Conservatives should support #SciFund

If you are a political conservative who supports science, you should be supporting the heck out of the #SciFund challenge.

Conservatives argue for small, limited government. But arguments for “small government” don’t get a lot of traction among scientists, because funding trends are going in the wrong direction.

The main sources of scientific funding in most of the world is industry and government. Industry still funds a lot of research (which makes up most of the total), but industry is reducing funding for basic research. Industry research often focuses on maximizing the next quarter profits.

Government funding is increasingly the only game in town for basic researchers. I appreciate that there are few rewards for being efficient in the current government granting system. We desperately need alternative ways to fund science.

The #SciFund challenge is the biggest, best promoted effort to find a new way to fund scientific research in a long time. You’d better believe that a lot of other researchers are watching and waiting to see what happens. If it fails, a lot of scientists are going to say, “Crowdfunding can’t work. Therefore, more government funding to science.”

I know many conservatives would rather see government involvement in research not increase. But I hope that science-minded conservatives appreciate that research isn’t free. The most effective way to reduce government involvement in funding research is to provide alternatives. Twiddle the knobs, and make the problem go away.

Conservatives are often charged with being anti-science. I’ve criticized conservative politicians (not least in one of the most popular posts ever on this blog), but I’ve always thought that was an oversimplification. Science has received a lot of bipartisan support. Step up and show people that conservatives can and do support good science.

If the #SciFund challenge succeeds, it will be something you can point as an example of innovative thinking that promotes personal freedom, and that shows people can support science without a government middleman.

If you’re a conservative who supports science, you should go to RocketHub right now and support a #SciFund project!

P.S.—And you should spread the word about #SciFund!

The #SciFund Challenge launches!

The wait is over.

The final version of Doctor Zen and the Amazon Crayfish Civilization is now ready for viewing at RocketHub! If you have three minutes, you have more than enough time to learn about my project in the #SciFund Challenge!

Why can’t you watch the video here? Because I want you to go to RocketHub, and not only watch mine, but look at the other insanely cool projects that have come in from around the world. If you don’t want to support me, please consider supporting someone else.

The #SciFund Challenge is an experiment in funding science. Over the next six weeks, I will be asking for your help in raising money for a research project. I’ll be talking more about the whys and wherefores in the next few days.

Want to learn more? Or perhaps even... donate?

If each person following the blog (according to Blogger) kicked in $6.41, my project would be fully funded.

You should go to RocketHub right now!

Coming soon...

Money for South Texas universities

The state of Texas is going to send a lot of money towards education in my area, and particularly at my institution. This has been covered in the news in several places, such as here and here.

Particularly interesting are the reports of $9.5 million to recruit new faculty in science and technology. The campus paper quotes my institution’s President, Robert Nelsen:

“We’re looking for starters,” he said. “These will be people with national reputations. We need new faculty and to have the quality of high-caliber faculty such as these is really going to be marvelous.”

Details on exactly how the money will be managed have not surfaced anywhere, as far as I can see. I wonder who will be making decisions about recruiting, and what that money will be used to do (i.e., salary, start-up, something else?).

In an effort like this, the devil is surely in the details. Recruiting new faculty (particularly people with “national reputations”) is a tricky business at the best of times.

Texas does not enjoy a great reputation for science. The last few weeks have seen a lot of discussion about Governor Rick Perry’s mistaken belief that we teach creationism here, and his comments about how climate scientists are lying about global warming to make money. Sprinkle with a couple of years of the Texas State Board of Education weakening the K-12 science standards, and is it any surprise you hear these sorts of dialogues among academics?

Way back when I was but a naive TT hopeful (ahh...2009), J and I had a not-that-serious conversation about which cities we'd be willing to grace with the privilege of our permanent/semi-permanent residence. In truth, it was not so much a conversation as it was me naming places, and J either accepting or vetoing, comme ça:

Me: San Francisco?
J: Probably.
Me: Chicago?
J: I could do Chicago.
Me: Houston?
J: No-HO! No Texas.

