particular outrage and evidence of a broken system if you are not immediately awarded a grant on first try, well……it is kind of dickish.
There is a more important issue here and it is the mentoring of people that you wish to help become successful at winning NIH grant support. Especially when you know that what they do is perhaps a little outside of the mainstream for a given IC or any IC. Or for any study section that you are aware of.
In my opinion it is mentoring malpractice to stomp about agreeing that this shows the system is awful and that it will never fund them. Such a response actually encourages them to drop out because it makes the future seem hopeless. My opinion is that proper mentoring involves giving the noobs a realistic view of the system and a realistic view of how hard it is going to be to secure funding. And my view is that proper mentoring is encouraging them to take the right steps forward to enhance their chances. Read between the summary statement lines. Don’t get distracted with the StockCritiques that so infuriate you. Don’t use this one exemplar to go all nonlinear about the ErrorZ OF FACT and INCompETENtz reviewers and whatnot. Show the newcomer how to search RePORTER to find the closest funded stuff. Talk about study sections and FOA and Program Officers. Work the dang steps!
Potnia Theron was a lot nicer about this than I was.
That post also got me wandering back to an older post by boehninglab about being a Working Class Scientist. Which is an excellent read.
Query of the Day: Career Self-Awareness
October 24, 2016
Aptitude for different roles in academic science is a tricky business. Until a person has been serving in a particular capacity, we never really know how well they will do. Sometimes one is very surprised, on both the “more capable”and “unexpected disaster” fronts.
And yes, I am fully aware that Imposter Syndrome gets in the way of self-assessment.
I am also aware of the Peter Principle.
Nevertheless the question of the day is whether you think about those future roles that you might reasonably be considered to fill. Do you have a firm idea of your strengths and weaknesses as an academic/scientist? Are there certain roles you could never do, wouldn’t be good at? Are there other ones you just *know* are right for you if only given the chance?
I think that I do. At my stage, these next-steps are mostly leadership roles for which I am utterly unsuited. I know this about myself and there is no way I would pursue them or feel slighted if passed over for that behind-the-scenes grooming/encouraging process.
I see other people who I think are eminently suited to be leaders of larger collectives. I’ve been able to observe several people who ascended to power (ahem) from petty to very grand indeed. I think I know what sorts of people do well and I am not that. At all.
Of course this post isn’t really about me but rather about those that do not seem to be aware of themselves. I marvel at that phenotype that doesn’t seem to recognize their own skill set and the strengths and limits that they express.
This got me to pondering and of course I am now curious about your experience, Dear Reader.
Do you feel as though you have a good assessment of your suitability for various next-roles that might lie ahead of you?
NPR on trying to create DUI regulation for marijuana
September 6, 2016
NPR had a good segment on this today: The Difficulty Of Enforcing Laws Against Driving While High. Definitely well worth a listen.
I had a few reactions in a comment that ended up being post-length, so here you go.
The major discussion of the segment was two-fold and I think illustrates where policy based on the science can be helpful, even if only to point to what we need to know but do not at present.
The first point was that THC hangs around in the body for a very long time post-consumption, particularly in comparison with alcohol. Someone who is a long term chronic user can have blood THC levels that are…appreciable (no matter the particular threshold for presumed impairment, this is relevant). Some of the best data on this are from the laboratory of Marilyn Huestis when she was, gasp, an intramural investigator at NIDA! There are some attempts in the Huestis work to compare THC and metabolite ratios to determine recency of consumption-that’s a good direction. IMO.
The second argument was about behavioral tolerance. One of the scientist interviewed was quoted along the lines of saying the relationship between blood levels, repetitive use and actual impairment was more linear for alcohol than for THC. Pretty much. There is some evidence for substantial behavioral tolerance, meaning even when acutely intoxicated, the chronic user may have relatively preserved performance versus the noob. There’s a laboratory study here that makes the point fairly succinctly, even if the behavior itself isn’t that complex. As a counterpoint, this recent human study fails to confirm behavioral tolerance in an acute dosing study (see Fig 4A for baseline THC by frequency of use, btw). As that NPR piece noted, it would be very valuable to get some rapid field screen for THC/driving – relevant impairment on a tablet.
Nakamura reports on the ECR program
June 17, 2016
If I stroke out today it is all the fault of MorganPhD.
Jeffery Mervis continues with coverage of the NIH review situation as it pertains to the disparity for African-American PIs identified in 2011 (that’s five years and fifteen funding rounds ago, folks) by the Ginther report.
