How far are you from the cutting edge?

This time of the year the media is flooded with end of the year lists and retropectives. Science is not immume from this syndrome. So as you ponder (along with the rest of the self-absorbed world) your place in the universe, its not a bad time to read what others are saying are the Grand Challenges and Great Opportunities in Science.

This serves two purposes. First, if it’s in Science magazine, people are talking about it, and it reflects, to some degree the status quo. Part of being a scholar is knowing what the big ideas are in your field, since those ideas are the lingua franca of science.

Second, when you are selling your work (to journals or granting agencies) its not a bad idea to find linkages to what everybody else is talking about and what the status quo thinks is important.

Now, I know this might sound a tad jaded. Perhaps you are working on wombat tunneling behavior because, by golly, that’s what your passionate about. And that’s cool too. But part of teaching (and writing grants and journal articles is teaching) is creating the desire in you reader to learn more. And it certainly helps if you can relate your work to things everybody else is interested in.

Our work in the Antlab? We are all over bullet points one and two above.

h/t to Matt over at Ontogeny .

“It’s the most, wunnerful tiiiiiiime….of the year!”, (or Grant writing 101)

Many of us are slogging away during the holidays, getting ready to pitch a grant.

Now there are folks who see this as the worst kind of drudgery. And yes, there is a rather masochistic element to spending a fair bit of time, and a whole lot of creative energy, pitching an idea to NSF when it’s currently funding about 8% of its proposals. Yet at the same time, its a great way to truly focus on what you want to do next, to anticipate what it would be like tromping through a new field site, relishing that new data, and, generally, finding out some cool new stuff.

We’ll be talking a lot about this subject, but I can’t think of a better way to begin than a short introduction by Joan Straumanis’s introduction to the art, science, and politics of writing a winning proposal. It’s built from her time working with Funding for the Improvement of PostSecondary Education (or “FIPSE” to close personal friends). I’ve reprinted it below, if you find roaming around the current administration’s Department of Education website, well, rather icky.

All the points are worth noting, but pay particular attention to

12. Write the abstract last…Write 3 versions: one page (first page of proposal, whether requested or not), one paragraph (if requested), and one line, the proposal title-which you should think of as a mini-abstract (descriptive and intriguing)…. Prepare for the possibility that some sleepy reviewer might read only the abstract.

h/t to SP, who’s also working on a proposal.