Thursday, June 23, 2011

The problem with expanding academia

I did a search today on the topic of surface enhanced Raman. Turns out there were about 3000 articles written on the subject in the last two years. Almost 500 of them were reviews in the same time span. Does anyone else see something wrong with this situation?

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

I'm still here

Been busy. NSF panels, mail in proposal reviews, journal article reviews, IRB, group finances, strategic planning meetings, students slacking, website updates, society stuff. Trying desperately to dig myself out from underneath all this service and managerial stuff so that I can write grant proposals. All sorts of ideas bouncing around my head, if only I could get a few days to write them down and add the appropriate pointless filler to meet the required page maximum.

Why can't we be adults and not penalize people for not using the 15 page maximum if they don't need it? Almost every proposal I read could omit about 2-3 pages without losing any value.