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The NSF is now requiring this as part of grant applications. You have to have a data management plan that includes the public deposit of both the data and results from grant funded work. Other funding orgs are following suit.

This is a fairly major project at the university I work for, both from the in-process data management perspective (keeping field researchers from storing their only copies on thumbdrives and laptops) and from the long-term repository perspective for holding the data when the grant is completed (that's what I'm involved with).

Storage is cheap. Convincing university administrators to pay for keeping it accessible is another problem, but the NSF position is helping.

Here is the IP policiy of the NSF: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/manuals/gpm05_131/gpm7.jsp#730

This project in particular was funded by the NSF and the Wyss Institute, which looks like some sort of incubator funded by Harvard. The gist of the NSF policty is that the grantee retains all rights to the invention/patents/copyrights of the research. This makes sense given the NSF's mission statement: "To promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense...."

NSF statistics show that in 2006, 2.2% of masters degrees in electrical engineering were awarded to people who described themselves as "black, non-Hispanic." This is compared to 13% of the population that is black. This goes a long way toward explaining why "About 1% of entrepreneurs who received venture capital in the first half of last year are black,[...]" This applies to any field where you're talking about a group being underrepresented; you have to look at the talent pool. If the group is underrepresented in the talent pool, then it's too late to fix the problem. They're simply going to be underrepresented in the field.

And why is it necessarily a problem if a particular group is underrepresented or overrepresented in a particular field? There are a lot of Jewish doctors out there. Is that bad? It's only bad if the underrepresentation is the result of injustice. What if some of it is the result of culture, preferences, or factors such as becoming a dentist because your mom is a dentist?

It would be extremely interesting to know what fraction of entrepreneurs who receive venture capital come from families with below-median incomes. I'll bet you a nickel the figure is much, much lower than 50%. But the US is allergic to talking about class. We only want to talk about race.

I said confirmation, not a bunch of anecdotes. Someone should dig into the NSF grants in the area and see how many of them actually mention global warming. A quick perusal of a portion of the list shows very few of the titles mention global warming (NSF award search). Maybe the money goes to scientists who have shown they do good science. The problem you have is that scientists are smart people and if they are deliberately pushing what they know to be bad science they have to know they will be found out sooner or later. I can't believe that many scientists are willing to take that chance with their scientific reputations.

Acquisti (NSF grant) had almost $400,000 for his last project, also 'privacy' related.
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0713361
(the more current info about this grant isn't up on nsf.gov yet)

anyone know how to find army contracting info?

Last time I checked, NASA isn't the only agency that does science. NOAA comes to mind as well as the NSF just to name a few. I my point is that there are terrestrial concerns that are a tad more pressing for the immediate term. Drop the hyperbole.

From Galileo's Wiki page:

Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which appeared to attack pope Urban VIII and thus alienated him and the Jesuits who had both supported Galileo up until this point.

So you may go ahead and remove the "quotes" from "turned political" because Galileo really did TURN POLITICAL.

As for this topic, those that pay for the research get the answers they want. When oil companies pay for climate research, the results usually favor the oil companies. When governments pay for research, the results favor expanding government's power. This is a reality of life and it works both ways. For example, if a scientist were to release seven papers calling all industrialized nations pay for the development of third world so they could skip the inefficient phase of industrialization, it is unlikely that he will receive much government funding (from industrialized nations anyway). Likewise, don't expect scientists that contributed to "An Inconvenient Truth" to get much funding from oil companies.

But for comparison purposes, Exxon spent $23 million for climate research in 10 years. The US government spent $79 billion on climate research and technology since 1989 - to be sure, this funding paid for things like satellites and studies, but it's 3,500 times as much as anything offered to sceptics. (Source) Exxon also spent $600 million on biofuels research.

It's not a matter of dishonesty. When considering who funding entities want to give their money to, they are not going to give it to someone who has consistently disagreed with them in the past. They are going to find someone who has already agreed with their position and fund that guy. Just as companies that support politicians are probably not doing it to sway a politician's position. It makes more sense to fund a politicians that already agrees with your position (with the exception of companies that support both sides). Government are no different. Just look at the board of the National Science Foundation and research the names on that list. You will find that many of them come from either "environmentally conscious" organizations or have been favorable to left causes in the past. For example, let's look at the very first guy on the list:

Mark R. Abbott is Dean and Professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University (OSU). He received his B.S. in Conservation of Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974 and his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis, in 1978. ...
Abbott was appointed by the governor as vice-chair of the Oregon Global Warming Commission. The commission was established by the Oregon Legislature to oversee the state's efforts in climate change mitigation and adaptation.

So he graduated from Berkeley and was vice chair of the Oregon Global Warming Commission. Remember, this guy is one of the leading voices in deciding who gets government research grants.

