Slashdot Mirror

A limited version of this is already in effect, as articles that arise from research supported by many (possibly all) US federal government grants must be available on a public access site with 12 months of the official date of publication (links to NIH and NSF policies). Lobbying by publishers blocked an effort for no or a shorter waiting period.

Isn't it already required to be publically available if it was funded by the NSF? Most of these peer-reviewed articles are probably already on PubMed, or at least the abstract is, if you want to bookmark it and wait until it becomes free.

A consensus in science it not something that scientists vote on. It happens organically when a strong majority of scientists agree on some issue so they move on to explore other aspects of the problem. As far as the effect on your career science is one of the most intensely competitive of human endeavors. Scientists love proving other scientists wrong. If there are any serious holes in the current theory you can bet someone is exploring it in hopes of making a name for themselves. But they're not going to waste their time on something that doesn't hold any scientific water.

As far as funding goes most of the government funding process is open with detailed records of what funding has been provided. For example the National Science Foundation has the details for their awards here. If the process is pushing a point of view how come no one has gone through those records to show that? I have to imagine that some have tried that and gave up after it became obvious that wasn't happening.

Yes, politics has had an effect on embryonic stem cell research, at least as funded by the Federal Government but show me the same thing has happened with climate science. All you have is some vague hand-wavy accusations without anything solid to back them up.

The preprint acknowledges that funding came from France's Ministry of Defense. In the US, it's usually possible to look up award numbers for government-funded research and find an abstract describing what the researchers proposed to do. The preprint didn't specify an award number, and I'm not especially motivated to try to search further.

However, I do have some experience submitting proposals to the National Science Foundation. There are a variety of funding mechanisms including solicitations to address a specific topic, unsolicited proposals to an NSF program, rapid response research (RAPID), and EAGER grants. An EAGER grant is a funding vehicle with limits on funding amounts and duration, and is designed to support unproven high risk research that is potentially transformative. This sounds exactly like the type of research that NSF would fund as an EAGER grant.

While I don't know the practical value of this research, it's not a scam, and it's not fair to assume that the people who reviewed it are idiots. Although NSF's EAGER program is only subject to external review rather than sending proposals to external reviewers, I don't know how the program that funded this research works. It's entirely possible that the proposal was sent for external review and received favorable reviews. The preprint does describe an experimental proof of concept, and I think you're being much too hasty in dismissing this idea.

The American corporate sector is funding science and engineering grants only in the sense that they pay taxes that is used as the basis for the NSF, NIH, DOD, DARPA, and so forth.

If you're saying that corporate America is directly funding science and engineering grants and other research projects at public and private universities to the tune of >$60B/year, then show me the data. Here's my data from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) showing that for FY2015, the HHS, DOD, DOE, NSF, NASA, USDA and other federal agencies spent $63.645B on research endeavors, including grants:

https://www.nsf.gov/statistics...

For FY2017 and FY2018, the research budgets are $69.744B and $62.421B, respectively, according to the US Congressional Research Service (CRS), a non-partisan agency that works directly for Congress:

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R...

In either case, you can go to the actual budgets passed by the legislative branch to verify these numbers.

I find it hard to believe that corporate America is outspending the federal government on research grants. If they are, however, then that's exciting news. Research is a primary driver of innovation that helps us remain competitive with the rest of the world.

Indeed. All federal funding for the National Science Foundation, which is the vast majority of all government investment in science research (outside of NASA which was 11.3B) is just 5.67 billion dollars for everything. That includes everything from researching Yellowstone to robotics to stem. The majority isn't even spent on hard sciences but rather integrating groups. We are talking grant money of maybe 100k here. Put that into perspective with 824 billion for the military. I'd say 0.000012% of our defense spending is very well spent on something that really could level most of America to smoking ruin, unlike some rag tag terrorists we helped create ourselves to have an excuse to wage wars that financially reward key players. Hell, I'd even up that to 0.001% and still call it financially sound.

Its not what you think. It hacking in "old" sense, creative, simple solutions to problems. Not the "new" definition of hacking as in hostile technological attacks.

It looks like they are taking a modern entrepreneurial methodology and applying it to DoD problems. The NSF has been doing this for a while through its variation Innovation Corp (I-Corp) programs, https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pg.... Running academic researchers through this training to increase the success rate of NSF funded research making it to the market.