Then there is physical space. Our university has been talking about a new wing on our science building for some time. The most recent capital improvement has been for a new Fine Arts center - which they got, and good for them! But it’s not clear when we’re going to see new space on a science building.

Finally, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board announced new rules for doctoral programs that take effect in October. The new rules tie requests to new doctoral programs to the undergraduate completion rate: you have to be at or above the state average (excluding the flagship universities, the University of Texas in Austin and Texas A&M University). This means that half the universities in Texas are cut out, including ours.

To sum up: we have millions of dollars to recruit new faculty with “national reputations” to come to a somewhat rural locale in a state with an anti-intellectual reputation, who will then be expected to perform their wonders with no doctoral students and no new space.

Sometimes, you have to wonder if the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

In related news, the University of Texas system was widely praised for new plans to promote university accountability.

As science funding dries up...

The funding of scientific research in the United States (and many other countries) is looking ever more like this:

With small ponds, a lot of people are determined to become the big fish.

So lots of researchers learn about “grantsmanship” and spend hours crafting the perfect proposal.

Some hope to find new funding sources in industry, private foundations and crowd funding.

But maybe there’s another strategy...

Rely on it a lot less than everyone else.

Adaptation or extinction. Those are always your choices in the face of extreme selection pressure.

Drying up photo by by Brian Auer on Flickr; big fish wall art by As_One on Flickr; both used under a Creative Commons license.

Open access and taxes

There are many reasons to argue for open access of scientific research. But this is not the best one:

It’s your taxes that fund the research, you should have access to the results without me or anyone else being a mediator.

That one is from Kevin at We, Beasties. When I protested that this argument omits indie science, Kevin replied that it’s such a small amount as to be not even worth considering.

Here’s how I see arguments going for people who try to link open access to tax dollars.

Open access advocate: American tax payers have paid for this research, so it should be freely available.

Unconvinced person: How will you do that? Put it on blogs? In library archives?

OAA: Oh, no! Real science has to be published in peer-reviewed journals for quality control purposes.

UP: Who runs those journals now?

OAA: Mostly private businesses.

UP: So you want to put those publishers out of business? You’re a socialist who wants to kill private sector jobs.

OAA: Wha...? No! Open access doesn’t mean a journal can’t be for profit.

UP: How are journals supposed to turn a profit if all that intellectual property is given out for free?

OAA: The authors will pay fees to the journal if their paper is accepted.

UP: How much?

OAA: One of the most successful open access journals charges $1,350 for each paper.

UP: And that comes out of the authors’ own pockets?

OAA: Oh, no! That money is budgeted by the researchers into the government grants we get.

UP: So you want even more of my tax dollars to fund your research? You’re a greedy pig at the trough who’ll leave a bankrupt country to my grandchildren.

OAA: Wha...? No! Open access means that scientific progress around the world can progress faster. Scientific research grows economies.

UP: So everyone could read this science funded by our tax dollars?

OAA: That’s right.

UP: You want to give away our best knowledge to countries competing with us in the global economy. You want to destroy our way of life and replace it with a global world government.

OAA: Wha...? No! Open access means that you personally will be able to delve into the world’s best new science!

UP: But I don’t care.

Photo by soukup on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

What the Coburn report has in common with arsenic life

Last week saw two big science stories hit that at first glance are unrelated. But I think they are symptomatic of the same underlying attitudes and problems.

First was Senator Coburn’s report on the National Science Foundation, which I covered here.

In response, the Los Angeles Time ran this excellent article about “Duh science.” It talks about why people often resist “what everyone knows.”

(C)onsider the case of Harvard sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler, who has spent about $3 million over the years demonstrating over and over that doctors who don’t get enough sleep make mistakes on the job. ...

Everyone had an anecdote. Czeisler had data. “It was dismissed out of hand,” he said. “They use the same argument over and over, even when we”ve tested it. It drives me up the wall.”

The researcher who built the treadmill for the shrimp, David Scholnick, explains (defends) his research in this article in The Toronto Star.

Second was the publication of a series of technical comments on the “arsenic life” paper by Wolfe-Simon and colleagues (editor’s comment here). Lots of commentary has emerged, again, but I was particularly struck by Ericka Check Hayden’s article in Nature, where several people bluntly say that they don’t want to replicate the work.