But, are scientists biased? Yes! If they were not, you would not see climate change alarmists releasing paper after paper saying climate change is a problem and you wouldn't see climate change deniers releasing paper after paper saying that it is not a big deal. Scientists perform experiments that support what they believed before the experiment started. A scientists won't form hypothesis prior to an experiment that he doesn't believe.

If a computer was fast enough in 1990, it should theoretically be fast enough today

For home users, I see little overlap between what computers were used for in 1990 vs now. Most people who own a home computer now did not even own one then - adoption was about 15% at the time.

Even since 2000, although Internet was catching on, the main application of the Internet - video - had barely started catching on.

Sea Turtles and Monitor Lizards can even get hundreds of pounds in weight yet none are warm blooded.

Apparently leatherback turtles are warm blooded:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v344/n6269/abs/344858a0.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/springwatch/meettheanimals/leatherback.shtml

There are warmblooded fish too, e.g. bluefin tuna and some sharks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_bluefin_tuna
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104543

It appears to be the latter. The spec is available here. NCSA negotiated a system with IBM, proposed it to NSF under the above linked RFP, went through a peer-reviewed awards process, negotiated an award with NSF, and started working on the delivery and other aspects with IBM and NCSA's other partners. Something went wrong in the last several months, and IBM's pull out was the result. I doubt that there is any more money to be found, and all parties knew what was asked of them in order for the project to be successful.

I only wish they did this for engineers and scientists, I would have loved the break from the books to get my hands dirty.

They do.

The data volume issue is brought up occasionally, but is a red herring. The SDSS dataset is comparable in size to that of Fermilab and CERN and is available to the public (hundreds of TB). No one said anyone should publish raw data either. A processed, manageable form is preferable. If the datasets are that large, then we should be working on publicly-funded data warehouses, just as we once built libraries across the country.

Astronomy has a history of sharing data, unlike particle physics. Furthermore, the NSF has data sharing requirements, and the NSF funds most astronomy activities in the US. The DOE funds particle physics (mostly). Data is also not available "on request" at all from particle physics experiments. There are some efforts to change this, but at the tail end of an experiment there is generally not a lot of manpower, money, or motivation to make data public. It's a big effort, really, and the culture of particle physics results in jealously guarded data.

So the best situation is that grant agencies require data sharing as a contingency for all publicly funded activities. (As the NSF has done) And I think we should put effort into data warehousing for publicly funded projects. Hell, give us DNA sequences, drug studies, pesticide tests, EPA water quality, everything publicly funded. Generally everyone wants a subset of the data. Giving anyone that asks the entire dataset is like sending them the library of congress because they want to read one book...

But the school aged population of over 50 million in the United States is about 7 times larger than the prisoner population of about 7 million. And it seems reasonable to assume that educating a person is more resource demanding than detaining a person. The fact that the amount spend on prisons is even on the same order of magnitude as the amount spent on schools is more than a little disconcerting to me.

Drop whatever you are doing right now and start writing a grant proposal. Here is what you will propose to do:

• Create a set of guidelines to encourage reuseability of software. These will include:
  • General guidelines as to modularity, reusability, liscensing, and documentation rather than specific instructions about languages.
  • General guidelines as to revision control, and the posting of resulting software, similar to the Data Management Plans referred to by another commenter.
  • Minimum standards as to openness of licenses and future availability of resulting software.
  • Restrictions against going around the rules to produce proprietary software.
• Create a clearinghouse web site with the following features:
  • Explanations of the above guidelines with help for researchers to follow the guidelines, including forums, online courses, and perhaps seminars.
  • A repository where researchers can publish their software in such a way that the version they used for their research is maintained in "stasis" in perpetuity, while also allowing others to fork, branch, borrow, or part out that software as their needs require.
    (While common revision management applications and schemes allow only a hierarchical, "branching," structure for the repositories, this repository will likely require the ability to track a very complex "graph" of the evolution of software and all the ways that researchers mix, combine, and improve the software.)
  • A system which allows users to rate and review software placed into the repository for both usefulness and adhearance to the guidelines. (Researchers who regularly post software which does not adheare to the guidelines will be less likely to get grants in the future.)

If you play your cards right you could end up with a lifetime career managing this clearinghouse. Why am I not writing this proposal? Because I am working on something else which I consider to be even more important.

This already part of NSF:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116928

(Although it's called "Data Management," it also applies to software generated in the course of research.)

My point is that, as long as the government does the investing - in the form of picking their cronies as the winners, we WON'T get private investment.

You're under the mistaken assumption that all of government funding and investment works like defense contracting. Believe it or not, there are some segments of the federal government that are very good at funding research based on its merits, rather than political connections. Groups like DoE and NSF have excellent procedures, where proposals are peer-reviewed by experts in academia, industry, and government. And, contrary to your assertion that government involvement interferes with private research, many funding proposals for government research investment comes from private industry. Want some evidence of how government investment can lead to private investment? You can read about the origins of the research that created the foundation for this little company.

