Subject: Re: Your tern!!!!!!!!!!!!!

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 19:40:35 EST

Hi Mary and David: You are wellcome to revamp this any way you wish -- it's  
not that long but I've sure spent a lot of time on it, still it has to conform 
 to what they want to see. So, be my guest and make it into a  fundable 
application with what ever you think it needs! Do you know what  font it has to be 
submitted in? There is brief section on each of  you in the text bellow, 
please feel free to change these as you wish.
 
The bold black info is taken from the instructions from NSF and I've  
abbreviated them and put them at the beginning of each section to  help us keep on 
track. We have some tighting up to do yet  especially in the Project Summary but 
I'm optimistic that we will  get it out in good style. Thanks Mary; we look 
forward to seeing you  Munday after about 4:45.
 
1. COVER SHEET
 
a. Include the program solicitation number and check the  preliminary 
proposal (or preproposal) box.
 
 David and Bob have been working on this and I think it is about  ready to go.
 
2. PROJECT SUMMARY ( to be only one page long)
 
a. essence of the proposed project clear to the  reader.
b. Succinctly describe deliverables and demonstrate how they  achieve the 
intended audience and strategic impacts.
c. Address the characteristics of innovation and collaboration. 
d. It must explicitly summarize in separate statements the  project's 
Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts, including the Additional  Review Criteria (in 
Section, VI. A)
these are * What is the intellectual merit of the proposed  activity? ** What 
are the broader impacts of the proposed activities?  ***  Additional Review 
Criteria -- within Intellectual merit reviewers will  asses: + deliverables, ++ 
project design, +++ project team, ++++  Partnerships. **** Within Broader 
impacts, reviewers will asses: + Audience  (Impact), ++ Public audiences 
(Impact), +++ Professional (Impact), ++++ Impact  evaluation + clear measures and 
criteria to for defining success? ++ Strategic  Impact, 
e. Summary is limited to one single-spaced page.

The essence of the proposed project is to promote and deliver  informal 
science education on the subject of evolution in an  economically efficient manner 
to a broad spectrum of the general  public at the National and International 
levels.  In fact, the specific concept behind the formation of our non-profit 
corporation  'Darwin Day Celebration' when it was formed in the year 2000, was 
to  promote informal science education. To accomplish to accomplish  our 
mission we need to substantially expand our  current model, that employs two (2) 
significant and innovative  elements, which we have tested and found to be very 
successful. First,  we have constructed a website that serves as an informal 
source of  accurate scientific information on evolution for a broad spectrum of 
the  general public, as well as for science educators at all levels. This  
website, darwinday.org, contains detailed information on  the topics of Charles 
Darwin's life, his contributions as an important  scientist, and evolutionary 
biology -- including the molecular mechanisms  that underlies the process of 
evolution. (A measure of the current success  of our website can be seen from 
the fact that over 1,100 other websites  point(link?)to it for information on 
these subjects.)  Secondly, by using Darwin as a symbol, we are promoting an 
annual  Celebration of Science and Humanity on, or near his birthday on February 
12. To accomplish this we  are using e-mail, and  dynamic Web page generation 
to encourage and publicize a variety of lectures,  exhibits in libraries and 
museums, discussions, dramatizations, and other events  focused on the 
scientific basis of evolution. This activity is  developed through informal 
partnerships and collaborative activity with many  other groups throughout the USA, and 
in other countries. For instance, in  February 2005 there were 143 informal  
educational events open to the public, that took place  across America and in 
12 additional countries around the world. These  events were attended by many 
thousands of participants, it is important to  emphasize that these events are 
annual celebrations not one-time  events. Samples of these informal, 
educational  events can be seen on  our website under Events. The funds we are seeking 
will be used  to improve and expand the content of our website and to greatly 
expand our  outreach to groups across the country and around the world, who 
in turn  develop the educational celebratory events  
 
The intellectual merit of this project is that, in addition  to its inherent 
scientific value, it addresses a timely and  current topic in the public 
arena, that of the authenticity of evolution as a  scientific theory and the need 
for the general public to learn more about  it. Our approach makes it possible 
to include exciting new data on the  relationship between molecular genetics 
and evolution. For instance many members  of the general public have shown a 
strong interest in the structure of  DNA and the function of the human genome, 
both from the point of view of their personal  health and in its relationship 
to the genetics of all other living  organisms on this planet. Therefore, we 
feel confident that our approach to  informal science education has been shown 
to be an effective method for  reaching out to those interested in life-long 
informal learning and is ready for  significant expansion. Through our 
activities we encourage life-long informal  education by making it possible for the 
general public to access,  not only the informal educational opportunities on our 
website  that they can visit online but also through attendance at numerous  
yearly educational events sponsored be University Biology Departments,  
Museums, Libraries that we contact but, also with others organizations that  
independently learn about our efforts from our website or through our nascent 
outreach efforts. Individual  public members can even contemplate participating by 
sponsoring their  own private or public event.  
 
