Nathan Schneider, Chronicle of Higher Education
February 16, 2015
Nowadays, Alfredo García studies graffiti. His dissertation in sociology at Princeton University is an ethnography of a changing Miami neighborhood, which means he spends his time chatting up strangers, arranging interviews, and climbing ladders with street artists. But during his second year at Princeton, in 2012, he tried something else. With a bit of out-of-pocket money, he surveyed 420 people about how looking at different kinds of fake Facebook profiles affected their views about Islam. He obtained clear statistical findings and produced a paper that is now under review at a respected journal. In the process he didn’t meet a single one of his subjects; not one of them was a Princeton undergraduate required to take surveys for a class.
Mr. García used Mechanical Turk, an Amazon.com-owned platform that describes itself as "artificial artificial intelligence." What it offers has been called crowd-work, or digital piecework, or crowdsourcing—thousands of people around the world sitting at their computers and doing discrete tasks for pay. Each of Mr. García’s subjects earned a quarter for filling out a survey less than 10 minutes long—$1.50 an hour, that is. Read more
Paul Voosen, Chronicle of Higher Education
February 9, 2015
When President Obama called for a $215-million "precision medicine
initiative" in his State of the Union speech last month, he was behaving
very much like a politician of his times. This was mission-driven
research, squarely aimed at solving society’s ills—in this case, by
tailoring cures to individuals. This was not science for the sake of
discovery—the "endless frontier,"
as the architect of U.S. science policy after World War II, Vannevar
Bush, termed it. This was utilitarian. There was a promise of applied
results.
Over the past decade, these promises have repeatedly been made in the name of "grand challenges." Often invoking the Apollo program,
philanthropies and governments have urged researchers to pursue
scientific solutions to specific societal problems. The United States,
Canada, India, and Brazil have all embraced grand challenges, and the
European Union has made solving "societal challenges" a pillar of its
research agenda. Challenges abound. Even as such mission-driven research has grown in scale and ambition,
its ends have become increasingly specific, several science-policy
researchers and historians say. Basic science is still supported under
the mantle of applied work—see the National Institutes of Health—but it
feels like the idea of science for discovery’s sake has lost nearly all
its gravity. Read more
National Science Foundation
February 2, 2015
Today, National Science Foundation (NSF) Director France A. Córdova
outlined President Obama's fiscal year (FY) 2016 budget request to
Congress for NSF. The FY16 request calls for $7.7 billion for NSF, an increase of $379 million over FY15, which is an increase of 5.2 percent.
The budget request includes support for new approaches to research on
sustainability, global climate, the food-energy-water nexus, cognitive
science and neurosciences, and risk and resilience. It promotes advanced
manufacturing research and clean energy activities and sustains
investments in cybersecurity research. It also supports a range of
investments in developing the science, technology, engineering and
mathematics (STEM) workforce, including new efforts to broaden
participation in STEM fields. Read more