The main focus for this week is on the Early Career Reviewer program. As you will recall, this blog has advocated continually and consistently for the participation of more junior PIs on grant review panels.
The ECR program was created explicitly to deal with underrepresented groups. However, what happened is that there was immediate opposition which insisted that the ECR program had to be open to all junior faculty/applicants, regardless of representation in the NIH game.
One-quarter of researchers in ECR’s first cohort were from minority groups, he notes. “But as we’ve gone along, there are fewer underrepresented minorities coming into the pool.”
…
Minorities comprise only 13% of the roughly 5100 researchers accepted into the program (6% African-American and 7% Hispanic), a percentage that roughly matches their current representation on study sections.
Ok, but how have the ECR participants fared?
[Nakamura] said ECR alumni have been more than twice as successful as the typical new investigator in winning an R01 grant.
NIIIIIICE. Except they didn’t flog the data as hard as one might hope. This is against the entire NI (or ESI?) population.
The pool of successful ECR alumni includes those who revised their application, sometimes more than once, after getting feedback on a declined proposal. That extra step greatly improves the odds of winning a grant. In contrast, the researchers in the comparison group hadn’t gone through the resubmission process.
Not sure if this really means “hadn’t” or “hadn’t necessarily“. The latter makes more sense if they are just comparing to aggregate stats. CSR data miners would have had to work harder to get this isolated to those who hadn’t revised yet, and I suspect if they had gone to that effort, they could have presented the ESIs who had at least one revision under their belt. But what about the underrepresented group of PIs that are the focus of all this effort?
It’s also hard to interpret the fact that 18% of the successful ECRs were underrepresented minorities because NIH did not report the fraction of minorities among ECR alumni applicants. So it is not clear whether African-Americans participating in the program did any better than the cohort as a whole—suggesting that the program might begin to close the racial gap—or better than a comparable group of minority scientists who were not ECR alumni.
SERIOUSLY Richard Nakamura? You just didn’t happen to request your data miners do the most important analysis? How is this even possible?
How on earth can you not be keeping track of applicants to ECR, direct requests from SROs, response rate and subsequent grant and reviewing behavior? It is almost as if you want to look like you are doing something but have no interest in it being informative or in generating actionable intelligence.
Moving along, we get a further insight into Richard Nakamura and his position in this situation.
Nakamura worries that asking minority scientists to play a bigger role in NIH’s grantsmaking process could distract them from building up their lab, finding stable funding, and earning tenure. Serving on a study section, he says, means that “those individuals will have less time to write applications. So we need to strike the right balance.”
Paternalistic nonsense. The same thing that Scarpa tried to use to justify his purge of Assistant Professors from study sections. My answer is the same. Let them decide. For themselves. Assistant Professors and underrepresented PIs can decide for themselves if they are ready and able to take up a review opportunity when asked. Don’t decide, paternalistically, that you know best and will refrain from asking for their own good, Director Nakamura!
Fascinatingly, Mervis secured an opinion that echoes this. So Nakamura will surely be reading it:
Riggs, the only African-American in his department, thinks the program is too brief to help minority scientists truly become part of the mainstream, and may even exacerbate their sense of being marginalized.
“After I sat on the panel, I realized there was a real network that exists, and I wasn’t part of that network,” he says. “My comments as a reviewer weren’t taken as seriously. And the people who serve on these panels get really nervous about having people … that they don’t know, or who they think are not qualified, or who are not part of the establishment.”
If NIH “wants this to be real,” Riggs suggests having early-career researchers “serve as an ECR and then call them back in 2 years and have them serve a full cycle. I would have loved to do that.”
The person in the best position to decide what is good or bad for his or her career is the investigator themself.
This comment also speaks to my objection to the ECR as a baby-intro version of peer review. It isn’t necessary. I first participated on study section in my Asst Prof years as a regular ad hoc with a load of about six grants, iirc. Might have been 2 less than the experienced folks had but it was not a baby-trainee experience in the least. I was treated as a new reviewer, but that was about the extent of it. I thought I was taken seriously and did not feel patronized.
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Related Reading:
Toni Scarpa to leave CSR
More on one Scientific Society’s Response to the Scarpa Solicitation
Your Grant In Review: Junior Reviewers Are Too Focused on Details
The latest Open Mike blogpost from NIH Deputy Director for the OER, Mike Lauer, ventures into analysis of TheRealProblem at last.
The setup, in and of itself, is really good information.
