Hello everyone. Are you still there? It's not much fun reading a blog that doesn't update for several days, is it? My excuse is two-fold.
1. That the University of Waikato Semester A has just started. Actually, that isn't a real excuse since I've known about it for a long time. It just acts to aggrevate the second reason.
2. A project call for some of the National Science Challenges has been released.
What are the National Science Challenges? Have a read on the MBIE website. The government is putting a lot of money into research focused on addressing ten, grand challenges. There was a bit of debate about these when they came out as being 'more of the same' for New Zealand (i.e. doing just what we've been doing anyway), but, whatever your view, they are here to stay a while. Now, a call for proposals has just been put out for some of these. The timescale isn't terribly long – I learned about it on Wednesday last week and I have till 5pm Wednesday this week (tomorrow!) to get something pulled together. With a team split over different institutions and numbering about eight researchers, this isn't an easy or quick job. But when someone dangles half a million dollars in front of you and asks you to jump up and down for a week (plus fit in some undergraduate lectures while you're at it) it sometimes pays to do it.
So sorry for no blog entries. Things might get calmer at 5.01pm tomorrow.