The so-called "302(b) allocations" for the House Appropriations committee have been released and they look very positive for those of us anxious to see whether Congress will continue its commitment to double the budgets of some key federal science agencies. The 302(b)'s are the allocations each of the subcommittees responsible for producing the 12 appropriations bills necessary to keep the federal government operating each year gets to spend on their particular bill. If the Budget Resolution determined the overall size of the federal discretionary spending "pie," the 302(b) allocations determine the size of each slice.
For FY 2008, the subcommittees that have jurisdiction over some of the science agencies we care about -- NSF, NIST, DOE Sci, NIH, NASA, and DOD -- have each gotten pretty reasonable-sized slices. The House Commerce, Science, Justice subcommittee, which determines funding for NSF, NIST, NASA and NOAA, received from the Congressional leadership a bump of $3 billion to their allocation compared with last year -- $53.35 billion for FY 08 vs. $50.34 for FY 07 -- a level $2.11 billion higher than the President requested for FY 08.
The Energy and Water Committee received a $1.30 billion bump -- enough to support a healthy increase to the Department of Energy's Office of Science in the first FY 08 appropriations bill to get marked up, as we reported previously. The Labor/HHS/Education committee, which funds NIH, received a $5.53 billion bump -- more than $9 billion higher than the Administration requested for FY 08.
While these increases don't guarantee the appropriators will continue Congress' commitment to doubling the budgets of NSF, NIST and DOE Sci, as called for in both the President's American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda, it certainly does make the job of finding money to fund the increases a whole lot easier. We'll keep an eye on the process and let you know how it goes. So far, so good.
While we see articles about the decline of computer science majors, particularly women, almost daily, the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece (sub. req’d.) about what a couple of universities are doing to attract and retain women in computer science programs.
Lucy Sanders of the National Center for Women in Information Technology has perhaps the key quote in the piece about the problem of recruiting and retaining computer science majors. "You walk into an intro class, and you start learning a programming language that eventually gets a machine to spit out a string of numbers," says Lucy Sanders, chief executive of the women-and-technology center. "That's not what computing is about. Computing is about solving real problems in medicine, or oceanography, and that's what people who do it love. But the intro courses don't teach that at all."
We've also noted on CRA's Computing Research Policy Tumble Log a couple of related articles in the last few days. One from Ars Technica, and another that's an AP story.
Update: The article does confuse enrollment and interest in computing at one point. Interest in computer science as a major among women dropped 70 percent between 2000 and 2005, not actual enrollment....
The Department of Energy's Office of Science would see significant increases under the FY 2008 House Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill marked up by the E&W Approps Subcommittee yesterday. Though we don't yet have all the detail about increases in individual accounts, we do know that the Office of Science would see an overall increase to $4.516 billion in FY 2008, which is $120 million above the President's request for FY 2008 and $719 million above the FY 2007 level, or an increase of 18.9 percent.
Presumably the increases in DOE Science will be spread reasonably equitably throughout the agency, which would mean the agency's Advanced Scientific Computing Research program should see an equally significant increase in FY 08. But we won't see real detail until the full appropriations committee marks up the bill in June.
For now, it's good to know that the appropriators appear prepared to continue their commitment to doubling the budgets of key federal science agencies, as spelled out in the President's American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda. Next up should be the House version of the Commerce, Science, Justice appropriations, which will include funding for the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We'll have all the details as we get 'em...
The National Science Foundation today announced it has selected BBN Technologies to create and run the project office for its proposed Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) research facility. BBN, which won the original government contract to build the ARPANET in 1969, will manage the planning and design of the GENI network facility, in consultation with the research community and the GENI Science Council.
GENI is conceived as a large-scale research instrument to test and mature a wide range of research ideas in data communications and distributed systems. While GENI itself isn't a replacement for the current Internet (or any other communications technology), it is designed to create an environment within which researchers can pursue ideas and develop technologies that might lead to an Internet fundamentally better than the current one.