Notice that the students teams are doing 100 interviews, that sounds exactly like NSF I-Corp. The premise here is to teach academic researchers that whatever ideas they have about the use of their technology is most like crap, that the solutions in their mind are most likely crap. That they need to get their a** out of their office/lab and go talk to real people in the real world. Talk not about your solution, but talk about the people's problems in the domain your solution exists in, what people have tried as solutions, what worked, what didn't, why, ... all the time not contaminating the interview by mentioning or steering things toward your ideas. The academic is merely interviewing to learn about real people, real problems and real solutions, or lack thereof. After 100 such interviews there should be some recurring themes, and these themes should suggest a direction to move in, unlike whatever crap the academics dreamed up in isolation in their office/lab.

Now the academics go implement a solution in a very incremental agile-like fashion. Doing more interviews to validate their solution and their continued progress, to make sure they are on track. Hypothesis, experiment, feedback, repeat.

Its basically applying an agile-like process to business and product development.

This new DoD stuff seems to be trying to get their suppliers to use this approach. Rather than the lets develop a business plan and complete product specification in isolation approach. The "it doesn't have to actually work, it only needs to meet the DoD approved spec" approach.

Yeah, I'm only a Computer Engineer developing satellite SBCs.

Yeah, no shit he didn't say " foreign students weren't the vast majority in engineering classes " because that'd be a pretty stupid thing to say Dumb fucks.

If this is real, Apple is very much behind the times when it comes to both sensor technology and understanding of the medical device market. Trying a spectroscopic approach (which appears to be the case) is way out of date, that's a generation behind even the FDA cleared tests, and isn't going to compete with the new generation of sensors being developed now.

There are several approaches to continuous monitoring of glucose, going back more than 10 years.

Many of these technologies, particularly the non-invasive ones, are more available outside the US than inside. This has more to do with the way medical device manufacturers are paid than any technical limitation. Bluntly, being in the glucose monitoring business is a great way to lose a lot of money quickly. Yes, the market is big, but it's brutal. Apple's strength is not dominating low margin, highly regulated markets.

Firstly basic research is practically non-existent in the private sector and always has been

Not true. For example, about a quarter of US college students go to a private sector college. And any listing of top research universities will have a heavy private sector presence (such as here, here, and here).

Similarly, let's see who actually is funding R&D in the US:

In 2006 the total expenditure for R&D conducted in the U.S. was about $340B in current dollars. Of this total, basic research accounts for about 18% ($62B), applied research about 22% ($75B), and development about 60% ($204B).[8] Over the past decades the U.S. institutions contributing to the output of basic research have shifted dramatically.[9] Although industrial contributions to national R&D now far outpace Federal R&D support, only about 3.8% of industry-performed R&D can be classified as 'basic', with the remainder devoted to applied R&D. For industry-funded and performed R&D, the basic percentage is about the same for 2006, 3.7%. This percentage of basic research performed by industry has hovered slightly below 4% of all industry-performed R&D for most years since the late 1990s.[10] In 2006, industry funded 17% of U.S. basic research, and performed 15% of it.

The Federal Government is the second largest source of R&D funding (28%) following industry. Federal expenditures vary greatly from agency to agency in terms of amounts, directions, and objectives, depending upon the mission of the particular agency.[11] Federal funding is the primary source of basic research support in the U.S. (over 59% in 2006[12]), of which about 56% is carried out by academic institutions. U.S. basic research is also funded by foundations (about 10%), universities and colleges (about 10%), and state and local governments (about 3.5% through funding of academic basic research).[13] Federal obligations for academic research (both basic and applied) and especially in the current support for National Institutes of Health (NIH) (whose budget had previously doubled between the years 1998 to 2003) declined in real terms between 2004 and 2005 and are expected to decline further in 2006 and 2007. This is the first multiyear decline in Federal obligations for academic research since 1982.[14] The intent of Federal policy is to increase support for physical sciences research in future years.[15]

Right there, we see that 17% of basic science funding in 2006 was paid directly by private industry with additional amounts by foundations and private universities and colleges. So claiming that the private sector in basic science research is non-existent is outright wrong. Even when you narrowly consider only the funding from private businesses!

We then need to consider that public funding has crowded out private funding - after all, what's the point, for example, of a billionaire donating money to a new particle accelerator, or a body of researchers to solicit private funds when public funding can easily outspend the private funding by an order of magnitude or more? Before that happened, private funding was a huge source of basic research. For example, most US professional astronomical telescopes from before the Second World War were privately funded. So private funding has been artificially suppressed by the plentiful public funding.

Finally, there's the matter of efficiency. Private research efforts tend to be a lot more productive for the money spent than public ones (which are often more about where the money is spent an

Since you refuse to look at the evidence for yourself, the eight major investigations that cleared CRU of any scientific misconduct include:

  - House of Commons Science and Technology Committee: "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact"

  - Independent Climate Change Review: "we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt."

