NSF RSS Feeds

The NSF now has RSS feeds for important sections of their website. I don't know how new this is, but it's great. Some of the useful feeds:

• Recently announced funding opportunities
• Upcoming deadlines
• New NSF publications
• NSF news

The NSF publications link has two new items that might be of interest. The first one is about a change in formatting for proposals. If I read it correctly, it now states that Times font cannot be used for writing proposals, rather Computer Modern (>= 10pt) is the preferred font.

a. Use of only the approved typefaces identified below, a black font
color, and a font size of 10 points or larger must be used:
. For Windows users: Arial, Helvetica, Palatino Linotype, or Georgia
. For Macintosh users: Arial, Helvetica, Palatino, or Georgia
. For TeX users: Computer Modern

A Symbol font may be used to insert Greek letters or special
characters; however, the font size requirement still applies;

It's a little confusing why Windows and Mac are of the same "type" as TeX.

The second document is a statistical overview of immigrant scientists and engineers in the US. Lots of interesting statistics to muse over, including this: fully 15% of all immigrant scientists and engineers in the US are Indian-born, followed by nearly 10% Chinese-born. Compare this to 19% for all of Europe.