NSF demo site

Hello-- not much to post tonight. We just watched Sebastian Seung's I am my Connectome on TED. 

My husband is looking for post-doc stuff, so tonight I was sharing with him a neat resource I learned about in class. This is the NSF fastlane DEMO site. 

If you navigate to fastlane  you'll see the demo site on the left side. It's fairly self-explanatory to get into, just make sure you log in as "Terry Demo" (that's your "name") and keep Terry's password.

 You can go into there and find all kinds of practice proposal areas-- you want to probably use the Proposal Functions

I'll admit I haven't fully explored it yet, but I'm working on it now, and I think its a neat, safe way to see the inner workings of the Fastlane without the major "Oh crud!" factor that is associated with actually submitting things incorrectly.

As a bonus I will also say this, my boss finally got to share with me some proposals written by her students in the past and by her and others in our working group. She also helpfully told me which were funded and which were not.
I think it's really great to read proposals, funded and not, and if you can get it, the reviews on them. I'm learning a few things like

1. you better have damn good, disproveable hypotheses.
2.  you should probably start with an outline and build in info around it
3. your research doesn't need to change the world. but it does need to change someone's world (broader impacts are pretty important!)

so clearly I'm no master of this yet, but that's the trend I'm noticing so far, and if I'm wrong I've got the rest of my life to find out and refine my hypotheses... about hypotheses...

wow.
I've heard asking good questions is the hardest part of this. I've certainly got plenty of questions! Now just to make them good.