  - International Science Assessment Panel: "We found absolutely no evidence of impropriety whatsoever"

  - Pennsylvania State University first panel and second panel: "Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community"

  - United States Environmental Protection Agency: CRU critics came to "faulty scientific conclusions" and "resorted to hyperbole."

  - Department of Commerce: "We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures"

- National Science Foundation: "We found no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence."

The NSF periodically puts out reports on science funding, which you can read yourself. Or, if you want the most relevant quote:

...the U.S. invests twice as much as any other single nation in R&D, despite slipping to tenth in world ranking of the percentage of its GDP it devotes to R&D. In 2011, the U.S. spent $429 billion on R&D, compared to China's $208 billion and Japan's $146 billion. Among other S&T metrics, the U.S. leads in high quality research publications, patents, and income from intellectual property exports.

To put a little perspective on that, we spend $40 billion a year on startup companies.

There are a few scientists who will leave the US because they get poached by governments abroad. That has happened already and would continue, no matter what we do. Our pie is the biggest, but we have a lot of people to feed. There are also scientists who will have to leave because of visa issues. That has been happening (a lot) anyway too. We've had a labor surplus in science in the US for a long time.

The world will not end if other countries are allowed to be good at science. We will not implode if the government cuts science funding. As scientists, there are plenty of structural problems we can improve during a time of change.

We rely too much on cheap academic labor. We no longer have a working system for transitioning young, high level scientists from training to independence. The government only funds about 1/3 of scientific work, but with the slow and continuing death of real commercial research, the government funds far more than it's share of these young scientists, and this puts stress on the whole system. In general, we have become bad at commercializing scientific work. From the cost to develop new pharmaceuticals, to clean energy, to nanotechnology, we have not delivered in the fields that were supposed to have application. We are now extremely bad at understanding how our work can be applied to everyday life in a non-threatening way (think GMOs...). Our professional organizations organize these calls for increased funding, but we don't address any of our other structural issues. We have an opportunity here to work on some of these things.

Private entrepreneurs, hoping to profit from research by promising researchers should be the ones financing it.

Not quite. The National Science Foundation provides an interesting "bridge" between basic research and an investible opportunity. The goal is to help NSF funded research "escape" from the laboratory. Sometimes a commercialization effort is too early or too high risk for the private investment community. This is where the NSF steps in with SBIR, to help scientists get from pure research to a point where private investors see opportunity. NSF SBIR is a bridge from the lab to Angels and VCs.
https://www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/sb...

And the NSF has a training program to make scientists more likely to succeed when they are nearing the "bridge". NSF I-Corp trains researchers in basic product development and business tasks so that they are more likely to succeed with SBIR or private investment.
https://www.nsf.gov/news/speci...

Private entrepreneurs, hoping to profit from research by promising researchers should be the ones financing it.

Not quite. The National Science Foundation provides an interesting "bridge" between basic research and an investible opportunity. The goal is to help NSF funded research "escape" from the laboratory. Sometimes a commercialization effort is too early or too high risk for the private investment community. This is where the NSF steps in with SBIR, to help scientists get from pure research to a point where private investors see opportunity. NSF SBIR is a bridge from the lab to Angels and VCs.
https://www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/sb...

And the NSF has a training program to make scientists more likely to succeed when they are nearing the "bridge". NSF I-Corp trains researchers in basic product development and business tasks so that they are more likely to succeed with SBIR or private investment.
https://www.nsf.gov/news/speci...

That is the single, most stupid take on research I have ever heard. If people like you were running the show, we would still be living in caves.

Not really, when that first researcher came along and proposed making an artificial man-made "cave" wherever wood could be found, it probably would have piqued the interest of the grant committee. :-)

By the way, the National Science Foundation is training researchers in marketing and other traditional business skills. They want to improve the success rate of moving research out of the lab and into the marketplace so they are teaching researchers to do customer discovery, an iterative product development cycle, realistic planning to move from early adopters to a more mainstream market, etc.
https://www.nsf.gov/news/speci...

The National Science Foundation?

mkay...

NS*. How about that?

The National Science Foundation?

mkay...

"Short" (1176 articles), and incomplete list of science performed with NSF funding:
http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries...

Much of it seemingly banal ("health indicators of coral", "water availability"), but that's what basic research is: building blocks.
But get enough blocks together, and eventually you've got a skyscraper of discovery and innovation.

Most academic papers are published with financial support from federal funding agencies. Too bad publishing academic papers is a private industry with a profit motive to keep you from accessing them.