The broader impact of these activities can be seen in the  long-term effects 
of these ongoing informal educational opportunities. For  instance we have 
been able to build excitement around the fact that Darwin's  200th will ocur in 
2009. Among other activities we are promoting a  countdown to 2009 to achieve 
what we refer to as a Global Celebration. In this  context large numbers of the 
general public both in the USA and around the  world will be informally 
educated as we encourage professional  individuals and institutions to develop an 
informal programs to  Celebrate Science and Humanity and to invite the public 
to attend.  
 
The funds we are seeking from the ISE in this application are to  enhance our 
ability to expand our outreach efforts and establish informal  partnerships 
within the USA and other countries. To accomplish this  task we need financial 
assistance in the following areas. 
 
     1. Website maintenance and expansion: We will need  to increase our 
current Web programmer from 1/2 time to full time to  (a) cover increasing website 
content and structure development  and maintenance needs (b) post new items 
under the "What's New" section.  (c) handle increasing incoming email related 
to the website and (d) coordinate  and post translations of our website into 
other languages as they are  received from volunteer translators. Currently 
volunteers from 4  countries have contacted us to do these translations and we 
will be solicit  many more by using the Web site.       
 
     2. Greatly expanded outreach efforts focused  on domestic and 
international learners: To accomplish this we will  need to hire two new full-time 
professional communicators.  One would staff the domestic desk and the other the  
international desk. To date most of our outreach effort has consisted of  
contacting professional scientists and soliciting their voluntary cooperation in  
the development of independent, informal public educational events,  sponsor by 
their institutions and that they, themselves spearhead. Example  of these 
educational events are presented in the Project  Description  We invite them to 
visit our website and offer them  non-monetary assistance on how to initiate an 
'event' appropriate for their  institution. From our past experience we 
recognize that to accomplish  the expansion we anticipate, these two-way email 
communications will  require an individual to address each of these markets.
 
3. We do not now have an independent External Evaluator and  will need to 
include this in our application.
 
4. To accomodate the anticipated expansion we will need to  purchase one 
additional Computer. (a onetime expence)

 
 3. PROJECT DESCRIPTION (can be 6 pages  long)

a. The narrative is a condensed version of the project description  for the 
full proposal 
b. Limited to 6 single-spaced pages.
c. Identify the essential features of the project in terms of  * impact,  ** 
innovation and ***collaboration as described for a full  proposal.
 
Brief Description of Our  Organization:
 
Our organization, 'Darwin Day Celebration', is a  website-based nonprofit 
educational 501(c)3 corporation registered  in California and our URL is 
_http://www.darwinday.org_ (http://www.darwinday.org/) . This 
Corporation was formed it the year 2000 and it's mission is to promote  
informal science education on the subject of evolution. The corporation  is 
governed by an all volunteer Board of Directors consisting of five  members 
(currently with one vacancy) that meets regularly once a month to act on  issues 
related to our operations. The Chairman of the Board and President of the  
Corporation is Robert J. Stephens Ph. D.; the VP is Arthur  Jackson, Community Leader; 
the Secretary of the Board is Mary P. White  Ph. D.; and the CFO is Benjamin 
Wade, a Business Executive. In addition we  have a 13 member Board of Advisors, 
consisting of internationally  recognized scientists, educators, philosophers 
and writers, available to assist  us with questions relevant to the content 
of our website and promotional  methods. The advisors are: Edward O. Wilson, 
Harvard University; Eugenie C.  Scott, National Center for Science Education; 
Daniel C. Dennett Tufts  Univ.; Patrick Bateson, Provost, Cambridge Univ.; Stven 
Pinker, Harvard Univ.;  Richard Dawkins, Oxford Univ.; Helena Cronin, London 
School of Economics;  Michael Shermer, Cal. Inst. of Technology; Steve Jones, 
Univ. College London;  Carl Zimmer, Science Writer; William Calvin, Univ. of 
Washington; Robin McKie,  London Observer; and Colin Tudge, London School of 
Economics. All of these  people are listed on our website under the NavBar 
heading of 'About DDC.' A long  list of 'Supporters' begins at the bottom of the 
Homepage and  continues with a link at the end of this list on the Homepage.
 