You are a living, breathing example of sqrt(2)'s point that, "The people saying we should do nothing are doing so mostly out of an ideological mistrust of government doing anything [emph. added]." You simply make blanket statements about how government programs like this ALWAYS fail and we WON'T have private investment, despite the fact that you have no idea how scientific research funding actually works.

For those interested, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship results have been posted, and biology by far got the most awards (almost 25%). Below are the awards per field mentioned on the application. source

593 Life Sciences
        524 Engineering
        197 Social Sciences
        158 Chemistry
        134 Psychology
        113 Comp/IS/Eng
        100 Physics and Astronomy
          80 Mathematical Sciences
          78 Geosciences
          23 STEM Education and Learning Research
            1 Baccalaureate

And within Engineering:

83 Engineering - Mechanical
          79 Engineering - Biomedical
          68 Engineering - Chemical
          59 Engineering - Bioengineering
          52 Engineering - Materials
          51 Engineering - Electrical and Electronic
          33 Engineering - Environmental
          32 Engineering - Civil
          28 Engineering - Aeronautical and Aerospace
            7 Engineering - Energy
            6 STEM Education and Learning Research - Engineering Education
            6 Engineering - Industrial
            6 Engineering - Computer Engineering
            4 Engineering - Agricultural
            3 Engineering - Nuclear
            3 Engineering - Engineering Science
            2 Engineering - Systems Engineering
            2 Engineering - Engineering Mechanics
            2 Comp/IS/Eng - Software Engineering
            1 Engineering - other (specify) - Water Resources Engineering
            1 Engineering - other (specify) - Pedagogy, Design Methodology
            1 Engineering - other (specify) - Operations Research - Industrial Engineering. Economic Risk Analysis
            1 Engineering - other (specify) - Information Warfare System Engineering
            1 Engineering - other (specify) - Architectural Engineering
            1 Engineering - Ocean

> The number of PhDs in computer science per year
> in the US is probably less than 100

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf10308/ says 1786 computer science PhDs awarded in the US in 2008.

You estimate for the number of CS graduates per year from CMU is about right (the school of computer science is 500-600 undergrads from the numbers I can find, but they have a computation biology major, and a music and technology one, and an a "computer science and arts" one in addition to straight computer science).

But yes, I would fully expect that a majority of CMU's CS graduates go into engineering (perhaps after doing a masters degree), not pure CS.

I want to see the max and min values with associated dates for the 1979 - 2009 periods. Also, I don't understand why we (US Citizens) have paid roughly 1.3 million dollars to get vague and inconclusive results like this. I really wish that the NSF would start funding real science for a change. Here's an example of other weird stuff they research with our money. http://majorityleader.gov/YouCut/Review.htm "This work was supported by NSF grants ANS 0909388 and ARC 0901962, the NASA Cryosphere Program, and the Ohio State University Climate Water and Carbon Program. Field work along the K-transect has been supported by NWO/ALW." Here's the grant information. http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0909388 http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/RecipientReportedData/pages/RecipientProjectSummary508.aspx?AwardIdSur=29630 I'm not totally against NSF I think it's an awesome idea but I would like some accountability.

Most reports I've seen show that about 30% of PhDs eventually end up with a tenured position. Which I consider good odds.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib97321.htm
Of course, there's more career paths than just being a tenured Professor. Overall, PhDs have a fraction of the unemployment rate of the general public and higher pay.
http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm
So its unlikely that you'll actually be worse off by making the attempt.

Dude, your "30% tenured" numbers are a bit dated (that link is to a 1997 report), and the unemployment / income data in the other link is averaged across all ages and so does not give the real picture of what life is like for recent grads. Most recent numbers I've heard are ~1 in 5 *postdocs* manage to obtain a faculty position of any type (tenured or otherwise) - and that was before the current economic crash. A lot of schools have been paying faculty from the income on their endowments, and when that became a negative number it triggered a lot of hiring freezes. A typical faculty job posting today at a medium-tier institution will draw in 300-400 or more applications - admin assistants are triaging candidates based on keywords in their CVs without even reading the application packages, just to cut down the overload before things even get to the official hiring committee. Consulting houses won't hire postdocs (a friend of mine was told they consider postdocs exploring consulting as being unable to get a faculty position [quite possibly true in this market] and therefore failures / not good enough). Industry is cutting back, some hiring is going on, but a lot of little startups went under when the amount of VC pulled back in the last couple of years, and even companies like Merck are closing whole research insitutes.

I love what I do, but there's no way in hell I'd encourage my kids to follow in my footsteps. Society simply does not value what we do, and the foundation of the whole enterprise is the hard labor of students and postdocs traded against the promise of future gains which are turning out to be more mirage than reality for the current generation of researchers. Check out http://www.nationalpostdoc.org for more current discussion of the situation.