Actually, most publicly funded research is now required to be published in publicly accessible ways:

• NIH public access policy
• NSF public access policy
• DOE public access plan

Granted, those came in to existence in the past decade or so, which leaves a lot of old papers not covered and subject to the whims of the publisher. Regardless, pretty well every existing research grant in the US from the federal government is now subject to those terms. The big for-profit publishers (think Nature and others) have made accommodations to allow for researchers to publish in their journals while still meeting the open access requirements.

Swartz died over this.

No, he didn't. He was over zealous, afraid, and likely fraught with unmanaged mental health problems. He was trying to make a name for himself and then didn't know what to do once he accomplished that. Regardless his goal was not to free all the data, if it had been he could have used other means that would not have landed him so quickly in so much trouble.

You know what? It doesn't take that much time (tax dollars) to write the paper.

The grant was for a little less than half a million dollars.Not sure where you are coming from but for me that is quite a lot to spend on a paper especially one with no original studies. There was quite a lot of references to other publications but no surveys, no sampling, nothing pointing to some hard data the team gathered on their own.

Now, if you bothered to read the paper, you'd find cool stuff like, "Patersonâ(TM)s artwork builds on an earlier project where she submerged a phone line connected to VatnajÃkull, Iceland and Europeâ(TM)s largest glacier. People could call the glacier (+44(0)7757001122) and listen to the distinctive pops, trills, and gurgles of the ice. More than ten thousand people called during the installation"

I'm sorry, were they supposed to be writing a research paper or a Buzzfeed article about the top 20 weirdest things people have done with ice? And people wonder why the social sciences get reputations as not being real science.

The NSF is usually very careful about who it gives money to; only something like 10% of funding request are granted. For those who are curious, the basic grant information on this grant is available from the NSF:

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch...

The grant was done through the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (specifically the division of Social and Economic Sciences) -- as opposed to the Geosciences Directorate, which I believe normally handles the climate change work. (The NSF is divided into different parts for funding different areas.)

FWIW, the house science committee has long been working to cut the budget for the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. I'm sure that good work gets funded by that directorate, but it sure does make me pissed that a BS grant like this gets funded, while more useful grants in applied physics (my area) don't get funded.

I wouldn't pin this bad grant on the NSF as a whole. Hopefully it's the exception for that directorate rather than the rule.

With NSF's public access policy in place, PubMed provides open-access to a lot of journal papers in a variety of formats, including EPUB.

I've found the PubMed site itself to be one of the best-laid-out reference web sites I've used, period -- its links to external journals, full and partial papers in various formats, and ability to bookmark items of interest, are all very functional and easy to access.

If you wanted to be charitable you could have [...], or you could remit that money to the government instead which is governed by the people.

Just to be clear, you are suggesting that money given to the government will go towards the needs of the people. That's what you're saying... yes?

Hypothetically speaking, a $1 million mutual fund well-invested can return roughly 7% over a long period and require 0.5% in management fees. Assuming 2.5% inflation, that amount would provide $50,000 per annum in perpetuity.

If you disagree with the numbers you can use other numbers, but the central point is the same.

$45 billion could be set up as a fund that supports 45,000 people in perpetuity.

Hypothetically, he could set up a system of "mini" Nobel prize awards given to people who do interesting research. For comparison, that's about the number of PhD candidates in the US.

We keep hearing about how little post graduate researchers are paid, how they can't have a family or any kind of life on their research stipends.

Instead of giving big lumps of money for particular areas of research, he could set up foundation grants that support *individuals* who have potentially interesting research ideas.

Just a thought. In any event, I don't think Mark reads slashdot anyway.

Thanks for the link. I'm interested in checking out the underlying sources,

Well, if you want numbers for the US, you can go to the NSF:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/...

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/...

I wasn't aware that so much research was funded by the private sector and I'll honestly still be a bit suspicious of the numbers

What you should really question is on what grounds you are "suspicious". You apparently had no data to base opinions on before I pointed you at those statistics, so your "suspicions" must be based on your political and/or economic preconceptions; ask yourself where those came from.

It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available. There is a lovely display, with graphical interface, which is just enchanting to wander through much of the tree of life. It does a great job conveying the scale of the diversity of life and the boggling number of species, and it's aimed at the general public. It has nice pinch/zoom/etc. touch-screen functionality on a table-sized display. Unfortunately, for years, there was exactly one place on earth where you could play with it: at the Harvard Natural History Museum. And unless you are there at a particularly empty time, you will have to squeeze a fair number of kids out of the way to actually play with it for more than about two minutes. Now, things have improved a bit and it looks like there are a grand total of four museums that have the exhibit. (You should visit if there is one near you, try to avoid a time when school field trips are likely to be there!) The development was supported by a $2.3 million US National Science Foundation grant so public money was used to develop it, and it seems feasible to implement it or at least a scaled-down version of it on what are now much more common multi-touch displays like tablets or at least be available on the web, but as far as I can tell, it's been years since the grant and still the only place you can use it is in these four museums. I see this as a missed opportunity for a dramatic broader impact on understanding evolution and the scale of the diversity of life.

