Aaswath Raman

Some grant numbers for NSF:

FY'26 until 2/27/26: 470
FY'25 until 2/27/25: 1534 | until 1/15/25: 1042
FY'24 until 2/27/24: 2135 | until 1/15/24: 1095
FY'23 until 2/27/23: 2064 | until 1/15/23: 1100
FY'22 until 2/27/22: 2431 | until 1/15/22: 1240
FY'21 until 2/27/21: 2030 | until 1/15/21: 955

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

Uhh..

I like how everyone has suddenly become a radiative cooling expert online :) everyone seems to forget that in most geometries the radiators also face the sun. There’s also that whole issue of “high flux“ events *cough*

My phone pulled up a photo of my now two year old from a year ago, and then I saw this.. there has to be a better way to do this!

IIRC we had an on campus case in 2019 that they emailed about, including presence in a large class lecture. Presumably due to high vaccine coverage there was no onward spread (and hopefully the same for you all too!). But I had a newborn then was was rather freaked out..

And don't extol the virtues of another university and department in your cover letter..

pretty good - I did take the physics GRE in Dorchester 20 years ago..

i guess I’ve pronounced Billerica wrong..

I think cryptocyanine should emit in that range and I recall seeing it used in ethanol or methanol

One wonders what Joey Smallwood would say about all of this..

1948 Newfoundland referendums - Wikipedia

I'm.. randomly.. remembering the Newfoundland referendums of 1948: "President Harry S. Truman's administration had little incentive to pursue annexation. With respect to foreign policy, such a territorial ambition would have only served to antagonize two key allies." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Ne...

Protects the integrity of NoseID

Even stranger, our gmail accounts will hit a quarter century in a few years..

Gene-specific selective sweeps are pervasive across human gut microbiomes - Nature Development and application of the integrated linkage disequilibrium score (iLDS) reveals both selective pressures impacting the human gut microbiome and the mechanisms by which gut bacteria adapt to ...

Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I was on a DARPA project with a program officer who came from industry and didn't go to grad school

One day the program officer told us that before working at DARPA, he thought universities were inefficient, but now was shocked at how much we and other university performers got done for so little $

For all the criticism of universities, my guess is that - absent a Bell labs or long term philanthropic donor - they will rediscover the financial logic behind the university “bundle”. Related point: universities need to advertise that they are very cheap R&D!!

A couple of other idle thoughts: they really seem to want to fund the formation of the team and organization as a whole, which I don't think NSF has really done before (unless we count SBIRs). This would conflict with a 15% indirect cap unless they waive that away (rules, what rules?)

Seems like they directly want to fund FROs, which is perhaps not a bad idea. But the scale of the proposed funding is quite large ($10M-$50M per year per team), and all the while NSF budgets are going to shrink and it seems like MRSEC is going to end? FROs ultimately need universities..

I still write my letters by hand so hopefully the peculiar phrasings will rise above the LLM'd masses.. To the extent that the student statement talks about specific things they actually did I guess it doesn't really matter one way or the other how it's been written

At least it's not 6-7 (parent of elementary-aged kids will know..)

Umm..

Wow a journal acquisition! Didn’t know that happened.. but makes sense. Thanks for flagging thjs

Just got a review request from them and was very confused..

Well this is getting confusing, there’s a new (Wiley) journal also named Nanophotonics: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/2192... not to be confused with the established De Gruyter one: www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/...

The context here is the UC Regents removed SAT requirements (they can't even be included optionally) against the recommendation of our academic senate: senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/commi...

SAT Fee Waiver Eligibility – SAT Suite | College Board SAT fee waivers are available to low-income 11th- and 12th-grade students in the U.S. or U.S. territories.

In an ideal world we wouldn't need the SAT and could trust high school grades, but that's clearly not working out in this case. I think there are fee waivers available though I'm sure the way they're implemented is non-ideal: satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/registra...

UC San Diego Sees Students’ Math Skills Plummet The number of first-year students at the University of California, San Diego, whose math skills fall below a middle school level has increased nearly 30-fold over the past five years, according to a n...

If students are getting 4.0s in their high schools math classes but unable to do 1st-8th grade math, the SAT has to be back on the table (as it already is at many other places). www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

Or exhibiting (deliberately or otherwise) extreme incompetence at administrative tasks to the extent that no one will ask you again :)