Most reports I've seen show that about 30% of PhDs eventually end up with a tenured position. Which I consider good odds. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib97321.htm Of course, there's more career paths than just being a tenured Professor. Overall, PhDs have a fraction of the unemployment rate of the general public and higher pay. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm So its unlikely that you'll actually be worse off by making the attempt.

If you are interested in university-centered research in science or engineering as a career, finding someone who is currently there and relatively recently trained is a reasonable plan. Generally people in that position are either swamped with work or they have developed good skills for minimizing distractions from their own work and may not be so interested in helping random strangers, though.

Be careful, a lot of faculty are pompous blowhards whose information and career advice is long out of date if not totally obsolete. A good way to find a successful active researcher in most science and many engineering fields is to look for those with active National Science Foundation grants via http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/tab.do?dispatch=4 the NSF award search page.

It is really strange that you would think that Monsanto had IP rights to the corn genome. You are quite wrong. The corn genome project was funded by public dollars.
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf04614/nsf04614.pdf
You can browse the maize genome or even download the data yourself:
http://www.maizesequence.org/index.html
I have multiple copies of this data on my hard drive now.
You can also check out the Idiot's guide to corn at
http://weedtowonder.org/
Much of what we know about plant genetics and breeding is due to what we learned from corn. The corn genome is not just cool, but a fundamental model system. It provides insights into the genomes for the cereal plants that contribute most of the calories you eat every day.

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1012208

above is direct link to award

cause the story does not link directly to it...lazy!

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1012208

One word H1B. Additional stats. The recession doubtlessly mucked about with things but it's a ripple in the stream of the past two+ decades. No one willingly bothers with the hassle of sponsoring H1Bs unless qualified fulfillment is difficult with the local pool of talent. Unemployment even for lower skilled S & E have historically been lower than most any other job sector. You will find anecdotal evidence abounding with respect to desperation of companies trying to find highly educated, usually highly specialized S & Es.

As for the second thing, you appear to largely be arguing in my direction (if indirectly), in that we should be teaching more, in particular, that which has been traditionally relegated to more specialized/advanced studies. There's a challenge though that really isn't being addressed by educators, which is that we're failing to inspire the pursuit of math. While equation manipulation is boring, it is also a gateway to other maths. Based on your sentiment it sounds as if you agree that we're teaching these prerequisites poorly. There needs to be a way for students to see the forest through the trees before they get fed up with "worthless math". If educators were succeeding in that I suspect we wouldn't have people writing articles such as TFA.

An old Blogging Heads segment mentioned a science curriculum developed by the NSF [National Science Foundation]. I vaguely remember looking into this at the time, and it being a downloadable, grade/age ordered sequence of projects/activities, but I can't seem to track it down now.

We still have that kind of government: it provides a LOT of money, across many many fields. I feel the problem is we have too many politicians who don't understand science and the importance of political neutrality. Some seek to ban various kinds outright (see Stem Cell research and Climatology). Others just have an economic bias and don't want the government involved in anything other than national defense (which itself benefits from massive government science sponsorship). I feel both type do a disservice, the former for trampling on the rights of others, and the latter for the exact short-term thinking you mention.

As for private business R&D, yes far too many are shortsighted and live quarter to quarter. That said generally speaking those companies who actually do invest in their future don't often fail, are fiscally healthy and respected in their fields as centers of innovation (e.g. IBM, GE, Google). Besides, I figure if anyone is responsible for how business acts, it's ultimately the shareholders who tacitly approve of the CEO/BoD because they just watch to see if their stock goes up every single quarter. When one's view is limited to P/E, research means nothing.

I can't remember the exact number but something like over 90% of the NASA budget is mandated of where it is spent by congress and the NASA administrator has no control over it. NASA has no choice but to be inefficient when saddled with restrictions like that.

I'm shocked. Shocked! You say that spending within a government agency is driven by... AGHAST... politics?

If you want to take some of the politics out, then with their scientists, R&D and launch facilities the NASA centers would be very competitive as FFRDCs. Look at NASA's JPL which is overseen by Caltech and see how successful they have been with the robotic missions: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf05306/#Topic5

Why aren't all the NASA centers run like that? Focus on the missions.

People who disbelieved the mountains of different evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change will put this latest piece of evidence in the same mountainous pile of ignored evidence.

Change is difference over time. Changes is dependent on historical data. If the historical data is flawed, then the "mountains of different evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change" is wrong because it concerns change. Historical data is everything. If the temp was warmer 50000 years ago, then the climate is cooling. If the temperatures was cooler 50000 years ago, then the climate is warming. If the temps were the same 50000 years ago, then the climate is not changing at all. So, again, if the historical data is incorrect, then the entire "mountains of different evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change" is also incorrect.

if scientists had wanted to have power and money they wouldn't have studied science over politics or finance.

No, they are scientists because they love doing science stuff. Unfortunately, that requires money. The board of the NSB is full of people with ties to "green energy" and have historical and/or financial ties to proving climate change. So if scientists want to continue doing science, they have to tow the line or else they end up being discredited and left to do nothing as the grant money dries up.

