About the Blog

Why is this blog called “The Second Criterion”?

Most of my scientific research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), both through my fellowship and through research grants to my lab and my university.  When we apply for grant money from the NSF, we have to explicitly address two aspects of our work: Intellectual Merit, and Broader Impacts.  The term “second criterion” refers to Broader Impacts, which is (quite literally) the second of these two criteria.

I’ll write more about the Broader Impacts criterion when I have time, but one aspect of Broader Impacts that is particularly important to me is outreach and communication.  Seems like a fitting theme for a blog, no?

That being said, I don’t think “The Second Criterion” is a particularly exciting name for a blog, and I intend it mostly as a temporary title as I get started.  So, this title may change – if you have a suggestion for a better name, leave me a comment and let me know!

What am I going to find on this blog?

Mostly, things that interest me.  This includes, but is not limited to:

• cool stuff in modern science
• random musings
• history of science
• science news
• science communication

There’s a list of post categories in the sidebar on the right – that’s probably a good place to start if you want to explore the topics on this blog.

May I re-post something that you wrote?

The content of this blog is currently licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.  This means that yes, you may re-post things that I’ve written here, but only if you make it clear that I am the author (preferably by linking back to the original post), and only if you quote it exactly and are not making any money off of it.  While not required, I’d love it if you’d send me a link to your re-post, too.

For any other uses, please contact me to ask permission.

Who are you?

See the About the Author page, here.