{"id":10728,"date":"2014-11-20T21:13:36","date_gmt":"2014-11-20T21:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=10728"},"modified":"2014-11-20T21:13:36","modified_gmt":"2014-11-20T21:13:36","slug":"a-breakthrough-donation-for-computer-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2014\/11\/20\/a-breakthrough-donation-for-computer-science\/","title":{"rendered":"A Breakthrough Donation for Computer Science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.computationalcomplexity.org\/2014\/11\/a-november-to-remember.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Lance Fortnow<\/a>\u00a0has a post summarizing some of the news affecting the CS community over the past month, including updates on various prizes as well as the significant media attention focusing on physics- and\u00a0math-related topics such as movies about Turing and Hawking as well as Terrence Tao on the <a href=\"http:\/\/thecolbertreport.cc.com\/videos\/6wtwlg\/terence-tao\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Colbert Report<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">From his post, I just learned that former Microsoft chief executive Steven Ballmer is making a <a href=\"http:\/\/bits.blogs.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/13\/gift-from-ballmer-will-expand-computer-science-faculty-at-harvard\/?_r=4\">donation<\/a> to Harvard that\u00a0will endow twelve&#8212;that&#8217;s right, 12&#8212;new tenured and tenure-track faculty positions in computer science. This is fantastic news and will have a huge positive impact on Harvard CS.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">One thing missing from Lance&#8217;s list was news about the Breakthrough Prizes in mathematics and fundamental physics. In case you&#8217;ve been living under a rock, these prizes give\u00a0a very hefty US $3 million purse to the chosen recipients. The winners\u00a0are all luminaries in their field, and it&#8217;s great to see them get recognition for their outstanding work.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">On the other hand, juxtaposing Ballmer&#8217;s donation and the Breakthrough Prizes couldn&#8217;t offer a starker contrast.\u00a0It costs the same amount&#8212;$3\u00a0million&#8212;to endow a university full\u00a0professor with appointments in more than one discipline at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/dukeforward.duke.edu\/ways-to-give\/endowment\/endowment-giving\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Duke University<\/a>.\u00a0My initial googling would suggest that this is a pretty typical figure at top-tier institutions.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">What if, instead of a offering a cash prize to the Breakthrough Prize winners, the reward was an upgrade to\u00a0an endowed chair at the current institution subject to\u00a0the condition that the existing position would go to\u00a0a new tenured or tenure-track hire in the same field? This seems to be a much better investment in science\u00a0overall because it will help build a community of researchers around the prize winner, and the marginal benefit to this community from associating with the prize winner is likely far greater than any extra incentive the researchers might get within the current system to simply strive\u00a0to win $3M cash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lance Fortnow\u00a0has a post summarizing some of the news affecting the CS community over the past month, including updates on various prizes as well as the significant media attention focusing on physics- and\u00a0math-related topics such as movies about Turing and Hawking as well as Terrence Tao on the Colbert Report. From his post, I just &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2014\/11\/20\/a-breakthrough-donation-for-computer-science\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A Breakthrough Donation for Computer Science&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,20,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2","category-computer-science","category-prize"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}