From the blog from VoIP Supply, two interesting posts.
Asterisk Unsafe? What a Bunch of Crap debunks a story regarding people “taking over” your Asterisk VoIP PBX for voice spamming.
Sangoma has launched a new line of VoIP cards that are not modular…and therefore a little easier to work with.
Via Make Magazine – Get your warning labels, warning signs, church signs here.
Innovation Economy – A blog about start-ups and innovation around Boston and New England. Check the post regarding the Detroit Automaker Bailout.
The Economist agrees about the bailout.
Getting down to the wire on our NIH grant application, I just casually attempted to log in with my usual credentials into Grants.gov. Using Internet Explorer…the latest version, (I guess) it didn’t work. I downloaded a fresh copy of FireFox, and was in. It also worked on Safari. So there is something odd going on with IE. I’m now thinking the ideal grant application machine is a Windows XP machine with dual monitors, so you can keep the instructions open at the same time you are filling out the forms. You also need a copy of Adobe Acrobat…the full application to slice and dice .PDF files.
Check out this Flash-based web site called The Girl Effect for an example of “using the medium”.
Note this is sort of raw and unedited….I’ll go back and clean it up later.
I’m cooling my heels waiting for a GoTo Webinar to start; and it hasn’t started yet, and already I’m annoyed…with an obnoxious message every 30 seconds “We’re sorry for the delay as the organizer hasn’t arrived. You will be placed on hold until the organizer arrives. Please remain on the line.”
The webinar consists of a VoIP audio to the computer, and display of a PowerPoint slide deck. Voice quality seems fine. You can submit questions either via a chat entry, and at the end of the webinar, they have been scrolling through the whole log and answering questions. They got a lot of questions….I submitted one at the beginning of the session, ad it looks like it appeared in the top fifth or so of the list..and that is where we are now after about 45 minutes of answering ad-hoc questions.
Page Limits: Phase I 15 pages max, Phase II 25 pages max, to include:
Specific aims
Background and Significance
Preliminary Studies/Progress Report
Research Design and Methods
Phase I one page max, Phase II 3 page max
(I-26 SF424 Application Guide)
You don’t need to identify an institute in the cover letter.
The CSR will assign it appropriately. (I-24)
Do you need approval by the IRB for Human Subjects Assurance at the time of submission?
No. — this is done just in time. (II-1) If they ask about an IRB….be happy…it probably means you’ll receive the award.
Permissible to submit a budget that deviates from the time and dollars normally awarded to Phase I or Phase II?
Yes, but they must be well justified. You are encouraged to discuss budgetary deviations with the program manager.
Average Phase I are $150,000 and average Phase II are $850,000
Difference between a resubmission and a revision?
(I-27) and (I-28)
Subcontractors are required to provide a letter of support which shows their role.
Multiple PIs?
Now allowed. Each PD/PI must have a role and a leadership plan is required (I-51)
F&A – Phase I f you don’t have a negotiated rate, propose a rate not to exceed 40%. They will not normally negotiate a rate.
Phase II will go with a 25% rate. If you request a rate higher than 25% then you will have a negotiated rate for the Phase II project.
E-Submission Survival Tips
Be sure that you have registered both in Grants.gov and in the eRA Commons.
It can take 2-4 weeks or even up to 8 weeks for newly established or foreign businesses.
Follow all of the FOA instructions.
Pay particular attention to Section IV of Application and Submission Information.
Download fresh application forms for each application deadline. For example Adobe Forms are going to replace PureEdge forms. Some of this is to support the peer review. Anything posted with a receipt date after January 31, 2009, will be done with Adobe Forms (hooray!)
After submission, you must track the application in Grants.gov
Errors stop application processing and must be corrected.
Warnings to not stop application submission and are corrected at the discretion of the applicant.
Reviewers never see your warnings. They never see the number of attempts tp submit.
You can correct errors and warnings for 2 business days after the submission deadline.
Common application errors.
Mssing eMail in SF424 (box 5) in the Applicant Information section
Missing PD/PI Commons User name in credential field of Sr/Key Person Profile form
Submit early. You must plan for multiple submission attempts. 60% of small business applicants need to correct errors, compared to 30% of academic submission. There is contention for help-desk resources.
