Grant wranglers of the world, unite!

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Cath@VWXYNot?

I’m in the early stages of submitting a pre-application to a new (to me) funding organisation, which involves finding and summarising a lot of information from their website.
I was impressed by the following option:
The PI also may provide permission to an individual in his/her organization to [...] assist in preparing the application
Wow! A funding body that acknowledges that people like me exist! And that lets me sign in using my own username and password, which I can control! I usually have to get the PI’s login details out of him or her, which is never ideal and occasionally causes significant delays when a password is forgotten or changed without my knowledge.
The website also provided a moment of amusement:
To save a copy of the forms above, right-click on the name and select from the pop-up menu that is displayed either "Save Target As..." (for Internet Explorer), or "Save Link As..." (for Netscape), or something similar in your browser.
Methinks helpdesk is sick of trying to track new browser trends, and is quite rightly encouraging those pesky Safari/Firefox/Chrome users to fend for themselves1.
1) Jealous? Me? Nah, I love my IE7 and wouldn’t change it even if I was allowed2.
2) not true

About Cath@VWXYNot?

"one of the sillier science bloggers [...] I thought I should give a warning to the more staid members of the community." - Bob O'Hara, December 2010
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15 Responses to Grant wranglers of the world, unite!

  1. Eric Michael Johnson says:
    May 12, 2009 at 12:42 am

    Addendum: For Linux users utilizing Topark or any similar anonymous open source platform, you’ll most likely be hacking our network anyway so won’t require instructions about how to do something as simple as save a link.

  2. Eva Amsen says:
    May 12, 2009 at 3:00 am

    Netscape? Who still uses Netscape? I last used it in… wait, let me think… early 2000 at the very latest.

  3. Henry Gee says:
    May 12, 2009 at 4:32 am

    You arrogant young whipper-snapper, Amsen. I still use Netscape Composer to write my web page. It shipped free with a CD of Britannica back in … oooh … 1998. It works well, and it does the job. Only gripe is I can’t hack into the html code, which is a slight pain. But not much.

  4. steffi suhr says:
    May 12, 2009 at 5:06 am

    Heh, Henry: 1998 is about the time I put together a subsection of this website for the research group I was in (which seems to have disappeared – or rather, re-organized and swallowed whole, both the group and that section of the website), using both Netscape Composer and early versions of Dreamweaver. Hang on, I’m younger than you are!!

  5. Bob O'Hara says:
    May 12, 2009 at 7:17 am

    I thought this was going to be a full rpg-related exposé.
    Oh well.

  6. Richard P. Grant says:
    May 12, 2009 at 8:00 am

    Kiss but don’t tell, that’s me.

  7. Cath Ennis says:
    May 12, 2009 at 2:00 pm

    LOL@Eric
    Eva, Henry and Steffi: I’ve actually never used Netscape! They’ve stopped supporting it now, right?
    Bob, sorry, maybe some other time
    Richard, such a gentleman 😉

  8. Richard P. Grant says:
    May 12, 2009 at 2:31 pm

    A bounder and a cad, but still a gentleman. bows

  9. James Zlosnik says:
    May 12, 2009 at 3:18 pm

    I think the helpdesk people are maybe just bored with answering what should be a totally basic question – do we all really need to be told how to save something anymore? As for Chrome – the right click options are great, far better than IE8, only occassionally use Firefox so don’t know if it also applies in there, but it is context sensitive – if it is an email addy you’re trying to copy it says so and just copies the address and not the mailto bit. Just tremendous.

  10. Cath Ennis says:
    May 12, 2009 at 5:26 pm

    I haven’t tried Chrome yet. Has anyone tried it on a Mac? Firefox is working really nicely for me, but if there are definite advantages to Chrome I might be persuadable.

  11. Richard Wintle says:
    May 12, 2009 at 7:28 pm

    I’m interested to know why Cath is attempting to access US-based “Congressionally-Directed” funds.
    Kind of them to permit the PI to get help, isn’t it?

  12. Cath Ennis says:
    May 12, 2009 at 7:35 pm

    Erm, I’m not (this time, we are eligible for some such money). If you googled the text I quoted and came up with that answer, then the organisation we’re applying to must have borrowed the wording from the government!

  13. Cath Ennis says:
    May 12, 2009 at 7:37 pm

    p.s. if you figure it out, please don’t post it, I’d rather not share explicit details of exactly what my PIs are doing and which grants they’re applying for

  14. Richard Wintle says:
    May 12, 2009 at 7:48 pm

    Heh. Cath – no problem, but honestly, if you post text verbatim like that, it will be obvious to anyone.
    But – somebody’s plagiarizing their instructions. See here.

  15. Cath Ennis says:
    May 12, 2009 at 7:56 pm

    I actually googled both pieces of text with and without quotation marks, and the funding body in question didn’t pop up on any of the top 5 pages, so I thought no more of it before posting. Just didn’t want any US researchers thinking I was illegitimately trying to get “their” money!
    Interesting that the text is the same on multiple websites!

Comments are closed.