"Fox "News" are a bunch of partisan frauds who are paid to lie through their teeth, and they are very good at it."

Theres a few sites on the net that look at the corporate backgrounds of most of Fox's "Experts". Almost all of them are in some way linked to the corporations they comment positively on (Ie defense experts who get on recomending america should buy a certain missile, then it pans out they are being paid off by the missiles manufacturer, or health experts claiming cigarettes are harmless who pan out to be employed by a PR company working for tobacco firms, and so on).

Its like they don't actually hire anyone at all qualified to comment, but instead let their advertisers nominate "experts".

Fair and balanced my arse. Fox is an astonishingly biased news. Remember folks, these same people complain about "liberal bias", despite study after study demonstrating a conservative lean in american news reporting.

And if you look at the NSF's board who approves scientific grant research money, you will find that many of the have ties to "green" technologies and have a financial interest in AGW. For example, the first guy on the list, Dan E. Arvizu:

Arvizu serves on a number of Boards, Panels and Advisory Committees including the American Council on Renewable Energy Advisory Board; the Energy Research, Development, and Deployment Policy Project Advisory Committee at the Harvard Kennedy School; the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Alternative Energies; the Singapore Clean Energy International Advisory Panel; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III; the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award Corporation; and the Colorado Renewable Energy Authority Board of Directors.

So, if the talking heads on Fox can be discredited because of their ties to industries that would oppose AGW, then you have to throw out every scientist who has received American grant money because it too is tainted by corporate interests. That's only fair, right?

For anyone interested here is the link on the NSF page showing the old site and the new facility.

I don't know about you but I really think they should change their URL to nsfw.gov

For anyone interested here is the link on the NSF page showing the old site and the new facility. Pretty cool (pardon the pun).

The fed already has technical organizations that can handle cases such as this, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/ffrdc/. Of course most of these can only do work for the DoD or DoE.

Insurance companies cover this crap because state legislatures pass laws that require them to in response to lobbyists. It has nothing to do with the validity or efficacy of the practices.

As far as your own personal experiences, ever hear of the placebo effect? Do you really think your anecdotes are the equivalent of the extensive investigations that have been done in these areas?

The National Science Foundation has a good publication on this topic.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind00/c8/c8s5.htm

And there is a lot of other literature on the topic, if you are interested in it:

http://www.chirowatch.com/cw-corruption.html
http://www.chiroweb.com/mpacms/dc/article.php?id=42556
http://www.rebuildyourback.com/chiropractic/school.php

As far as acupuncture, did you know the Chinese themselves banned it in 1929? It was only during the Cultural Revolution (trip back to superstition and ignorance) that it became allowed again.

Here is the National Council Against Health Fraud position on Acupuncture.

http://www.ncahf.org/pp/acu.html

These guys are frauds and quacks. Their prevelence in our culture is a simple indication of the failures and limitations of our educational system.

> "There is absolutely nothing in structural engineering someone without a degree cannot understand that someone with one magically does. This is proved by the huge number of bridges build before there even were schools for engineering.

Let's see where this logic can take us:

"No knowledge of electrical engineering is necessary to build a modern computer. This is proved by the abacus."

"I don't need some fancy medical degree to perform surgery. After all, Ancient Egyptians performed surgery."

"Relativity, Schmelativity. Kepler didn't need it so I don't see why I do."

Frankly, your statement is preposterous. Modern bridge engineering is so far beyond bridges of the nineteenth century or before that it's like comparing comparing clubs to AK-47s.

> "There is nothing in climate science that somehow makes the owner of a paper which says "PhD" magically smarter than someone without one."

Using the same reasoning,

"I think I'll do just fine representing myself at my murder trial."

The years of study and experimentation in earning that PhD are necessary but not sufficient to have an informed opinion in their area of expertise.

> "9000 is such a big number that it raises some questions."

9000 is a paltry number when compared to the number of science PhDs in the US. In 2008 alone the US awarded 12,736 PhDs in the natural sciences. (http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf10308/, summed numbers for biological, natural, and "earth, atmospheric and ocean" as the relevant categories.) So, a little over 3/4 of the number of PhD scientists the US produces in one year have signed this ridiculous petition, if we assume honest reporting by the petitioning agency, which has been challenged.

NIH budget in 2002: $19,319,125,000
NIH budget in 2008: $23,841,208,000

Nice cherry picking of statistics and a strawman. First you made the claim the Bush cut the budget, then, you cherry picked the numbers to show he only increased it by 25%. Bottom line is, Bush significantly increased funding for NIH.

Do you also remember how Bush was going to double NSF's budget? We all know how THAT went:

Yeah, he did:

http://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2000/overview.htm

Has NSF at 3 billion dollars.

Actual budget, according to your figures, is what,

Actual 2009 budget (even later): $6.85B.