If you can’t view the application in the ERA commons, we can’t review it. You can’t imagine the things that were attached to the application (recipes….etc).
Get connected to receive notifications or process/policy changes and contingency alerts.
Use the eRA Commons help desk and document the issues. It is especially important is issue threatens on-time submission.
http://ithelpdesk.nih.gov/eRA/ – allows you to open a trouble ticket.
Suzanne E. Fisher, Ph.D. Director of Receipt and Referral.
Advance approval is not given for late applications. A window of consideration is 1 week. Anything received after 1 week will not be reviewed at all.
Format, approved fonts, Arial, Helvetia, palatino, Georgia, type size 1/2 inch margins, Applies to enitre application. This is to be kind to the reviewers.
Cover letter should be used for a number of purposes
Institute/Center Assignment
Suggest review assignment
Identify areas of expertise needed to evaluate the applicaiton
Required for a changed/corrected submission
Cover letter is not shared with the reviewers.
Only 1 resubmission will be required, (right now you can do 2…but that is ending)
You have to change the content, and you have mark changes in the text.
Looking for scientific changes. Think of what would be helpful for the reviewers.
If you don’t see the application in the Commons…..they can’t work on it.
Verify the Activity Code
Request change in writing
Don’t expect us to be mind readers.
Best person to talk to is the person who is available when you call.
Applications reviewed but not discussed a the Scientific Review meeting, about 40% applications fall into that category.
support@grants.gov
1 (800) 518-4726
Customer service number and trouble ticket with case notes.
First-timers need to obtain the following:
DUNS number (from Dunn and Bradstreet)
Tax Identification Number (from IRS)
Central Contract Registration (CAGE code)
Grants.gov password
There is a Grants.gov blog (!)
Once a quarter they have a “stakeholder webcast”
CFDA – Catalog for Domestic Assistance
Keyword Search is powered by Google.
Cover sheet shows a list of the mandatory forms.
You can save the forms package to a network drive if multiple people will be working on the package.
Once you submit, you get a Grants.gov email receipt. Then Validation eMail which either says the package was submitted or rejection due to errors. The most common problem is a DUNS number error.
Eventually, you’ll get an eMail showing that the agency has retrieved the application package.
They have three cutomer support reps.
ALL PDF ATTACHMENT FILENAMES MUST BE LESS THAN 50 CHARS AND MAY NOT CONTAIN SPACES
Background and Significant length recommended to 2 or 3 pages.
They have a full list of all validations that they go through. The help desk can direct you to the list of the validation.
The biosketch is the way for you to show to the reviewers that you are capable of performing the research.
Multiple PD/PI leadership plan. Intended for a team approach type of projects. Multiple disciplines. Follow the instruction for the leadership plan. Google on http://grants.nih.gov/grants/multi_pi
Phase I specific aims should include milestones with specific aims
CDC has only about $8 million in their SBIR budget.
NIH has about $650 million
(per year).
Bibliography and References Cited.
Propose a budget and time frame that is reasonable and appropriate for the research, and justify it. You are not limited to the $750,000. (Phase II). Time period and award amounts are guidelines.
Note there is the ability for the small business to request a fee of 7%.
Patent costs are NOT allowed as indirect or direct costs, (but you could perhaps use the fee for this).
Program status: scheduled to be reauthorized by September 2008, but instead it was extended to March 2009. Agencies have been advised to do business as usual. Award amounts remain the same that they were in 1992 (!) (but stay tuned).
They will post the slides on the webinar.
F&A costs they have lots of questions. Section 1 page 96 gives you everything you ever wanted to know about F&A. Usually you are instructed to leave the fringe section blank in the budget form, because it is usually figured as part of indirect costs. Earliest possible start date for people submitting in December would be July.
On Phase I they don’t negotiate an indirect rate.
Phase II they give an option to allow up to 25% without negotiation. If you want to negotiate a rate, then include the estimated rate in the application, and then be prepared to start the negotiation process (which can be 6-12 months!!)
