Does being on a telescope time allocation committee get you a better chance of being awarded observing time ? Yes, says Jane Greaves of Cardiff University (who I do not know) - it boosts your chances by a factor of three. And this doesn't seem to be because being on the TAC gives you better knowledge of how to write a good proposal, because when people stop serving on the TAC, their success rate drops right back down again. They probably don't submit a massively higher number of proposals either, since this is usually a very time-consuming procedure. Could they be motivated to write the best possible proposals while on the TAC but don't care so much afterwards ? I guess, but it doesn't seem likely.
The obvious and most likely inference is that TACs are biased towards serving members. Someone should give a sample of proposals to external members for review and compare their scores with that of the TAC.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.05790.pdf
Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Black holes belay bird Bentleys
Following that marvellous Aeon piece on how Phineas Gage didn't suffer a horrible personality disorder after taking a bolt to the brain...
-
Hmmm. [The comments below include a prime example of someone claiming they're interested in truth but just want higher standard, where...
-
Where Americans think Ukraine is These are the guesses of 2066 Americans as to where Ukraine is. Only 1 in 6 were correct. Presumably the...
-
"The price quoted by Tesla does not include installation of the unit. To this needs to be added the cost of installing solar panels to ...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.