VENI-grant congratulation

I was happily surprised by a letter I received from the rector of the University of Amsterdam. If you click the image you can read it... well, if you speak Dutch. (For the few people out there who don't, it reads as follows:

Dear Mr. Grasman,

On behalf of the Board of Goveners I would like to congratulate you with your recently awarded "VENI-innovation impuls" application. The awardment of your application again shows that research that is conducted within our university is both nationally as well as internationally acknowledged.

I wish you good luck in conducting your research.

Sincerely,

prof. mr. P.F. van der Heijden, rector)

They even announced it on the UvA website, just like the research school and the Netherlands Science Foundation did. It made me realize that I didn't get anything like it from the Psychology department... Not even a single word from the very same person that brought flowers to congratulate Eric-Jan—whom I share a room with—with his VIDI-grant... Even when I expressed my surprise that apparently only VIDI-grant applicants received flowers... Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all bitter .

VENI Award

It is official and definite: I got a VENI-grant! That means getting paid for 3 years of self chosen work at a self chosen institution. Stated otherwise: € 208,000 for my own research... . Well, it is bound by a couple of if's and but's: The 'institution of my choice' holds actually as long as it is willing to accept me (...mmm ...let me think ...I think I will stay at the UvA), and I had to write down the work that I will do on before hand (grant proposal ...yep). Oh, and it has to start within 6 month of the award date (which will be August 1, 2006)... I hope I will be able to keep working on stochastic catastrophy theory, but that's a “luxury problem” I guess. I didn't get any flowers from the Pscyhology department though... A bit strange 2 years ago all VENI awarded researchers received flowers ('een bosje bloemen') in a vase, and this time apparently only the VIDI-awarded researchers got flowers... Anyway, “flowers are for girls” as Wery put it (he also didn't get flowers).

Goodbye comic passport!

I have to renew my passport before going to New York in July. I'm sort of sorry about that for two reasons: The first is, that in order to comply with international and EU agreements, a new passport containing biometric marks and an RF-chip will be issued from August 26th this year, and the new passport that I will have to get before July 6th will be valid for 5 years. So I'll be stuck another 5 years with an outdated passport. 'Another' 5 years that is, because my current passport is already outdated: I am one of the relatively few people who 'ownes' a Dutch passport that is also a comic book about the entire written history of the Netherlands... writen in very tiny tiny but still legible fine print. Unfortunately, when I renew, I will have to hand the current one. And although I can ask it back (which I always do), they will have to make it 'clearly invalid'—which means that they wil make a big cut with scissors or drill three large holes through it. To rescue the internal images, I scaned my entire passport and save it to my blog. (I was amazed that no one appears to have put this unique passport online yet...)         

Cool Google Spreadsheet... (?)

Google already announced its acquisition of Writely, a web based word processor that enables you to edit, save, share, and real-time co-edit Word (-like) documents through a web browser from anywhere in the world (... eh... you'll need an internet connection), and we already saw Google Calendar (which together with Gmail replaced Outlook for me). Then we saw Google Pages, a great web based web page editor that even my mom can easily use, and the google-labs version of Google Notebook which allows you to annotate (segments of) web pages for public or private use (exactly what I have been waiting for...). But now, Google comes with a google-labs version of Google Spreadsheets, which is, no surprise, a web based spreadsheet program. It's really quite cool and promises a lot for the online word-processor (=Writely?) that they have in preparation. It's limited compared to OpenOffice.org's Calc program, or Microsoft's Excel, but it's better than the Excel version I have on my PDA: apart from crunching numbers and statistics with an extensive range of math-, stats-, financial-, date- and string-functions, formatting, sorting, importing and exporting from and to excel or csv, it allows me to collaborate with colleagues in real time on a single sheet, while 'talking' to each other with a messenger service as in your Gmail account. Thank god I have a Gmail account! How unfortunate that I don't use spreadsheets a lot, nor do my colleagues... :'(

New scientific review shows vegetarian diets cause major weight loss

Although nutrition science is not most well known for being steadfast (not to mention the popular beliefs based on scientific mistakes; see also The Skeptic) and the title of this post can be interpreted both in favor and against, but as a vegetarian myself I'm delightfully reinsured by the article below. I can't say it worked for me in the ways claimed unfortunately though (unlimited amounts of fruits and whole grains??). And of course, some meat fanatics will argue that vegetarians at least tend to look unhealthily pale... Anyway, health wasn't a motivation in denouncing meat from my diet, but this new finding suggests a beneficial side effect. The article was published on eureka.org, here's a link that also explains how to obtain a copy of the report as published in Nutrition Reviews.

New scientific review shows vegetarian diets cause major weight loss

Controlled research trials prove diet's efficacy WASHINGTON—A scientific review in April's Nutrition Reviews shows that a vegetarian diet is highly effective for weight loss. Vegetarian populations tend to be slimmer than meat-eaters, and they experience lower rates of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other life-threatening conditions linked to overweight and obesity. The new review, compiling data from 87 previous studies, shows the weight-loss effect does not depend on exercise or calorie-counting, and it occurs at a rate of approximately 1 pound per week. Rates of obesity in the general population are skyrocketing, while in vegetarians, obesity prevalence ranges from 0 percent to 6 percent, note study authors Susan E. Berkow, Ph.D., C.N.S., and Neal D. Barnard, M.D., of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM).

The authors found that the body weight of both male and female vegetarians is, on average, 3 percent to 20 percent lower than that of meat-eaters. Vegetarian and vegan diets have also been put to the test in clinical studies, as the review notes. The best of these clinical studies isolated the effects of diet by keeping exercise constant. The researchers found that a low-fat vegan diet leads to weight loss of about 1 pound per week, even without additional exercise or limits on portion sizes, calories, or carbohydrates.

"Our research reveals that people can enjoy unlimited portions of high-fiber foods such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to achieve or maintain a healthy body weight without feeling hungry," says Dr. Berkow, the lead author.

"There is evidence that a vegan diet causes an increased calorie burn after meals, meaning plant-based foods are being used more efficiently as fuel for the body, as opposed to being stored as fat," says Dr. Barnard. Insulin sensitivity is increased by a vegan diet, allowing nutrients to more rapidly enter the cells of the body to be converted to heat rather than to fat.

Earlier this month, a team of researchers led by Tim Key of Oxford University found that meat-eaters who switched to a plant-based diet gained less weight over a period of five years. Papers reviewed by Drs. Berkow and Barnard include several published by Dr. Key and his colleagues, as well as a recent study of more than 55,000 Swedish women showing that meat-eaters are more likely to be overweight than vegetarians and vegans.