(M)ost labs are too busy with their own work to spend time replicating work that they feel is fundamentally flawed, and it’s not likely to be published in high-impact journals. So principal investigators are reluctant to spend their resources, and their students’ time, replicating the work.

“If you extended the results to show there is no detectable arsenic, where could you publish that?” said Simon Silver of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who critiqued the work in FEMS Microbiology Letters in January and on 24 May at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans. “How could the young person who was asked to do that work ever get a job?” Silver said.

I think there’s something unstated in Silver’s quote. He’s probably asking, “How could someone doing that work get a tenure-track job in a major research university?” Not everyone aspires to that goal.

Refuting another scientist's work also takes time that scientists could be spending on their own research. For instance, Helmann says he is in the process of installing a highly sensitive mass spectrometry machine capable of measuring very small amounts of elements. But, he says, “I’ve got my own science to do.”

This is bad news for science all round. This entry by PZ Myers beat me to it:

I'm suggesting that they are symptoms of something rotten in the world of science. Testing claims ought to be what we do. If the journals are going to fill up with positive claims thanks to the file-drawer effect, and if nobody ever wants to evaluate those claims, and if negative results are unpublishable, the literature is going to decline in utility for lack of rigor and evaluation.

And even if researchers are willing to do the replication, journal editors don’t seem to see this as important. An excellent recent example detailed by Ben Goldacre was the publication of findings that seemed to suggest precognition. The author, Daryl Bem, correctly realized this was an extraordinary claim, and in his paper, stressed the importance of other labs trying to repeat the finding.

The journal wouldn’t publish the papers. The journal seemed to have a blanket policy (informal or not, I don’t know) not to publish replications.

I’ll add this. Of all the papers I’ve published so far, by far the hardest one to get into print was a replication.

The common link to these two stories?

Both are about the tension between wanting breakthroughs and the reality that science usually progresses in slow, hard fought, millimeter by millimeter increments.

Politicians wants breakthroughs because they see anything else as a waste of taxpayer money. Consequently, it’s easy to look in and see a single research project as stupid because you have no context.

Scientists want breakthroughs because discoveries can make careers. It’s no accident that the arsenic tolerant bacteria’s name is an acronym for “Give Felisa A Job.”

Lots of people (including editors) overwhelmingly want the breakthrough, the identifiable “Eureka!” moments. We need tell more stories of scientific progress that unfolds over years and decades, which is a great opportunity for bloggers.

Related posts

Tales to astonish
Original and transformative
My posts on arsenic life here, here and here.

Photo by quarksteilchen on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

More for those that have the most?

A little more evidence that institutions are not interested in a level playing field.

Larry Faulkner, the former president of UT-Austin... wants more funding for the great universities.

Not all universities. The great ones.

That’s from a report on a panel discussion about research universities in Texas in The Texas Tribune.

Not only are people saying that the institutions with the most money should get even more money, they also want the most promising talent pool funneled into them too:

Rex Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil... argued that there was a need to “differentiate” in terms of placement of students in universities — i.e., to make sure that the best students go to well-funded, top universities, as opposed to trying to help everyone equally.

... He added: “If we want to take advantage of our great research universities, we cannot burden them with remedial education.”

A reason that teaching is seen as a “burden” is because there are not enough professors. Open up tenure-track positions. Many hands make light work. (I understand this is not a popular option for universities right now, because there is a push to cut instead of invest.)

Ray Bowen, the chairman of the National Science Board and the former president of Texas A&M, said that Texas faced a “unique problem,” because many of our brightest students go out of state as a result of the state’s lack of research universities.

I’d be interested to see the data supporting that statement. I doubt the vast majority of high school students are looking around going, “I dunno, that department didn’t have enough Nature papers over the last five years...”

It is always interesting to watch those with power and money argue that they need even more power and more money.

Related posts
Inclining the playing field
Balkanizing small universities
To have and have not. Mostly not.

Want us to teach more?