Like, he DOUBLED it.

Unlike our anti-science Obama, Bush was a real science President for you.

There is much better use for 30M such as spending it on education, which is broken rather than Internet which isn't not so broken.

That's not the point of the NSF. Besides, as this link http://nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10001/toc.jsp to their FY 2009 report shows, they already spend almost a billion dollars a year on education. Or over 30 times the value of this award. I really don't think you can claim that canceling this award and giving the money to the DoEdu (or even shifting it to the education side of NSF) would be better value for the money.

The nsf conducted a survey that found that 51% of people in the U.S. thought antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c7/c7s1.htm

"technology" at least is still something that is largely created in Western countries and Japan.

Of the 40 new semiconductor fabs now under construction around the world, 35 of them are in Asia. Clue: The technology to build these next-generation fabs is not coming from "Western countries and Japan." Even if it were, the west could not design the next generation, because it will have had no experience operating and optimizing the present generation -- and none of its profits to reinvest.

When I was in graduate school in 1981, at a major US state university, I was one of four graduate students out of 102 in the electrical engineering department that were born in the US. A coworker attended the same university department in 1990, and was the only doctoral candidate who was a US citizen, out of almost 200 students. I begrudge my fellow foreign students nothing at all -- I knew several of them well, and it's a tough life; they had and have my respect -- but it was quite clear even 20 or 30 years ago that the nexus of new technology development was not going to stay in the US. And while this university was somewhat of an extreme case, the trend nationwide is clear. Very clear. Open a random IEEE technical journal -- Journal of Solid State Circuits, for example -- and look at the authorship of the papers. Globalization, which I support, has a corollary, and that is that no one nation or region has a monopoly on research and development.

"technology" at least is still something that is largely created in Western countries and Japan.

Of the 40 new semiconductor fabs now under construction around the world, 35 of them are in Asia. Clue: The technology to build these next-generation fabs is not coming from "Western countries and Japan." Even if it were, the west could not design the next generation, because it will have had no experience operating and optimizing the present generation -- and none of its profits to reinvest.

When I was in graduate school in 1981, at a major US state university, I was one of four graduate students out of 102 in the electrical engineering department that were born in the US. A coworker attended the same university department in 1990, and was the only doctoral candidate who was a US citizen, out of almost 200 students. I begrudge my fellow foreign students nothing at all -- I knew several of them well, and it's a tough life; they had and have my respect -- but it was quite clear even 20 or 30 years ago that the nexus of new technology development was not going to stay in the US. And while this university was somewhat of an extreme case, the trend nationwide is clear. Very clear. Open a random IEEE technical journal -- Journal of Solid State Circuits, for example -- and look at the authorship of the papers. Globalization, which I support, has a corollary, and that is that no one nation or region has a monopoly on research and development.

I should qualify this by saying that scientists sometimes are hired by politicians, as science advisors, but I'm speaking about the vast majority of publishing scientists funded through the usual government agencies (and typically hired by universities).

Right, I didn't challenge that and went straight to the NSB. Of course, you wouldn't believe a scientist hired by Inhoffe. However, sometimes a scientist will make a discovery and THEN get hired by those that want to see his findings reported.

Sorry, in my last post Kelvin K. Droegemeier's didn't make it. He is the meteorologist. His biography is here:
http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/members/bio.jsp?pers=22472

Yes, I believe we've had this discussion before. If not with you, I've had with someone else. Now, who is National Science Foundation? Or to be more accurate, who makes up the National Science Board? The list can be found HERE. Surely these guys are not biased. Surely their daytime jobs would not be affected by AGW research, right? Let's look at a member, shall we?

Dan E. Arvizu became the eighth Director of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on January 15, 2005. NREL, located in Golden, Colorado, is the Department of Energy's primary laboratory for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (Alliance). He is President of Alliance and also is an Executive Vice President with the Midwest Research Institute, headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri.

Hmmm... Director of the US Dept of Energy's Renewable Energy Laboratory. Gee, I wonder what would happen to his funding if we found out that AGW is not really a problem. I wonder what his views are concerning giving grants to those that seek to disprove the current "consensus" of AGW.

How about this guy?

G. Wayne Clough has been a member of the faculty at Duke University, Stanford University, Virginia Tech, and the University of Washington. At Virginia Tech, he served as Head of the Department of Civil Engineering and as Dean of the College of Engineering. In 1993, he was appointed Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of Washington, and in 1994 he became Georgia Tech's tenth president. In 2008 he was appointed the 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.

Hmmmm. The Smithsonian Institute? What do they have to do with Global Warming? Surely, they can be a non-biased source, right? Let's see.

