very diverse, as were the reasons for asking
for FT time. Some of these include:
mit on time? Would the reviewers choose
the ”right” proposals?
• obtaining data to complete a thesis or get
the last pieces of data needed to complete
a paper;
Reviewers are assigned eight proposals each,
which they must grade from 0 (poor, do not
observe) to 4 (excellent, must observe). They
also must provide a brief written review and
assess their own knowledge of the subject
area on a scale of 0 (“I know little about this
field”) to 2 (“I work or have recently worked
in this field”).
• compensating for an observing run lost to
poor weather at another telescope;
• conducting pilot observations or gathering information for upcoming standard
proposals;
• complementing multi-wavelength monitoring campaigns;
• and, finally, simply pursuing topics of interest to the submitting PI.
On the other hand, the proposals were generally short (all but one asking for less than
about six hours). Roughly 75% requested the
Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS),
and most came from the mainland United
States. This is not to say that the other partners were not represented; Canada, Brazil,
and UH also participated in this first cycle.
The mix of proposals received for the second call, due at the end of February, was
somewhat different, with more emphasis
on infrared instrumentation. Slightly less
time (54 hours) was requested overall from
the 12 proposals submitted. We speculate
that the oversubscription of the FT program
will eventually self-regulate, with high values discouraging people from submitting
proposals (too much work for too small a
chance of success) and low values having
the opposite effect (”free” telescope time!).
On Trial:
Fast Turnaround Peer Review
The peer review process is the most novel,
high-profile, and little-tested, aspect of the
FT program, and we have been watching it
unfold with great anticipation.
Would there be signs of bias and unfairness
in the system? Would the reviewers all sub-
January 2016
It’s too early for a statistically sound analysis of the process. However, it does appear
that most of the reviews — which are returned anonymously to the PIs — have been
thoughtful and useful. Of the handful of PIs
who have filled in their feedback surveys so
far, 75% report that the reviews they received
were ”mostly helpful,” with 25% considering
them to be ”variable.” A small fraction of reviewers essentially restated the proposals, or
gave single-sentence assessments, prompting us to update the web pages with advice
about how to write a helpful review.
We have also found that reviewers tend to
weigh the need for rapid response more
highly than instructed. A main aim of the
program is to enable good science, whether
that means timely observations of an object
that is swiftly fading, or simply taking data
for a project that the researcher is excited
about right now. Whether a program is timecritical is intended to be a secondary consideration. We are not sure why people are
putting so much emphasis on this. Perhaps
they feel that, to paraphrase the feedback
of one early-career reviewer, “Time Allocation Committees [TACs] are better at judging proposals than we are, so only proposals
that really need the FT program should go
through this route.” Or perhaps there’s a psychological component, something like “my
program really needs to be done soon, so
why should it compete against something
that can wait?” In any case, we have updated
2015 Year in Review
GeminiFocus
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