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NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

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Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#471

Post by patagurbon »

streptomycin wrote: post #376
frob wrote: post #11

The NSF funded my graduate research. It feels like someone is going through my past and burning all of the ladders that helped me grow and succeed.

I could never get beyond "honorable mention" for the NSF GRFP. I found the diversity part of it most difficult to write. Like honestly my research had nothing to do with diversity and I'm not an underrepresented minority myself. But that was a major part of how the application was scored, so you had to come up with some bullshit and hope for the best. And that was like 15 years ago, I hear things have only gotten mor…

I would counter your anecdata with the 5 friends I have, all of whom are whiter than printer paper and 3 of whom are deeply conservative, who received GRFP. Your failure to get GRFP had nothing to do with the diversity statement.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#472

Post by davrosthedalek »

burntwater wrote: post #364
fallingknife wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad is a university researcher. During the Biden administration he was forced to add completely unscientific DEI language to his grants if he wanted to get them funded. You just don't know about it because the media you watch doesn't report on that because they support it. So yeah, the whole Harvard thing is more of the same.

Who forced this? Was it actually the Biden administration, or was it university policies?

Normally not the University. NSF has a "Broader Impact" aspect of the grant applications (for as long as I can remember), and the DOE started to require a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan during the Biden administration. Grant reviewers (typically people from the research community) are asked to take these into account for the review of the proposals.

I suspect the father mentioned above means the latter.

I do not know, but could imagine it's possible, that HBCUs might have their own requirements. But normally, universities do not regulate the proposal writing except for financial aspects (salary windows, IDC+fringe rates etc)

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#473

Post by patagurbon »

josephcsible wrote: post #222
chairhairair wrote: post #43

The NSF budget is ~$10billion. That's about half of NASA's, 1.2% of the DoD's, 0.5% of the discretionary budget ($1.7 trillion). Why is this the focus of the admin? Science is one of the few things the US is doing well.

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. More seriously, the NSF isn't the focus of the admin. They're going through every federal agency making cuts, not singling out this one in particular.

Unlike a lot of government spending research spending provably increases revenues by more than expenditures.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#474

Post by anigbrowl »

wang_li wrote: post #208
tachim wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are implying a few things here; that it is the responsibility of others to fund your success and that there were not, or will not be, alternative means of such funding. Yes, the government funds research, the benefit of which accrues to all of society. There is no credible alternative to government funding for public research; the scales are not the same. Private funding of basic research (internal R&D budgets)…

When you speak in abstracts and generic terms about the value of government funding research, you are saying nothing meaningful in terms of knowing whether the government should spend more or less on research. If the OP's specific research was into The Changing Mating Habits of the Delta Smelt Due to Habitat Destruction, then probably it was money that could far better spent paying tuition for, say, medical students…

Delta Smelt

I did not stop reading right there, but I may as well have. Invoking this particular area of research has become a popular conservative trope, because casual news readers do not get the point of studying a tiny fish in general or its love life in particular, even though it's a useful indicator species for the overall health of the riparian ecosystem.

You seem you like an intelligent person. Why are you leaning on tropes that exploit and glorify ignorance and anti-intellectualism?

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#475

Post by generic92034 »

sheepscreek wrote: post #453
CamperBob2 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to describe what's happening here You can describe it as a deliberate and very successful attack by America's enemies, because that's what it is.

What’s in it for people like the current Trade and Treasury Secretaries, heck even the V.P? In their previous lives, they seemed levelheaded - yet here we are. Is it just pure selfishness, “if I don’t do it, someone else will” mentality?

There never was any shortage of opportunists.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#476

Post by pelagicAustral »

beej71 wrote: post #298
762236 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DEI in practice is illegal (we don't get to make decisions based on race, or other protected categories of a person's identity). I get trained on this once a year at work. What we do instead is improve the probability that underrepresented people can enter the hiring pipeline, e.g., by investing in schools.

Every DEI program I've ever been involved in has been 100% about selecting people _purely_ on merit. Not race, not gender, not whether or not they're trans. The DEI trainings are about completely ignoring those factors when hiring. I'm curious what they call your trainings on the matter.

IF they are so into selecting people based on merit, why do they want to know who/what am I having sex with, what do I think I am, what race I am, did my parents went to college, etc? Have you tried to apply for a job online in the last 10 years?

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#477

Post by pelagicAustral »

hackyhacky wrote: post #205
762236 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DEI in practice is illegal (we don't get to make decisions based on race, or other protected categories of a person's identity). I get trained on this once a year at work. What we do instead is improve the probability that underrepresented people can enter the hiring pipeline, e.g., by investing in schools.

> DEI in practice is illegal No, it isn't, and this assumption is based on a poor understanding of what DEI is. The right paints DEI as a directive to hire less-qualified people based on their race. In reality, DEI just ensures that everyone gets a fair chance regardless of their race.

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Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#478

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

moralestapia wrote: post #405
zhivota wrote: post #295

I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant. The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we…

[flagged]

You’re getting downvoted because of your childlike naïveté and/or willful ignorance. There is no hidden “very good reason” lurking somewhere. They are slashing and burning the federal government.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#479

Post by [deleted] »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #418
freejazz wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's Trump's socialized medicine plan? That's by far the most populist desire of populist America. It's very easy to get caught up in the name of things and not look at it substantively, which is what you seem to be attacking the other poster for. Trump might have a populist appeal, but it doesn't make him a populist. The weight of Trump's actions and promises lie in all this deportation and culture war nonsense,…

As I mentioned: >People on the left don't recognize it [populism] because they don't recognize the tools that right wing people use to stimulate the working class. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole because it takes years to escape the ideological camp you grew into. But suffice to say, both sides ultimately want the same things and disagree on the route to take to that destination (while telling their base tha…

[deleted]

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#480

Post by godshatter »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #134
Workaccount2 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1] People on the left are going to be caught totally flat-footed if they don't pull their head out of their bubble. Trump is a populist president. He was elected by working class individuals and so far he has shown every intent of following through for them. People on the left don't recognize it because they don't recognize the tools that righ…

>Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1] Great, so he won't need to cut the NSF then?

According to the national debt clock, we're at around 36.8T in debt. I don't know if that's his motivation or not, but we're not starting all this from a balanced budget.
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