aaac:feedback [Assay and Acquisition of Radiopure Materials]

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==== Model for moving Forward ====
There is a new model as we move forward.  The current AAAC committee will take our draft report and use it to craft an AAAC report that will be included in the 2016 March Report.  The AAAC report will be distributed to Congress, and as such will have to follow their guidelines with findings and recommendations.  Some of our language will have to be changed - for example (in the 3rd to last paragraph): 
"Reducing the size of individual research grants, decreasing the number of funding opportunities
available, limiting the number of proposal submissions per investigator, or enforcing a pre-proposal stage
may artificially raise funding rates in the short term, but will actually only serve to disguise the problem
instead of solving it." reads like a Recommendation, but if that were our actual recommendation to congress, it could hamstring the agencies from actually pursuing any of those options.  

The AAAC still wants us to interact with them in the re-formatting of the interim report into an official report. The section on "specific corrections" should be used to provide this feedback to AAAC.

There is a lot of interest for us to provide more than this type of report from AAAC, which must follow their charge to report on inter-agency cooperation and their adherence to the decadal process.  We should instead find sponsorship within AAS, which our survey will help us do.  Therefore, we will continue along the direction we have outlined, but we will no longer be an AAAC official committee.
=== Specific corrections for the AAAC 2016 March Report ===
  * Add paragraph about DOE Cosmic Frontier (Prisca will send)
  * Clarify language (and numbers) on the AAS full membership vs number of unique proposers over a 3-yr cycle
  * Get membership numbers from APS too
  * Add Jim Ulvestad's NSF AAG statistics that show that the number of new PI/old PI hovers at 80% over the last 2 years.  So new PIs are getting funded.
=== Suggestions for an Improved AAS Proposal Pressures Report ===
=== Community Comments received ===
  * Lots of confusion over No. of proposals vs no. of unique proposers vs over a 3 yr cycle
  * More details on Planetary and Helio physics
  * From Richard Mushotzky: One possible solution lies in the jump in proposals from 2004-2007 of 55% that must have been accompanied by a similar rise in proposers, but your statistics on proposers only goes back to 2008. It must be that we had a substantial rise in the size of the proposing community over the 2004-2009 epoch which was much larger than the number of members of the AAS. This seems consistent since the rise in the number of proposals from 2008-2014 of 38% roughly matches the increase in the PI pool of 30%. I can think of 2 simple possibilities 1) the fraction of proposing astronomers who are members of the AAS dropped in that period and has remained constant since then 2) there was a substantial increase in the fraction of the community who started to write research proposals in this period. I know from personal experience that #2 is true. A significant fraction of the new hires in this period, at institutions that previously did not stress research, are now strongly encouraged to conduct research and thus write proposals increasing the total pool of proposers. I wonder if your group could obtain statistics for the number of PIs going back to 2000?
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