Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Funding Type: Discretionary,Grant
Total Available: N/A
Award Ceiling: N/A
Deadline: 10.31.10
Eligibility: Unrestricted

Description:
This multidisciplinary program supports basic research in solid state and materials chemistry comprising the elucidation of the atomic and molecular basis for material development and properties in the solid state from the nanoscale to the bulk. General areas of interest include but are not limited to innovative approaches to design, synthesis, bulk crystal and/or film growth, and characterization of novel organic, inorganic, and hybrid materials, as well as liquid crystal materials and multi-component material systems exhibiting new phenomena and/or providing new scientific insights into structure/composition/property relationships in the solid state. Relevant topics include original material design principles, new approaches to assembly or crystalline material growth, characterization of new material phenomena or superior behavior, investigations of surface and interfacial effects on material system structures and properties, and unraveling the relationships between structure/composition (e.g. self- or program-assembled materials, crystalline material growth, and nanostructured material systems) and properties (e.g. charge, ionic, thermal or spin transport, exciton diffusion, chemical reactivity and selectivity, etc.). Development of new organic solid state materials, environmentally-safe and sustainable materials, and fundamental studies of novel material and material systems for efficient energy harvesting, conversion and storage are encouraged. The SSMC program works closely with other programs within the Division of Materials Research (DMR) and in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Engineering (ENG) directorates to accommodate the multidisciplinary nature of proposal submissions.

Radiosurgery

Topic editor Nader Pouratian of the Department of Neurosurgery, David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California–Los Angeles, speaks with Drs. Alberto Franzin and Carlo Serra of the Department of Neurosurgery and Radiosurgery, Division of Neuroscience, IRCCS San Raffaele, Milan, Italy. Their article is entitled “Evaluation of hearing function after Gamma Knife surgery of vestibular schwannomas.”

Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Funding Type: Discretionary, Cooperative Agreement
Total Available: $11.3 Million
Award Ceiling: $2.5 Million
Deadline: 02.02.10
Eligibility: Institutions of Higher Education

Description:
The Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service (SFS) program seeks to increase the number of qualified students entering the fields of information assurance and computer security and to increase the capacity of the United States higher education enterprise to continue to produce professionals in these fields to meet the needs of our increasingly technological society. The SFS program is composed of two tracks:The Scholarship Track provides funding to colleges and universities to award scholarships to students in the information assurance and computer security fields. Scholarship recipients shall pursue academic programs in information assurance for the final two years of undergraduate study, or for two years of master’s-level study, or for the final two years of Ph.D.-level study. These students will participate as a cohort during their two years of study and activities, including a summer internship in the Federal Government. A limited number of students may be placed in National Laboratories and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). This number shall be set by the program office each year.

Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Funding Type: Discretionary, Grant
Total Available: N/A
Award Ceiling: $4 Million
Deadline: 01.25.10
Eligibility: Institutions of Higher Education and Nonprofits

Description:
A virtual organization is a group of individuals whose members and resources may be dispersed geographically, but who function as a coherent unit through the use of cyberinfrastructure. Virtual organizations are increasingly central to the science and engineering projects funded by the National Science Foundation. Focused investments in sociotechnical analyses of virtual organizations are necessary to harness their full potential and the promise they offer for discovery and learning. The Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS) program supports fundamental scientific research, particularly advances in social, organizational and design science understanding, directed at advancing the understanding of how to develop virtual organizations and under what conditions virtual organizations can enable and enhance scientific, engineering, and education production and innovation. Levels of analysis may include (but are not limited to) individuals, groups, organizations, and institutional arrangements. Disciplinary perspectives may include (but are not limited to) anthropology, complexity sciences, computer and information sciences, decision and management sciences, economics, engineering, organization theory, organizational behavior, social and industrial psychology, public administration, political science and sociology. Research methods may span a broad variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, including (but not limited to): ethnographies, surveys, simulation studies, experiments, comparative case studies, and network analyses. VOSS funded research must be grounded in theory and rooted in empirical methods. It must produce broadly applicable and transferable results that augment knowledge and practice of virtual organizations as a modality. VOSS does not support proposals that aim to implement or evaluate individual virtual organizations.

Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Funding Type: Discretionary, Cooperative Agreement
Total Available: $16 Million
Award Ceiling: $1.5 Million
Deadline: 01.14.10
Eligibility: Unrestricted

Description:
The National Science Foundation (NSF) invites investigators at U.S. organizations to submit proposals to conduct research about the Arctic. Arctic research includes field and modeling studies and data analysis in and about the arctic region. The goal of the NSF Division of Arctic Sciences is to gain a better understanding of the Arctic’s physical, biological, geological, chemical, social and cultural processes, and the interactions of ocean, land, atmosphere, biological, and human systems in the Arctic. The Division of Arctic Sciences and other NSF programs support projects that contribute to the development of the next generation of researchers and scientific literacy for all ages through education, outreach, and broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Program representatives from OPP and other non-OPP NSF programs that support arctic research coordinate across NSF, including joint review and funding of arctic proposals and mutual support of special projects with high logistical costs.

Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Funding Type: Discretionary, Grant
Total Available: $8.8 Million
Award Ceiling: N/A
Deadline: 11.02.10
Eligibility: Unrestricted

Description:
The program in Geometric Analysis supports research on differential geometry and its relation to partial differential equations and variational principles; aspects of global analysis, including the differential geometry of complex manifolds and geometric Lie group theory; geometric methods in modern mathematical physics; and geometry of convex sets, integral geometry, and related geometric topics.

Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Funding Type: Discretionary, Grant
Total Available: N/A
Award Ceiling: N/A
Deadline: 10.31.10
Eligibility: Unrestricted

Description:
This program supports theoretical and computational materials research and education in the topical areas represented in DMR programs, including condensed matter physics, polymers, solid-state and materials chemistry, metals and nanostructures, electronic and photonic materials, ceramics, and biomaterials. The program supports fundamental research that advances conceptual, analytical, and computational techniques for materials research. A broad spectrum of research is supported using electronic structure methods, many-body theory, statistical mechanics, and Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations, along with other techniques, many involving advanced scientific computing. Emphasis is on approaches that begin at the smallest appropriate length scale, such as electronic, atomic, molecular, nano-, micro-, and mesoscale, required to yield fundamental insight into material properties, processes, and behavior and to reveal new materials phenomena. Areas of recent interest include, but are not limited to: strongly correlated electron systems; low-dimensional systems; nonequilibrium phenomena, including pattern formation, microstructural evolution, and fracture; high-temperature superconductivity; nanostructured materials and mesoscale phenomena; quantum coherence and its control; and soft condensed matter, including systems of biological interest.

Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Funding Type: Discretionary, Grant
Total Available: N/A
Award Ceiling: N/A
Deadline: 10.31.10
Eligibility: Unrestricted

Description:
The Biomaterials Program supports fundamental research at the intersection of the physical, chemical, and biological sciences. Proposals focused on the preparation, characterization, structure-property relationships, and applications of biomaterials are encouraged. Emphasis is on novel design of biomaterials, including bioderived, bioinspired, biomimetic and biocompatible materials, discovery of new phenomena, and the combination of experiment with theory and/or simulation. General areas of interest include, but are not restricted to, self- and directed molecular assemblies, surfaces and interfaces, membranes and vesicles, gels and networks, carriers and drug delivery systems, smart and self-healing systems, tissue culture scaffolds, mineralization, hybrids and composites, multi-functional biomaterials such as photonic and electronic biomaterials, biomaterials for energy harvesting, conversion and storage, and biomaterials for sensors and actuators.

Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Funding Type: Discretionary, Grant
Total Available: $36 Million
Award Ceiling: N/A
Deadline: 02.04.10
Eligibility: Institutions of Higher Education, Nonprofits

Description:
Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) is NSF’s bold five-year initiative to create revolutionary science and engineering research outcomes made possible by innovations and advances in computational thinking. Computational thinking is defined comprehensively to encompass computational concepts, methods, models, algorithms, and tools. Applied in challenging science and engineering research and education contexts, computational thinking promises a profound impact on the Nation’s ability to generate and apply new knowledge. Collectively, CDI research outcomes are expected to produce paradigm shifts in our understanding of a wide range of science and engineering phenomena and socio-technical innovations that create new wealth and enhance the national quality of life. CDI seeks ambitious, transformative, multidisciplinary research proposals within or across the following three thematic areas:

1. From Data to Knowledge: enhancing human cognition and generating new knowledge from a wealth of heterogeneous digital data;
2. Understanding Complexity in Natural, Built, and Social Systems: deriving fundamental insights on systems comprising multiple interacting elements; and
3. Virtual Organizations: enhancing discovery and innovation by bringing people and resources together across institutional, geographical and cultural boundaries.

The following video from the National Science Foundation gives a brief introduction to the impact of the theory of evolution by natural selection on contemporary environmental pressures and our society.

