11–20 of 45 posts
Keep perspective: 3% of the budget was used for risk analysis. The conclusion of that research was that it's not worth spending the remaining 97%.
$1.3b... wow. I hate to say it but: this is what you get with Goverment in charge of research.
Please do not lower yourself to blanket statements like this. It's true, government projects sometimes become massive boondoggles like this (or say, the JSF) but just as often the benefits are enormous.
$1.3b... wow. I hate to say it but: this is what you get with Goverment in charge of research.
No no wrong wrong please stop applying blanket statements to things like this. DARPA and NASA alone have benefitted humanity and science in ways hard to grasp - from the Internet to vaccines to the microwave frackin' oven. Please do not lower yourself to blanket statements like this. It's true, government projects sometimes become massive boondoggles like this (or say, the JSF) but just as often the benefits are enor…
http://acd.od.nih.gov/reports/NCS_WG_FINAL_REPORT.pdf
edit: this page suggests about 60% of the funding was spent: https://www.nationalchildrensstudy.gov/about/funding/Pages/i...
Wow, $1.3 billion is a huge amount for a single study. For comparison, the Framingham Heart Study, going on 65 years, has an annual budget of about $10 million: (Concerns that the 2013 sequester would cut about $4 million, about 40% of its budget here: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/blog/2013/10/09/framing... ) Any good accounts of how the $1.3B was spent?
"There are 112 papers resulting from NCS efforts so far, primarily papers about methodological design issues, but also including preliminary results related to environmental exposures."
$1.3b to track 100k kids for 7 years. That's about $2k/child/year, which sounds insanely expensive. How can a study cost that much? You could buy each participant an iPad _every_ year and given them $100/month for filling out surveys, or you could hire 1 researcher for every 25 kids, which sounds grossly inefficient -- and you'd still be under $1.3b for 7 years.
$1.3b to track 100k kids for 7 years. That's about $2k/child/year, which sounds insanely expensive. How can a study cost that much? You could buy each participant an iPad _every_ year and given them $100/month for filling out surveys, or you could hire 1 researcher for every 25 kids, which sounds grossly inefficient -- and you'd still be under $1.3b for 7 years.
The NCS was planned and known to be a massive undertaking, to try to ask some very serious questions about health that are hard to get out without long-term cohort studies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No no wrong wrong please stop applying blanket statements to things like this. DARPA and NASA alone have benefitted humanity and science in ways hard to grasp - from the Internet to vaccines to the microwave frackin' oven. Please do not lower yourself to blanket statements like this. It's true, government projects sometimes become massive boondoggles like this (or say, the JSF) but just as often the benefits are enor…
are you kidding me? NASA is your idea of a successful lean government project? Elon Musk is doing what NASA couldn't with a tiny fraction of their budget.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No no wrong wrong please stop applying blanket statements to things like this. DARPA and NASA alone have benefitted humanity and science in ways hard to grasp - from the Internet to vaccines to the microwave frackin' oven. Please do not lower yourself to blanket statements like this. It's true, government projects sometimes become massive boondoggles like this (or say, the JSF) but just as often the benefits are enor…
are you kidding me? NASA is your idea of a successful lean government project? Elon Musk is doing what NASA couldn't with a tiny fraction of their budget.
Your argument presupposes SpaceX hasn't benefited from the previous work done before. Which they have, immensely. Stop reducing complex systems into simple certainties. It's insulting to the entire community of scientists that have been dedicated to rocket and space research over the past 70 years.
After reading the very concise and accessible report on the state of the study, I got the impression that the $1.3 billion had been allocated by Congress but that little or none of it had been spent, basically because the study design never got close enough to being finalized and approved for any large-scale data acquisition to even take place. Unless I'm quite mistaken, the $1.3 billion has been parked on the NIH's…
Edit: I'm not anymore. http://www.nationalchildrensstudy.gov/about/funding/Pages/in... appears to be decent for at least the recent past.