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On Tuesday, I submitted a research proposal to the Natural Environment research Council (NERC). It was rather stressful as I pressed the submit button too quickly, not noticing the “Case for Support” that must be at most 4 pages long had one line on page 5… This is enough to get a straight rejection! I also discovered that the University of Bristol was closed that day (so I technically missed a day off, the joys of teleworking…) and therefore nodody was answering the phone. Anyway, it was all sorted out eventually and the proposal is now with the finance office which (hopefully) will send it to NERC today (final deadline is tomorrow).

But why this blog post? Well, I simply wonder why NERC imposes page limits? I am not against a length limit, just against a page limit. Everybody writing a proposal ends up playing a lot with the layout, making the margins as small as authorised (1.5cm), using the smallest font allowed (Times New Roman 12pt is smaller than Arial 12pt by the way…). This is very time consuming, it also unlikely to make the research better and it is really just a waste of time in my mind. I understand why there is a limit but it should not be a limit on the layout. Surely letting people use “plain text” and counting the words or characters would be easier?

I understand that sometimes graphics and equations are included and a limit should be put on these too. But the current system already discourages equations and figures anyway. If you include an equation or a figure in your proposal, you lose a lot of valuable real estate in the document.

Oh well… and I have to start the next proposal now…

The website for the hydrology group at Bristol University has just been refreshed, have a look.

There is now have a dynamic menu in the sidebar and a Flickr gallery integrated throughout the site using thumbnails. Oh, and the content has been updated too!! It looks a lot better than the out-of-date version of the site we had for a long long time.

This re-design took almost 6 months to do though, which is huge considering its small footprint… It shows that nobody in the team has much time to spend on things like the website. It also shows that it’s hard to get content from people. Hopefully, people will update their section more often and we won’t have to do it all again in a few years time. We’ll see.