Initially, the job of the GENI Program Office (GPO) will be to develop detailed engineering plans and costs for the facility. NSF's original solicitation for the GPO estimated a budget of up to $12.5 million a year for four years ($2.5 million a year for administrative costs, $10 million for development and prototyping). GENI still has quite a few hurdles to jump in the NSF approval process, but the naming of a GPO contractor, coupled with the CCC's naming of a GENI Science Council in March, should provide more heft to the effort.
The GPO is online now and includes this useful FAQ.
The BBN press release is here.
NSF's Press Release: Three Wishes for a Future Internet? GENI Project Will Soon Be At Your Command
The House and Senate have announced a conference agreement of the Joint Budget Resolution for FY08 (PDF), a key step in the annual appropriations process once it's passed by both chambers. The General Science, Space and Technology account, known as Function 250, is the total budget amount for NASA (except aviation programs), NSF, DOE Office of Science and DHS S&T. Research funding in Function 250 fares well in the conference agreement, growing by $1.7 billion over the FY 2007 level, which budget committee members intend to use to “provide significant increases for NSF and the DOE Office of Science and fully fund the President’s FY2008 request for NASA at $17.3 billion” (according to the report accompanying the resolution).
While this sounds like great news, like everything in Washington, it isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds. As we wrote in this space on the FY07 budget resolution (PDF), the budget resolution really only helps the appropriators and the congressional leadership set the overall level of funding for the year, not the agency-by-agency numbers. The leadership will use the resolution to determine how much money goes to each appropriations subcommittee and the subcommittee will then decide how much each agency in their jurisdiction gets. This all means that we need to continue working to ensure that everyone on the Hill knows how important basic research funding is and that the Appropriations bills should fully fund the American Competitiveness Initiative.
We will keep you updated as the Appropriations process moves forward.
The House Armed Services Committee Friday passed its version of the FY 2008 Defense Authorization bill (H.R. 1585). The authorization includes increases for Army and Navy basic research and keeps Air Force basic research funding level. Defense wide basic research, which includes DARPA, is up $22.25 million with an increase of $8 million for “semiconductor focus research” in the Defense Research Sciences.
The committee released a report Monday for the authorization bill and it includes language stating the committee’s concern with the Department of Defense science and technology research budget requests, specifically basic research. The committee requests a report from the Secretary of Defense that “shall also outline a long-term, strategic plan for how the Department believes a sustained increase in funding for DOD basic research could be effectively utilized.”
It also included language regarding the education programs at the department and shifted funds between the programs that the department requested while staying at the same total level of funding. The committee gave a lower authorization to the Pre-engineering modules, a new program, at $3.5 million and transferred that money to the Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) funded at $27 million, Materials World Modules (MWM) funded at $3.5 million, and the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowships funded at $7.4 million.
Thanks to Jason Van Wey of MIT for providing the breakdown and report language information.
Last June, CRA and he National Institutes of Health jointly hosted a workshop motivated by the following two observations (from the 2004 NIH Roadmap):
The success of computational biology is shown by the fact that computation has become integral and critical to modern biomedical research.It seems rational to conclude (as the attendees of the workshop concluded) that the productive synergies between the two fields can accelerate research in both, but only if the challenges are addressed through cooperative effort. So, the workshop attendees -- leaders in computing and biomedicine, along with NIH Program Directors -- aimed to address these challenges by developing a "list of focused recommendations and action items that would guide the NIH and computing communities in addressing current impediments to fully realizing effective collaborations at the interface between computing and biomedical research." Those recommendations are now available (pdf) as a 14 page report....
Because computation is integral to biomedical research, its deficiencies have become significant limiters on the rate of progress of biomedical research.
The workshop participants ultimately came to agreement on six recommendations, which are listed in some detail in the report but that I'll attempt to summarize here:
The report includes much more detail for each of the recommendations, including a timeline for implementation and an estimated cost for each. The report also includes more detail on the particular computing research areas the participants thought deserved particular attention.