Ronald Trowbridge, writing in the Texas Tribune, thinks public universities in Texas should be teaching more and doing less research.

Our universities have shifted priorities to research first, students second. “The ultimate source of this cultural shift,” writes Harry Lewis, a former dean at Harvard University, “is the replacement of education by research as the university’s principal function.”

But Trowbridge doesn’t examine the reason for that shift. I suggest that this shift may have occurred because there is money to be had through research. Successful research programs are a revenue source. If Texas politicians and taxpayers want more teaching, they should be willing to pony up the cash that will replace the money that will be lost as less research is done.

Trowbridge also bemoans the number of adjuncts and graduate students teaching introductory classes. I agree; I’d love to see more tenured and tenure-track faculty teaching such classes. Again, who’s willing to pony up the cash for those more permanent positions?

Trowbridge argues that professors teaching two classes a semester is normal, when this is only true at the two major institutions in the state. He also apparently doesn’t consider working with research students “teaching,” when it is arguably some of the most important teaching at a university.

I’m for transparency and accountability, but “accountability” is not a license to allow you to demand the outcomes you’d like.

Peak science

We’re familiar with the idea of peak oil, peak fish, and other resource peaks. Some large, but finite resource, gets exploited to a point where either it gets too difficult to extract, or is drained faster than it can be renewed.

Could there be peak science?

Might there be a point where we can’t keep doing more science?

And could we already be past the peak?

• • • • •

At first glance, the notion that we’ve topped out our research, or that we could, seems completely absurd, particularly coming from a biologist. Biology has more interesting and worthwhile questions that are now potentially solvable than probably every before in history.

Researchers know that the results of one experiment often raise more questions than they answered. This makes the well seem boundless.

But perceptions can be dangerous. People used to say, “There’s plenty of fish in the sea” before fishery after fishery collapsed.

• • • • •

There are a lot of worrying signs.

1. Declining support for public funding of science. Obviously, science isn’t alone in this regard. Budgets are poor for a lot of worthwhile endeavours.
2. Administrative burdens. You need to go through a fairly complex approval process before you can even run some experiments. And once you have any sort of external funding, the accounting and effort certification is widely considered to be much more onerous than it used to be.
3. Disenfranchised junior researchers. People who want to be scientists are facing long training at low pay and little stability. It’s not a healthy situation where senior scientists get compared to plantation owners and sweatshop operators. (Jenny Rohn published an opinion piece in Nature last week discussing this problem at the post-doc level.)
4. Bigger questions means bigger equipment. Answering bigger questions often requires bigger infrastructure. For basic physics, can we get much larger than the Large Hadron Collider? Not for the near future, certainly.
5. Energy constriction. And peak research might be more tied to peak oil than people like to think. Research doesn’t take just human energy, it takes physical energy. How many pipette tips and other plastics (which is often petroleum-based, remember) does an active biomedical lab go through in a week? Has anyone calculated the carbon footprint of active biological research labs?

Each one alone is a formidable problem. But combined, they might start to squeeze and constrict scientific output.

I am not convinced that research is a speculative bubble waiting to pop, like tulips or comics or housing paid for with sub-prime mortgages. I can more easily envision a slow, painful decline, as we’ve seen with other resource peaks.

• • • • •

If there is a peak, it will not be evenly distributed. Some research fields will buck these trends. For instance, I see a bright future for any research involving the internet and phones.

The internet and widespread mobile phone ownership means you can get huge, detailed data sets easily. And this is one area where these seems to be a healthy interest in research in the private sector. Just look at OK Trends. More than a few people have looked at their blog and said, “That could easily have been published in a proper peer-reviewed scientific journal.”

Citizen science and crowd sourced science is another place where I see lots of growth. If you can create research projects where people can contribute easily (and maybe have a bit of fun doing it), people are willing to help.

But many kinds of basic science don’t lend themselves to either that kind of automation or the distribution of workload. You can do studies, but it’s a lot harder to do experiments in these ways.

• • • • •

In some ways, I don’t believe my own arguments. Scientists often criticize business and governments about pursuing “business as usual” policies regarding energy despite overwhelming evidence that they are not sustainable.

