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'YouCut' Targets National Science Foundation Budget
jamie writes "As some of you may have heard, the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination. So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut's first target — yes, its first target — was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation."
Agreed. That and cut congressional perks too.
-- Alastair
Rocket technology
Early computers
Internet
Countless advances made by publicly funded scientists
Of course you could argue that EVENTUALLY, all these would have been done by private interests. I don't believe that is true, but even if it is... the question is becomes how long would it have taken and how closely would it be controlled?
Great Intellect...
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
From http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
From time to time, I act as a grant reviewer and panelist for the NSF. I can quite frankly attest that the NSF is anything but bloated. The number of excellent and virtuous projects that do not get funded is always a crying shame. Of course, some proposals are utter rubbish. However, far fewer projects get funded than are deserving of funding. Not only that, the NSF provide us with a small *per deium*, from which we have to pay our own hotel, meals, transportation and everything else, apart from travel costs. One is lucky to break even, when working for the NSF. In addition, it is hard work! Our lunch break is usually just long enough to run across the road to a food court and then we eat as we work. In the evenings, there are summaries to write. I only do it because I believe that it makes the world a better place. However, if this is what the Republicans are intending, there will be no need for more business bailouts, as they will just outsource the whole country to multinationals (who usually don't pay tax, due to off-shore 'arrangements'). Thus, this is a strategy only Osama bin Laden could rationally endorse.
Ummm, I hate to break it to you, but it WASN'T in the 90s that the U.S. debt soared. Since WWII, there are have been precisely two periods where the ratio of U.S debt to GDP rose in a sustained way. The first was under Reagan/Bush, when under Reagan especially, the (democratic) congress consistently approved a budget that was lower than what the president recommended. The second was under Bush Jr./Obama. Regarding the latter, Obama isn't spending at any greater rate than Bush Jr. did, but at least he has the excuse that deficit spending is the only thing that has kept the economy from going into a full blown depression.
The bottom line however, isn't that this is the end of the world, the U.S. just needs to ensure that the deficit spending is being spent on things that will improve the economy in the long-term. However, tax cuts are absolutely the worst way to improve the GDP in the long-term. It would be better to spend the money on replacing aging infrastructure and building new infrastructure, or other things that have a direct and unambiguous effect on the economy.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
DARPA's research predates Metcalf's Law by more than a decade. As a leader in network research Metcalf must have been famliar with ARPANet. It is quite likely that work influenced Metcalf's perception of networking. Regardless, Metcalf's law doesn't say anything about network reliability.
Prior to DARPA the prevailing theory was that circuit-switched networks were the way to go. The entire phone system was built on circuit-switched networks. There is no reason to think a packet-switched network would have suddenly become popular without a little prodding by the government.
Long after DARPA's research, commercial entities such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe had their own ideas about how computer networks should function. If a commercial entity had invented the Internet it would have functioned like the AOL of 1993 where all content has to be approved by a single corporation. That corporation would collect a tax on all transactions. It would kick out anyone it did not agree with. It would be far, far different than the Internet we have today and it would have undoubtedly happened much later.
Do you really want your tax dollars going toward research for Soccer (Football everywhere else in the world) and video game sounds?
As one might expect, the characterization you allude to from the YouCut project page isn't quite accurate. First off, here's links to actual research info on the so-called "soccer research" (actually research into a means of quantifying individual contributions to team performance) and the sound rendering for physically based simulation project. Here's some snippets from a news article regarding the projects:
But the researchers behind these projects say Smith has misrepresented their work and the amount of money spent on the projects. ... ... ...
"This was not $750,000 given by NSF for us to develop an algorithm to look at the performance of soccer players," Northwestern University engineering professor Luis Amaral told LiveScience. Amaral, who was the lead investigator on the soccer study cited by Smith, called the congressman's portrayal of his work "not only incorrect, but misleading."
"This was $750,000 that was given to a larger team of researchers to study a very broad range of questions related to creating provocative, efficient teams of researchers who innovate," Amaral said.
Amaral's soccer study, published in June in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, was supported by two NSF grants. The first was a $450,000 award to develop efficient methods to evaluate the productivity of researchers and research institutions. The second was a $300,000 grant to study how teams collaborate. By quantifying researchers' contributions to their fields, Amaral and his colleagues hope to help funding agencies like the NSF allocate money more effectively.
How do those grants translate to studying soccer? According to Amaral, an M.D./Ph.D. student was rotating through Amaral's lab to learn the computer software Amaral and his colleagues use to model complex systems such as to explore how creativity and innovation arise from networks of researchers. The researchers decided to train the young scientist using easily available data from the World Cup. Soccer was particularly appealing, because team performance is difficult to rank using regular statistical methods, Amaral said.
Smith's second target, research to model the sound of breaking objects, is supported by an ongoing $1.2 million grant given to three researchers over four years. The goal of the research is to create advanced simulation technology for virtual environments, Cornell's James told LiveScience.
"Just think of the impact of computer-graphics rendering, and now imagine the combined potential for realistic computer-sound rendering," he said, citing possible uses of realistic simulations for engineering cars, aircraft and even spacecraft. The results may also be useful in designing rehabilitation and training simulations like those used in the military. Even robots could become better at navigating their environments with higher-level sound processing, James said.