Within the Smithsonian Institution, global change research is conducted at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and the National Zoological Park. Research is organized around themes of atmospheric processes, ecosystem dynamics, observing natural and anthropogenic environmental change on daily to decadal time scales, and defining longer term climate proxies present in the historical artifacts and records of the museums as well as in the geologic record at field sites. The Smithsonian Institution program strives to improve knowledge of the natural processes involved in global climate change, to provide a long-term repository of climate-relevant research materials for present and future studies, and to bring this knowledge to various audiences, ranging from scholarly to the lay public. The unique contribution of the Smithsonian Institution is a long-term perspective; for example, undertaking investigations that may require extended study before producing useful results and conducting observations on sufficiently long (e.g., decadal) time scales to resolve human-caused modification of natural variability.

Well, crap. How about a meteorologist. Surely one can be non-biased. How about this guy. Surely, he has no vested interest in government money going to AGW research:

He also directs the Sasaki Institute, which is a non-profit organization at the University of Oklahoma that fosters the development and application of knowledge, policy, and advanced technology for the mutual benefit of the government, academic and private sectors.

Well, there you have it. I'm not saying that all the members are biased, but here are three that deal with AGW. Many of the others are professors of health, philosophy, communications and other none climate disciplines.

So, yeah, it appears that the NSB, the part of the NSF that directs funding, is quite biased toward research that supports AGW and have jobs that are threatened by research that may disprove AGW.

The way it works (in the US) is that Congress allocates funds for research in general. Agencies like the NSF (National Science Foundation), DARPA, etc actually administer the grants. They take applications and decide which are the best ideas that should be funded. The people running these agencies are academics, not politicos. For example, the National Science Board, which oversees the NSF, is listed here. While these groups control which projects get funded, they do not control the results of the research. If a funded project disproved existing theory, it is up to peer reviewed journals to publish or not.

A common criticism of the system is that it encourages a sort of orthodoxy in research. So if the NSF things "dark matter" is a great explanation, then projects which try to find alternative explanations may receive less funding because it is viewed as a waste. This is unfortunate, but there is not enough money to fund all the possible projects so some sort of prioritization must be made. It is much better to have experts do this, even though they have biases.

If the political parties really had that much control of research funding and the results of that research, you would expect that over the last several years you would see lots of peer reviewed research disproving human caused climate change. After all, Republicans were running congress and the White House for a long time.

Since you're not a botanist (nor am I) how do you know what garlic looked like 600 years ago?

Well, here's an illustration from the 15th century. Notice any bulbous feature that is lacking in the Voynich sketch? Notice they don't even bother to depict the root system in the 15th century sketch unlike the Voynich. My point was, not a single one of those plants relayed the distinguishing features you would obvious take care to note on the plant--all she offers is the leaf of stachys that has a hilarious tuber below it in the Voynich sketch but nothing in her botanical book! An obvious stretch of the imagination is the rose bush with no roses.

When corn was first cultivated, it looked like what we call "baby corn" today. It wasn't until centuries of selection and cross-breeding that we got the much larger corn that everyone knows.

I'm not sure where you found information that plants have changed dramatically in a few hundred years. While it's true that they have changed dramatically over thousands of years and since the advent of agriculture, 600 years is not the same as 6,000 years. While you're kind of right that thousands of years changed plants, I assure you that most if not all of today's plants look the same as they did 600 years ago.

The author really believes that China is rewarding intellects? According to wikipedia, China spent $40Billion on the 2008 Olympics.

I don't see intellects in any First world country making the same money as athletes. Nike spends on sponsorships $255 to $260million a year and spent $143.4 million on advertising in the first nine months of 2008. Note that Nike is a $31Billion company.

In comparison, the National Science Foundation received a total of $6.49 billion for FY09.

As a kid growing up? I don't recall any commercials saying "I wanna be like Stephen [Hawking]" or kids beating up other kids for some intellectual device, but they were sure beating each other up for a pair of Air Jordans.

Anybody else ever notice that the only commercials on TV for Educational Institutions (besides community or trade schools) are during college football games? Those commercials are only for the two schools that are playing. There's a commercial every 5minutes for sneakers, Under Armor shirts, Fitness equipment, sports drinks or sporting events. (As a side note, anybody recall the last time you saw an advertisement for Educational Software, besides Rosetta Stone? But there's a commercial every hour for some new XBOX/PS3/Wii game).

Intellectuals are enablers of other people to go onto great success. I guarantee you there were a ton of intellectuals that designed the bike, software to track, study the technique of Lance Armstrong's cycling career and victories in the Tour de France. But other than the brand, Trek, those big brained people will never be known, nor will someone pay them $50m in endorsements.

Btw: It's not just athletes vs intellectuals. Not all intellectuals are compensated equally either. I maintain the storage environment for a very large mainframe environment for a household WallStreet financial firm. Over a PB of online FICON disk much of it synchronously replicated to a remote disaster recovery site, and I can assure that my bonus is not even close to that of an entry level trader. I'm sure I could do a lot more damage than that 28yr old MBA.

