Tag Archives: NSERC

Academe

Creating automatically dozens of calendar notifications (with R)

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In a few days, we will have our annual NSERC-CRSNG meeting for grant reviews. In a nutshell (the process will be the same as last year), we get an excel file that looks like a calendar, with about 45 slots of 20 minutes, from Monday 8 am till Friday 5 pm. This year, I wanted to create automatically notifications that could get directly into my agenda. And actually, that’s easy with calendar.

First, we can extract information for an excel file, or from a pdf document (which is a printed version of an excel file). First let us read the excel document

library("readxl")
loc = "/Users/ac/Downloads/NSERC.xlsx"
data_xls = read_excel(loc)

Then, I use the structure of the document: each column is a day, so I start on Monday, and then I go down, row by row. Each time I have something which looks like “RGPIN-2024-12345”, I create an ics file, with the reference name, and the appropriate time

library(stringr)
library(calendar)
library(lubridate)
ext_RGPIN = function(chr) str_extract_all(chr, "RGPIN-2024-[0-9]{4}|R[0-9]{1}")[[1]]
ext_time = function(chr)strsplit(as.character(chr)," - ")[[1]][1]
for(j in 2:6){
for(i in 1:nrow(data_xls)){
read_RGPIN = ext_RGPIN(data_xls[i,j])
if(!is.na(read_RGPIN[1])) {
dayhour = paste("2025-02-0",j," ",ext_time(data_xls[i,1]),sep="")
s <- lubridate::ymd_hm(dayhour,tz = "EST")
ic = ic_event(
start = s,
end = s+20*60 ,
summary = paste(read_RGPIN[1]," (",read_RGPIN[2],")",sep=""),
format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")
ic_write(ic, paste("ic_NSERC",read_RGPIN[1],".ics",sep=""))
cat(read_RGPIN[1],"...",dayhour,"\n")
}}}

(to illustrate, I imported those in 2025). Finally, I can import all those notifications in my agenda.

Computer

NSERC – Discovery Grants Program, over the past 5 years

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In a previous post, I discussed how it was possible to scrap the NSERC website to get stats about discovery grants. Since we just got the new 2018 figures, I thought it would be a good opportunity to update my graphs,

library(XML)
library(stringr)
url="http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/NSERC-CRSNG/FundingDecisions-DecisionsFinancement/ResearchGrants-SubventionsDeRecherche/ResultsGSC-ResultatsCSS_eng.asp"
download.file(url,destfile = "GSC.html")
library(XML)
tables=readHTMLTable("GSC.html")
GSC=tables[[1]]$V1
GSC=as.character(GSC[-(1:2)])
namesGSC=tables[[1]]$V2
namesGSC=as.character(namesGSC[-(1:2)])
Correction = function(x) as.numeric(gsub('[$,]', '', x))
YEAR=2013:2018
for(i in 1:length(YEAR)){
y=YEAR[i]
grants= function(gsc){
  url=paste("http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/NSERC-CRSNG/FundingDecisions-DecisionsFinancement/ResearchGrants-SubventionsDeRecherche/ResultsGSCDetail-ResultatsCSSDetails_eng.asp?Year=",y,"&amp;GSC=",gsc,sep="")
  download.file(url,destfile = "GSC.html")
  library(XML)
  tables=readHTMLTable("GSC.html")
  X=as.character(tables[[1]]$"Awarded Amount")
  A=as.numeric(Vectorize(Correction)(X))
  return(c(median(A),mean(A),as.numeric(quantile(A,(1:99)/100))))
}
M=Vectorize(grants)(GSC[1:12])
plot(M[3:101,8],(1:99)/100,type="s",xlim=c(0,130000),xlab=
paste("Annual Discovery Grant (CAN) - ",y,sep=""),ylab="")
lines(M[3:101,5],(1:99)/100,type="s",col="red")
lines(M[3:101,4],(1:99)/100,type="s",col="blue")
abline(v=M[3,5],lty=2,col=rgb(1,0,0,.4))
idx=which(M[3:101,8]&lt;M[3,5])
lines(M[2+idx,8],(idx)/100,type="s",lwd=4)
legend("bottomright",c("maths","physics","chemestry"),
col=c("black","red","blue"),lty=1,bty="n")}

