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

[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"