The reason for this situation is that science funding by the federal government has been more or less flat for about a decade

I was going to give a 'you are full of it' reply, but realized you might actually believe this.
So here is some info on the Federal science funding:
NSF funding history
NIH funding trends
Defence funding (PDF file)

I know it's tough, but we must have competition! Unfortunately, that also means that many (most?) people will have to re-tool... Best of luck with your career though.

Sometimes hysteria is justified.

We received information that an NSF senior official was viewing sexually explicit material on his NSF computer in violation of NSFâ(TM)s computer use policies. We determined that, for the past two years, the employee had been repeatedly and excessively visiting pornographic websites and spend- ing up to 20 percent of his official work time viewing sexually explicit images and engaging in sexually explicit on-line âoechatsâ with various women. Based on the employeeâ(TM)s salary we identified a potential loss of more than $58,000 in employee compensation for that personal time.
When interviewed, the employee acknowledged using his NSF computer to visit pornographic websites and admitted that he spent excessive time chatting with women at the sites during official government work hours. We determined that the employee charged more than $40,300 to his personal credit card over 24 months to cover the cost of participating in these on-line chats. We concluded that the employeeâ(TM)s activities adversely affected the workplace making it offensive and hostile. In response to our referral, the agency issued the employee a Notice of Proposed Removal, and then a Notice for Removal, after which he left NSF.

source

At least he used his personal credit card.

Well, this is reported by the Washington Times, so you know it's not biased in the least. OK, let's take a look.

The only substantive abuse claim here is a quote from the NSF's inspector general making a budget request to Congress. The Times article implies that "this dramatic increase," forcing fraud detection efforts to be reduced, refers to employees browsing porn.

But that's not the case, is it. If we read the Times article very carefully, we see that the very first graf references:

Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography

Subsequent references to "the problems," "this dramatic increase," and "the misconduct cases" are all really talking about employee misconduct as a whole, not porn surfing specifically.

Maybe that's why this article is big on rhetoric and small on actual cases. One lengthy case is detailed on the article's first page. How much did that case cost taxpayers? "Between $13,800 and $58,000." Out of the NSF's $6.49 billion budget. That's 0.0006%.

How often is "often"? Six times as often as before. Misconduct cases -- not porn specifically -- went from 3 in 2006, to 7 in 2007, to 10 in 2008. The Times hints repeatedly that this is a huge problem, but despite its lavish use of adjectives -- "pervasive," "swamped," "well-publicized" -- it has to report that the actual number of porn-related misconduct cases in 2008 was seven.

Slashdot's headline "Porn Surfing Rampant" is exactly the kind of exaggeration that the Washington Times was hoping secondary media would slap on this story. "Rampant" is just not true, there's no possible way seven cases in a year can be described that way.

If each case was as bad as the one "between $13,800 and $58,000" case that was identified, those seven cases probably cost 0.004% of the NSF's budget.

But the Times article gets worse, moving from exaggeration to outright lies. Later, its author Jim McElhatton writes:

The foundation's inspector general ... told Congress it was diverted from that mission by the porn cases.

That's a flat-out lie. The OIG told Congress it was diverted by "employee misconduct," not porn. Here, read the actual budget request. (Full quote below.)

There is one paragraph in a 7-page report that references employee misconduct, and nowhere are "porn cases" referenced. Surely some of the cost to the agency was specifically from porn-surfing misconduct. And some was not. How much? We still don't know.

Look, any major institution, private or public, that employs a large number of people and gives them access to the internet, is going to have a few employees who abuse that access. It's ridiculous to think otherwise. Employees are capable of wasting time in a wide variety of creative ways. I daresay some employees in the private sector are wasting time reading Slashdot right at this very moment when they are nominally getting paid to do other things.

Republicans aren't fans of science; we know that. Smearing the NSF in the media by associating their name with porn for a news cycle is a fun yuk I suppose, but for conservatives it's another shot fired in the culture war. I find it depressing. There's actual news out there; this is at best People magazine type crap.

And it's ironic that this gets spread over the internet that the NSF helped create, and the story is brought to you thanks to the Freedom of Information Act that was passed by Democrats over the objections of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Scalia.

Finally, as someone who 10 years ago was writing stories for Slashdot

Yes, I agree: the fear surrounding Three Mile Island is based more on Hollywood than physics. The article makes at least one other mistake:

Many scientists and environmentalists still distrust nuclear power in any form, arguing that it can never escape its cost, safety and waste problems.

How is that a mistake? Let's borrow from m-w.com for a minute, and let's select definition number one.

it's not true that many scientists oppose nuclear power.

Now, for the preceding statement to be true, the number of scientists that make up 27% of the population must fall short of the (admittedly loose) definition of many. Assuming the Pew Research Center uses decent polling methods, and pulling our numbers for the number of scientists in the USA (2,157,300) from the National Science Foundation, your statement equates to the following:

582,471 does not constitute "many."

Interesting hypothesis.