witam, We just had a long discussion regarding possibilities for the next grant proposal. Here is what i remember and understood in the discussion.
* We haven't yet got a reply from Sebastian.
* It's not obvious how easy or wise it would be to include Jarek, given that: OCRA has its own funding, so including stuff relevant to OCRA might be used as an argument against the grant proposal; and Jarek is not yet a PhD student, and has not yet decided to do a PhD in Torun, or decided between TCfA and CAMK.
* In both cases, there are still a few weeks for discussion (but not much more).
* From our previous proposal:
http://www.astro.uni.torun.pl/sympa/cosmo-torun/2003-01/thrd1.html http://www.astro.uni.torun.pl/sympa/cosmo-torun/2003-02/thrd1.html
we had one referee very positive, two quite negative. One of the negatively commenting referees failed to understand how AGNs can be used to test topology, but the other simply felt that AGNs and topology are separate fields and should not be combined.
* The AGN evolution observations of motyl + magda + andrzej together make a very tight knit project and would be self-sufficient for a grant proposal alone.
* It is important to maximise the chances of the grant proposal being accepted in order to get the money.
* There was consensus that
(1) We should have AGN observations as the main focus of the proposal (not topology).
(2) That given (1), andrzej should be PI since he is much, much, much more experienced in AGN observations than boud.
(3) We still have some time (e.g. till 7 Jan) to decide further basic questions before getting heavily into the paperwork, printing, signing, etc.
* The two most likely scenarios are:
(4) (4a) andrzej + magda + motyl -> theme = AGN observations - birth/death/HYMORs AND [(4b) boud + bartek either (4b.1) make an independent grant proposal on another theme at the same time OR (4b.2) wait till the following grant period (Jul 2004) to avoid the chance of the grant committee creating bad feeling by giving a grant to one "group" (or neither) and not the other. ]
OR
(5) andrzej + magda + motyl + boud + bartek -> theme = AGN observations - birth/death/HYMORs - plus theoretical tools to use these to test AGN evolution hypotheses in terms of a cosmologically realistic galaxy evolution model, including sensitivity to different hypotheses on how the non-baryonic dark matter particles behave:
general discussion (please modify, correct, add links): http://adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Cosmo/GalaxyAGNFormation
ArFus GPL software package: http://adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Cosmo/ArFus
i personally think the idea of us "competing" against each other for basic research funding is ridiculous. The history of science constantly shows that it's only a long term point of view (50 years or so) which can seriously judge which science is best or most relevant, and even this generally oversimplifies the fact that most of science is integrated and that both the independent cross-checking by many scientists, not just by "superior" scientists, and also the high profile, "breakthroughs", are just as important for science as a whole to progress.
In any case, competition became impractical with special relativity and the atom bomb.
See also: http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
However, for the moment the Polish astro community, and the Polish research community in general, is not well enough organised (nor would have a common point of view) to shift the grant system to something more intelligent and cooperative.
So we need to make a decision by early/mid January.
My feeling is that we have a good chance of coming to a decision by "formal consensus" on the above proposals (4) and (5) (or modified versions of them) at another meeting during early/mid January.
This means something like: - we are clear on what the different proposals are (see above) - any of us (whether mgr or dr or nearly-hab ;) can *block* any of the proposals, but can only do so on the basis of what she/he thinks is a fundamental reason (e.g. science and/or money), not based on (e.g.) seniority or some unstated intuition
("formal" doesn't mean bureaucratic, it means that we are clear about what we are saying and how we decide)
i personally don't have objections to any of the options, except that i might block (4b.1) unless people think that there would be a good chance of two "competing" proposals being simultaneously accepted.
pozd boud
PS: please corrrect, comment, whatever.
On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Andrzej Marecki wrote:
BTW(2) - Motyl proposes that we work on the grant proposal tomorrow afternoon (Wed 17 Dec) @radio astronomy.
Let's say at 13:00. Is that OK for everyone?
A.