Yet in reading commentary from researchers about these problem, particularly in the United States, the discussion almost always seems to center around grants from government agencies: business as usual. I’m struck by how few people have are proposing anything but “business as usual” policies: make sure the federal grants keep coming.

As scientists, it’s our job to come up with better ideas.

Photo by  Hamed Saber on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Why have industries pulled out of basic research?

This USA Today article on brewing fights over American federal funding for research mentions something that’s puzzled me for a long time.

Over the past few decades, industry has moved far from the halcyon days of Bell Labs, inventor of the transistor, when private firms pursued basic research.

Unfortunately, that little quote does a rather big disservice to Bell Labs. Bell Labs had a key role not just in developing the transistor, but other critical inventions like the laser, solar cells, cell phones, light emitting diodes, and, for the neuroscientists in the crow, fMRI.

Bell Labs is still operating, but much smaller than it used to be, and it isn’t doing basic physics research any more.

But with such a track record of acclaim and patents and, one assumes, profit in the long haul... why haven’t many more companies dug in and invested in basic research? And what would it take to get companies to create places where basic, curiosity-driven research could be done?

Promises versus trust

If you’re reading this, chances are you have more than a passing interest in science. You’re probably convinced that science is, on the whole, a good thing.

Two entries on the web on Friday were both about convincing people of the worth of basic science.

Holly Bik wrote a post on the Scientific American Guest blog:

Marine sponges are practically a gold mine. The mere mention of this phylum elicits Pavlovian salivation from pharmaceutical companies—in addition to malaria, sponge chemicals are leading the fight against tumors, cancer, bacteria, inflammation, and arthritis. Even sponge skeletons have been tested as ‘bioscaffolds’ to help heal bone and cartilage injuries.

Holly and I had a conversation on Twitter about this. I worry that in trying to advocate for basic research, we make two mistakes:

1. We define “benefits” very narrowly, usually medicine.
2. We oversell those potential benefits.

Holly replied:

Unfortunately a lot of people only relate ‘benefits’ to human medicine. I was playing the game to get the msg across & open eyes.

It was reminiscent of this cartoon:

Hannah Walters chipped in that she thought “because it’s awesome” is an honest way to talk about research, but it’s hard to put that into a sound bite.

Coincidentally, Randy Olson wrote an editorial on this the same day:

But research scientists are in a different situation. And yet, they too need the public’s support. So how can they achieve this?

The answer is trust. People support institutions they trust. Scientists have a long record of success. They have brought us technology, cured diseases, and improved the standard of living for humanity. Rather than pointing to the future and asking the public to hope for their continued success, scientists can draw on their past record to win public trust.

And this is one reason why I am always telling scientists that one of our biggest advantages is our lack of pretense, our honesty, and authenticity.

(S)upport for science will come not from the promise of future solutions but from telling stories about solutions achieved in the past.

With that in mind, I reread Holly’s blog. What stories are there about solutions achieved in the past?

In parasitology we learned that Artemisinins, some of the most potent and effective anti-malaria drugs, were originally discovered in an unremarkable pan-Eurasian herb, Artemisia annua (annual wormwood).

There is a potentially great story... but it’s just one sentence! You could do a whole post – at least! – just telling that story.

Plus, one of the great things about stories and building trust is that it can take the long view. James Burke’s epic television series Connections come to mind as a model for telling great stories about science that show how one discovery can simmer for a long time before triggering some other finding.

Promises are most effective when they’re made and fulfilled in the short-term. A promise to do something in 50 years isn’t much of a promise. Science is horrible at keeping promises.

Stories can span decades and generations. That’s the time frame that science operates at, and excels at.

Has American industry given up an American scientists?

Some time ago, an influential report called Rising Above the gathering Storm was published. In September, an update was published, which has only just been covered here by Beryl Benderly. This summary makes for depressing reading. In particular, I was stopped cold by this:

If labor costs that are higher than corporations wish to pay indicate a labor shortage, then “de facto there can no longer be domestic shortages of scientists and engineers,” the report says, because those corporations will export the work.

