1- I fail to see how that optimize taxpayer's money usage.
2- I long for the time when you'd just send an ASCII file and they'd use whatever fucking font they wanted to print it out.
The only objective thing they're selecting by having such rules, is whether the "researcher" asking for a grant will be docile and cooperative enough to, eg. participate in scams such as IPCC or vaccines, if not worse.
How many seconds of taxpayer money would be wasted just changing the font themselves? They might need to ask for a Word document instead of a pdf but so what? I agree this sounds petty considering how much work apparently goes into such an application. If they're trying to screen out spammers, the way employers do with CVs, then maybe this is a practical test though.
This is all about the page limits on grants and making it so everyone has the same room to describe their projects.
It is petty to reject over a font, especially when it seems they had a vague description of requirements, but changing the font has nothing to do with why the grant applications were rejected; it was that if the font was changed, the grant would be over the page limit allowed.
Sort of reminds me of the bands that wouldn't play a venue if the crazy rider demands weren't adhered to. So the logic goes - if the venue haven't put the effort in to source the bizarre requests on the rider, they probably haven't met all the requirements for sound, electrics, stage weight etc. And thus the show will be terrible or dangerous.
If you can't follow the initial instructions regarding the font, what chances do you have further down the line?
(That said, passing on Calibri before explicitly banning it seems a tad harsh.)
If anyone is wondering about some specifics and doesn't already know the story, this was a (now well-known) trick by Van Halen. Their rider included a provision where backstage needed to have a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed. It was explicitly done as a safety measure. More details: http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp
Agreed. But again, we're talking about researchers, not about brainwashed robots selected to work at the IPCC or at the WHO and countersign any paper the politicians tell them to countersign.
2- I long for the time when you'd just send an ASCII file and they'd use whatever fucking font they wanted to print it out.
The only objective thing they're selecting by having such rules, is whether the "researcher" asking for a grant will be docile and cooperative enough to, eg. participate in scams such as IPCC or vaccines, if not worse.