date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 11:52:30 GMT from: "Prof B.E. Launder" subject: Response to Revised Draft to: Mike Hulme Mike Time is very short and my comments are limited to essentials that can easily be implemented. If we get through this first filter, we must start straight away on the full proposal. Brian _______________________________________________________ General Remarks * As you said, the outline is still too long (by at least a factor of two) and many sections are too discursive. In taking a red pencil, however, you must be selective as some bits are already compactly written or need augmentation. * In particular, the Engineering input is hardly visible. This will be damaging in the eyes of the referees to be used by EPSRC. A few small additions are proposed below. Specific Comments Page 4: * If it is thought helpful to the proposal to include the designatory letters 'FRS', the corresponding signal of Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, FREng, should also be appended to my name (See remark above about giving Engineering greater visibility). In view of space constraints, DO NOT add the rationale but it will be helpful for the full proposal. Page 5: Paragraph 1: Research Director .... will have "overall responsibility for the Centre" (NOT ' control of') Final Paragraph, 3rd sentence: after "locate" add "the headquarters of". Page 6: lines 3 and 4: "Two 'satellite' centres will be established at Southampton and UMIST which wil include offices staffed by a part-time coordinator and a secretary" Paragraph 3 [The detailed composition of the Centre's management team will need discussion by the participants later. No further explanation is merited at this stage]. 2lb [Yes 'Environment Research Centre' is OK for now]. Page 7: Box: As noted in earlier e-mail Stewart Miller died a couple of weeks ago. Please include the designatory letters 'FREng' immediately following Dr J J McQuaid's name. Page 8: RP1: Desperately wordy. Is it necessary to put this theme first? Page 9: RP2: [Better - even though longer. There's more meat] Page 10, paragraph 3, amend as follows: "and in France to develop more reliable flow-simulation software and to assess the political, economic ..." Final paragraph, line 1: "complement" [i.e. no "i"]. Page 11: Top: Include in list of contributing organizations: British Energy, Electricité de France. Page 12: RP6: Again written too expansively. Page 13: 'Knowledge transfer' [not hyphenated] Line 1: 'communicating with' [not "to"] I am concerned that the proposed expenditure of effort and money on "pro-active media strategy", "roadshows" and "popular publications for targeted audiences (such as high schools)" will not be seen as appropriate for a research centre. If this is included, it should be made clear that the costs would be met from "soft money" not the RC grant. Given pressures on space, it would be best to delete it. Additional funding: not true that all have attracted money in the area of "climate change". Little of the engineering work has been directed at climate change per se. Perhaps: "in the field of climate change and areas related thereto". Can we really claim that "all" participants have been "extremely successful"? I don't think I could claim that for myself and it seems doubtful if all the others named could. Page 15: Operational Principles: I am unclear what the third sentence of the first bullet point means. Bullet point 4: We will surely need to adopt rigorous peer-reviewed and- assessed procedures for allocating the £1.4 M. p.a. Clearly, some independent input and monitoring (the Advisory Board?) will be essential to retain the RC's confidence Box B: There will need to be secretarial support for the UMIST and (I suppose) Southampton coordinators. Further discussions will therefore be needed on the precise distribution. Page 18: Possible additional entries: * British Energy: Collaborative work on assessing and refining software for predicting temperature variations in coolant circuits of nuclear reactors under failure scenarios. *Electricité de France: Development of software for simulating tidal and wind driven sea motion in the English Channel and North Sea. Page 20: Please use my 'user-friendly' e-mail address: I would suggest that in this list we should drop the FRS attached to John Shepherd's name and mine.