SGERs being replaced ?

The new NSF news feeds are great. I get to hear all kinds of interesting tidbits about the NSF, including some recent chatter on encouraging “transformative research”. One direct consequence of this chatter is this (emphasis mine):

[NSF Director] Bement yesterday proposed a three-pronged strategy before the task force on transformative research. It was unanimously adopted by the task force on Tuesday and then unanimously adopted by the Board on Wednesday. Bement’s plan for will:

1. Infuse support of potentially transformative research throughout NSF and all of its programs;

2. Learn how to facilitate potentially transformative research; and

3. Lead the community through opportunities for potentially tranformative research proposal submissions.

[...]

To lead the community, Bement will embark on a three-year trial, during which NSF will replace small grants for exploratory research with a two-tiered “early-concept” award mechanism. Tier I will call for limited funding grants that are internally reviewed. Tier II will entail larger grants requiring additional levels of review. Further, NSF will create a working group to recommend implementation details; a mechanism to monitor and track impact and lessons-learned; and a method to advertise the new approach to the community.

Fastlane and Holidays

As many of you are painfully aware, the NSF deadline for theory proposals is this Monday, Feb 19. As you may have also realized, Feb 19 is a federal holiday. According to NSF guidelines, in such an event, the deadline moves to the next working day (i.e the 20th) and I’ve confirmed that this is a correct interpretation for this deadline.

However, does Fastlane itself know this ? Suppose Fastlane refuses to accept any proposal submitted after Feb 19 (since in principle it has the information on the call and the deadline) ? Can the program manager then override it ?

I wonder if anyone has any experience with this…

Some good news on funding the NSF

As has been reported in many places, the House has passed a new spending bill that puts back many of the American Competitiveness Initiative funding that was proposed for FY07. This bill was passed in agreement with the Senate, so Senate passage is hopefully forthcoming next week, when it’s taken up there.

There are some differences in the level of the increase. According to Peter Harsha at the CRA blog,

Under the agreement, NSF would receive a 6 percent increase, slightly below the 7.8 percent increase called for in the ACI, but $335 million more than FY 2006.

But according to the AAAS funding update,

The National Science Foundation (NSF) would receive the full requested increase of 7.7 percent or $334 million for its core Research & Related Activities (R&RA) account to $4.7 billion. This funding would allow most research directorates to reverse declining funding of recent years with increases of between 6 and 8 percent. Total NSF R&D would climb 7.0 percent to $4.5 billion within a total budget of $5.9 billion, reversing two years of cuts in 2005 and 2006

Of course, the President still has to sign the bill. But since the ACI was his idea, one can be hopeful.