No, I did not forget my password

I seem to be falling down on the self-imposed blogging job lately. I've been, perhaps paradoxically, busy without anything very interesting to say.

I am giving a talk next week at the AAAR Supersites conference in Atlanta. My faithful readers (both of them) may recall that, after a mediocre speaking performance at my last conference, I vowed to do a better job with my next talk. Ok, I didn't really vow anything, but I did say it would be a good idea not to be finishing slides the morning of. Well, here it is a week before my talk, and the Powerpoint file has not been created yet. (I've had similar success with this year's New Years resolutions.) And I need to finish this and get it cleared by various people before I leave Monday morning. I'm supposed to be off this Friday, but I have a feeling I'll be here all day.

Last week I participated in an amusing little exercise: a peer review panel. I agreed to do this before Christmas--the topic is fairly related to my research, and I'm probably as qualified as anyone in my group to be on the panel. However, the interesting thing about this panel is that we had no actual power. The researchers in question had already been awarded a million-dollar grant as a Congressional "line item" (i.e., pork barrel project). We were tasked with assessing the proposal and making recommendations on how the PIs could improve their research. I guess this was to give the EPA project officer some cover: a smidgeon of bargaining power in making adjustments to the focus/direction of their project. However, they've been awarded the grant, so if push came to shove and they said "no, we will do things the way we want to" it's not clear to me what would happen, but I think they would still get their money. Fortunately these researchers seem capable, but no doubt there are a lot of other projects, perhaps more worthy than this one, that could have been funded for a million bucks. I reckon other pork-seeking investigators have only themselves to blame for not having the foresight to locate themselves in Texas.