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Tuesday, September 27, 2005

who are these people?

It is mini proposal season; which is not the season of small proposals, but the small season of normal and big proposals.

Ok, NSF proposals are due round about nowish, whereas NASA likes spring and early summer.

So, NSF has this thing where you have to list all your co-authors and collaborators, so any appearance of conflict can be avoided...

Was just updating my list, and realised that, mostly as a consequence of being a co-author on a small number of papers with lots of authors, I now do not know a large fraction of my co-authors! In fact there are not a few I have never even met.

At least they are, I gather, friends-of-friends; or possibly whoever happened to be on the telescope that night; or possibly boyfriends of students of former collaborators of some co-author, or something.

The scary thing is: couple of more papers like these, and the only people eligible to referee my proposals will either know absolutely nothing about the sub-fields I work on, or they are people I do not collaborate with at all, ever, even second hand.

As opposed to...

Hm, I wonder if blogging counts for NSF "collaborator" purposes! And should I be listing the geo/bio crowd?! One dreads to ask. There is, after all, a page limit.

1 Comments:

Blogger Steinn said...

Well, I am hoping that NSF does not put genomicists or deep archean hard rock drillers on Relativity panels, but a strict and narrow interpretation of NSF guidelines might arguably suggest that I should list all my astrobio collaborators, which would be at least another 20 names, including the EPO proposals...

In which case I will need a waiver on the page limit, 'cause collaborators already takes almost a full page of text.

Maybe this is a fiendish ploy to keep DoE PIs out of NSF panels, they can't submit because it would take them too long to type in the collaborators lists. Of course the PIs on DoE projects probably have staff who can be ordered to compile and transcribe such lists...

The real trick is finding "where are they now", NSF wants current affiliation of old collaboratord. Tricky.

10:23 AM  

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