The [private] sector at the time of the manhattan project was still mostly farming; there was no "silicon valley" at that time, and if you were talented, the government and only a handful of large corporations (e.g. IBM) were worth working for. 1960 wasn't a whole lot different, though shortly after that saw the beginnings of the tech boom.

I completely agree that the private sector in the 1940-1970 was much different than it is now. But that is basically part of my point. Private industry has massively increased spending on R&D over the past 40 years, while the federal government has not. These graphs show just how sharply this R&D spending has diverged between private and public sectors. Private R&D spending was only double public spending in 1950, while it is closer to a 10x difference now.

It is a good thing that research done by the public in the 1900's spurred such technological growth. It was basic research done by the government that gave the private sector technologies mature enough to make their R&D spending more profitable. The private sector has continued to acknowledge the importance of R&D spending, while the public sector has tapered off.

As long as this continues, I think we will find more of our best minds will continue to create companies like Facebook and WhatsApp instead of creating the next technology as revolutionary as the Internet itself.

It irritates me every time I hear this ruddy nonsense that keeps spewing out of Seattle and San Fransisco that we're not cranking out enough computer science graduates.

Hey Microsoft! Newsflash! Computer science majors rise and fall as starting salaries rise and fall.

If you want to see more majors, raise your starting salaries. Stop firing everyone and outsourcing to India.

"There is ample evidence of Ocean acidification to suggest that CO2 needs to be treated as a pollutant."

Then I'm sure you'll have no problem providing that evidence of this and of any harm..

I can tell you ahead of time corals have genes that switch on to handle heat and co2 and they have survived 7000 ppm CO2 in the past and that this is not affecting reefs which by some miracle are only dying near man where he pollutes; in the open ocean coral is fine.

Tree of life with time scale
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...

Historic co2
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Corals can turn certain genes on and off to cope with heat
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Dr. Bruce Carlson produced a wonderful video demonstrating the resilient capacity of coral reefs if humans would simply stopped interfering with nature.
http://www.advancedaquarist.co...

Palau's coral reefs surprisingly resistant to ocean acidification
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ....

Total reef losses due to climate change are unlikely
http://www.advancedaquarist.co...

For cold water corals, warming is beating acidification to drive a growth spurt
http://arstechnica.com/science...

"Ocean acidification killed off more than 90 per cent of marine life 252 million years ago, scientists believe"
Nonsense published in The Independent in April 2015.

In an attempt to frighten people about rising CO2 and ocean acidification The Independent ran a story postulating ocean acidification could have been responsible for massive die-offs we know as major extinction events. This is unlikely. Translate "scientists believe" as "a couple of guys had a crazy idea and wrote it up.". In a climate of increasing CO2 this might resonate with some, but rising CO2 has now stalled.

Global energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide stalled in 2014
Preliminary IEA data point to emissions decoupling from economic growth for the first time in 40 years
http://www.iea.org/newsroomand...

If it was so acid why didn't the coral die out? It's by far the most sensitive to pH. The fact is, coral has survived 7000 ppm CO2 in the past much higher than the 400ppm of today.

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

How? It has genes it can switch on that let it ignore heat and pH, that's why. Have they not surveyed all the literature?

Mechanisms of reef coral resistance to future climate change
In less than 2 years, acclimatization achieves the same heat tolerance that we would expect from strong natural selection over many generations for these long-lived organisms.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Palau's coral reefs surprisingly resistant to ocean acidification
January 16, 2014 - Marine scientists working on the coral reefs of Palau have made two unexpected discoveries that could provide insight into corals' resistance and resilience to ocean acidification.
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ....

JJ Scheel (1968:Page 25) proved in the 1950s aquatic life doesn't care about pH at all which you can prove to yourself at home. Transfer any fish from water of pH 9 to water of pH 4.5 and back again - they simply don't care about pH. One of the great aquarium myths along with "nitrates are deadly" (Not with an LD of 2200 ppm for marine larvae they're not) and "Plant bulbs" are essential (no, intensity matters, spectrum not one bit).

It's a widely held myth they do but again, the literature suggests otherwise and I've verified it's right on countless occasions and you can too.

