Hi Sebastian, It's getting time for the cosmo/extragalactic group to prepare our next grant application.

Some of the others feel that your interests are probably more in the polarisation project (where i think you are part of the grant) rather than in AGN death/rebirth studies, hybrid morphology studies, and using AGNs and the CMB for cosmic topology. At least so far your collaboration with the rest of us has not been that active.

Would you feel it is reasonable for you *not* to be included in our next grant proposal?

i'm sure you're doing some interesting stuff with Peter Wilkinson, but at the moment it would seem a bit artificial to include you in our grant proposal.

i personally think that grant proposals are an *ineffective* way of providing negative and positive feedback to the quality of scientific research, and contribute more to astropolitics than to science. The money would be better distributed evenly (to stipends and salaries) and feedback mechanisms such as wiki pages on research projects would provide faster and much more open and constructive methods of both negative feedback (criticising "bad science" or scientific errors) and positive feedback (encouraging "good science").

However, for the moment we still have to live with grants and the related politics. :(

So please tell us what you think.

pozdrawiam boud