Thanks to our appetite for novelty, innovation is requisite. It’s not something that only a few people do. The innovative drive lives in every human brain, and the resulting war against the repetitive is what powers the colossal changes that distinguish one generation from the next, one decade from the next, one year from the next. The drive to create the new is part of our biological makeup. We build cultures by the hundreds and new stories by the millions. We surround ourselves with things that have never existed before, while pigs and llamas and goldfish do not. But where do our new ideas come from?
Applicants must use FORMS-E application packages for due dates on or after January 25, 2018 and must use FORMS-D application packages for due dates on or before January 24, 2018 (see
NOT-OD-17-062
for details). Applicants are encouraged to submit early to allow time to work through any unforeseen issues.
With the academic job market in full swing, people are applying to multiple positions, in hopes of landing a faculty job somewhere, anywhere. For those who don’t make the shortlist — or who may have decided that a professorship isn’t for them after all — a big market for people with Ph.D.s has emerged at Amazon, the retail behemoth.
This year, I've spent a lot of time working with graduate students on their writing. They were preparing manuscripts for peer-reviewed publication, and wanted to lead the writing process from first cut to submission. The result, in addition to a stack of drafts, has been an unexpected and welcome education for me — a raft of challenges in learning to write, in teaching writing and in the craft of writing. Writing is hard work, even for people who enjoy it. In my most impatient moments, I think of what William Shawn, legendary editor of
The New Yorker magazine, once said to writer John McPhee: “It takes as long as it takes.”
Researchers have traced the origins of dozens of alabaster sculptures dating from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries using chemical-isotope signatures. Medieval trade routes are a mystery to historians because written records are rare. So Wolfram Kloppmann at the French Geological Survey in Orleans, France, and his colleagues analysed the isotopic composition of sulfur, oxygen and strontium in alabaster works of art from the period. They then matched these isotopic fingerprints with geographical locations.
On October 2, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross released the Streamlining Permitting and Regulatory Burdens for American Manufacturers report that was submitted to President Donald Trump. The report, which gathered input from domestic manufacturers and industry stakeholders, identified 20 sets of regulations and permitting issues as being a top priority for reform and immediate action to begin unleashing of the domestic manufacturing industry.
