Funding
drorzel | September 28, 2008There's an interesting exchange over at the Reality-Based Community around the topic of "earmarks" for science, like the grizzly bear DNA study McCain keeps mocking. Michael O'Hare argues that science should not be funded by earmarks:
Almost any piece of scientific research, especially in biology, that isn't called "Cure cancer!" is liable to the kind of ignorant ridicule lobbed at these. Sure, some research is deeply silly and some is not worth doing. But that non-specialists can make fun of something from its title means nothing, and these japes indicate only the smug ignorance of the…
drorzel | September 19, 2008The Pontiff beat me to it, but my Ph.D. alma mater has scored a $12.5 million grant from the NSF to fund the Joint Quantum Institute as a Physics Frontier Center for the development of quantum technology:
The Physics Frontier Center (PFC) award, effective September 1, will fund 17 graduate students, seven postdoctoral scientists and seven undergraduates as well as an extensive and highly cross-disciplinary research program under the general title Processing Quantum Coherence. Ultimately the work may lead to development of a computer that exploits the strange phenomena of quantum mechanics…
drorzel | September 18, 2008There's an article in yesterday's Inside Higher Ed about the supply of scientists and engineers, arguing that there is not, in fact, a shortage:
Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, looked at what he called five "mysteries" of the STEM work force issue. For example, why do employers claim a shortage of qualified STEM graduates while prospects for Ph.D.s remain "poor"? Why do retention and completion rates for STEM fields remain low compared with students' aspirations? Why is there a "serious" funding crisis at the National Institutes of Health after its…
drorzel | March 1, 2008As mentioned previously, I was invited to discuss physics and politics at one of the local fraternities earlier this week. Oddly, given the primacy of Greek organizations on campus, this is only the fourth time I've set foot inside a fraternity or sorority house in seven years. The previous occasions were times when I was doing housing inspections for the committee that handles those matters.
They've cleaned up the house since the other time I was there-- they used to be Φ Γ Δ, years ago, and then there was a brief interregnum when they were officially "Alpha Beta" (referred to as "oh, those…
drorzel | February 26, 2008The local fraternities and sororities hold occasional dinners/ discussions with faculty, to demonstrate that they're engaged with the intellectual life of the college. One of my students invited me to dinner at the Change in Kinetic Energy fraternity tomorrow night, and I agreed to do a discussion of physics and politics.
That's a vague topic, because I didn't have anything really definite in mind for it, other than that it seems better suited to a dinner and discussion than any of my regular presentations, which tend to be PowerPoint lectures. That doesn't really seem appropriate, so I…
drorzel | February 20, 2008Regular commenter Johan Larson writes with a suggested blog topic:
The Human Genome Project (yes, you have to pronounce those capitals) cost about $3 billion. If $3 billion were yours to spend on scientific research, how would you spend the money?
That's a great question, and a great topic for a Dorky Poll. I'll narrow my response a little, because if I had to choose from all areas of science, it's a no-brainer to throw all the money at public health-- eradication of malaria, cures for major diseases, etc. For the sake of variety, let's restrict it to your own particular subfield, so, for…
drorzel | November 21, 2007I generally like Gregg Easterbrook's writing about football (though he's kind of gone off the deep end regarding the Patriots this year), but everything else he turns his hand to is a disaster. In particular, he tends to pad his columns out with references to science and technology issues. I'm not quite sure what the point of these is supposed to be, other than to demonstrate that he, Gregg Easterbrook, is so much smarter than the average football fan that he knows, like, rocket science and stuff. The problem with that is that his knowledge of rocket science seems to owe more to Star Trek…
drorzel | August 15, 2007Michael Nielsen, who's so smart it's like he's posting from tomorrow, offers a couple of provocative questions about the perception of a crisis in funding for basic science:
First, how much funding is enough for fundamental research? What criterion should be used to decide how much money is the right amount to spend on fundamental research?
Second, the human race spent a lot lot more on fundamental research in the second half of the twentieth century than it did in the first. It's hard to get a good handle on exactly how much, in part because it depends on what you mean by fundamental…
drorzel | February 9, 2007The big story in high-energy physics this week is the release of a report on the projected cost of the International (very nearly) Linear Collider (ILC), which comes out to $6.7 billion-with-a-b (not including labor). There's a story in the Times this morning, and an expert view on Cosmic Variance, and... well, if you read physics blogs, you've seen it mentioned. They'd revoke my blogging license if I failed to say anything about it.
Maybe I'm just cranky at the end of a long week, but I have a hard time getting all that excited about this. For one thing, it's not my area of physics. More…
drorzel | January 9, 2007A lot of people have commented on this New York Times article on science budgets, mostly echoing the author's lament about the negative effects of operating at 2006 funding levels. I really don't have much to add to that, but it's worth reminding people where the blame for this belongs:
Last year, Congress passed just 2 of 11 spending bills -- for the military and domestic security -- and froze all other federal spending at 2006 levels. Factoring in inflation, the budgets translate into reductions of about 3 percent to 4 percent for most fields of science and engineering.
Congressional…
drorzel | October 11, 2006Back in late July, I got email from a writer for Physics World magazine (which is sort of the UK equivalent of Physics Today), asking my opinion on a few questions relating to particle physics funding. The basis for asking me (as opposed to, you know, a particle physicist) was presumably a post from April in which I ranted a bit about the justification of Big Science projects.
The article is now out, but not available on-line, so I haven't read it. I spent a fair amount of time typing up my response, though, so I'm going to recycle it into a blog post, because I can do that.
The original…
drorzel | May 22, 2006A scientific conference like DAMOP almost always includes a conference banquet (to which people may or may not bring dates), usually the last night of the meeting, where everybody gets together to eat massive quantities of catered food and drink massive amounts of wine supplied by the conference. The quality of these ranges from your standard rubber chicken sort of fare to the multi-course gourmet meal (with a different bottle of wine for each course) provided at a conference I attended in Bordeaux.
DAMOP does all right in the food department, though you're not going to get real gourmet fare…
drorzel | April 27, 2006The big physics story of the day is bound to be this new report on American particle physics:
The United States should be prepared to spend up to half a billion dollars in the next five years to ensure that a giant particle accelerator now being designed by a worldwide consortium of scientists can be built on American soil, the panel said. If that does not happen, particle physics, the quest for the fundamental forces and constituents of nature, will wither in this country, it said.
You might assume that, as a physicist, I'm all in favor of this-- half a billion is a lot of money, after all…
drorzel | April 24, 2006I've found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I've never met. I still don't really feel qualified to offer useful advice-- I haven't even come up for tenure yet, after all. I might have something useful to say next year at this time-- that, or you'll know not to listen to anything I have to say.
Anyway, since I'm thinking about this, and since I'm otherwise afflicted with motivation-sapping medical crud, I'm…
drorzel | January 14, 2006The big news in physics yesterday was the announcement that a private donation has been made to support experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. This is the accelerator that's slamming gold nuclei into each other to create a quark-gluon plasma, along with a million dippy stories about how it might make a black hole that will eat the whole New York metro area. This isn't my field (not by a long shot), but I think this is terrifically exciting work, not least because the observations that they've made confound existing theories-- the "plasma" acts more like a liquid…