In other words, industry positions for people with doctorates are vanishing because American corporations are outsourcing research. That pretty much leaves becoming a professor or leaving science as the only long-term career choices for a person with a freshly minted Ph.D. in the United States.

That’s terrifying.

Weirdly, the report recommends doubling federal research funding. As Benderly points out, that didn’t work for NIH in the late 1990s. There is a very deep structural problem here, and there’s few good ideas about how to twiddle the knobs to make the it go away.

Another take is by Canadian Girl Postdoc.

Pay per view science

There’s a nice article on the pressures facing academic libraries that delves into costs and the commercialization of knowledge. I agree with much of what Robert Darnton says is there, but wanted to play Devil’s advocate:

(T)hose publishers add very little value to the research process, and most of the research is ultimately funded by American taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health and other organizations.

First, a challenge to those who think publishers add little value: try publishing your own journal. It can be done, and is getting easier all the time. But it is hardly a trivial matter. PLoS is not a “two people in a garage” operation by any stretch of the imagination.

Second, I’m getting a little tired of the implied argument that because much science is funded by the American National Institutes of Health (or some other federal agency), all science should be free to Americans. (In fairness, Darnton doesn’t make that argument explicitly.)

If a research project is not funded by U.S. taxpayers, why should the scientists have to make the results free to the American public?

Some journals that normally have paywalls offer an open access option for authors. Maybe we should have the reverse, too: open access journals could have an option that allows independent researchers to charge for their science. A $1 fee through PayPal, say, that would go directly to the researchers.

Maybe this could become a new way to fund research: pay per view fees on articles that went straight to authors could help fund the next projects.

Indie spirit

A lot has been written about the second Rock Stars of Science campaign. Chris Mooney is keeping tabs: One, two, three, three and a half, four.

In a way, the pairing of these particular scientists and these particular musicians is apt. In both fields, these are Famous People. They who run big operations with big money.

In short, these are people who have Made It.

But for every headliner, there’s a brilliant session musician who only people in the industry know. There are the friends in their garages practicing and bands crisscrossing the country in second hand vans. Singers who hold down day jobs to hold themselves over between gigs. These can be musicians of high caliber, have a thousand true fans, but will never hear their song on the radio.

I want an Indie Bands of Science campaign.

I want something to celebrate the grad students who are still trying to break into a science career, the overworked post docs, and the profs who run labs on shoestrings.

In many places, the value of faculty members is being judged by their monetary value alone. How much grant money can you bring in?

This is a like judging the quality of music by the number of iTunes downloads. By that measure, one of your favourite musicians is “objectively” not as good as the Glee Cast, Ke$ha, or Justin Beiber.

For faculty members, it’s an embarrassment not to have funding. Nobody exactly brags about it. But maybe it’s time for people to speak out and say when they have produced science without grant support.

For instance, if you look through the acknowledgments of my newest paper, you won’t see any funding agencies mentioned. That’s because the paper is self-financed: I paid for everything out of my own pocket. Here’s the cost breakdown:

• Domain name renewal for Marmorkrebs.org: $32.61 (3 years)
• Domain name renewal for MarbledCrayfish.org: $20.38 (2 years)
• SurveyMonkey Pro: $39.80 (two months)
• Publishing fee for open access journal: $200.12 (may be some bank fees for wire transfer in there)
• Grand total: $292.91.

I could have shaved it down to $230.94 or so if I was counted the domain name renewals for one year, didn’t bother with the alternate domain name, and if I’d been more efficient downloading and analyzing the SurveyMonkey data. I suppose I could have hacked it down to less than $100 if I was willing to put it in a journal behind a paywall, but I wasn’t willing to do that. On the other hand, it doesn’t include any costs of the computer or software I bought, as those work on innumerable other projects.

A lot of science cannot be done this cheaply. But there is often almost an assumption that all science – or maybe all science worth doing – is supported by taxpayers. Many arguing for open access publication say something like this repeatedly. Some funding agencies may track how many papers came out of their awards – and frankly, some of those numbers are scary, with over a million dollars going into the production of some papers.