Mythbusters rates this one: utter nonsense. Supervolcanoes blocked out the sun. When you have no light, warmths or plant life, pH of the water, irrelevant to aquatic life, is the least of your problems. Every species alive today survived this, there's no reason to think they won't if it were to happen again - which is isn't.

Refs:
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ....
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
https://books.google.ca/books?...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

"Ocean acidification killed off more than 90 per cent of marine life 252 million years ago, scientists believe"
Nonsense published in The Independent in April 2015.

In an attempt to frighten people about rising CO2 and ocean acidification The Independent ran a story postulating ocean acidification could have been responsible for massive die-offs we know as major extinction events. This is unlikely. Translate "scientists believe" as "a couple of guys had a crazy idea and wrote it up.". In a climate of increasing CO2 this might resonate with some, but rising CO2 has now stalled.

Global energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide stalled in 2014
Preliminary IEA data point to emissions decoupling from economic growth for the first time in 40 years
http://www.iea.org/newsroomand...

If it was so acid why didn't the coral die out? It's by far the most sensitive to pH. The fact is, coral has survived 7000 ppm CO2 in the past much higher than the 400ppm of today.

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

How? It has genes it can switch on that let it ignore heat and pH, that's why. Have they not surveyed all the literature?

Mechanisms of reef coral resistance to future climate change
In less than 2 years, acclimatization achieves the same heat tolerance that we would expect from strong natural selection over many generations for these long-lived organisms.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Palau's coral reefs surprisingly resistant to ocean acidification
January 16, 2014 - Marine scientists working on the coral reefs of Palau have made two unexpected discoveries that could provide insight into corals' resistance and resilience to ocean acidification.
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ....

JJ Scheel (1968:Page 25) proved in the 1950s aquatic life doesn't care about pH at all which you can prove to yourself at home. Transfer any fish from water of pH 9 to water of pH 4.5 and back again - they simply don't care about pH. One of the great aquarium myths along with "nitrates are deadly" (Not with an LD of 2200 ppm for marine larvae they're not) and "Plant bulbs" are essential (no, intensity matters, spectrum not one bit).

It's a widely held myth they do but again, the literature suggests otherwise and I've verified it's right on countless occasions and you can too.

Mythbusters rates this one: utter nonsense. Supervolcanoes blocked out the sun. When you have no light, warmths or plant life, pH of the water, irrelevant to aquatic life, is the least of your problems. Every species alive today survived this, there's no reason to think they won't if it were to happen again - which is isn't.

Refs:
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ....
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
https://books.google.ca/books?...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

For those who can't remember this far back, we have the National Science Foundation to thank for CORE-Plus, SIMMS, The Interactive Mathematics Program, and the Connected Mathematics Project, along with other curricula otherwise known as "Leftist Math" that really caught on in the late 90's. While their intentions were good, and their involvement in creating new math programs helped reshape much needed reforms in how mathematics was taught, the programs pushed the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. (I'm speaking as a mathematics teacher who instructed students in CORE-Plus and CMP.)

As much as I am frustrated with the current methods of "integrating" technology into classrooms, given their past track record, I'm skeptical as to how the NSF can improve it.

It did a horrible job of predicitng the polar ice refreezing that happened 2 or 3 years ago.

Good, because if the models predicted events that did not happen, that would be a bad sign for them. The "polar ice refreezing" that you are refering to didn't happen. Polar ice did rebound from a record low, which it was widely expected to do. In fact, every record low polar ice year is followed by a few years that are higher than the record low before until we reach the next record low. However, the overall trend is still downward.

Global Warming was being used by meteorologists as the cause for the polar vortexes that dropped temperatures down into the single and negative digits.

From my understanding, that is correct. Warming in the arctic is changing the wind flow which is allowing colder Arctic air to be pushed over the North East section of North America.

And all the work you do to try and save our asses from rising temparatures will be meaningless when the Yellowstone Supervolcanoe erupts and takes out half the country, which "well established science" said should have erupted close to 20 years ago.

The National Science Foundations seems to think it will be 1 or 2 million years from now. Are you sure you know the difference between reporters and scientists?

Like I said in a previous post, infra-red imaging of the inner planets in our solar system shows them heating up at a rate similar to Earth. But, say that out loud and people like you friggin flip out.

Maybe, the flip out at you because it's not true? Mars isn't warming.

Why we need $400 million to teach K-12 CS: 1. "Only 10 percent of schools teach it [CS]." 2. "No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States." 3. "Currently, only 25 states allow computer science to count as a mathematics or science credit towards graduation."

Why don't you so to the source on this.

