[I may be on vacation in soggy LA, but computing research policy waits for no one! So here’s an update from the road…] The National Academies have released their long-awaited report, Assessment of Department of Defense Basic Research. This is the study that was requested by the Senate Armed Services Committee in the FY 2004 […]
The Wall Street Journal online edition has an interesting article on the federal budget deficit and the President’s plan for overcoming it. Included is some info about the impact of appropriation cuts on the National Science Foundation and a good primer on the challenge facing the President and Congress in looking for other places to […]
In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy, researchers at Penn State University determined that the National Science Foundation is the “most acknowledged” agency in computing research. The researchers “text-mined” 335,000 papers in computer science in the CiteSeer database and discovered the science agency had been acknowledged 12,287 times. DARPA was […]
The Council on Competitiveness’ long-awaited report on their National Innovation Initiative is now out (pdf) and contains some very strong recommendations in support of the federal role in funding fundamental research. Here’s a first brief peek at their recommendations for “[Revitalizing] Frontier and Multidisciplinary Research”: Spur radical innovation by reallocating three percent of all federal […]
As the FY 05 appropriations process demonstrated, the current organization of congressional appropriations subcommittees (and thus, appropriations bills) is a mess that puts science agencies at a disadvantage in the competition for federal dollars. The current structure is a mish-mash of jurisdictions that forces agencies that have little or nothing to do with each other […]
According to this report at Space.com, NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe will step down this week and may take a position at Lousiana State University. Apparently the former head of DOD’s anti-ballistic missile shield program, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, is the leading candidate to replace him, though the others mentioned as possibilities are interesting: […]
His name is Sam Bodman, formerly Deputy Secretary of Commerce and a former Associate Professor in chemical engineering at MIT. That’s about all I know about him at the moment. If confirmed, he’ll replace current Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. The President’s announcement is here. Abraham’s press release is here. And Sherry Boehlert, Chair of […]
The first “passbacks” from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have apparently begun to leak and rumors are circulating that NIST is once again in for lean times. (Passbacks are OMB’s response to each agency’s budget request for the coming fiscal year — they are OMB’s verdict on what will and won’t […]
The Washington Post has an interesting article about House Majority Leader Tom Delay’s (R-TX) successful efforts to singlehandedly secure a large increase for the President’s Moon/Mars Space Initiative in the FY 2005 Omnibus Appropriations bill. In a bill that included some significant cuts to science, most notably a cut of $105 million to the National […]
Thomas Friedman’s editorial in the New York Times today hits Congress hard for approving a cut to the National Science Foundation in the Omnibus Appropriations bill. A sample: Of all the irresponsible aspects of the 2005 budget bill that the Republican-led Congress just passed, nothing could be more irresponsible than the fact that funding for […]
