{"id":1361,"date":"2007-04-26T10:14:23","date_gmt":"2007-04-26T10:14:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/04\/26\/show-me-the-money\/"},"modified":"2007-04-26T10:14:23","modified_gmt":"2007-04-26T10:14:23","slug":"show-me-the-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/04\/26\/show-me-the-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Show Me the Money"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><cite>Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> <a href=\"http:\/\/insidehighered.com\/news\/2007\/04\/26\/qt\">notes in passing<\/a> a new <a href=\"http:\/\/commerce.senate.gov\/public\/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&#038;PressRelease_id=248794&#038;Month=4&#038;Year=2007\">bill from the Senate<\/a> supporting scientific research. There&#8217;s a lot of bafflegab there, but if you scroll to the bottom, you can find the executive summary:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>More specifically, the Commerce and Science Division of the America COMPETES Act would: <\/p>\n<p>Increase Research Investment by: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Establishing the Innovation Acceleration Research Program to direct federal agencies funding research in science and technology to set as a goal dedicating approximately 8% of their Research and Development (R&#038;D) budgets toward high-risk frontier research. <\/li>\n<li> Authorizing the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from approximately $703 million in Fiscal Year 2008 to approximately $937 million in Fiscal Year 2011 and requiring NIST to set aside no less than 8 percent of its annual funding for high-risk, high-reward innovation acceleration research. <\/li>\n<li> Directing NASA to increase funding for basic research and fully participate in interagency activities to foster competitiveness and innovation, using the full extent of existing budget authority. <\/li>\n<li>Coordinating ocean and atmospheric research and education at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies to promote U.S. leadership in these important fields. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Develop an Innovation Infrastructure by: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Establishing a President&#8217;s Council on Innovation and Competitiveness to develop a comprehensive agenda to promote innovation and competitiveness in the public and private sectors. <\/li>\n<li>Requiring the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study to identify forms of risk that create barriers to innovation.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>While I&#8217;m as happy as the next guy to see legislation passed that supports science in any way, I have to say, I&#8217;m not impressed by this list. Five of the six itesm are meaningless piffle, as far as I&#8217;m concerned.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The only one that strikes me as genuinely useful is the second item: Increasing NIST&#8217;s funding. The rest of it is meaningless crap&#8211; do we really need yet another blue-ribbon panel to churn out white papers that nobody will read? And does anybody think that a mandate to support &#8220;high-risk frontier research&#8221; will lead to anything other than the re-labelling of existing projects as &#8220;high-risk frontier research?&#8221; The phrase is sufficiently vague that it could apply to just about anything that&#8217;s already getting government funding.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to support scientific innovation, the way to do that is with money. If &#8220;high-risk frontier research&#8221; is not being funded, it&#8217;s because there isn&#8217;t enough money to fund everything that deserves funding. Adding vague additional directives to the funding agencies isn&#8217;t going to help anything&#8211; even assuming that agencies could accurately identify &#8220;frontier research&#8221; that will &#8220;increase competetiveness&#8221; (whatever that means), in the absence of new funding it will be funded only at the expense of other worthwhile research that doesn&#8217;t happen to fit the buzzwords of the moment.<\/p>\n<p>Symbolic affirmations of support for science are all very nice, but as Randy Newman said, it&#8217;s money that matters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Inside Higher Ed notes in passing a new bill from the Senate supporting scientific research. There&#8217;s a lot of bafflegab there, but if you scroll to the bottom, you can find the executive summary: More specifically, the Commerce and Science Division of the America COMPETES Act would: Increase Research Investment by: Establishing the Innovation Acceleration&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/04\/26\/show-me-the-money\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Show Me the Money<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policy","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}