DCAA provides services in connection with negotiation, administration, and settlement of awards to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent on fair and reasonable prices. In 2012, DCAA audited NEON’s construction proposal budget.2 DCAA rendered an adverse opinion on NEON’s proposal since the audit disclosed significant questioned and unsupported costs of $154.4 million (nearly 36% of the proposed $433.7 million budget). Of the total exception amount of $154.4 million, $72.6 million (47%) were questioned contingencies. In February 2013, we contracted an accounting system audit because of the significance of the findings in that report.

Both of you are idiots.

DCAA rendered an adverse opinion on NEON’s proposal since the audit disclosed significant questioned and unsupported costs of $154.4 million (nearly 36% of the proposed $433.7 million budget).

There is the report submitted to the NSF.

Here is a list of allowable expenses.

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch...

"Many of the ideas that drive modern cloud computing, such as server virtualization, network slicing, and robust distributed storage, arose from the research community. But because today's clouds have particular, non-malleable implementations of these ideas "baked in," they are unsuitable as facilities in which to conduct research on future cloud architectures. This project creates CloudLab, a facility that will enable fundamental advances in cloud architecture. CloudLab will not be a cloud; CloudLab will be large-scale, distributed scientific infrastructure on top of which many different clouds can be built. It will support thousands of researchers and run hundreds of different, experimental clouds simultaneously. The Phase I CloudLab deployment will provide data centers at Clemson (with Dell equipment), Utah (HP), and Wisconsin (Cisco), with each industrial partner collaborating to explore next-generation ideas for cloud architectures

CloudLab will be a place where researchers can try out ideas using any cloud software stack they can imagine. It will accomplish this by running at a layer below cloud infrastructure: it will provide isolated, bare-metal access to a set of resources that researchers can use to bring up their own clouds. These clouds may run instances of today's popular stacks, modest modifications to them, or something entirely new. CloudLab will not be tied to any particular particular cloud stack, and will support experimentation on multiple in parallel.

The impact of cloud computing outside the field of computer science has been substantial: it has enabled a new generation of applications and services with direct impacts on society at large. CloudLab is positioned to have an immediate and substantial impact on the research community by providing access to the resources it needs to shape the future of clouds. Cloud architecture research, enabled by CloudLab, will empower a new generation of applications and services which will bring direct benefit to the public in areas of national priority such as medicine, smart grids, and natural disaster early warning and response."

What study are you talking about exactly? You mean the wordpress post about a random guy's gut feeling on the subject? That's real scientifically rigorous. What about the fact that the dip in students does not occur in other science fields which had similarly bad job markets? Computer Science is the only major on that whole chart that has a significant decrease in women at any point in the last decade. Also, it makes it really difficult to take anything you are saying seriously with that incredibly offensive name.

If you are wondering about the impact of carbon dioxide on say, forests, this type of question is easy to research with a quick Google search. In 30 seconds, I found this NSF study by Harvard researchers, for example, not exactly normally a hotbed of pro-GHG folks.

It's actually quite well-established that increased carbon dioxide levels are very good for plant growth. As it turns out, it also enables them to grow while needing less water, for example.

> That's correct, and doesn't contradict what I said in any way. Physics grew much more slowly,

From your own citation bachelors degrees in physics went from 4.8% in 1966 to 14.2% in 1984 while CS went from 14.6% to 37.2% - that means physics grew nearly 300% while CS grew by 250%. When your definition of 'much more slowly' turns out to actually be 20% faster it means your version of reality is so out of sync with the real world that there is no point in continuing this discussion any more.

> That's correct, and doesn't contradict what I said in any way. Physics grew much more slowly,

From your own citation bachelors degrees in physics went from 4.8% in 1966 to 14.2% in 1984 while CS went from 14.6% to 37.2% - that means physics grew nearly 300% while CS grew by 250%. When your definition of 'much more slowly' turns out to actually be 20% faster it means your version of reality is so out of sync with the real world that there is no point in continuing this discussion any more.

Somebody has to be at the top, the thing is that it was all part of a similar trend and while that trend continued for women in other disciplines long after 1984 it didn't for women in CS.

"Somebody has to be at the top" is a cop-out. It might be that but that's an explanation that should only be accepted after ruling others out.

And while the trend continued for women in some other disciplines, it did not continue for women in other disciplines, in particular most of engineering.

I thought it was interesting that you failed to provide a citation for your claims. Obviously you had just googled it yourself. When someone does that, it is a clear indicator that they know they are misrepresenting the facts and are hoping nobody is going to double-check them.

Actually I had found it some time ago and was not looking at the original source, but a spreadsheet I'd made. My source was the NSF.

So when it actually turned out that the percentage of bachelors degrees in STEM in general, and in physics specifically, going to females continued to grow at nearly the same rate the 20 years after 1984 that it had been for the 20 years before 1984, I was completely unsurprised.

That's correct, and doesn't contradict what I said in any way. Physics grew much more slowly, and kept growing until 2002, but it topped out that year, at 22.6%. That same year, Computer Science was at 27.5%. Both fields dropped after that, CS more sharply. But the 1984 peak-and-drop was peculiar to CS.

There's something going on, or at least something has gone on, that is both particular to computer science (and thus unlikely to be due to general attitudes towards mathematics education or anything similar), and much more variable than long term social pressure of any sort.

This sounds suspiciously like something written by someone with an online MBA: "Each project tests a critical component in a future data ecosystem in conjunction with a research community of users," said said Irene Qualters, division director for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at NSF. "This assures that solutions will be applied and use-inspired."

If we want the public to continue to support federal funding of the sciences we have to do better than this. I understand the point, but it this needlessly laden with buzz-phrases and it is clumsy.

I understand your point about the technobabble. However, Ms. Qualters' résumé appears to be somewhat less fluffy that the quote would suggest.

Yep and inappropriate comments like "your are stupid" suddenly get mixed together with "sexual" because the question asks about "inappropriate or sexual" instead of "inappropriate sexual".

But this is a minor problem. The bigger problem is their approach to sampling. They use voluntary online survey. These type of surveys tend to be answered by people with vested interest in the topic and ignored by people busy with other things. How do I know that their sample is no good? Here is a quote

Hundreds of respondents, recruited online, answered our survey questions. A majority of the sample were women N = 516/666 (77.5%).

So they have a miniscule sample, that is horribly biased towards one sex (for comparison see the gender and race distribution in academia here".

Yup.

Also high on the question list for any sort of sensitive job is your financial position - if you've got the sort of debts that would make you more susceptible to bribery.

Sensitive? You mean like the job Barr was doing? Please. Here's an excerpt from the job description:

NSF Program Directors bear the primary responsibility for carrying out the agency's overall mission: to support innovative and merit-reviewed activities in basic research and education that contribute to the nation's technical strength, security, and welfare. Discharging this responsibility requires knowledge in the appropriate disciplines, knowledge and experience with research on educational innovations, but also a commitment to high standards, a considerable breadth of interest and receptivity to new ideas, a strong sense of fairness, good judgment, and a high degree of personal integrity. Those selected will coordinate the management of undergraduate education proposals and awards in DUE programs. Successful candidates will participate in all phases of the solicitation, review and management of proposals submitted to assigned programs; conduct post-award monitoring of funded projects, including site visits and review of annual and final reports; represent the division at professional meetings and conferences; conduct analyses and prepare reports and internal budget plans for programs and other EHR and DUE activities; contribute to the Foundation-wide coordination of scholarly activities for undergraduate STEM education; provide leadership in broadening participation in STEM disciplines and in undergraduate STEM education; and represent the division in cross-directorate and interagency initiatives related to undergraduate education, including measures to keep both the content and teaching approaches current in and conforming with contemporary advances within the science and with current STEM education research findings.

I'm not sure who could, or would, try to blackmail the professor over this bullshit. It's not like she was nominated to be ambassador to Bumfuckistan, or director of the CIA. It's just ludicrous.

So.. let's mod the idiot +4 insightful, because we're apparently dumbfucks who believe stupid-conspiracy theories about science funding.

So here's the Actual breakdown of NSF research funding(which is about 80% of their total funding, with the rest allocated to science education and overhead).

Now, back to that first link. About 1.75% of research funding goes to environmental research of any sort, which is the umbrella category for climate change research among a fuck-ton of others. half goes to defense research.

So if you want an "easy target" for money, there's your answer. Not paranoia about evil climate change researchers. Next is health, with a good 25%ish, which is the thing that this article whines about. So, yeah, change from an area that gets 25% of national research spending, to one that gets 2. Good job.

So.. let's mod the idiot +4 insightful, because we're apparently dumbfucks who believe stupid-conspiracy theories about science funding.

So here's the Actual breakdown of NSF research funding(which is about 80% of their total funding, with the rest allocated to science education and overhead).

Now, back to that first link. About 1.75% of research funding goes to environmental research of any sort, which is the umbrella category for climate change research among a fuck-ton of others. half goes to defense research.

So if you want an "easy target" for money, there's your answer. Not paranoia about evil climate change researchers. Next is health, with a good 25%ish, which is the thing that this article whines about. So, yeah, change from an area that gets 25% of national research spending, to one that gets 2. Good job.

Even on Earth there are a lot of creatures that can survive conditions far outside the normal range.

Ooops. Left out the link. Here it is.