- Productivity Tip #1: Have More Meetings (But Keep Them Short)
Do your meetings take an hour to do what could've been accomplished in fifteen minutes? Do you look with dread at the colorful blocks on your Outlook calendar telling you your time is about to be wasted? Here are some ways to trim the fat and make meetings shorter and smart...
- Why We All Need More Sleep (Really!)
Do you have a sleep schedule, or is it more of an "I wish I had time to sleep" schedule? Don't laugh it off--getting enough sleep is critical for work and life. As Arianna Huffington, self-professed "sleep evangelist," writes in the following essay for the Telegraph, a lack of ...
- Jewels from Rock Talk
The rumor patrol wants to squash the myth that R01s are getting shorter. A little over half of R01s awarded are five years in length. This has been stable since 2006 and is not trending to shorter lengths. Reality check: write the grant for the right duration to get strong scien...
- Here’s What Happens When You Extend a Deadline
What happens when we move back deadlines — once we get past the initial feeling of sweet relief? Research suggests we have a lot of difficulty using our newly-found time wisely. We wind up facing the same problem again — the same time pressure, the same stress, the same feeling-n...
- Peering into Peer Review
Why don't proposals given better scores by the National Institutes of Health lead to more important research outcomes?
Michael Lauer's job at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to fund the best cardiology research and to disseminate the results rapidly to other scienti...
- How to Talk to People Who Don’t Want to Talk to You
"You're more interested in what you have to say than anyone else is," said 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney.
Do any of these sound familiar?
"I'm busy. Can you come back later?"
"Thanks. We've got it covered."
"We don't have the budget for that."
You’ve probably heard all t...
- Rock Talk: New Reforms to Federal Grant Policies
In February last year I blogged about the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)’s request for comments on proposed federal grant policy reforms. These policies, contained in multiple documents known as circulars, contain Fed-wide regulations on spending, not just for research...
- Rock Talk: PubMed Gets Interactive
Today NIH’s National Library of Medicine (NLM) is bringing a new way of sharing and exchanging research information, fully integrated with the PubMed website, to a wider audience.
For the last few months, NLM has been running a pilot of a commenting system for PubMed’s massi...
- Rock Talk: FY13 by the Numbers
Application success rates, as I blogged about in December, declined in 2013 to a historic low. In fact, most of the numbers you are going to see throughout the Data Book went down because of the reduction of NIH’s budget due to the sequestration which lowered NIH appropriations b...
- On Declining Gracefully
As the new semester begins, so come the invitations to serve on this committee or be part of that grant. Trying to figure out graceful ways to decline? Give our link of the week a shot:
You Are So Kind to Think of Me
The Chronicle of Higher Education
My last post focused o...
