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2003 MacArthur 'Genius Grant' Winners Announced
ccnull writes "This year's list of 24 MacArthur Fellows has been released. Each winner of the so-called 'Genius Grant' receives $500,000, no strings attached. 2003's winners include a blacksmith, a biomedical engineer, a computation geometer, a biophysicist, a nurse, and a short story writer 'crafting witty, experimental prose.'"
So I guess my shell-script "thinkgeek fortune grabber" wouldn't cut it.
Esoteric reference.
a short story writer celebrating the complexity of life's most ordinary moments (Lydia Davis
A blog like any other.
Why not me? I am not going to make it in my profession.
" a short story writer celebrating the complexity of life's most ordinary moments (Lydia Davis)"
Up next. A short-story writer celebrates the complexities of spending 500,000.00
What exactly does "a blacksmith exploring the expressive qualities of metal" mean? Does he hammer the iron until it cries?
There is no spoon or sig.
It's not a grant if there are no strings attached, it's an entitlement.
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, teach teachers.
Those who can't teach teachers, administrate
Those who can't administrate are on the school board.
Just think how much iron $500,000 will buy!
You don't apply ?? I still don't know how the people are found for the grant ?
Bit of Article.....
Several hundred nominators assist the Foundation in identifying people who should be considered for a MacArthur Fellowship. Nominators, who are appointed each year and serve anonymously, are chosen from many fields of endeavor and challenged to identify people who demonstrate exceptional creativity and promise. A 12-member Selection Committee, whose members also serve anonymously, meets regularly throughout the year to review nominee files, narrow the list, and make final recommendations to the Foundation's Board of Directors. Typically, between 20 and 25 Fellows are selected each year.
They turn me down for a Nobel.
Then they turn me down for an Ig Nobel.
Now, the Genius Grant passes me over.
Why don't I get some recognition for my first-hand studies on the effects of sleep deprivation due to intense Slashdot reading? Dear Lord, WHY???
One of the winners, Erik Demaine, is 22 and is already a CS professor at MIT with a gigantic publication list. I find this both inspiring and profoundly demoralizing. He'd better not be getting laid more than me too.
Erik Demaine is also a recipient. He is the one who showed Tetris is an NP-complete problem.
It always kills me when people with interesting, fun jobs get money and awards. Like this and the Academy Awards. To qualify for these awards you first have to have a great job that you love. In that case do you really need more award.
Where's the award for the programmer who refactored 500K lines of hopeless spaghetti code left over by some idiot who hard no idea about structured programing?!
Interestingly, among the academics given the MacArthur grants, the Ivy league schools Harvard, MIT and Yale appear to be producing a number of these folks whether at the undergraduate level, the graduate level or the faculty level. Many of the recipients appear to have done at least some time at those institutions.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Private parties should give money to whoever they want w/o idjits like you saying "what about the children......what about Africa......what about the poor"
Give YOUR money to whoever the fuck you want to and stop telling other people how to spend theirs!
I have to argue that most people do not care in the slightest about art
Great. Make sure you delete all those MP3s on your hard drive. Wouldn't want that art to get to you or anything.
Unless of course it's that dreck the labels shovel to the masses. That is *NOT* art, so you can keep it.
While you're at it, what color is your car? If it's not white (cheap paint and reflects most solar heating) then it's not a paint chosen for function. Make sure you only buy white cars in the future. And no radios. Those waste power.
Same goes for your house. No paintings on the wall, all white walls and carpets. Efficiency, not aesthetics!
And, you're not one of those casemodding people are you? That's a waste of resources!
And ultimately, I think the point everyone who DIDN'T READ THE ARTICLE is missing is that this is a PRIVATE foundation giving these grants out. It's their money. If they want to give a grant for a blacksmith to study the expressiveness of metal, it's THEIR MONEY to give. If they wanted to give a grant to study the number of cats that walk by a given house in a year, same deal.
Yeah, show me where in the U.S. teachers are being overpaid. Only neo-con, big business puppets suggest that teachers are paid too much. Sure, the state of education in the US has resulted in underqualifed or just pain bad teachers in some areas, but generally only because those districs are so dangerous and hopeless that better teachers get discouraged and quit.
If we paid teachers well we'd attract more teachers that are truly talented, like we did just thirty five years ago, when teachers salaries where about the same as doctors and lawyers. Those teachers taught me, and they were fantastic. I feel sorry for today's students.
Look, you knew what teachers made when you chose the profession. (If you didn't, you have an even bigger problem, but we're going to assume that you did.) You chose to become a teacher and you chose to accept the salary. Why is it that teachers are about the only group in this society who are constantly whining about being underpaid, as though their pay is some sort of moral issue? You don't hear people in any other profession whine about their pay with the same sort of self-righteous indignation that we hear from teachers.
If you don't like the pay as a teacher, get out of the profession. Go find something for which the pay is higher. It's YOUR choice.
