A brief observation. This morning, the Washington Post sent out a news alert that “Obama promises more than 600,000 stimulus jobs” this summer. As if we needed another reminder as to a key review criteria for applications for ARRA funding.
Perhaps this would be a good time to remind you that in the NSF Dear Colleage letter that appeared and then disappeared and then reappeared, the Science of Science & Innovation Policy (SciSIP) Program is accepting 2-5 page proposals for RAPID funding that address the outcome of ARRA, such as:
- What was the contribution of the science investment to the creation and retention of jobs?
- What was the contribution of the science investment to science and technology industries?
- What scientific or technological advances were achieved?
- What was the impact on the scientific workforce?
In keeping with the Presidential focus on openness and transparency in government, proposals might also examine and evaluate different approaches to building appropriate platforms for tracking and assessing science investments across the federal government as well as ways to visually convey the information to policy makers and the American public.
Edward Tufte, your country needs you.
ama said
I hope NSF gets some good apps for this–I think it’s critical that we, as scientists, take an evidence-based approach to evaluating the efficacy of the stimulus package (and all government science spending, for that matter). The usefulness of ARRA funding seems, so far, to have been taken for granted by most folks I’ve talked to, but as we saw from the Great Doubling of ’90s-era NIH funding, these things can have some serious unintended consequences, ie, a large increase in PhDs and postdocs without a proportional increase in tenure track jobs, as well as a demographic bulge of labs that got funded at the 30th %ile and are SOL in the age of 12% paylines.
I wish NIH had taken the opportunity to put aside a few bucks to have somebody, anybody, rewrite the truly stupendously execrable SF424 forms package, whose awfulness cannot be overstated.
D said
Although NIH would like to take credit for the SF424, it can’t. It was a form designed by contractors for the OMB to be used by ALL federal agencies. A prime example of the price you pay for designing something by committee.
writedit said
Really? The NIH would like to take credit for the SF424? It has improved with age and revisions but, as ama notes, still lacks literary flow. – writedit
whimple said
… as well as a demographic bulge of labs that got funded at the 30th %ile and are SOL in the age of 12% paylines.
It’s not just these labs that are SOL. This lack of nimbleness can also be called a failure of the academic tenure system. The increasingly frantic newsletters from the AAUP seem to also be evidence along these lines.
Hwa Shi-Hsia said
I ❤ Edward Tufte. Although I've been deliberately stretching what he said because it's fun to tell people "PowerPoint killed the astronauts".
writedit said
I just realized I forgot to add a bit about an item in Science last Friday about the administration claims on job creation and the economic models used to estimate how many jobs are created and “sustained”. With regard to ARRA reporting at Universities: