Victor Marcel Acosta

NIH is the biggest and by far the most transparent agency we've got. Good luck getting DOE or DoD numbers like this.

Prediction: these markets will follow the path of chess, backgammon, poker. Now that real money is involved, advantage traders will swoop in, teenagers will make huge bags, and then the action will dry up pretty soon after. It's not the same as betting on sports--little entertainment value here.

Yeah, I see your point that it devalues ref letters if reviewers would ordinarily be familiar with you and know how to calibrate based on your choice of words. But that's an edge case for most review scenarios, no? Most of the time reviewers calibrate off of "typical UG research advisor" or whatever

In my experience it isn't that hard both as reviewer and applicant. Just a change that folks have to get used to.
identities can sometimes be guessed but not enough to kill concept.

But I don't know exactly what applicant characteristics it selects for/against. might not be exactly what we'd guess.

I think it's cool that they do blind review. Curious what the various breakdowns are before and after they started that.

There's nothing like cold hard experimental data from experimentalists you trust.

Woohoo! Second year on a row I got one right! John Clarke is a giant. it was a privilege to occupy the same building as a grad student, he was always kind to us.

I'll go with John Clarke and two others (Devoret + Martinis? not enough of a historian on the topic) for SQUIDs and superconducting qubits for 2025 Physics Nobel.

Link to the Lauer blog post? I couldn't find it for some reason

Looks like this was quite prescient

Trend: paper reviews that appear to be LLM generated.

Used to get reviews like "pg5, 2nd par. You say XYZ but don't back it up/it's confusing"
I loved these.

Now: "the paper lacks [something vague + not obviously relevant], explain how this will be implemented"

(Rev's still polite and unpaid!)

I don't get it. Gerrymandering is just as much of a both sides, race to the bottom issue. And far more entrenched, solutions are harder than scotus walking back the relatively recent Citizens United case.

Love your blog, but this really ought to say RF pulse amplitude

Not my field, but the actual arxiv paper didn't seem so bad to me (except for the 3 column format!), was it?

This computer-generated clickbait article jumbled the words up.

Sounds like an "epiphany" college kids have smoking weed and philosophizing late at night.

But I guess now it's NIH policy?

I'm sorry, but the PhD is not just a "training" degree. For me, any definition must include a marker of academic achievement for creating and disseminating new knowledge.

"IONQ CEO Niccolo de Masi sells $103 million in stock. SEC filing confirms full liquidation. Investors question timing. Pump-and-dump concerns rise."
citizenwatchreport.com/ionq-ceo-nic...

Here's the published version, which includes some pretty TEM images in the Appendices:
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

People on here are need to focus. Bhattacharya appointment is one of the least insane things going on out there. Folks quibbling about his h-index and nunber of R01s...Look who we elected president!

Great review, cool photophysics--I learned something new!

Chemically resolved nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy by longitudinal magnetization detection with a diamond magnetometer Non-inductive magnetometers based on solid-state spins offer a promising solution for small-volume nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) detection. A remaining challenge is to operate at a sufficiently hig...

New paper, led by postdoc Janis Smits:

-Introduces a “Ramsey-Mz” protocol for NMR spectroscopy using diamond NV centers
-In principle, works at arbitrary field. Well suited to moderate fields (0.3-3 T)
-Resolved ethanol chemical shift structure with negligble distortion

arxiv.org/abs/2503.02140

Because almost all his political positions were formed in the 80s and he doesn't update them. In this case he took the Reagan position opposing "unfair trade" with Japan.

Please do not use an llm to review my papers. I much prefer you just paste whatever bullet points/notes you were going to put into the llm prompt into a txt file and submit. No flowery verbage needed!

He's not a student of history, is he?

As well as being an utter cockwomble.

Watched the oval office meeting. First 40 min is standard Trump BS, Zelensky is used to it and nods along. Then Vance starts bloviating, speaking with entitlement about shit he absolutely has no idea about. Zelensky loses it. Weve all been in Zelenky's shoes, its impossible to bite ur tongue there.

Alright I'll say it.

The Microsoft Majorana craziness is what you get when you let theoretical physicists run your device R&D agenda based on the "beauty" of the idea instead of what actually works.

How does that even work tho. Country is devastated and they just volunteer to turn over 3 years worth of GDP? I haven't followed the news much but sounds like a classic trump BS empty threat.

Hopefully it ends up not mattering, we'll see. That notice is great fodder for convincing students to work on their technical writing.

Maybe I'm not caught up, working off the original notice from Friday: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
It doesn't mention any changes to the formula, just says new IDC rate is 15% and refer to the current de minimis rate, so I assumed it intends to still apply the rate to modified total direct costs.

Why do you say the "former" (proposed 15% flat IDC rate) is a percentage of total cost?