doin' my dance

[alexr_rwx]

Paraphrase of a recent discussion:

oniugnip: ... you're doing fun and beautiful things. Diagrammatic reasoning is exciting. Can you make them waive my tuition?
ashok: Funny thing about that... I don't have any grants because Washington is cutting most funding for CS research. NSF is only approving about one in fifty of the proposed proposals these days...
oniugnip: Oh my god.

... what are we doing, as a nation? I think the thing that keeps my libertarian-small-government leanings in check is the idea that private companies aren't going to fund science just for the sake of advancement-of-knowledge. Somebody's got to do it.

So in the meantime, I'm asking around -- I've heard that it's conceivable that Ron Ferguson and Nancy Nercessian and Janet Kolodner have funding for students -- the latter looks like the most fun, so I emailed her first.

Comments

"Washington is cutting most funding "

[(Anonymous)]

I'd be willing to bet that if you asked just about anyone about the cause closest to their heart, they could say "Washington is cutting most funding... for (enter the thing you love)". Unless you love the military. As an arts enthusiast, I can point out that there is no money to have music classes in schools. they are cutting funding. Anything that isn't deemed absolutley crucial is thrown out ie: band, chorus, drama, P.E. Man it kills me that we have so daggone much money to bomb people on the other side of the world, and we can't put on a decent play in middle school. We are raising a generation of kids who won't understand team work, but has learned that if you disagree with someone elses politics, it is OK to just go kill them.
Excuse me for the rant, if you have figured out who wrote this, you know that I live in "happy world", where the answer is always- let's put on a show. Life is beautiful, it's just that sometimes humans get overzealous and screw it all up. come with me to happy world.

[zip4096.livejournal.com]

Damn :(

I bet there's no particular shortage of funding for military R&D...

[samarin.livejournal.com]

appropriate choice of music, my droogie!

[reality-calls.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately it seems that politicians have finally realized that science interferes with their ability to market their ideologies by poking all sorts of holes in those ideologies using such underhanded tactics as "objectivity", "logic", and "evidence".  The natural response is, of course, to support science only where there is some direct political benefit, and unfortunately computer science research projects promote Communist notions like the nefarious "Open Source" movement, which threaten to bring down the foundations of our society.  At least, that's what the campaign donors and lobbyists say.

Also, I imagine the concept of "Garbage in, garbage out", if fully appreciated, would be quite devastating to most politicians' world views at this point...

      "Live from the People's Republic"