This OpEd (free link) by Norman Ornstein, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (a reasonably influential conservative think tank — Newt Gingrich is also a fellow), ran today in Roll Call (sub req’d), “the Newspaper of Capitol Hill.” It’s a strong defense of federal support of basic research that cites DARPA’s declining support for […]
The Seattle PI makes the economic case for federal support of R&D in an editorial today. But what happens if the United States not only gives up every trade protection benefit, continues to suffer a loss of manufacturing and fritters away its research leadership in science, medicine and technology? That’s a lose-lose proposition. And it […]
Following in the wake of news stories and OpEds in the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News editorializes today on the negative impact of DARPA’s shift away from university researchers in computer science and engineering. Of all the government sources of funding for basic technology research, few have delivered more breakthroughs for Silicon […]
Since Sue, Ed, Andy, and a whole host of my relatives have all sent me a pointer to this OpEd by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times, you may have already seen it. But that doesn’t make it any less worth noting. Friedman picks up where former Clinton defense officials Perry and Deutch left off […]
The New York Times has an interesting OpEd today from former secretary of defense William Perry and his former undersecretary John Deutch on the lack of support for basic research, applied research and advanced technology development (collectively, “Defense Science and Technology”) at the Department of Defense. Of the Pentagon’s $419.3 billion budget request for next […]
Washington Post science and technology writer Rick Weiss riffs off of the recent news that NASA plans to pull the plug on the Voyager missions to demonstrate that the U.S. support for research has become too mundane — too evolutionary rather than revolutionary, too focused on short-term gains versus long-term results. The two Voyager probes, […]
John Markoff writes in detail in Saturday’s NY Times about DARPA’s diminishing investment in university-based computer science research and its potential impact. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon – which has long underwritten open-ended “blue sky” research by the nation’s best computer scientists – is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers […]
Federal Computer Week has a depressing article today on the impact of recent and planned cuts to NASA’s IT programs. The agency’s IT R&D programs are due to decline $66 million in FY 2005, with a further cut of $89 million requested in the President’s FY 2006 budget — a figure that would represent a […]
BBC coverage of the jump to 135.5 teraflops. ZDNet has more. The feat won’t show up on the current Top500.org list until they release the next revision of the list, which I think will be in May (the last was released in November at the Supercomputing 2004 conference in Pittsburgh, and it seems to be […]
The long-awaited PITAC report on Cyber Security, Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization (pdf, 2.2mb) has just been released. The committee spent nearly a year reviewing the federal government’s cyber security R&D effort, a process we’ve covered in this space. The resulting report concludes that the IT infrastructure — beyond the public Internet — is […]