We first looked at all research project grants (RPGs) funded between 2003 and 2015. For each year, we identified unique principal investigators who were named on at least one RPG award in that year. Figure 1 shows that the number of NIH-supported investigators has increased only slightly, and has remained fairly constant at about 27,500 over the past thirteen years.
Burn that one into your brain, people. There are about 27,500 unique PIs funded at any given time and this number has been rock steady for at least thirteen years. Sure, it is crazy-making stuff that they do not go back past the doubling interval to see what is really going on but hey, this is a significant improvement. At last the NIH is grappling with their enterprise by funded-investigators instead of funded-applications. This is a key addition and long, long overdue. I approve.
There are some related analyses from DataHound that lead into these considerations as well. I recommend you go back and read Longitudinal PI Analysis: Distributions, Mind the Gap and especially A longitudinal analysis of NIH R-Funded Investigators: 2006-2013. This latter one estimated a similar number of unique PIs but it also estimated the churn rate, that is, the number in each fiscal year that are new and the number who have left the funded-PI distribution (it was about 5,300 PIs per FY).
Back to Lauer’s post for the supplicant information that DataHound couldn’t get:
To determine how many unique researchers want to be funded, we identified unique applicants over 5-year windows. We chose to look at a multi-year window for two reasons: most research grants last for more than one year and most applicants submit applications over a period of time measured in years, not just 12 months, that may overlap with their periods of funding, if they are funded. Figure 2 shows our findings for applicants as well as awardees: the number of unique applicants has increased substantially, from about 60,000 investigators who had applied during the period from 1999 to 2003 to slightly less than 90,000 in who had applied during the period from 2011 to 2015.
The too-many-mouths problem is illustrated. Simply. Cleanly. We can speculate about various factors until the cows come home but this is IT.
Too Many Mouths At The Trough And Not Enough Slops.
The blogpost then goes on to calculate a Cumulative Investigator Rate which is basically how many PIs get funded over a 5 year interval out of those who wish to be funded. In 2003 it was 43% and this declined to 31% in 2015. This was for RPGs. If you limit to R01 only, the CIR goes from 45% to 34% over this interval of time. For R21s, the CIR was at 20% in 2003 and is down around 11% for 2015. Newsbreak: Funding rates for R21s are terrible, despite what you would imagine should be the case for this mechanism.
Now we get to the hard part. Having reviewed these data the person responsible for the entire Extramural Research enterprise of NIH boots the obvious. Hard. First, he tries to off load the responsibility by citing Kimble et al and Pickett et al. Then he basically endorses their red herring distractions (when it comes to this particular issue).
NIH leadership is currently engaged in efforts to explore which policies or policy options best assure efficient and sustainable funding given the current hypercompetitive environment. These efforts include funding opportunity announcements for R35 awards which focus on programs, rather than highly specific projects; new models for training graduate students and postdoctoral fellows; establishment of an office of workforce diversity;
Right? It’s right there in front of you, dude, and you can’t even say it as one of a list of possible suggestions.
We need to stop producing so many PhD scientists.
This is the obvious solution. It is the only thing that will have sustained and systematic effect, while retaining some thin vestige of decency towards the people who have already devoted years and decades to the NIH extramural enterprise.
Oh and don’t get me too wrong. From a personal perspective, clearly Lauer is not completely idiotic:
and even what we are doing here, namely drawing attention to numbers of unique investigators and applicants.
HAHAHHAHAHAAH. What a bureaucratic weasel. He sees it all right. He does. And he’s trying to wink it into the conversation without taking any responsibility whatsoever. I see you, man. I see you. Okay. I’ll take up the hard work for you.
We need to stop training so many PhDs. Now. Yesterday in fact. All of us. Stop pretending your high-falutin program gets to keep all their students and those inferior jerks, over there, need to close up shop. Significant reductions are called for.
Personally, I call for a complete moratorium on new PhD admits for 5 years.
Go.
Entitled to a Grant: What is fair?
May 2, 2016
https://twitter.com/andpru/status/727175979660120064
I am genuinely curious as to how you people see this. Is there any particular difference between people arguing that that acquisition of the first major grant award should be protected versus multiple award and the people arguing that acquisition of the first and third concurrent awards should be on an equal footing?
If we agree that NIH (or NSF or CIHR or whatever) grants are competitively awarded, it follows that nobody is actually entitled to a grant. And as far as I am aware, all major funding agencies operate in a way that states and demonstrates the truth of this statement.
Specifically in the NIH system, it is possible for the NIH officials to choose not to fund a grant proposal that gets the best possible score and glowing reviews during peer review. Heck, this could happen repeatedly for approximately the same project and the NIH could still choose not to fund it.
Nobody is entitled to a grant from the NIH. Nobody.
It is also the case that the NIH works very hard to ensure a certain amount of equal representation in their awarded grants. By geography (State and Congressional district), by PI characteristics of sex and prior NIH PIness, by topic domain (see the 28 ICs) or subdomain (see Division, Branches of the ICs. also RFAs), etc.
Does a lean to prioritize the award of a grant to those with no other major NIH support (and we’re not just talking the newcomers- plenty of well-experienced folks are getting special treatment because they have run out of other NIH grant support) have a justification?
Does the following graph, posted by Sally Rockey, the previous head of Extramural Research at the NIH make a difference?
This shows the percentage of all PIs in the NIH system for Fiscal Years 1986, 1998, 2004 (end of doubling) and 2009 who serve as PI on 1-8 Research Project Grants. In the latest data, 72.3% had only one R01 and 93% had 1 or 2 concurrent RPGs. There were 5.4% of the PIs that held 3 grants and 1.2% that held 4 grants. I just don’t see where shifting the 7% of 3+ concurrent awards into the 1-2 grant population is going to budge the needle on the perceived grant chances of those without any major NIH award. Yes, obviously there will be some folks funded who would otherwise not have been. Obviously. But if this is put through in a systematic way*, the first thing the current 3+ grant holders are going to do is stop putting in modular grants and max out their allowable 2 at $499,999 direct costs. Maybe some will even get Program permission to breach the $500,000 DC / y threshold. So there won’t be a direct shift of 7% of grants back into the 1-2 grant PI population.
There has been a small trend for PIs holding more grants concurrently from 1986 to the late naughties but this is undoubtedly down to the decreasing purchasing power of the modular-budget grant.
BRDPI.
I”ve taken their table of yearly adjustments and used those to calculate the increase necessary to keep pace with inflation (black bars) and the decrement in purchasing power (red bars). The starting point was the 2001 fiscal year (and the BRDPI spreadsheet is older so the 2011 BRDPI adjustment is predicted, rather than actual). As you can see, a full modular $250,000 year in 2011 has 69% of the purchasing power of that same award in 2001.
Without that factor, I’d say the relative proportions of PIs holding 1, 2, 3 etc grants would be even more similar across time than it already is.
So I come back to my original question. What is fair? What policies should the NIH or any broad governmental funding body adopt when it comes to distributing the grant wealth across laboratories? On what basis should they do this?
Fairness? Diversity of grant effort? PR/optics?
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*and let us face it, it is hugely unlikely that the entire NIH will put through a 2-grant cap without any exceptions. Even with considerable force and authority behind it, any such initiative is likely to be only partially successful in preventing 3+ grant PIs.
DISCLAIMER: As always, I am an interested party in these discussions. My lab’s grant fortunes are affected by broad sweeping policies that the NIH might choose to adopt or fail to adopt. You should always read my comments about the NIH grant game with this in mind.
Open Grantsmanship
April 27, 2016
The Ramirez Group is practicing open grantsmanship by posting “R01 Style” documents on a website. This is certainly a courageous move and one that is unusual for scientists. It is not so long ago that mid-to-senior level Principal Investigator types were absolutely dismayed to learn that CRISP, the forerunner to RePORTER, would hand over their funded grants’ abstract to anyone who wished to see it.
There are a number of interesting things here to consider. On the face of it, this responds to a plea that I’ve heard now and again for real actual sample grant materials. Those who are less well-surrounded by grant-writing types can obviously benefit from seeing how the rather dry instructions from NIH translate into actual working documents. Good stuff.
As we move through certain changes put in place by the NIH, even the well experienced folks can benefit from seeing how one person chooses to deal with the Authentication of Resources requirement or some such. Budgeting may be helpful for others. Ditto the Vertebrate Animals section.
There is the chance that this will work as Open Pre-Submission Peer Review for the Ramirez group as well. For example, I might observe that referring to Santa Cruz as the authoritative proof of authentic antibodies may not have the desired effect in all reviewers. This might then allow them to take a different approach to this section of the grant, avoiding the dangers of a reviewer that “heard SC antibodies are crap”.
But there are also drawbacks to this type of Open Science. In this case I might note that posting a Vertebrate Animals statement (or certain types of research protocol description) is just begging the AR wackaloons to make your life hell.
But there is another issue here that I think the Readers of this blog might want to dig into.
Priority claiming.
