Canada vs USA

Typical NSF grant I review: proposes three-year research plan. Asks for money for two graduate students, maybe a postdoc. Narrative is 15 pages to describe research plan.

I just reviewed an NSERC grant, the Canadian equivalent of NSF. Proposed a five year research plan. Asked for money for six graduate students. Narrative is only 5 pages long! (And I've heard that this is a constraint NSERC proposes.) It's very well written but gosh I kept wishing for more detail. On the other hand, it would be great if I only had to write 5 pages of narrative to get that much money.

requests I get over email

FSP's post today made me think about requests I get over email. I have some webpages which rank highly on Google web searches. Thus I get requests for information from time to time. Here are some examples of requests that crossed a line. In some cases I've replaced information in [brackets].

Q: Would you so kind
to send me some information about detailed
design of [experimental technique]? Thanks.

(Everything I know I already put on my webpage about [experimental technique], including references where you can learn more.)

Q:What is the '2nd law of thermo dynamics'?

(This question came back in 2001, perhaps when people weren't better at web searches...? I don't do research on the laws of thermodynamics so it's a bit of a stretch that this person emailed me.)

Q:i am a studient who study in New Zealand~
the teacher give us a research assignment
about [physics theory]~
the first thing i need to research is
"[very specific question that is vaguely related to some keywords on one of my webpages]"
but i coulden't find anything on that for few weeks~~
can you please give a direction to search for ??

(ummmm... no!)

Q:Why are magnets attracted to Iron fillings?
I am doing an experiment in school.

(Note that my work nothing to do with magnetism, except that the word "magnet" shows up on one of my webpages.)

Q: I was wondering of you could make a program to display [simple graphical object] in Visual Basic 6. If that is possible could you give me some tips to
manage the program, or give me an program that I could start with to make it
like I want to make it for myself.

(I get a lot of requests like this... I have some very simple 5-10 line programs on some webpages, and people often want me to translate these very simple programs into some other language. Sometimes I'm pretty sure it's for a specific class assignment, although this particular request I'm not sure.)


These were all emails I got in the first four months of 2001 (to pick a random time period where I happen to have saved them). Fortunately, these are a minority. Most people who read my webpages and email me have very good questions. It's just amusing to think back on the ones who don't quite see that they're asking for a bit more help than is reasonable.

first post

I've created a blogger account so I'm a little less anonymous, for the purposes of posting comments on other blogs. I don't anticipate writing many blog entries... too busy doing other things.