First, we will take a look at the National Science Foundation (NSF) – Congress created the NSF in 1950 to promote the progress of science. For this purpose, NSF makes more than 10,000 new grant awards annually, many of these grants fund worthy research in the hard sciences. Recently, however NSF has funded some more questionable projects – $750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.
via Eric Cantor – Citizen Review. There is a huge problem with this plan, namely how are average citizens (the vast majority non-scientists or never having written a NSF grant) supposed to identify grants that are honestly wasteful versus those that they either just disagree with or just don’t even understand. Though leave it to a politician to leave scientific decisions to average citizens with no training in science.
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