As I am wont to observe, the chances are high in the empirical sciences that if you have a good idea, someone else has had it as well. And if the ideas are good enough to shape into a grant proposal, someone else might think these thoughts too. And if the resulting application is a plan that will be competitive, well, it will have been shaped into a certain format space by the acquired wisdom that is poured into a grant proposal. So again, you are likely to have company.
Finally, we all know that the current NIH game means that each PI is submitting a LOT of proposals for research to the NIH.
All of this means that it is likely that if you have proposed a 5 year plan of research to the NIH someone else has already, or will soon, propose something that is a lot like it.
This is known.
It is also known that your chances of bringing your ideas to fruition (published papers) are a lot higher if you have grant support than if you do not. The other way to say this is that if you do not happen to get funded for this grant application, the chances that someone else will publish papers related to your shared ideas is higher.
In the broader sense this means that if you do not get the grant, the record will be less likely to credit you for having those ideas and brilliant insights that were key to the proposal.
So what to do? Well, you could always write Medical Hypotheses and review papers, sure. But these can be imprecise. They describe general hypotheses and predictions but….that’s about all.
It would be of more credit to you to lay out the way that you would actually test those hypotheses, is it not? In all of the brilliant experimental design elegance, key controls and fancy scientific approaches that are respected after the fact as amazing work. Maybe even with a little bit of preliminary evidence that you are on the right track, even if that evidence is far too limited to ever be published.
Enter the Open Grantsmanship ploy.
It is genius.
For two reasons.
First, of course, is pure priority claiming. If someone else gets “your” grant and publishes papers, you get to go around whining that you had the idea first. Sure, many people do this but you will have evidence.
Second, there is the subtle attempt to poison the waters for those other competitors’ applications. If you can get enough people in your subfield reading your Open Grant proposals then just maaaaaybe someone on a grant panel will remember this. And when a competing proposal is under review just maaaaaaybe they will say “hey, didn’t Ramirez Group propose this? maybe it isn’t so unique.”. Or maybe they will be predisposed to see that your approach is better and downgrade the proposal that is actually under review* accordingly. Perhaps your thin skin of preliminary data will be helpful in making that other proposal look bad. Etc.
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*oh, it happens. I have had review comments on my proposals that seemed weird until I became aware of other grant proposals that I know for certain sure couldn’t have been in the same round of review. It becomes clear in some cases that “why didn’t you do things this way” comments are because that other proposal did indeed do things that way.
Shorthand
April 22, 2016
Storyboard
Pretty data
N-up
Prove the hypothesis
Representative image
Trend for significance
Different subcultures of science may use certain phrases that send people in other traditions into paroxysms of critique.
Mostly it is because such phrasing can sound like bad science. As if the person using it doesn’t understand how dangerous and horrible their thinking is.
We’ve gone a few rounds over storyboarding and representative images in the past.
Today’s topic is “n-up”, which is deployed, I surmise, after examining a few results, replicates or subjects that look promising for what the lab would prefer to be so. It raises my hackles. It smells to me like a recipe for confirmation bias and false alarming. To me.
Apparently this is normal phrasing for other people and merely indicates the pilot study is complete?
How do you use the phrase?
It’s the pig-dog field scientists that are the problem
March 10, 2016
But clearly the laboratory based male scientists would never harass their female subordinates.
Field science is bad.
Lab science is good.
This is what the head of the Office of Extramural Research at the NIH seems to think.
The adults in the room
October 14, 2015
Do you want to talk about what a pleasure it was to see actual adults in the Democratic debate yesterday?
And about what a contrast it made with the preening, unserious clowns running for the Republican nomination?
My take is this: Hillary is the most Presidential of any candidate running….on either side and by a considerable margin. Bernie has the right policies. Clearly. And O’Malley made great strides in introducing himself to a national audience. His closing comment was really strong and you should check it out. Maybe the Dem’s bench isn’t empty* after all?
Second take: I am of the opinion this is the Republican’s election to lose. It just seems to me that enduring inability to see what Obama has accomplished (with Repubs holding one of his hands behind his back) will put another Democratic administration far behind in this race. No matter who the Democratic candidate is. Well, Bernie and Hillary gave me a little more hope last night. Decency may win out after all.
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*I still say Hillary and Bernie are too old and am disappointed there has not been a very deep bench on the Democratic side this cycle.
Glam cost
September 24, 2015
How much do you think it costs to generate the manuscript that is accepted for publication at your average Glam journal?
How do you align this with your views on fair distribution of research funding?
DrugMonkey 