House Republicans have a proposal for cutting spending starting next month: Summary here To emphasize, the proposal is for cutting funds already allocated for this year as well as for the coming year. A few numbers: NIH cuts for 2011: * $260M, inflationary increases on non-competing grants ($260M for next ... read more

Back in the 1990's, the Oakland A's were a mediocre team. In baseball, the traditional way to improve a team has been to hire a bunch of super star players. The trouble with being a mediocre team, though, is that it's hard to sell tickets, which makes it tough to pay for expensive talent. To make matters worse, A... read more

...someone who forgoes current income in order to forgo future income." Choice comment from a letter to the Economist in response to their recent article, The Disposable Academic read more

Fellow mathematician Jordan Ellenberg has an unusual take on the NRC's rankings: in Slate he compares the NRC's approach to ranking graduate programs to a new method psychologists are using for classifying mental illnesses. The article is worth reading in full, but the gist of it is that there are two standard ap... read more

This weeks Economist has an article subtitled, "Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time" (subscription required). Many of the items reported are familiar for those who read phds.org, but a few new things stood out: PhD production is growing rapidly outside the US. This means possibly additional opportunities i... read more