The whole thing is only 14 pages and is a quick read -- well worth it.
Update: (5/29/07) -- Dan Reed has a lot more of the backstory for the report on his blog today.
The following is brought to you by your friends at the CCC...:
Under an agreement with the National Science Foundation, the Computing Research Association (CRA) has established the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to engage the computing research community in articulating and pursuing longer-term research visions - visions that will capture the imagination of our community and of the public at large.
The CCC invites your engagement in this process! At the Federated Computing Research Conference in San Diego during the second week in June, five special talks will sketch the possibilities. These talks are intended to be inspirational, motivational, and accessible. Please join us!
Monday June 11, 6-7 p.m., Grand Exhibit Hall
Christos Papadimitriou, UC Berkeley
The Algorithmic Lens: How the Sciences are Being Transformed by the Computational Perspective
Abstract
Tuesday June 12, 6-7 p.m., Grand Exhibit Hall
Bob Colwell, Independent Consultant
Future of Computer Architecture '07
Abstract
Wednesday June 13, 6-7 p.m., Grand Exhibit Hall
Randal Bryant, Carnegie Mellon University
Data-Intensive Super Computing: Taking Google-Style Computing Beyond Web Search
Abstract
Thursday June 14, 6-7 p.m., Grand Exhibit Hall
Scott Shenker, UC Berkeley
We Dream of GENI: Exploring Radical Network Designs
Abstract
Friday June 15, 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m., Grand Exhibit Hall (FCRC Keynote Talk)
Ed Lazowska, University of Washington and Chair, Computing Community Consortium
Computer Science: Past, Present and Future
Abstract
More info here.
David Broder writes about the America COMPETES Act in his column today at the Washington Post. It contains this great quote from Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), one of the sponsors of the Act:
"Last week," he said, "while the media covered Iraq and U.S. attorneys, the Senate spent three days debating and passing perhaps the most important piece of legislation of this two-year session. Almost no one noticed."Read the whole thing.Alexander has a point. The bill, boldly named the America Competes Act, authorized an additional $16 billion over four years as part of a $60 billion effort to "double spending for physical sciences research, recruit 10,000 new math and science teachers and retrain 250,000 more, provide grants to researchers and invest more in high-risk, high-payoff research."
The National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 1867), which we've discussed previously, will be on the House floor today. The bill authorizes appropriations at the agency (which is not the same as actually funding the agency -- only the appropriations committee can do that -- but is still a necessary (and symbolic) step in getting funding for the agency) at the levels called for in the President's American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda -- a trajectory that would double the agency's budget over the next seven years.
It's likely the bill will pass today without much difficulty. There are, however, a whole slate of amendments proposed, some of which are pretty awful (though not likely to pass). For example, there are amendments from Reps. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) and John Campbell (R-CA) that would specifically prohibit funding of nine already-funded grants in NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economics directorate, based apparently on their "silly" titles. Here are the grants targeted:
There are a number of reasons amendments like this are a bad idea. The primary one is that the NSF peer-review system, while arguably not perfect (well, far from perfect), is still likely a much more reliable way of choosing meritorious research than Congressional intervention. It's also pretty reasonable to assert that titles are not the best way to judge the worthiness of research.the reproductive aging and symptom experience at midlife among Bangladeshi Immigrants, Sedentees, and White London Neighbors; the diet and social stratification in ancient Puerto Rico; archives of Andean Knotted-String Records; the accuracy in the cross-cultural understanding of others’ emotions; bison hunting on the late prehistoric Great Plains; team versus individual play; sexual politics of waste in Dakar, Senegal; social relationships and reproductive strategies of Phayre’s Leaf Monkeys; and cognitive model of superstitious belief.
