VWXYNot? Comment(s) of the week:
Nina and Grant for the following exchange: Nina: "Life should be a conference, everyone wearing nametags all the time, with their first name, last name, nickname, country of origin and country of residence. Birthdate optional."
Grant: Nina, I’m sure tech types will suggest we’ll all be bumping cell phones to exchange names in a few years. (Eurgh.)
One more: you know that thing where the person can’t quite read your name tag and leans in close over your chest to read it…
Nina: "ok, how about tattooing your name onto your forehead?"
Grant: "How about a sub-dermal name implant invisible when not active that glows when triggered by trained neural signals beaming your name to the people opposite you?
Failing that we could all wear electrode scalp caps that carry a flip up sign… (Taking as my cue the brain-computer interfaces emotiv and others are marketing.)"
[NB as a chronic tartler, I approve of all the above methods]
Alyssa for "It’s cloudy again
We see it’s cold and dreary
But – we have windows!!!"
Ricardipus for "Bugger me, the grant’s
Finally done. Thank goodness.
Now back to fun stuff."
Bean-mom for "I just clicked on the article on circular RNAs–I’d seen the headline earlier but hadn’t yet read it–and just as I expected, I’m all WTF?! MicroRNAs, long non-coding RNAs, now we’ve got circular RNAs. . . I feel like someone should just write a review titled, “RNA: WTF?”"
Nina again for "edit: my advisor has improved his standing desk further by standing on a wooden board that balances on a small (but sturdy) plastic tube, to make him wobble while standing, so to keep working those balancing muscles, or something like that. The tube comes from one of my experiments. I will miss that “wtf I’ll create my own standing desk – pilates work-out” attitude, I must admit."
Bob O'H for "Reminds me of my youth playing boardgames. There was one called Civilisation, which a friend described as “almost as long as the real thing”."
Chall "it surely looks like the Leafs MIGHT go to play offs for the first time in 7 years…. if I didn’t jinx it by saying it here of course. That said, I find myself wondering how bad it will be to end 5th place if Boston stays 4th. It sort of feels better to play the 3rd (Capitals right now) than Bruins but right now I’ll settle for PLAYOFFS and miracle :)"
[the Leafs making the playoffs is a miracle indeed]
KJHaxton for "Good question! I’d put:
– occasional baker of cakes for meetings
– fair to moderate tolerance for bullshit
– low tolerance for unfairness and willing to get very cross about it (folds arms and glowers at the screen)
– best selection of tea bags in desk drawer (8 kinds at last count)
– prone to wearing scarves and shirts that don’t match
Ah well, I’m not sure I’d find a new job on the basis of those :)"
Ricardipus again for "Pros:
- rarely swears in public
- has few friends, so unlikely to have loud, belly-laughing conversations on phone or in person
- capable of speaking at length about (a) race cars, (b) cameras, or (c) bad science
Cons:
- occasionally swears in public
- has few friends, so likely to have poor social interactions with co-workers
- capable of speaking at length about (a) race cars, (b) cameras, or (c) bad science
I’d also probably include “easily suckered into serving on irrelevant committees” into each category, too."
Bean-mom again for "–Friendly.
–Doesn’t bake, but if you have a potluck I’ll bring killer spring rolls (both crispy fried pork ones, and the vegetarian fresh rice-paper ones).
–Doesn’t bake, but husband bakes. Occasionally, you may be a recipient of his talent.
–Will cheerfully listen to other people’s dramas, but won’t cause any of my own. Not at work, anyway."
and Nina yet again for "As I may have mentioned before, I’m pretty sure my cv point “Love baking (chocolate) cakes” earned me my PhD position, and it definitely often raised questions in interviews (“so, how often do you bake cake? What kind of chocolate do you use?”)"
Post(s) of the Week: Beth Snow for "Modern conveniences" (how on earth did we survive, let alone study and write theses, before Skype and cloud computing?!)
Steve Caplan for "Science education: the generalist vs the specialist" (are 3 year or 4 year degrees better for students?)
