Category: Science

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New DARPA Director

DARPA, you know the people who invented the internet (“100 geniuses connected by a travel agent”), has a new director:

The Department of Defense (DoD) today announced the appointment of Regina E. Dugan as the 19th director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is the principal agency within the DoD for research, development, and demonstration of concepts, devices, and systems that provide highly advanced military capabilities for the current and future combat force. In this role of developing high-risk, high-payoff projects, DARPA compliments and balances the overall science and technology program of the DoD.

Go MechE’s from Caltech! DARPA’s last director Tony Tether ruffled a lot of feathers as it was widely perceived that the agency was shifting to short term research at the expense of the kind of groundbreaking work that had been funded in the past (See Peter Lee for details and recommendations for changes at DARPA.) Hopefully Dr. Dugan will take a different tack. That would certainly make a lot of computer science researchers a lot happier.

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Who Will Study the Studiers?

NSF awards $400K in stimulus funding to study the impact of stimulus funding on science.

Researchers at the University of Virginia get $199,951 to study the impact of stimulus funding on employment in science and engineering fields, while the University of Michigan receives $199,988 to develop a database of the investments in and outcomes of social science projects funded by the ARRA.

But no one is asking the real question. Who will study the impact of funding these two groups on science? Huh?

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Theorist In a Box

When I was a postdoc, I made it a habit to try to spend at least one week a year visiting Isaac Chuang’s lab at MIT. There were many reason for this, including that Ike has been a collaborator of mine, and Ken Brown, another collaborator was working as a postdoc in the lab. But another reason was…it’s damn nice for a theorist to sit in a real experimental lab. Oh sure, you need to keep the theorists away from all the cords and knobs for fear that they might actually touch something. And don’t ever let a theorist chose the music being played in the lab or you’ll end up hearing some real wacky “music.” But as a theorist I got a lot out of simply being around the actual enactment of the ideas that otherwise exist for me only in a paper or in my head. Being in a lab is very inspiring for an aspiring theorist.
So now I could go and bother one of the physics people and ask them if I could work in their lab. But this is 2009, damnit, and that 2 in 2009 certainly stands for web 2.0 or science 2.0 or iTechnology 2.0. In other words I want the same effect of visiting an experimental lab without getting of my lazy bum and walking across campus. So…
Continue reading “Theorist In a Box”

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Slow Science

The “slow movement” is a vast beast: there’s Slow Food, Slow Travel, Slow Money, and even, I kid you not, Slow Reading. These movements all begin with the premise that modern culture emphasizes ever increasing speed and convenience (cue the Eagle’s: “Listen, baby. You can hear the engine ring. We’ve been up and down this highway; haven’t seen a goddam thing.”) The prescribed medicine is a moderance in life. More smelling of the roses (but watch out for Ringo), more taking the long road, and most definitely more chewing your food slowly. While the movement suffers from large doses of overly nostalgic pastoralism, I find myself resonant with the slow movements search for a good pace and balance in how I try to live my life.
Thinking about this the other day (while chewing slowly, of course) I wondered, well, what about “Slow Science?” And like most thoughts you think might not have ever been thought, it turns out that this phrase has come up before: “Taking time to savour the rewards of slow science” Lisa Alleva, Nature 443, 271 (2006). To quote from the letter:

In shedding the ambition of my peers, I have discovered a secret: science, slow science, is perhaps the most rewarding and pleasurable pastime one could ever hope for. My supervisor’s lab is small — two postdocs only, with no teaching responsibilities. We are free to read the literature, formulate ideas and carefully plan our experiments so as to execute thoughtful strategies. We do not plough through genomes hoping to discover something interesting; we formulate a theory, and then we go in and test it.
Perhaps we are old-fashioned, but I feel my education as a scientist has benefited far more from my five years of slow science than the preceding five years of fast science. What’s more, we are on the brink of something big, exciting and wonderful, that spurs my slow science forever onwards.

So what about it? Who’s in for a slow science movement?
Continue reading “Slow Science”

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arXiview: A New iPhone App for the arXiv

Over 9 months ago I decided to apply for teaching tenure track jobs. Then the economy took what can best be described as a massive, ill-aimed, swan dive. Thus creating an incredible amount of stress in my life. So what does a CS/physics research professor do when he’s stress? The answer to that question is available on the iTunes app store today: arXiview. What better way to take out stress and at the same time learn objective C and write an iPhone app that at least one person (yourself) will use?
Continue reading “arXiview: A New iPhone App for the arXiv”

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Another Physicist To Washington

A press release from Caltech about Steve Koonin, who was the boss of my bosses during a SURF project and was a student of my undergraduate advisor at Caltech (and also responsible for severe drops in GPAs for many of the physicist students I knew at Caltech :)):

Steven Koonin, visiting associate in physics and former provost of Caltech, has been nominated by President Obama to serve as Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. The position requires Senate confirmation. Koonin is currently chief scientist for BP, where he is responsible for guiding the company’s long-range technology strategy, particularly in alternative and renewable energy sources. He has served on numerous advisory bodies for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy and its various national laboratories. Koonin’s research interests have included theoretical and computational physics, as well as global environmental science. He earned his BS at Caltech in 1972 and his PhD from MIT in 1975.

Note the dates between BS and PhD!

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Watch NSF Spend?

The NSF has put up a “recovery” page for the stimulus bill: http://www.nsf.gov/recovery. Interestingly it appears that there is an link to an rss feed for “weekly reports.” These appear to be excel files of the spending done by the NSF under the stimulus act as of that week (so far nada has been spent.)
Cool, now we can set up a betting pool for spending amounts as of a given date 🙂

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Earth to Republicans: Curing STDs Would Probably Be a Good Thing

On Morning Edition this morning, there was a story about the annual Conservative Political Action Conference which contained a line which made me guffaw:

Representative Paul Ryan: “[rant on spending in stimulus plan]…$400 million dollars to study sexually transmitted diseases!” [rant on about how his daughter is more responsible that President Obama]

Oh my! The horror. Actually spending money studying diseases that infect 65 million U.S. citizens. Yes Rep. Ryan, it would be a real shame if that money improved the lives of those 65 million people (and maybe it might even help, you know, those outside of the United States as well…I know, I know blasphemy.)
Now I’m all for the Republican’s ranting on the stimulus bill and spending, but really guys, why do you keep picking on the scientific studies (Jindal’s “something called volcano monitoring”, McCain’s Bear DNA)?

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Zotero 1.5 Beta and More

Zotero, a Firefox extension for managing research sources, has announced the release of Zotero 1.5 beta. I’ve heard good things from those who use Zotero. This major update adds some nifty synchronizing and automatic backup. The next step after this for Zotero, I believe, is adding sharing capabilities.
By the way does anyone know what happened to arXiv on you harddrive? It’s not been updated in over a year, which is a shame. Personally I find the arXiv’s lack of publicity accessible methods for obtaining the full text kind of a bummer. There is so much fun you could have given the ability to have the arXiv on your own local system. Sure there are bandwidth issues, but I’ve been hanging around long enough with computer scientists to know that there are serious good solutions to these problems as well.