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Practical policy research opportunity

Good news, everyone. There’s money available from a programme called BiodivERsA ((No comments, please, on the beauty, or otherwise, of that particular name.)) You have to come up with a proposal for an international research project to:

  • link scientific advancement to challenges in biodiversity policy and conservation management;
  • generate new knowledge and insights with the eventual goal of use in policy and management;
  • generate added value to national research projects across Europe by linking expertise and efforts across national teams.

Furthermore, it should have to do with biodiversity, and should link scientific advance to policy and practice. And it should include partners from other ERA-net countries. The online pre-proposal form will be available from next Monday, 10 December.

So you could, for example, decide to study the impact of european legislation on levels of agricultural biodiversity and then propose policy solutions that would increase the diversity farmers and others can easily make use of. But they’ll never fund you.

I wonder what they will fund.

Hat tip: Ecology and Policy.

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Tasty rice

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I’m at IRRI in the Philippines the whole week (and the next, actually, but that’s another story) for a workshop to develop a global ex situ conservation strategy for rice genetic resources. More on that later. Right now, I just wanted to show you a photo I took today during a rice variety tasting the T.T. Chang Genetic Resources Centre laid on. There were about 20 different genotypes from around the world: normal and fragrant, white and black, loose and very sticky. They included Carolina Gold, which I blogged about a few days ago. It’s amazing how different rice varieties can taste.

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Floral glory

Kabul Flowers A fascinating post over at Human Flower Project takes as its starting point the different cultural aesthetics associated with different styles of flower-arranging, from the all-encompassing European “one of everything” to the zen simplicity of Japanese ikebana. But that’s really all just throat-clearing prior to Julie’s rhapsodizing on flower bouquets in Afghanistan. She wonders what inspired the Afghan style, and whether it has survived. “[W]ith all that’s happened in the past three decades, do flowers in Afghanistan today look anything like Ard’s picture from the early 1970s? Can an aesthetic this original and strong survive thirty years of war?” good question. I have no idea.

Flickr photo by Ard Hesselink, used under a Creative Commons Licence.

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The All-Healing Berry

I don’t know why it should feel weird to be sitting in Kuala Lumpur International Airport, drinking a cappuccino and reading about the joys of caffeine on the free wifi. But it does. Maybe the lack of sleep. Maybe the fact that I wouldn’t be able to do it nearly so easily in an airport in the land of cappuccino.

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Literary Corner

Two books, two quotes, re two posts on maize domestication and maize preferences.

I quite imagine that huitlacoche, the corn fungus, may have been the ambrosia of the Aztec gods. I never find it quite enough to eat quesadillas filled with them, so every summer that I am in Mexico I go to the Bola Roja in Puebla to eat a large plateful of the fungus served with strips of creamy white cheese and lots of hot tortillas.

The word is derived from the Nahuatl words huitlatl, meaning “excrement,” or “excrescence,” and cochtli or cochin, of uncertain etymology, although, according to Sahagún, it may be connected in some way to the verb coch, which means “to sleep”.

“The cuisines of Mexico” (Diana Kennedy)

Three truths keep bubbling to the surface in a search for a good piece of corn bread.

Southerners like their corn bread thin — about one inch deep in the pan. they want it made with white cornmeal. White looks pure.

The North likes a thick corn bread — sometimes three to four inches deep in the pan — and made with yellow cornmeal. Yellow looks rich.

Few Europeans care for corn in any form. They consider it a “gross food.”

“The Complete Book of Breads” (Bernard Clayton Jr)

A week ago I asked a random sample (of two), 50% northern and 50% southern, and they were in total agreement with the first two truths. The third “truth” is patently not true, but no matter.