Over Mountain, Under Mountain

Eva is busy being traveled to this week. So, I am taking on the travel guide duties. Apologies in advance.

Recently, we took our family up to Boone, NC. Our daughters experienced Grandfather Mountain, including an animal park that provides a home to individuals from indigenous species that cannot live in the wild (usually the fault of thoughtless humans). They also got their first experience in natural caverns at Linville Caverns.

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We also spent hours cruising the Blue Ridge Parkway while small children napped, but I don’t have pictures of that due to making sure I did not drive off the edge of mountains. This tweet was slightly dishonest in its time frame. I wrote it after the car had come to a full and complete stop.

You can follow all our science-y travels on the Have Science Will Travel map.Screen Shot 2013-05-20 at 9.59.08 PM

Song of the Semi-Regular Time Unit

Like you, I too have been missing Marie-Claire‘s regular Song of the Week picks. Fortunately for science education, but unfortunately for us, she has been too busy getting situated as the first Research Chair in Science Education and Public Engagement. How busy? Too busy to get her Barry (Jack Black in High Fidelity) on.

I scratch that itch by tuning into the Pandora station we created by seeding it with all the artists we could from past Songs of the Week (Marie-Claire’s music selections are more eclectic than Pandora’s library at times) – KFPR 1865AM*.

KFPR 1865AM Button

Currently playing while I type? Amos Lee’s “Sweet Pea”.

*K (West of the Mississippi) + FP (Finch & Pea) + R (Radio) 1865 (Year Mendel published “Experiments in Plant Hybridization”) + AM (cause we are old school)

Sunday Science Poem: Lord Byron’s Post-Apocalyptic Vision

‘Darkness’, Lord Byron (1816)

HubertLouvreRuinsDarwin’s argument for evolution by natural selection gets a lot of attention as the science bombshell of the 19th century that shocked the sensibilities of Victorian society, but there was an equally consequential, if less dramatic, scientific development that took place much earlier in the century, a development that left a deep impression on the generation before Darwin: William Herschel’s discovery that the universe is much bigger and much older than nearly anyone had imagined.

William Herschel’s scientific findings, made with his ever larger telescopes, were a frequent target of Romantic poets’ imaginations, and towards the end of his career, Herschel’s speculations about the past and future of the cosmos fed Romantic angst over the role of God and humanity in what now seemed to be a jaw-droppingly vast cosmic stage.

Among Herschel’s more disturbing ideas is the notion of a natural end to the Milky Way. As Richard Holmes notes in The Age of Wonder, Herschel jarred the poet Thomas Campbell by explaining that the night sky was filled with “many distant stars [that] had probably ‘ceased to exist’ millions of years ago, and that looking up into the night sky we were seeing a stellar landscape that was not really there at all. The sky was full of ghosts.”1 Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Lord Byron’s Post-Apocalyptic Vision”

Science Caturday: Forces are Unbalanced!

Physics Kitteh demonstrates one aspect of Newton’s second law of motion. Oh dear, mass and acceleration both appear rather high.  The net force  with which Physics Kitteh hits that chair could be substantial.

oh-noes-i-has-let-go

Chemistry Cat says:  extra ‘nip for Physics Kitteh! Thanks for the lesson and see you next Caturday.

Image via Cheezburger.com

The paradox of more science funding, less research… we’ve seen this before

Does this sound familiar?

Since 19XX, overall federal research funding in all fields has shown a steady increase, resulting in greater than 40 percent growth (adjusted for inflation) from 19XX to 19XX. University-based researchers have been the primary beneficiaries of this growth. Although the data are harder to come by, relevant Figures from [Agency X] and several universities indicate that the growth in funding for XXX research has been comparable to these overall trends.

However, these figures lump together many different kinds of projects and funders. For example, one element of xxx funding is the base-funded (or core) program, which is the primary source of support for small science endeavors. This report looks at base-funded programs at both NSF and [Agency X] and finds, contrary to the trends described above, that they have not even kept up with inflation and have certainly not been able to keep pace with the explosion in grant requests. As a result, grant sizes have decreased, and the percentage of proposals accepted has dropped. A rough calculation shows that researchers must now write two to four proposals per year to remain funded, up from one or two in 19XX. Of course, increasing the time spent searching for support means that less time is spent on productive research. Rising university overhead and fringe benefit costs, that consume more and more of each grant dollar exacerbate this problem. Clearly, the base-funded program has not participated proportionately in the overall XXX research funding increase. Although we do not attempt to quantify the effect this has had on the quality of science produced, we do find that the core program has become much less efficient during the past decade. We also infer that the lion’s share of new funding has gone into project-specific funding, most of which involves big science efforts.

I’ve blanked out a few things… can you guess what area of research and what time period this refers to? The answer is below the fold. Continue reading “The paradox of more science funding, less research… we’ve seen this before”