Look in January – they are looking to change these figures.
Is filing a FastTrack substantially reducing my change to get funded compared to a Phase I only?
Works well if you have strong preliminary data, etc. strong milestones, may have letters of interest of commercial partners, for companies who have a commercialization record.
In 2007:
24.1% of Phase I were awarded
19% FastTracks were awarded
Example Phase I and Phase II successfully funded grants are available at the NIH web site.
It is possible to submit preliminary data after the deadline Phase I ? Yes
Negotiation of indirect rates doesn’t happen until you have been selected for an award.
Examples of justification for the 7% fee:
Reality is that it is granted. Typically we don’t negotiate it.
You should mark EACH multiple investigator with PD/PI role.
You need to submit multiple days in advance of the deadline.
Follow the instructions very closely. SF424
PI cannot be a consultant.
STTR requires that the PI put in at least 10% for the project.
SBIR doesn’t require an actual percentage, but typically it is more than 10%
Look at sample collaboration agreement for STTR for dealing with IP
Mac users, Citrix has a capacity of 50 users. Use it off hours. (outside of 10AM-10PM)
(LK – this basically is a disaster…find a PC! hopefully it will be fixed going forward. )
A number of questions from people who said they couldn’t get their letters of support by the deadline. No sympathy here.
This may be a reflection on the applicant. (Translation: Be sure that you have them in a timely manner). However, you can negotiate with the SRO.
Only the contact PI needs to be affiliated with the small business, meeting the 50% employment rule.
Rest of the questions will be posted. NIH Web Site Webinar November.
Four weeks to go, and I’m assembling an SBIR “Competing Continuation” grant, an odd-ball National Institutes of Health grant opportunity which requires an SBIR Phase II as a prerequisite, and basically allows you to continue research and development for “complex” medical devices, drugs, etc, that still have a way to go before commercialization.
NIH converted to an online submission procedure about two years ago. By most accounts it was fairly buggy, and they are continuing to refine it; it looks as if they are going to base the next version on Adobe Forms. As described a few days ago, if you have either a Mac with Leopard, OS-X, or a machine with Windows Vista, the only option that runs the forms is to use a Citrix terminal application which looks like Windows 95, crashes regularly, and logs you off after 20 minutes in any case. After struggling with this for a session last Friday, I’m punting and I’ve regressed to a Windows XP machine.
Even using the “native” PureEdge viewer, things are fairly kludgy. PureEdge installs as viwer, sort of like Adobe Acrobat, within Internet Explorer. You then navigate to the web page that contains the xfd for the web form. After inputting data, you can save the data. Unfortunatly the saved data from my Citrix session won’t seem to run…I have to reenter everything that I put on Friday.
After downloading the form again the form opens.
A couple of extracts from the SF424 instructions.
A budget peried is considered to be one year or portion of a year if the grant period is less than a year. If you have a multi-year budget, then you must fill out one for each year. The figures will be consolidated on a read-only summary sheet.
If you are working within a consortium, it is helpful to have the consortium budgets entered first. These are done with the form shown in the lower left-hand corner, the R&R subaward budget form, which works similarly to the main budget form. You can even create the file for this and email it to your consortium partner to fill out and and return.
Totals from the consortium budget needs to be entered into the main budget. This is also the time where you can be sure to enforce rules such as the requirement that the maximum amount a subaward can be is 50% of the total amount for an SBIR grant. I sent the subaward budget back twice for revisions for this and similar restrictions.
All this goes considerably better when accompanied by music of your choice. Shawn Colvin was helpful.
Why the native Grabber application in OS-X can’t save in someting other than a TIFF file format is beyond me, and a whole lot of other people besides. Over at Lifehacker, the fans have it all figured out. Shameless quote:
Check out TInkertool/Onyx. They’re both really nice tools for macs, but the nice thing is they include an option to change the Grab filetype.
Also, if you want commands to take screenshots, in PNG, look no further then below:
Command(Apple)-Shift-3 – Whole desktop/menubar/etc.
Command(Apple)-Shift-4 – You drag and define the space it takes the picture.