But nobody tracks self-financed science. Nobody even acknowledges efficiency, let alone rewards it. I would love to know how much science gets done because someone simply eats some or all of the costs because it’s faster and simpler to open their wallets than get and manage a grant.

Let’s celebrate the indie spirit.

Reference

Faulkes Z. 2010. The spread of the parthenogenetic marbled crayfish, Marmorkrebs (Procambarus sp.), in the North American pet trade. Aquatic Invasions 5(4): 447-450. http://dx.doi.org/10.3391/ai.2010.5.4.16

Shiny Toy Guns picture by Nirazilla on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Reverse dumpster diving: Republicans and National Science Foundation spending

Michael Faraday, the story goes, was once asked by a politician what good electricity was. Faraday reportedly said, “One day, sir, you may tax it.”

This might explain why the American Republican party is uninterested in science,  since so many of them seem to see no benefits to any taxation, ever. Meanwhile, Republicans are asking people to look for “wasteful” projects in the National Science Foundation.

What is bothersome is that the web page is very... directed. There is a preconceived idea about what is “wasteful.”

In the “Search Award For” field, try some keywords, such as: success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus, etc. to bring up grants.

At the end of this, you know a Republican politician is waiting to say, “Look at all the wasteful spending on these subjects that people identified... using the criteria that we suggested they use to look for wasteful spending.” Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What they don’t tell people is the size of the NSF budget. Go look at Jess Bachman’s “Death and Taxes” poster of the US Budget, and find the NSF.

It’ll take a while.

Because it’s hard to see.

Because it’s tiny.

If you really want to save people some money, one could argue that the place to start would be the place where the most money goes. Shaving off a couple of percentage points of the costs of some agencies could well save more than the entire NSF budget.

The site also makes it sound like the NSF is just awarding money to any random crap that happens to be out there. It doesn’t tell you about the entire peer review process, and how these projects represent only a small fractions of submitted proposals.

Third, there is a clear way to submit “suspect” links, but no way to submit a comment in support of the NSF.

Of course, attacking funded research projects is a venerable political trick. Sarah Palin criticized fruit fly research; John McCain criticized lobster research.

While Michael Faraday’s taxation answer fall upon deaf ears in the Republican Party, let me remind them of another version of the story.

“What good is electricity?”

Faraday replied, “One might as well as what good is a newborn baby.”

Oh, Republicans, why do you hate the babies of science?

Don’t feed the BEAR

The Wall Street Journal has a nice article on moves made to increase transparency and accountability of universities.

It focuses on Texas, and starts with one of the most controversial acts so far. Texas A&M publicly posted a “cost / benefit” analysis of each department and faculty. The implication seemed to be, “Everyone should be pulling their own weight, and that means each professor should bring into the university more money than they cost.”

We’ve had similar documents internally at our institution for some time, and I imagine other universities do to. Ours is called the break even analysis report (BEAR). I came out fairly well in one of our last ones, because I teach introductory biology. Biology in general comes out well, because we have a lot of majors.

I don't like the attitudes I've seen such reports engender. They do not promote collegiality.

I don’t know that any business operates under a scheme where every item must be equally profitable. In every business, some items subsidize the rest. Not every movie in the theater recoups its costs. Not every TV show is a hit. Some things fly off the shelves, while others sit there unsold even when there’s no other choice.

Another potential problem with releasing such a report publicly is that it doesn’t emphasize variation over time. Just like a business, some times are profitable, and some are not. If one department is down a million dollars this year, it might be in the black by an equal amount the next.

The article also discusses other laws the Texas legislature (which is, you might recall, largely dominated by a party that advocates small government) has imposed on universities.

As someone working under these new laws, some of them are well intentioned but I’m not convinced they will help either students or taxpayers more generally. For instance, we now have to have a class syllabus up months before the start of classes. We have until next Monday to get ours up for the spring semester.

It's questionable how important students think a syllabus is. Put something up that far in advance often means that you can't put in very much detail. Because we're busy with the current semester, we don't have a heck of a lot of time to figure out what we're going to do next semester. So it encourages a minimal, generic syllabus.

