Posted on Leave a comment

March Links: Reinventing Philanthropy, Bureaucrats in Action, Urbanism and Environment, Abstinence Education on Valentine’s Day, and More

* Google Finds It Hard to Reinvent Philanthropy. Seliger + Associates unsurprised.

* Bureaucrat acts like a jerk and attempts to silence smart guy. News at 11:00.

* Southwest Airlines pilot holds plane for murder victim’s family. Wow.

* Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.

* FYI: US manufacturing still tops China’s by nearly 46 percent, at least as measured by dollar output.

* The most amusing recent grant title: “Developing High-Throughput Assays for Predictive Modeling of Reproductive and Developmental Toxicity Modulated Through the Endocrine System or Pertinent Pathways in Humans and Species Relevant to Ecological Risk Assessment.” Say it three times fast.

* You Can’t Be Against Dense, Urban Development and Consider Yourself an Environmentalist.

* An important rap song: Julian Smith’s “I’m Reading a Book,” complete with bagpipes at the end.

* The Facebook fast, with lessons learned.

* What do twin adoption studies show?

* The quality of nonfiction versus fiction. We don’t think it matters much what grant writers read as long as they do read.

* Slate’s review of Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation: “[. . . ] The Great Stagnation makes an ambitious argument whose chief present advantage (and greatest eventual liability) is that it’s impossible to assess in real time.” This might be the most important book of the year, and at the very least is dense with argument and novel thought.

* Why I don’t care very much about tablets anymore, from Jon Stokes, except I never did care about tablets in the first place. A sample:

A Google Image search turns up the above, quite typical picture of a scribe practicing his art. You’ll notice that the scribe’s desk contains two levels, where the topmost level holds an exemplar document and the bottom holds the document that he’s actually working on. The scribe in the picture could be a copyist who’s making a copy of the exemplar, or he could be a writer who’s using the top copy as a source or reference. Either way, his basic work setup is the same as my modern monitor plus keyboard setup, in that it’s vertically split into two planes, with the top plane being used for display and the bottom plane being used for input.

The key here is that the scribe’s hands aren’t in the way of his display, and neither are mine when I work at my desktop or laptop. My hands rest on a keyboard, comfortably out of sight and out of mind.

With a tablet, in contrast, my rather large hands end up covering some portion of the display as I try to manipulate it. In general, it’s less optimal to have an output area that also doubles as an input area. This is why the mouse and keyboard will be with us for decades hence—because they let you keep your hands away from what you’re trying to focus on.

When you write a full proposal on a tablet, let me know. And not just as a stunt to say, “I could do it,” either.

* Why publishers are scared of ebooks—the standard reasons and Amanda Hocking as symbol.

* In an amusing twist, Texas publishes its Abstinence Education Services RFP on Valentine’s Day.

Posted on 4 Comments

Google Faster than Grants.Gov — Finding the Capital Fund Education and Training Community Facilities Program and the FY 2011 Recovery Implementation Fund

Here's what real search looks likeWhile researching this week’s e-mail Grant Alert newsletter, I needed to find out more about the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) FY 2011 Recovery Implementation Fund. I searched for it on Grants.gov, which kept hanging instead of returning information.

But there’s a way around this: you can restrict Google searches to a single domain. If you want to search for a term, just type in the search term followed by site:http://grants.gov, or whatever site you need. So I tried “Recovery Implementation Fund site:grants.gov,” which immediately found the funding announcement.

If whoever is running Grants.gov had half a brain, they’d use a Google custom search (or one from Bing, Yahoo, or the other major search engine) instead of whatever lousy in-house search tool they’re using. But this presupposes that the brain trust at Grants.gov would care. They don’t because they publish RFPs but don’t respond to RFPs, so why would they care about those of us who are looking for RFPs? Customer service doesn’t matter if customers don’t matter.

The same thing happened with the the Capital Fund Education and Training Community Facilities Program, and Google again came to the rescue. If you’re struggling with a Grants.gov search—or a search of any janky site—use this technique to get around it. It’s also helpful at local or state government sites that contain useful data that you can’t easily otherwise find; Google is often smarter than the designers of such government websites.