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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

#541

Post by jorblumesea »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #179
ddahlen wrote: post #38

I have been in and out of the academic world my entire career. I have worked as a programmer/engineer for two universities and a national lab, and worked at a startup founded by some professors. There is huge uncertainty with the people whom I have worked with, nobody seems to be sure what is going to happen, but it feels like it wont be good. Hiring freezes, international graduate students receiving emails to self d…

The irony is that in their supposed effort to "Make America Great Again" they're going to end up accelerating China's rise. We may have decided that basic research is no longer something we want to do, but China's going to continue to forge ahead and leave us in the dust. All thanks to people who have no understanding of how anything works, but only want to tear things down that they don't understand.

tbh I don't know if many senior leaders in the admin that actually think these policies are going to make anything better. It just seems like a mass looting project. Lutnick, for example, is definitely a wall street insider and is under no illusions that any of these policies benefit the nation.

If you look at the agenda it's all cultural wars stuff (smoke screens) and wealth transfer to the rich.

They understand this, most educated people understand this, it's just his base that is in the dark.

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

#542

Post by counters »

donnachangstein wrote: post #540
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…

> I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total. Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. There is no government program in existence that costs $10k total, you are almost assuredly ignoring overhead and all other costs. It's like calling a contractor to repair something, then crying foul when he charges $350 because you found the part on Amazon for $15. But let's assume it was $10k. >…

> I won't doubt it was fun and educational but I can't in all honesty pretend that is a good value for the taxpayers.

The students who work on these types of projects go on to create technology, companies, and jobs. The skills and experience they learn is a direct injection into our innovation economy.

And of course that's not even to mention that a lot of the things they work on will never get vetted in private industry, so we'll never even know if there is value hidden in the weeds.

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

#543

Post by schmidtleonard »

donnachangstein wrote: post #540
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…

> I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total. Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. There is no government program in existence that costs $10k total, you are almost assuredly ignoring overhead and all other costs. It's like calling a contractor to repair something, then crying foul when he charges $350 because you found the part on Amazon for $15. But let's assume it was $10k. >…

Money "wasted" by the NSF is far better spent than money wasted in, say, the Google Graveyard or any other monument to private malinvestment. This is because science has a value capture problem by design, making it systematically uninvestable by the private market, making opportunities plentiful -- and making it an archetypal example of a place where government investment has a role to play, because we can capture value as a country that is impossible to capture as a company.

The real scandal is that we don't do more of it: our global competitors do not share the same contempt for science that is increasingly infecting the USA, and slowing our jog as they pass us is the worst strategy I can possibly imagine.

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

#544

Post by oldprogrammer2 »

faster wrote: post #361
oldprogrammer2 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has trade sanctions with those countries.

The US has trade sanctions on Iran too, and Iran is on the tariff list. I don't think that's it. Some transparency would be helpful.

Iran is on the tariffs list because of Trump's maximum pressure policy (an official National Security Memorandum) against Iran. This is coupled with Trump's willingness to get Russia to cooperate in the ceasefire.

I'm not claiming his administration's logic is 100% sound, only that there is an explanation that doesn't assume the rather farfetched theory that Trump is an agent for Russia.

I'm not particularly well-versed in this area, but searching for the topic on Google easily found this information on sites such as Wikipedia, WSJ, Newsweek, and whitehouse.gov.

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

#545

Post by donnachangstein »

beachy wrote: post #515
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…

It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on. Case in point the Vietnam war, which cost thousands of lives because decisions were based on statistics from the field which had been heavily manipulated as they percolated upwards. Right now, just a…

[flagged]

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

#546

Post by inverted_flag »

skyyler wrote: post #469
inverted_flag wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. There are absolutely not going to be free and fair elections 4 years from now. People really need to start preparing for this reality.

If I'm a working class person without much in the way of assets, what does preparing even mean here?

Can't say it here without getting flagged.

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

#547

Post by HWR_14 »

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #442

"According to sources who requested anonymity for fear of retribution..." This is equally worrying. Sounds like people living in a dictatorship reporting to a foreign news channel. Not quite there, yet.

It's pretty boilerplate. The standard for anonymous sources is to explain why you granted the source anonymity in about that many words. So frequently it's "because of fear of retribution" or "to speak openly about non-public X".

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

#548

Post by jorblumesea »

jhp123 wrote: post #333
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.

I'm not the first one to see parallels to the Cultural Revolution. Policies like purging the intelligentsia and sending educated urban people to go work in the fields weren't motivated by any thought out plan, but by an irrational sense of resentment against "elites" and a desire for "purity".

There are other parallels, such as using young indoctrinated students being used as political weapons. DOGE for example.

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

#549

Post by theshackleford »

donnachangstein wrote: post #545
beachy wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on. Case in point the Vietnam war, which cost thousands of lives because decisions were based on statistics from the field which had been heavily manipulated as they percolated upwards. Right now, just a…

[flagged]

> In case it wasn't completely clear: stop sending the Chinese money

This is the same thing I’m working to sell people on, only in regards to the US. Working hard to get them to dump US software products and services.

Fingers crossed!

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

#550

Post by keeda »

damnitbuilds wrote: post #85
wrl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forcing the inclusion of woke, DEI language in totally unrelated grants, even in areas such as maths What? Can you show any examples of this?

We have two crazy policies: - Forcing this irrelevant nonsense into maths grant applications. - Cancelling the grant applications because they contain this nonsense. And science is the loser. . One example: This grant was for $500,000: " Elliptic and Parabolic Partial Differential Equations ABSTRACT Partial differential equations (PDE) are mathematical tools that are used to model natural phenomena like electromagnet…

Given the current administration is slashing so many programs it's clear there is a lot of language in many grants that has "DEI" or DEI-adjacent language. What is not clear is:

1) This is "forced" due to any government policy.

2) Any such policies could be attributed only to the Biden administration, or even any single administration.

I was curious so I stalked the PI in the linked grant, who happens to be female. Here is a relevant link, 3rd or so on Google: https://www.montana.edu/news/22806/montana-state-mathematics...

Burroughs said Davey stands out not just for her mathematical prowess but also for her commitment to students in all levels of study. Davey is co-director of the department’s Directed Reading Program, which pairs undergraduate students with graduate student mentors to read and discuss books on mutual subjects of interest over the course of a semester.

“It’s a way for us to connect graduate student mentors with undergraduates, who then see what math can look like outside the classroom,” Davey said.

...

A portion of the funding from the CAREER grant will enable Davey to extend her support to young mathematicians across the country. She will organize and conduct a summer workshop in Bozeman open to 40 upper-level graduate students and post-doctoral researchers from around the nation, particularly those from underrepresented groups. Cherry noted the outreach effort coincides with the college’s long-term goal of better serving underrepresented communities in the state.

So:

1. From that it does seem she is personally invested in making her subject more approachable.

2. The college itself has a goal of encouraging such outreach.

3. In case you think the university itself was influenced by the government policies, here's a "DEI" program from its website that started in 2016: https://www.montana.edu/provost/d_i.html -- if you browse around the site there are even more programs going farther back.

Additionally, I'm personally aware of "DEI" policies in universities going back more than two decades now, long before the term "DEI" was even coined.

Seems highly likely that the language in the grant was more due to the researcher's personal preferences and the institution's policies than anything any government policies.

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