Well after a lot of rumors, innuendo, and veto threats, the House supplemental appropriations bill -- the last hope for rectifying the shortfall for science in FY 2008 -- does not contain additional funding for science and technology but the Senate version does. The House version, which is scheduled to be debated and voted on today, only includes additional domestic funding for veterans education, unemployment benefits, and Medicaid and some additional international aid that the President requested. The Senate version, which is scheduled to have floor time next week, also includes $1.2 billion for science at NASA, NSF, NIH, and DOE. It is unlikely that the Senate will pass the supplemental with a veto proof majority so the question going forward is how to reconcile the two bills -- and how they will handle the science funding -- and avoid a Presidential veto. It is likely that much of the Senate funding will get stripped out in order to satisfy House Republicans and “Blue Dog” Democrats who would vote against the additional spending and to avoid a veto by the President. We’ll keep you posted as the debate and votes happen and let you know how it all shakes out in the end…
Update: Here is a breakdown of the funding for science the Senate is including in their version of the supplemental.
$150 million for NSF basic research activities and $50 million for four science/math education programs.
$400 million for DOE - $300 million for environmental management and $100 million for ACI, of which $50 million is fusion (ITER).
$200 million for NASA for a new account to reimburse NASA programs that helped to cover costs associated with Space Shuttle return to flight after 2003 Columbia accident.
$400 million for NIH.
This additional funding, while welcome, does not cover the short fall for the ACI-related agencies who lost out in the FY08 omnibus. But at least the Senate included science funding which is more than can be said for the House version. Sigh.
CRA Chair Dan Reed (who is also Microsoft's "Scalable and Multicore Strategist") will testify Thursday before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee to talk about the computational aspects of U.S. climate modeling.
This hearing will examine the current computing capacity to process models at the regional and local scales, the need for continuous observational data to support the models, and the basic science to support the improvement of the next generation of climate models to meet the needs of decisionmakers. The hearing will focus on developing applications, consumer expectations, and network operation.We'll have Dan's testimony here, links to any archived video and audio coverage of the proceedings, as well as our take on how it all went down, so stay tuned.
The Computing Community Consortium -- a partnership between CRA and the National Science Foundation that seeks to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer-range, more audacious research challenges, then work to realize them -- has launched its new blog, and it's definitely worth checking out.
Given the goal of CCC to get the community talking about research visions (and then setting to work on developing the most promising ones into clearly defined initiatives that could receive funding from various federal agencies), a blog seems like a reasonable way to help spur the discussions. Researchers on the CCC Council will author some of the initial (hopefully opinionated) pieces, but I think the hope is that the discussions will get carried on both in the open comments section and in some additional online fora.
Anyway, you can check it out at http://www.cccblog.org. They've already got a good summary of some of the activities of the new CCC "Big Data Computing Study Group" -- including the Hadoop Summit and the Data-Intensive Scalable Computing Symposium.
The blog also looks really nice -- I'm a little jealous and am wondering whether my IT guy (who is also CCC's IT guy) can set me up with the same nice Wordpress setup -- and features open commenting and the ability to subscribe to the articles via e-mail, which is very handy. Definitely worth checking out.
The saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, NSF and AAAS agree and are sponsoring the sixth annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. There are five awards categories: Photographs/Pictures, Illustrations/Drawings, Informational/Explanatory Graphics, Interactive Media, and Non-Interactive Media. The deadline for entries is May 31.
The premise of the Challenge is that science is often communicated through visuals better than words, particularly in our web and graphics culture. Winning entries in each category will be published in Science Magazine and Science Online as well as at the NSF web site. One of the winners will be on the cover of Science Magazine’s September 26 issue.
More information and winning entries from the previous five years can be found here.