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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

#671

Post by bilbo0s »

Ray20 wrote: post #592
bilbo0s wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought HN User burnte was being hyperbolic in the assertions that post put forth. Then I read a few articles. sigh. 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. I'll add in way of explanation to non-US citizens that in the US, we've always had a fixation on certai…

>Still monumentally irrational behavior, but I just wanted to offer some explanation of the national psychology driving these kinds of non-sensical actions. I don't quite understand what is irrational and non-sensical in such behavior. It is quite expected, rational and natural.

Demanding other nations follow our laws is “rational”? And “natural”?

Uh.. yeah..

Agree to disagree.

In fact, I think our entire unhealthy fixation on minorities is irrational. But hey, obviously enough voters believe in this trump nonsense that it will continue unabated.

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

#672

Post by Fomite »

nxobject wrote: post #357
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.

Having been awarded a grant from DMS for an undergrad training program – the "broader impacts statement" was more obnoxious, and forced. There are other issues that affect our ability to do good science, and the "broadening participation" mandate was peanuts compared to the other indignities of grantwriting. Politely speaking, I'm not sure what crowd you're speaking for.

This. At most, all I've ever had to do is note that my institution is a land grant university that draws from a diverse pool of applicants, including those in rural areas and 1st generation students. It was maybe a paragraph.

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

#673

Post by Ray20 »

Smeevy wrote: post #661
Ray20 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You just said a lot of things that are easily disproven. >war being waged in an unknown place It's Ukraine. They've been an ally in a strategic location for decades. Just because you can't find it on a map doesn't mean I can't. >for an unknown reason They were invaded by Russia. >But funding the dictator Zelensky so that he can capture people who do not want to fight for him and send them to certain death in storm tr…

>They've been an ally in a strategic location for decades.

Ally in what? Typical gaslighting.

Before the invasion, no one could find Ukraine on a map and no one considered it an ally (if they even knew it existed). To such extent that many Ukrainians in the USA before 2014, when introducing themselves, often said they were from Russia - just to avoid having to explain what is Ukraine.

>They were invaded by Russia.

Yes. But what is the war being fought for? What is the end game? Because without an answer to this question, any support for Ukraine looks like warmongering. And for some reason, no one answers it, making the whole situation look like the war is being waged to busificate and kill all Ukrainian men (except for the privileged relatives of officials who successfully left the country despite the ban).

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

#674

Post by Fomite »

tantalor wrote: post #54
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.

Less public funding -> less competition for private sector R&D, e.g. big pharma

Big pharma has thrived by letting public sector R&D do basic discovery that's high risk, and then pick up the successful projects as part of public-private commercialization programs.

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

#675

Post by mullingitover »

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…

“These geese which lay golden eggs are costing a lot of taxpayer dollars, we’re going to save a lot of money on corn when we butcher them.”

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

#676

Post by zelphirkalt »

cmontella wrote: post #133
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…

Yes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car companies, which then went on to create a market for driverless cars, and now America is a leader in the industry. And it needed to happened because the state of American robotics was sad in 2004; the very first challenge was a disaster when all the cars ran…

America the leader in the driverless car industry? Not entirely sure it is still true. At least might not be true much longer. China is already building EVs en mass and some of them have, according to some people I met at least, better self-driving capability.

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

#677

Post by magila »

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.

My experience is that discrimination in hiring is never openly advocated for obvious reasons. Instead you get what could be called "stochastic discrimination" where there is pressure to "increase diversity" without elaboration on how that should be achieved in the face of a not so diverse pool of qualified candidates.

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

#679

Post by Ray20 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #662
Ray20 wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Would you have believed a few months ago that the US government would be trying to strong-arm foreign nations who are nominally allies into compliance with its policy preferences? What do you mean? Hasn't the USA pretty much ALWAYS done this? >The whole hysteria about illegal immigrants is based on the specious claim that one party is importing them wholesale and somehow converting them into voters to steal election…

The USA has not always done this. It has historically thrown its weight around (see any history book) but has historically maintained a far greater emphasis on diplomacy and international comity rather than the outright bullying we see now. You will note that I specifically referred to the US' behavior toward nominal allies. If you disagree, please provide some examples. > millions of illegal immigrants who are commi…

>historically maintained a far greater emphasis on diplomacy and international comity rather than the outright bullying we see now.

What are you even talking about?

The US military budget is bigger than the next nine countries’ military budgets combined. It's always been outright bullying.

Or do you seriously think that such a budget was just for a beauty?

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

#680

Post by Fomite »

It's hard to understate what a drain this is on scientific productivity beyond the direct impact of the budget cuts. It's also just a tremendous distraction - trying to figure out what the various vaguely worded statements mean, wondering if your program is next even if you've escaped for the moment, worrying about how to keep your people employed - especially since the number of other places that could take them are shrinking.

There's an incredible amount of cognitive burden just on doing science right now, and it's very difficult to feel like writing new proposals, working on long term projects, etc. is worthwhile.

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