The Corporate and working offices of Darwin Day Celebration are  located at 
2682 Middlefield Rd. Suite P, Redwood City, California 94063.  Our Phone # is 
650-701-1948 and our Fax # is 650-369-7215 -- and the Mission  statement of our 
corporation is as follows:
                                            
           Mission  Statement

The dual mission of Darwin Day Celebration is to  promote public education 
about science and in  addition to encourage the celebration of Science and  
Humanity throughout the global community including the general  public, private 
and public institutions, science professionals, science  educators at all 
levels, libraries, museums, the print and electronic media,  and science enthusiasts 
everywhere. Science is our most reliable  knowledge system. It has been, and 
continues to be, acquired  solely through the application of human curiosity 
and ingenuity and, most  importantly, it has provided enormous benefit to the 
health, prosperity and  intellectual satisfaction for our human existence. 
These are worthy  achievements for all people to celebrate!  
To accomplish this mission Darwin Day Celebration will  maintain an 
attractive website that provides potential participants with  extensive educational 
material, together with examples and appropriate  suggestions, on ways to develop 
meaningful celebrations. All participants are  invited and encouraged to 
register their events on this website by going _here _ 
(http://www.darwinday.org/NEWlang/regevent/index.php) in order  to both advertise their celebrations and 
to develop a sense of common purpose  among all participants. 
To support this mission, Darwin Day Celebration will maintain  an ongoing, 
continually expanding, national and international outreach effort,  using all 
means at our disposal such as, lists of names and email addresses in  the 
categories named above, in order to encourage participation.  Press  releases, email 
announcements and even the US postal service will be used  to promote this 
worthy cause. The countdown to 2009 -- Darwin’s 200th  birthday, is underway. We 
hope you will join this effort and experience the  satisfaction of 
participating with others to establish a positive celebration  that reaches out to our 
entire Global Community! We believe it’s an idea whose  time has  come!

Project Personnel
 
The team of people  that would supervise and carry out the project proposed 
here are as  follows:
 
1. Robert J. Stephens Ph.D., Dr. Stephens is Chairperson of the Board  and 
Pres. of Darwin Day Celebration (DDC) He is a Cell  Biologist with the following 
degrees B.A. from Pepperdine College, M.A.  form Cornell Univ. and a PH.D. 
form the Univ. of Southern California and  Postdoctoral training at Yale Univ. 
Dr. Stephens spent 28 years at SRI  International and Stanford Research Inst. 
as Director, Cell Biology  Program. He is Author or co-author of over 125 
reviewed, research  publications. He is now retired and a full-time volunteer at 
DDC. He  has been responsible for the design and content of the DDC website. A 
full  resume is available.
 
2. Mary P White, Ph.D. -- Dr. White is a member of the Board and Secretary  
of DDC and she will become the Principal Investigator on the ISE project we  
are currently seeking -- Dr. White's holds a BS degree  in Psychology from MSU, 
and a PH.D in Psychology from Univ. of  Michigan. She is currently a Counselor 
/ Learning Specialist, Menlo  College, Menlo Park, CA. and has many years of 
experience as a  college Prof and research scientist. She will volunteer her 
time as the PI on  this project. A full resume is available.
 
3. David Harris holds three Masters Degrees as follows; M.A.  Biomedical 
Communications and an M.S. in Health Services Administration  from Stanford Univ. 
and an M.A in Biochemistry from Univ. of Oregon His B.A. is  from UCBC. He has 
had extensive experience as a specialist in Computer  Communications 
Programing and as a System Analyst. He is currently working  1/2 time in this capacity 
for DDC and would be hired full-time if the  project is funded. A full resume 
is available.
 
4. Other volunteers are also available on an, as-needed basis, to assist  
with various tasks such as content development, Language translations, editing,  
and art work.
 
5. To expand our activities as presented in this proposal we will need to  
hire two (2) new professional communicators to do the tasks envisioned in the  
application. 

Impact:
 
Experience during the past four years has shown us that the model that we  
have developed and tested on a modest but significant scale permits us to target 
 a broad base of both the public and professional audience in an effective 
and  efficient manor. The audience we have been able to  reach includes those 
listed in our mission statement above; i., e.,  the general public, private and 
public institutions, science professionals,  science educators at all levels, 
libraries, museums, the print and electronic  media, and science enthusiasts 
everywhere. In fact, to the extent that we  are able to expand we have the 
potential to reach a significant portion of each  of these audiences even though 
it may take time to do so.
 
