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When one’s salary is “soft money”...
Mar. 5th, 2014 08:57 pmSo the NIH reviewers liked my QuitPoints proposal – in fact, they rated it as “excellent” according to the online pdf that translates rating numbers into evaluative adjectives – but that’s probably nowhere near good enough to get funding in this penny-pinching era. It would have been a smartphone app for smoking cessation that would boost intrinsic motivation for doing things that make it more likely to quit successfully (since you can’t boost intrinsic motivation for quitting smoking itself, unless we figure out how to make withdrawal and cravings into a fun time). In other words, a theoretically grounded game to help people quit smoking.
Also, it used to be that you could use the reviewers’ comments to improve a proposal and submit it again, and then again if you still hadn’t improved it enough, and then even a fourth time, but now, you get just two tries then you’re out. Unless you find a different funding mechanism to submit it to, or unless you’re willing to wait six years until it’s fair game again. This is already my second try for QuitPoints under the R34 mechanism that seemed best suited to it.
The good side, of course, is that now I’ll continue to have enough free time, theoretically, to work on the other things I want to work on. And there’s a vast number of those, in various degrees of development, waiting patiently for my attention to return. (Meanwhile, I do have to do those two Big Projects – writing the website for my current grant, and writing the proposal for the FDA one. But summer should be good!)
Also, D. wrote a very pretty melody this evening on his clarinet, then figured it out again on the keyboard, and now he’s still humming it while doing his geometry homework. The tune is rather like if you took the Woody the Woodpecker theme and stretched it out and made it lyrical. So pretty!
Also, it used to be that you could use the reviewers’ comments to improve a proposal and submit it again, and then again if you still hadn’t improved it enough, and then even a fourth time, but now, you get just two tries then you’re out. Unless you find a different funding mechanism to submit it to, or unless you’re willing to wait six years until it’s fair game again. This is already my second try for QuitPoints under the R34 mechanism that seemed best suited to it.
The good side, of course, is that now I’ll continue to have enough free time, theoretically, to work on the other things I want to work on. And there’s a vast number of those, in various degrees of development, waiting patiently for my attention to return. (Meanwhile, I do have to do those two Big Projects – writing the website for my current grant, and writing the proposal for the FDA one. But summer should be good!)
Also, D. wrote a very pretty melody this evening on his clarinet, then figured it out again on the keyboard, and now he’s still humming it while doing his geometry homework. The tune is rather like if you took the Woody the Woodpecker theme and stretched it out and made it lyrical. So pretty!