Limbo

It has been so long since I've posted to my blog, Typepad has actually improved the interface.  Or at least changed it.  I feel rumplestiltskinish.   The quiatus has been due to a rapid fire month of graduations, a wedding,  the trauma of workshop liquidation, moving preparations, and, not least, post-grant-writing-pre-announcement angst.  

Since autumn, I have been engaged with a team at the University of Washington in a response to the NSF DataNet solicitation.  Twenty-three preliminary proposals were submitted in the first of two rounds of awards.  Seven were invited to submit full proposals.  Three were site visited in May. Now we wait.  And wait. 

I can't think of a professional product I'm happier with than this proposal, and we're eager to know the outcome and get down to the work on this exciting effort.  But of course there are others who feel similarly about their own efforts in pursuit of this grail, some of whom have already been sent back to the drawing board, and some of whom share our limbo.  The plan as we understand it that two of the three teams who were site-visited will receive funding in the first round. Sort of a scissors/paper/rock thing.

Partly in response to this activity, Jane Greenberg and myself are organizing a session on metadata for scientific data sets at the Dublin Core meeting in Berlin in late September.  Data curation is a hot topic, and efforts are underway in many countries. We hope to engage the DC community in identifying problems and opportunities for description of data sets that will improve their discovery, a central piece of the NSF solicitation.  Got ideas to share?  Hope to see you there.

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Our newly-minted graduate of Miami University of Ohio, Brendan, and his Mom.  Both are looking for jobs (poli-sci, NGO in Washington/NY/London in the case of former, Library/literacy/TESOL, Seattle, in the latter) All leads gratefully accepted.  Thats Coach Cull, the St. Charles Cross Country coach on the right of the picture. He coached both our boys in high school, one of the really great things that happened to them there.

Comments

[Lucia Shelton]

Congrats on your son's graduation. If he's smiling like that I can imagine you.

You came out of the limbo and I decided to start writing about something I know better: South America. You can check at http://sheltonl.blogspot.com

[Bruce Moore]

Keep on dancing. I hope you get under that bar. And congratulations on your son's graduation.

Cheers,

Bruce