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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

#711

Post by transcriptase »

hobs wrote: post #627
jasonfarnon wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this type of research really at risk? I thought the feds were after research with an ideological bent. Rather than speculate about how the feds might see certain research as ideological, can we have some concrete examples of the type of research projects that have been discontinued?

Do you know that sealioning on the 1000th ridiculously bad cut is just in bad faith right? At this point we don't actually need to spend time proving how the Trump administration is doing a wrong thing actually, it can be inferred from the other EVERY SINGLE TIME.

So you’re saying being the NPC who endlessly repeats “Orange man bad!” is not only the morally responsible thing to do, but the logical thing as well.

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

#712

Post by kens »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #332
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…

Hard to declare that the earth is only 6000 years old with all those science hippies in the way. Gotta set priorities.

A bit over 6000 years old: the specific date that Ussher determined for creation is October 23, 4004 BC, an amusing level of precision.

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

#713

Post by hdivider »

alabastervlog wrote: post #60
duxup wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a bribe machine / patronage machine, you gotta grease the wheels across a whole range of people. And the odds they have some actual expertise? I'm not holding my breath, there's no indication that domain knowledge or such is relevant to Trump team members jobs... quite the opposite.

A whole bunch of us clearly didn't pay attention during history class when they covered the US government in the back half of the 19th century. (Really, I could have stopped that sentence after "history class", or maybe even after "attention")

After "attention", definitely. :) In broad strokes, the US excels in looking to the future, but compared to e.g. Europe, it's harder for folks to get interested in history.

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

#714

Post by davrosthedalek »

dekhn wrote: post #571
davrosthedalek wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Regarding your last sentence- they also ensure that the grant proposals don't propose to do anything illegal, or that the university is not resourced to carry out.

To a degree, yes. But the grant management personnel are typically not researchers, so it's very hard for them to fully vet the main text of the proposal.

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

#715

Post by ericpauley »

jimmar wrote: post #78

In 2023, the NSF said it gave 9,400 research awards at an average of $239,700 each [1]. That's $2.25 billion. That year, the NSF has a budget of $10.5 billion [2]. Can somebody with more insight into the NSF explain where the NSF money goes? My PhD was largely funded through government grants, though not the NSF. To put it mildly, our government contacts were not the most competent people and were frequently roadbloc…

$239,700 is annualized. Most awards are 3 years long. The total amount awarded is average annualized times average duration.

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

#716

Post by throwawaymaths »

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…

thats not entirely accurate. a great conterexample was the mark XIV torpedo during world war two. it was faulty and the workers at the bureau of navy ordinance couldnt get their heads out of their asses to fix the problem. meanwhile sailors were dying. admirals and captains kept trying to fix the problem until finally one admiral (king iirc) got so pissed off he shoved the changes through and reformed the bureau of ordinance.

https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Admin-Hist/USN-Admin/US...

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

#717

Post by throwup238 »

elevation wrote: post #709
ethbr1 wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’ve been doing nothing for decades. Here's a list of the 250+ pieces of nothing that the 118th Congress passed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_118th_Un... If you're going to reach for hyperbole, at least make it defensible.

[flagged]

> Instead, they consistently cede their legislative authority to bureaucrats by creating office after office of unelected regulators who generate reams of rules with the power of law but with no democratic oversight.

The irony of saying that in a thread about the NSF getting gutted is palpable.

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

#718

Post by disqard »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #691
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 feel this way as well. They're killing or gutting so many programs that help to develop the next generation. Not just NSF and NIH, but also Americorps, Job Corps, educational exchange programs like the Fullbright. I just saw they were making a 50% cut to the peace corps. It feels like they want to destroy everything that's optimistic and forward-thinking.

Back when he won his first term, the local college newspaper's post-election edition had this headline (and subhead):

---

Hate Wins.

The Only Way Is Forward.

---

It was (and continues to be) a surprisingly pithy summary of the entire MAGA movement (and what we can do about it).

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

#719

Post by int_19h »

donnachangstein wrote: post #552
schmidtleonard wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 va…

This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government. I hear the Juicero had an outstanding power supply. For all the waste, some folks probably learned a lot about power electronics. It seems odd to me that of all places, a forum run by a VC outfit, thinks a government jobs program to churn STEM grads with nonsense projects is the way to go.

Perhaps consider why it is that even here, of all places, so many people see this kind of bullshit for what it is?
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