Bean-mom for "Leaving scientific research... again" (science SUCKS sometimes)
Eva Amsen, writing at the Occam's Typewriter Irregulars for "The two ideas to fix the gender balance that do not make me cringe" (the panel pledge and the Finkbeiner test)
Bob O'Hara for "Making reviewing boring stuff less boring" (would a stripped-down manuscript format work better for the, um, less exciting papers out there?)
Alyssa for "Just the pants, thanks" (absolutely hilarious take on the modern clothes shopping experience)
Eva Amsen again for "My self-updating address book" (how LinkedIn can be useful)
CromerCrox for "Plagues" (how's God been cursing you lately?)
Prof-like Substance for "If you don't talk to your kids about it someone else will" (anticipating school-yard talk about religion and other big issues)
and CromerCrox again for "Conferences" (the problem of sexism at conferences)
Archives:
October 2008 - March 2009; April 2009 - September 2009; October 2009 - March 2010; April 2010 - September 2010; October 2010 - February 2011; March 2011 - September 2011; October 2011 - March 2012; April 2012 - September 2012; October 2012 - March 2013; April 2013 - September 2013
On a peripherally related topic, I queried the Canadian Research Information System yesterday for grants that my favourite PI is involved in. Copying and pasting from the resulting webpage table resulted in a distastrously messed up hodgepodge of formatting that looks a lot like your “padding text” above.
mine was deliberate, though.
At least that site’s working (in a limited way) now… I was trying to use it last week and kept getting 404 errors.
So, a grant entitled Deciphering Concerted Improvements Towards Linking Mechanisms would have a pretty good chance.
And it still manages to say more than some abstracts I’ve read.
It would probably do better than Unraveling a Comprehensive Investigation of Evaluated INTERROGATION techniques, yes (depending on the funding agency, of course).
Wasn’t that a leaked repot about water-boarding?
I’m sure there are some funding agencies that would actually approve that application…
As an Evaluation Specialist, it saddens me greatly that all the applications that started with the word “evaluation” were unsuccessful. =(
I’m sure that grants about evaluation, rather than ones that mention evaluating biological parameters or something, would do better – if submitted to the right review panel, anyway
If it mentions ‘evaluation’ in the title, it is clearly referring to existing (old) work that is being evaluated, therefore is not novel, therefore is not fundable – obvious
yeah, Beth! ;-p
*hangs head in shame*
All articles I’ve written that have had ‘mechanism’ in the title or abstract have had [imho anecdotal of course and it's not like the article number is going to be statistically significant anyway, but it's so fun to make these extra-polarity comments....] easier times in the reviews
So, have you thought about doing another graph where the words are in “percentage” since the green/red is a little hard to actually calculate? I see that Linking and Improvement have 100% success rate, and Mechanism seems to be about 70% and Functional 50-50 or 40/60? I agree that I might be slightly off kilter here, since I’m having to calculate the % success, CV, variables and degrees of freedom right now so I am slighthly number crazy…
I’d definitely like to compare manuscript and grant titles – I suspect that the structures are different, but that word choice is less important for manuscripts (except maybe at the top tier journals?)
I did think about doing percentages, but this was easier ;-p
So, now you can form a hypothesis on which words in the title might increase funding success, how are you going to test it?
develop an improved title function?
I see an opportunity for an iPhone app that generates sure-to-be-funded grant titles based on your input keywords (or maybe just by examining your existing publications from PubMed).
Hm, Genome Canada has a bioinformatics competition going on right now… do you think developing such an app would count?
There’s no harm* in applying!
*no physical harm, anyway. The effects on your stress levels and other indicators of mental health may in fact be harmful.
Could a further analysis consider the success/failure rate of grants where the title becomes an acronym? I’ve seen (and sadly been party to) some amazing linguistic feats to conjure an acronym for a project title, but have never been convinced that it is worthwhile.
Argh. Certain disciplines (Computer Science, e.g.) are really, really guilty of this. And particularly of the most egregious form of acronym – the one with lower AND upper case letters in it. Argh.
I was amused that in the most recent round of Genome Canada Letters of Intent, there was a project proposing an acronym already in use by an existing GC project. One that you’re familiar with.
I suggest forming a TASKFORCE to study this further
(The Acronym Study: Knowledge For Omics Research Centres’ Edification)
I LOVE that! It could be a GE3LS project
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