Command(Apple)-Shift-4-Space – It allows you to take a picture of anything, and just that thing, whether it be a window or something like that.It saves the files on the desktop as Picture 1.png, Picture 2.png, etc.
Hope this helps.
Thanks pardner.
I received a notice that Parallels 4 is available, and since I had recently bought a copy of 3 for the iMac, the upgrade was free. In between a bunch of other stuff, I downloaded and installed it, and I have to say I’m impressed. Version 3 upgraded my existing Windows Vista virtual machine fairly smoothly, and I’m installing an Ubuntu Linux VM right now from CD that I had lying around with 8.04 (Hardy Heron, if memory serves). Now since there is a new version 8.10, I followed the Ubuntu instructions to do an in-place upgrade.
By default Parallels allocates 512K of RAM and 34 megs of disk space for an Ubuntu installation. The Ubuntu installer said the upgrade could take some hours.
In a moment of weakness, and just before the great upgrade for Mac laptops in October, I bought a 24″ IMac for my home workstation and an “old” cinema display to replace the Dell display I was using in our lab for the laptop. If I had to do it all over again… I would have waited two days (!) and possibly gotten an upgraded Mac laptop Pro, and one or two of the “new” cinema displays, and just moved the laptop between the two desks. As it is, I spend a fair amount of time worrying whether the laptop and IMac are synchronized and have to buy two copies of mac applications, IWork and Parallels. The new cinema displays include an iSight camera and are designed to integrate with the new laptops.
For syncing eMail, I use the Mac Mail client and configure the accounts as IMAP accounts on my mail server.
For syncing files, I’ve subscribed to the Mac.Me service, ($99/year) and use IDisk. This works as well as an FTP server to my own FTP site; and the .me service will also synchronize ICal and the address book. Calendar entries are put in Google Calendar, which is then synched to the two ICal applications.
It all seems a little complicated and kludgy. But the upshot is by using my mail server, and Google calendar, I can always go to the web to see my eMail and appointments. Despite the uproar when Mac.me was introduced in the summer, so far it seems to work fine for what I need.
I also took the opportunity to buy Adobe Creative Suite. They sent CS3, and of course, they have just released CS4. I’m not able to figure whether I’ll be able to upgrade to CS4 without paying. Lots of problems here, worth another discussion.
I haven’t focused on VoIP for awhile… but others do.
FierceVoIP announced that Logitech has bought out SightSpeed. Sightspeed was (is) one of my favorite videoconferencing applications, and it will be very interesting to see what becomes of the product.
VoipInsider reports that Polycom has updated the firmware for Soundpoint phones.
VoicePulse has announced a fail-over option for their accounts. They’ve completely redesigned their web site with a new interface, that looks really classy. This is one VoIP provider who appears to be here to stay. Hooray!
Windows for Devices reports that Motorola will discontinue development of Symbian and MotoMax phones, and concentrate on Windows Mobile, and Google Android. The site emphasizes hardware running embedded versions of Windows, there is a companion site for the Linux crowd at Linux For Devices.
I got sucked in to a bit of back and forth on our local Linux/Unix list a couple days ago and wrote:
Ten years ago I was consulting for a multi-national education non-profit, and I discussed with the systems manager the notion of using open source…in particular I was talking about replacing their Windows 2000/NT servers, with Linux. This would have been a logistical wrench, not least because they had several client/server applications that used SQL-Server as the back end. His point was that as an educational institution, they got such good discounts on any proprietary software that the amount spent on the software was a miniscule percentage of their IT budget. So, there was no economic benefit, and certainly no performance benefit that justified such a change.
Later that year I was doing an inventory of their machines at one of the european sites and couldn’t find the terminal server box. Turns out this was a Linux box running VMC or something and it had been bricked up in a wall during a recent renovation, and been merrily running, unseen, for several months.
So, the moral for me was, use what works. At the time I actually got them to go from running four O/S’s in the organization to two, Windows, and the aforementioned Linux. We dumped Macs in one site, and Novell in another, and my advice to subsequent clients was to run one and only one OS in the organization.
I’m happy to say that they didn’t all run Windows.
tfnp 