Trying to fund innovative research

Science funding tends to favour mediocrity over grand ideas
[Via Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk]

It’s a good job Einstein didn’t need a grant

The kind of idle pastime that might amuse physicists is to imagine drafting Einstein’s grant applications in 1905. “I propose to investigate the idea that light travels in little bits,” one might say. “I will explore the possibility that time slows down as things speed up,” goes another. Imagine what comments these would have elicited from reviewers for the German Science Funding Agency, had such a thing existed. Instead, Einstein just did the work anyway while drawing his wages as a technical expert third-class at the Bern patent office. And that is how he invented quantum physics and relativity.

The moral seems to be that really innovative ideas don’t get funded – that the system is set up to exclude them. To wring research money from government agencies, you have to write a proposal that gets assessed by anonymous experts (“peer reviewers”). If its ambitions are too grand or its ideas too unconventional, there is a strong chance it will be trashed. So does the money go only to “safe” proposals that plod down well-trodden avenues, timidly advancing the frontiers of knowledge a few nanometres?

There is some truth in the accusation that grant mechanisms favour mediocrity. After all, your proposal has to specify exactly what you are going to achieve. But how can you know the results before you have done the experiments, unless you are aiming to prove the bleeding obvious?

To address this complaint, the US National Science Foundation has announced a scheme for awarding grants. From next year – if Congress approves – the Creative Research Awards for Transformative Interdisciplinary Ventures (Creativ – oh, I get it) will have $24m (£15.36m) to give to “unusually creative high-risk/high-reward interdisciplinary proposals”. In other words, it is looking for new ideas that might not work, but which would be massive if they do.

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It will be interesting to see what gets funded. Of course, this assumes Congress will actually fund something new.

Since it has failed to pass a new budget by the statutory deadline over the last 2 years, that assumption seems very weak.

How the military-industrial complex deals with a Medal of Honor recipent

Comment: The Case of Dakota Meyer : The New Yorker
[Via The New Yorker]

This is what happened to Dakota Meyer when he was deployed as a Marine in Afghanistan, and what he did about it. His patrol, with two Afghan Army platoons, was headed to a meeting in a village called Ganjgal one day before dawn in September, 2009, when they were ambushed. Four of Meyer’s fellow Marines were stranded; he could hear them on the radio. He was ordered to stay put, but didn’t listen. He rode into the field on the exposed back of a gun truck, under heavy fire, and saved thirty-six soldiers, more than two dozen of them Afghans. When his truck stopped working he found another, and then another. The fifth and final time he went in on foot, and finally made it to the trench where his four friends had been trapped. “I checked them all for a pulse,” he wrote in a handwritten statement for military investigators, obtained by the Marine Corps Times, but the “bodies were already stiff…. I found SSgt Kenefick facedown in the trench w/ his GPS in his hand. His face appeared as if he was screaming. He had been shot in the head.” Meyer, still under fire, got all of their bodies out. He was twenty-one years old.

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What a patriotic act for BAE– selling technology to people who could very well be using it against our troops. And when the Medal of Honor recipient calls them on it, they not only harass him but apparently spread rumors that prevent him from getting employment.

I hope he wins his case. I hope BAE loses not only the case but any ability to send other countries better material than our own soldiers have. I hope he gets a huge settlement but his reputation – a man who is the first living man to receive the Medal of Honor since Vietnam – has forever been tarnished by the motives of an apparent war profiteer.