At present we do not employ an external evaluator but we are  exploring how 
best to include this service in our full application. We do  however currently 
have a positive sense of the effectiveness of our  approach. For instance, 
website activity analysis by 'Webalizer' shows  that our peak activity this past 
month reached 3082 hits (visits) per day  and in addition we know that we have 
generated at least 143 informal educational  events this year, with 89 of 
these being held in the USA and the remainder  divided among 12 other countries. 
Another strong indicator of the impact we are  currently generating however, 
can be see from the fact that our website,  according to "linkPopularity.com, 
an independent Link Popularity Service"  shows darwinday.org is linked as 
follows by three of the most popular  Search Engines: 1020 links by Altavista; 1020 
by Yahoo and 1334 by  MSN, a very good showing for our current level of 
promotion. In addition,  our website was recently showing up to 3,080 visits per 
day. 
 
Many of these informal educational events are now occurring on an  annual 
basis but with new, and widely varied educational topics.  Our sense of the 
average attendance at these informal event is decidedly  more than 100 and could be 
as high as 200 or more. Some events  attended by our members toped 500. For 
example, the Celebration  at the University of California at Berkeley ran for 5 
days and included displays  and films shown by the museum and afternoon and 
evening presentations sponsored  by the Entomology Department. We also attended 
a Community event in  Sacramento California that was attended by over 300 
local  people. In some of the other University settings, where they have  
developed programs that last 1 to 5 days with several speakers such as those at  the 
University of Tennessee, Salem College Mass (David can you pick out 2 or 3  
more examples?) the attendance was even much higher. 
 
We believe our intended long-term strategic impact will be realized  through 
a vigorous promotion or 'advertising, if you will' of our two  approaches to 
informal science education. These approaches are, first to provide  and 
maintain an excellent permanent website on the subject of  evolution that is 
continuously updated with the findings of ongoing  research on various aspects of the 
subject, particularly in genetics and the  human genome which has caught the 
publics attention.

In addition to the demonstrated effectiveness of our model we believe  it 
also addresses a timely and current topic, that of the authenticity  of evolution 
as a scientific theory and the need for the general public to  learn more 
about it. This topic makes it possible to includes exciting new  data on the 
relationship between molecular genetics and evolution. Many members  of the 
general public have shown a strong interest in the structure and  function of the 
human genome and in it's relationship to the genetics of  all other living 
organisms on this planet. Therefore, we feel confident that  this project has been 
shown to be an effective method for reaching out to  those interested in 
life-long informal learning and is ready for significant  expansion. 

Innovation
 
The most innovative primary project deliverable in this proposal is  the fact 
that the project will multiply the amount of informal science education  many 
fold with no cost to the project itself because the cost of the events  are 
born by the sponsoring entity. Therefore ISE will receive  excellent value for 
its investment in this application. For the modest cost of  approximately 
$130,000 per year, we will be able to deliver a minimum of several  hundred, and 
we predict several thousand, annual informal science  educational venues across 
the USA and around the world, sponsored by a  diverse group of educational 
institutions including Universities, Colleges,  Libraries, Museums, Churches, 
Primary and Secondary schools and even  privately sponsored activities, at no 
additional charge to the project. The  Second primary project deliverable is the 
year around website where people  in every walk of life will be able to learn 
informally as they visit and browse  the extensive offerings there. This site 
will be continually improved and  updated by our volunteers and new items 
will be added frequently to our 'What's  New' section.

In addition to the demonstrated effectiveness of our model we believe  it 
also addresses a timely and current topic, that of the authenticity  of evolution 
as a scientific theory and the need for the general public to  learn more 
about it. This topic makes it possible to includes exciting new  data on the 
relationship between molecular genetics and evolution. Many members  of the 
general public have shown a strong interest in the structure and  function of the 
human genome and in it's relationship to the genetics of  all other living 
organisms on this planet. Therefore, we feel confident that  this project has been 
shown to be an effective method for reaching out to  those interested in 
life-long informal learning and is ready for significant  expansion. 

 
Collaboration
 
The way that we have been able to make a modest amount of funds produce a  
significant amount of informal science education is by forming informal  
collaboration efforts with numerous groups and institutions that have the  ability to 
sponsor these events on their own but need encouragement to take the  
initiative and do so. Thus, we reach out to them and offer them concrete  suggestions 
and an opportunity to advertise their educational events  on our website.  
(This section still has to be finished by  expanding it at least a bit)