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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.'"
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.
That's not entirely true : you can be employee of the month at McDonald's.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
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..."
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
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".