With those functions, I plot the cumulative distribution functions for three disciplines, manely maths, physics and chemistry. I added a line for the lowest value in physics (the vertical line), and the bold line shows the proportion of researchers in maths who got less than the lowest amount in physics,

Hence, in 2013, 60% of the researchers in maths get less than any researcher in physics (and more than 90% in maths get less than any researcher in chemistry). Then, from 2014 to 2018, we get

It is rather constant : 50% of the researchers in mathematics in Canada get less than any researcher in physics, or in chemistry. I don’t understand why, but it’s interesting to observe that this is very stable…

Non classé

October, grant proposal season

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In 2012, Danielle Herbert, Adrian Barnett, Philip Clarke and Nicholas Graves published an article entitled “on the time spent preparing grant proposals: an observational study of Australian researchers“, whose conclusions had been included in Nature under a more explicit title, “Australia’s grant system wastes time” ! In this study, they included 3700 grant applications sent to the National Health and Medical Research Council, and showed that each application represented 37 working days: “Extrapolating this to all 3,727 submitted proposals gives an estimated 550 working years of researchers’ time (95% confidence interval, 513-589)“. But in these times when I have to write my funding application, I find that losing 37 days of work is huge. Because it’s become the norm! And somehow, it’s sad.

Forget about the crazy idea that I would rather, in fact, spend more time doing my research. In fact, the thought I had this morning was that it is rather sad that in the Faculty of Science, mathematicians are asked to spend a considerable amount of time, comparable to that required of physicists or chemists, for often smaller amounts of funding… And I thought it could be easily verified. We start by retrieving the discipline codes

url="http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/NSERC-CRSNG/FundingDecisions-DecisionsFinancement/ResearchGrants-SubventionsDeRecherche/ResultsGSC-ResultatsCSS_eng.asp"
download.file(url,destfile = "GSC.html")
library(XML)
tables=readHTMLTable("GSC.html")
GSC=tables[[1]]$V1
GSC=as.character(GSC[-(1:2)])
namesGSC=tables[[1]]$V2
namesGSC=as.character(namesGSC[-(1:2)])

We’re going to need a small function, to remove the $ and other symbols that pollute the data (and prevent them from being treated as numbers)

library(stringr)
Correction = function(x) as.numeric(gsub('[$,]', '', x))

We will now read the 12 pages, and harvest (we will just take the 2017 data, but we could go back a few years before)

grants= function(gsc){
     url=paste("http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/NSERC-CRSNG/FundingDecisions-DecisionsFinancement/ResearchGrants-SubventionsDeRecherche/ResultsGSCDetail-ResultatsCSSDetails_eng.asp?Year=2017&amp;GSC=",gsc,sep="")
    download.file(url,destfile = "GSC.html")
    library(XML)
    tables=readHTMLTable("GSC.html")
    X=as.character(tables[[1]]$"Awarded Amount")
    A=as.numeric(Vectorize(Correction)(X))
return(c(median(A),mean(A),as.numeric(quantile(A,(1:99)/100))))
}
M=Vectorize(grants)(GSC[1:12])

The average amounts of individual grants can be compared,

barplot(M[2,])

In mathematics, the average grant amount is $24400. If we normalize by this quantity, we obtain

barplot(M[2,]/M[2,8])

In other words, the average amount of a (individual) grant in chemistry (to pay for students, conferences, etc.) is twice that in mathematics, 60% higher in physics than in maths…

We can also look at the median values (rather than the averages)

barplot(M[1,])

Here again, it is in mathematics that it is the weakest….

barplot(M[1,]/M[1,8])

in comparable proportions. If we think that the time spent writing should be proportional to the amount allocated, we should spend half as much time in math as in chemistry.

Cumulative functions can also be ploted,

plot(M[3:101,8],(1:99)/100,type="s",xlim=range(M))
lines(M[3:101,5],(1:99)/100,type="s",col="red")
lines(M[3:101,4],(1:99)/100,type="s",col="blue")

with math in black, physics in red, and chemistry in blue. What is surprising is the bottom part: a “bad” researcher in chemistry or physics will earn more than the median researcher in mathematics…

Now that my intuition is confirmed, I have to go back, writing my proposal… and explain to my coauthors that I have to postpone some research projects because, well, you know…