"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 9 Dec 2010 02:38:15 -0800, "azotic"
wrote:

?The incoming Republican majority in the House of Representatives has
selected the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the first target for a
"YouCut Citizen Review", in which ordinary Americans are being asked to
identify "wasteful spending that should be cut".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=LSYTS-nRt4o

I LIKE it and just signed up for YouCut!


http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/sh...lay-judge.html

Same video, 1 second shorter. ?!?


Fraudsters in academia may have to get real jobs.

Sacre bleu! That'd be a first.


--
Invest in America: Buy a CONgresscritter today!

So who, exactly, summarizes the research projects for the layman vote on?
A congressman from a state that is pushing to teach creationism? A sleazy
politician can make anything sound bad (and this guy has never been anything
but a politician
http://www.adriansmith.house.gov/ind...1&It emid=61).

He gave an example of modeling the sound of things breaking for the video
game industry, and asked, "do we want to subsidize the gaming industry?"
What he misses is that synthesizing the sound of something breaking is an
extraordinarily complex problem of applied math and physics that has never
been solved before now. The applications could be applied to video games,
but they also could also be applied to modeling effects of sonic booms,
explosions and all kinds of things yet to be thought of. This research made
news in the engineering magazines I read. In any case basic science is not
supposed to be driven by applications but by pushing the bounds of what has
not been done before. But even if the Congressman was perfectly accurate and
the research could only ever be useful for the video game industry, this
industry is one of the few growth industries in the US worth many billions
of dollars and thousands of jobs.

Here is an article describing how misleading his summary is. Remember, these
are probably the most egregious examples he could find.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...ismisleadin g