Additionally, there's an interesting (and bad) amendment proposed by Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL) that would tie any increases in the NSF budget to proportional increases at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The amendment, Weldon says in a press release, would "ensure that NASA's budget is not raided to fund the NSF increase." As someone who has been doing science policy work for the better part of a decade, it amuses a little to think of NASA in the role of victim to NSF, as I've watched innumerable times in the past as NASA increases swallowed up all the available funding room in VA/HUD appropriations bills that shortchanged NSF and NIST. But the Weldon amendment is an innovative approach to "protecting" NASA, by trying to link the two agencies' budgets. It might, however, set an awkward precedent. One could imagine linking the National Institutes of Health and NASA, or NIH and NSF, or NSF and DOE, or NSF and NIST and NIH...the number of permutations just among the science agencies are enormous. But why stop there? We could link NSF and the Veterans Administration. The Department of Labor to NIH. Or NASA and the Department of Transportation (wait, that could almost make sense). In any case, the idea of linking two agencies with disparate missions together is probably not sound policy, and I would argue that the best way to "protect" NASA funding (which isn't actually at risk because of the NSF Authorization) is to ensure NASA is pursuing a compelling mission for the Nation.
You can find a complete list of amendments being considered today on THOMAS. We'll try to keep score here throughout the day.
One other piece of news about the bill is that it appears H.R. 1867 will get conferenced with the Senate as part of the S. 761 (the "America COMPETES Act") conference. This is actually very good news as it means the NSF Authorization has a real chance of enactment. While the bill is expected to pass the House without much difficulty, it wasn't clear that the Senate had much of an interest in moving it's own version of the bill, simply because they'd already passed an NSF authorization as part of S. 761. Now it appears that there's an inclination to take the NSF-specific portions of that bill out and use them as a conference vehicle for H.R. 1867. We'll have more as we learn more, but in short, this means that there's a potential path to enactment that is relatively free of big bumps....
Update: (5/3/07 12:20 am) -- The bill passed overwhelmingly (399-17). The Garrett and Campbell amendments both failed, and the Weldon amendment was subject to a point of order that the NASA provisions weren't germane to the bill -- a point of order that was sustained. So great news all around!
...on Jim Horning's Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be blog. The first, on a recent cyber security hearing on the Hill has a nice extended quote from the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and S&T of the House Committee on Homeland Security, complaining about the gutting of the cyber security R&D budget at DHS.
The second is a summary of a paper by Robert Meyer and Michel Cukier on the impact of (perceived) user gender on the cyber attack threat (quick summary: "females" are much more likely to get attacked), which concludes with this great quote from Jim:
If this hostility is anywhere near the typical Internet experience, is it any wonder that computing and IT are increasingly losing the women?"
A resolution to honor Frances E. Allen, the 2006 recipient of ACM's A.M. Turing Award, passed the House today. House Concurrent Resolution 95 was introduced by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and reported out of the House Science and Technology Committee last week.
We wrote about Dr. Allen here when the Turning Award was announced in February. She was the first woman to receive the award since it was first given forty years ago. Dr. Allen was an IBM Fellow at the TJ Watson Research Center.
A press release from the House Science and Technology Committee stated:
H. Con. Res. 95 recognizes her achievements in computer research and development while working at IBM Corporation, and salutes the Turing Award Committee for recognizing the contributions of women to the field of computing."It is certainly telling that women, who earn more than half of all undergraduate degrees in this country and make up more than half of the professional workforce, represent only 25% percent of all information technology workers," Woolsey said. "Dr. Allen has been an inspirational mentor to younger researchers and a leader within the computing community and it is clear that Dr. Allen deserves recognition for all of the tireless work she has done to promote women's role in computing."
Interesting article (requires free registration) on the innovation agenda in the San Jose Mercury News. While it does focus mostly on the energy and environmental areas that could be helped, it also touches on almost all aspects of the overall innovation agenda such as funding basic research and increasing STEM K-12 teachers. There is also a good quote from Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) who said, "I'm a fiscal conservative, but the dollars we invest in basic research will come back to us in spades in terms of stimulating economic activity and helping the United States remain at the forefront of global innovation."