And another thing. Teacher unions have led the whining for years that we need lower student/teacher ratios (so the unions can have more jobs for their members). In my state, the current ratio is 15-1. When I was growing up in the '60s and '70s, it was typical to have 25 to 30 kids in each class, yet the quality of instruction continues to go DOWN, in spite of the lower student/teacher ratios. If teachers would do a better job of educating kids in classes of the old size, that WOULD leave more money to pay the decent teachers better.
My mother was a teacher for her entire career and my father started as a teacher, so I have respect for many of the people who choose to do it. But the truth is that the profession is LOADED with many, many incompetent boobs (being administrered by other incompetent boobs) who would rather whine than figure out how to do the job they're being paid to do.
I mean, the guy has a Tetris Award, for fucks sake--you know how that drives the ladies wild. Plus, his beard is pretty far onto the "eww, gross" side of the facial-hair spectrum; no woman can resist jowl-pubes.
Government support of the arts is an ancient practice.
Mozart, Schubert, Emily Bronte and John Keats died young and poor - who knows what more they could have done had they been given financial support?
Try going to a museum some time. Some of the greatest works of art ever done were conceived with the help of huge amounts of private funding. Michelangelo was no starving artist; many of his benefactors chose to lavish him with riches. Why should modern trusts do any less?
I'm an engineer and as pragmatic as the next guy, but given a world without art and beauty, just give me the cancer -- what's the point?
BTW, if this was sarcasm and I missed it, I'm very happy and apologize in advance.
10+ years ago, there was a short-lied show on Fox named "Flying Blind". The girlfriend of the min character had a roommate who just wandered around in a bathrobe, apparently unemployed, but always had money for stuff...
About halfway through the second season, the main characted asked, "Just what do you DO, anyway?"
Bathrobe guy: "I have a Genius Grant..."
Main Character: "You? But you're not a genius!"
Bathrobe guy: "I was the night I slept with the lady who gives out the grants..."
The problem with the Union is that they tend want pay based on seniority rather than how well you perform your job, so an ace teacher makes the same as the dead wood who has been teaching just as long.
Basically any Union exists for these reasons:
1) To get Better Pay and Benefits for its members
2) Better Working conditions, including getting reduced workloads
3) Better Job Security, including protecting the jobs of incompetant boobs.
I'm not anti-union, but most of the items on the list are not really in-sync with improving the quality of education. It just annoys me when the NEA runs ads bragging about how they care about the quality of our kids education. No... you are for the teachers, not the kids, let's be honest here. Just because the NEA or other union opposes certain reforms does not mean the reform is bad for education, if the union opposes it, it's most likely because they perceive it to be increasing the workload for teachers, or weakening their (the union's) power. Which is fine, that's what they are supposed to do. I just wish more people would see that for what it is, and not some noble act of fighting FOR their kids' best educational interest.
Paying the good teachers extra would be a good start, it would give other teachers incentive to perform better. But the unions are against it, basically because it's too arbitrary for them. Unions need clearly defined workplace rules and pay scales, when the administration can start making arbitrary decisions, the Union loses some of its power.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Probably more out of skew is 2 awards going to New Mexico residents (8.3% of the awards going to an area with 0.75% of the population).
Closer to skew is 4 awards (16.67%) going to California residents (10-11% of the population) and even more so if you count that as "West Coast" instead of just California.
When you deduct the two awards to international residents, that leaves 5 awards (20.83%) to be spread among the other 44 states. Those went to residents of Colorado, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.
Does that mean the remaining 39 states do not contain sufficient genius to warrant an award? Does that mean that we have an abnormally high concentration of genius in New York and Boston? While New York and Boston residents would probably like to think so, maybe put on big foam fingers and drunkenly shout "We're Number One", the rest of the nation would likely disagree.
Going through a portion of the historical listing of winners (last names starting with A-F), we find that out of 164 winners, 70 (42.7%) resided in the states of New York or Massachusets, and 30 (18.3% of total recipients, 62.5% of all New York state recipients) were in New York City. An additional 56 (34.1%) were in California, but those were more evenly spread out with only 11 (6.7% of total, 19.6% of state) being in Los Angeles.
So historically, based on that list, you have nearly 77% of all recipients being concentrated in 3 states and over 18% of them in just one city.
I'm sure the recipients of these grants are deserving, hard-working, geniuses in their own right. I just wonder if their geographic location is giving them an unfair advantage over geniuses in the rest of the U.S.
- Greg , though that still weights Cali's share of the awards above its share of the , just short of half of the recipients (11) are on the East Coast, 9 of them in New York or Massachusets (the other 2 are in Connecticut and Georgia).
Start a happiness pandemic
Technology makes life comfortable. Art makes it worth living.
Blinn, James F.
Demaine, Erik
Holland, John H.
Jurafsky, Daniel
Rus, Daniela
Shor, Peter
Sims, Karl
Stallman, Richard
Winfree, Erik
Wolfram, Stephen
The MacArthur Foundation site has the fellows sorted by field. These eleven were the ones they classed under "Computer Science".