Similarly, we now have to put up a curriculum vita. Again, I wonder what the average undergraduate, or their parents, for that matter, is going to get out of a listing of my publications. I have no problem with people knowing (it's all over my home page), but how does it help them? How does it help the typical student pick classes, or decide what university to attend, or any of the other routine decisions that they make?

Picture by jepoirrier on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Inclining the playing field

You have two grant proposals in front of you.

One is a researcher at an primarily undergraduate institution that isn’t well known outside of its region, but this particular person has had several years of producing a string of publications in international journals. In fact, this person has pulled together a few colleagues, and they have a good collaboration going.

The other is a researcher at a major research university that is recognized internationally, and has been publishing, but at nowhere near the rate of the first researcher. He’s plugging away at his own lab with his own doctoral students, and not really working with other faculty in his institution or elsewhere.

Dame Nancy Rothwell would have us believe that the right thing to do is to give the money to the second researcher. He may not be as productive as the first, but that's not important, because the best institutions have to be maintained.

The Times Higher Education reports:

If the coming cuts in higher education spending were so severe that Hefce was forced to choose between protecting funding for top institutions and islands of excellence, the latter should lose out, she said.

To put it another way, people do not count; only institutions do. Individual initiative does not count; only maintaining prestige does. And the status quo never, ever changes.

There’s a message from a king worried about his crown.

As research dollars tighten, watch for more and more vested interests making more and more efforts to stop people from competing for the resources that the established places have had to themselves for a long time.

Hat tip to Chris Atherton.

Confidentiality clauses and choices

There’s a worrying discussion of how BP has been offering contracts to faculty members doing research in the Gulf of Mexico... with confidentiality clauses. One of the most interesting aspects about the article by the American Association of University Professors president is that he argues that maybe professors shouldn’t be allowed to take those contracts, even if they wanted to (emphasis added):

The increasing impact of corporate funding on the integrity of faculty research is among the changes higher education must confront. The decision about whether to sign restrictive contracts is not simply a matter of individual choice. It has broad implications for higher education and for the society at large.

I’m not sure what Nelson has in mind here. Let’s say for the sake of argument that such restrictive confidentiality clauses are so corrosive to the research enterprise that that they should not be allowed. At what level do you set policy? At the level of professional societies? Institutional policies? State or federal legislation?

While I agree that the issue is important, I’m not sure whether it warrants anything other than professional disrepute.

Related posts

Privately funded science

Privately funded science

David Calquhuon argued on his blog that science bloggers should never be paid. But at least one heading suggested a bigger issue is at stake:

Science and commerce don’t mix

I talked before about how science used to be practiced by the well-to-do, because it ensured analysis unfettered by vulgar concerns like worrying how you were going to feed yourself. This may is one of the reason that public funding has been so highly sought after: it is as close as most scientists can get to achieving the gentlemanly disinterest that is still idolized.

But.

The research community in the U.S. is starving for money. State funding for institutions is drying up, probably for good, and federal funding may not return to old levels in a long time, if ever. Indeed, a story ran talking about how disappointed many researchers were with the current administration – not about funding, admittedly.

Where does that leave researchers?

As it happens, this was also the crux of a case (#6) for the National Ethics Bowl. Again, that it’s a case in a national competition suggests it isn’t clear cut.

Our ethics team came down on the side saying that private money could be acceptable for researchers, with qualifications, the most important one being the independence of the researchers to conduct and publish the results.

The Seed / Pepsi blow-out is an example of the tensions. Some bloggers left. Some stayed. Several talked about how very conflicted they were about what the right thing to do was.

With public money becoming less available, more and more researchers are going to be turning to some manner of private funding. As a profession and as individuals, we basic researchers have not given a lot of attention to this. Requirements to disclose potential conflicts of interest in conference abstracts, say, became common in the 1990s, if I remember right, which is fairly recent in the scheme of things. I am grateful to Mike the Mad Biologist for his discussion about this.

Maybe researchers are hoping that public funding rates will go back to old levels and the problem will go away. I think they’re going to be disappointed.