Please go to his website and tell him this is a bad idea:

http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm

More likely it was, "University Academics" "created computer models" that have been tested using "soccer players"... and other federally funded researchers are studying new methods of sound recording, which could be used by the Video Game Industry (a multi-billion dollar industry BTW). Maybe we should give some money to study the effects of prayer.

Understanding the sound of breaking glass could be used for autonomous security systems. Metrics to quantify player performance on a team could be used to understand cooperative behavior of team activities like military exercises or the performance of political groups.

It is just myopic people like this should not be in power. This is movement builds on Sarah Palin's "Fruit Fly" research comment. It is just ignorant.

I really like the idea of developing a community website (not unlike Videosift) as a tool to promote the funding of some areas of research. A well designed website providing brief but informative notes on research areas, projects, initial results, etc., given wide promotion, would be interesting, as an experiment (with no up or down voting on who actually gets money, just on the perceived value of the ideas).


One rough hypothesis is that this will lead to cuts in funding to research projects that lack, in the eyes of the lay person, obvious scientific/social importance simply because many of these research areas/projects may be too abstract for a lay person to grasp from the info provided. Thus we will be effectively culling programs in a very poorly informed way, possibly leading to an age of research more focused on immediate social/commercial results. So with something like bird mating behavior vs. pesticide environmental toxicity... people will choose pesticide toxicity without even weighing the possibility that the bird research may be relevant to agricultural, safe air travel, disease, etc..


I say we should test this hypothesis, and then debate about whether and in what situations it worked, and whether some form of this idea could be a good or bad way to help delegate our finite resources.


p.s. I'm writing this on an excellent online community's comment page, a situation which may be influencing my optimism for the IDEA of this online experiment. If you visit the actual webpage for this project its garbage... 'dig through NSF's website and paste in research titles that sound wasteful', which will likely lead to anything fruitfly or C.elegans related being dumped on the guy's assistants to dig through... thats a waste of time, but a more powerful, well designed site could be awesome.

Done.

Moving this video to MycroftHomlz's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.