From The National Science Foundation:

Some of evolution science’s brightest minds discuss the impacts of “On the Origin of Species” in this introductory video for the National Science Foundation’s new special report entitled Evolution of Evolution: 150 Years of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”

Today, November 24th, 2009, marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s seminal work On the Origin of Species. In contrast to a common misconception, Darwin did not conceive of the idea of evolution, as his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had previously hypothesized that animals were descended from a single living “filament” long ago; more on the history of evolutionary thought can be found here. What Darwin, and who was to become his colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, described was the mechanism – Natural Selection – by which evolution acts on all living creatures, as elucidated from multiple lines of evidence. They presented their theory together as On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection which was published in two scientific papers to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858.

In celebration of this monumental event the National Science Foundation has launched an interactive website called the Evolution of Evolution that highlights the timeline associated with the theory and it’s impact on science and society.  Click through to reach the website.

Det er lett å bli villedet på det økologiske markedet. Noen merker kaller seg for økologisk uten å være det. Noen er økologiske uten å skilte med det, og andre er semi-økologiske det vil si at de bruker noen økolgiske ingredienser, og andre ingredienser som ikke er det. Det er også en del serier som er naturlige, uten å være økologiske.

Huden vår er kroppens største organ, og 67% av det som smøres på huden taes opp av kroppen. Legg derfor vekt på at dusj-såper, body lotion og ansiktsprodukter er av den beste kvalitet. Uten mineral-oljer, men med kaldpressede økologiske oljer som tilfører kroppen næringstoffer istedet for å forurense den, skape hormonell ubalense og belastning på utrensningsorganene våre.

Det er en jungel der ute med forskjellige sertifiseringer, og jeg tenkte det kan være greit å orientere seg litt blandt de mest vanlige:

USDA organic

Er en matvare sertifisering i USA, det vil si at de bruker samme retningslinjer som økologisk mat. Innenfor USDA Organic er det tre grupper:

100 % Organic som har rett til å bruke stempelet “USDA”. Her er alt laget av økolgiske ingredienser.

95% Organic har også rett til å bruke stempelte “USDA”, men har en veldig kort liste over hvilke produkter som ikke er økologiske. De må fremdeles ikke inneholde noen syntetiske stoffer eller kjemisk fremkallede stoffer.

“Made With” organic ingredients, kan ikke bruke stempelet, og inneholder minst 70% økologiske stoffer. Det er her lov til å bruke noen godkjente syntetiske stoffer. 

 Produkter fra Juice Beauty og Erbaviva bærer en USDA sertifisering.

NSF er en sertifisering som brukes av Origins, Aveda, Aubrey Organics, som kun refererer til “made with” økologiske stoffer. Må inneholde 70% økologiske stoffer, og kan da bruke NSF stempelet.  En streng og høy standard for en ikke så streng “made with” kategori.

Ecosert er den vanligste sertifiseringen i Europa. For å få denne sertfifiseringen må kun 10% være økologisk, dette er faktisk høyere prosent andel enn det høres ut som, fordi det ekkluderer vann, men er fremdeles ikke så streng som USDA. Mange av de tillatte ingrediensene på den ikke-økologiske delen av produktene tillater petrokjemikalier og syntetiske stoffer.

Vår serie Patyka har en Ecosert sertifisering der en kan lese på produktene hvor stor andel som er økologisk, de fleste produktene har en 99% høy andel av økologiske ingredienser.

Soil Association (UK) er meget lik USDA sertifiseringen og dermed en av de som stiller strengest krav.

Serien vår The Organic Pharmacy er sertifisert av Soil Association.

Cosmos  er en ny Europeisk sertifisering der Ecosert, Cosmeobio, Soil Association, ICEA, BIDH, og bioforum har gått sammen for å lage en felles retningslinje for økologiske produkter. Det vil bli mulig å bruke denne sertifiseringen fra Jan 2010.

 Velg sertifiserte kvalitetsprodukter når du kjøper økologisk!

Tip to Kirk Robbins Science for All  for featuring  the North Cascades & Olympic Science Partnership in Washington state. It’s an NSF-funded project (presumably through the Math Science Partnerships program, though I don’t see that confirmed at the project’s site) located at Western Washington University:

The North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership is a National Science Foundation funded project involving 28 school districts, two education service districts, four community colleges, Washington State LASER, the Naval Undersea Museum, Washington State MESA, and Western Washington University. The project involves close interaction of the partners to reform science education in grades 3-10 through teacher professional development, implementation of new curriculum materials, and development and support of learning communities in the schools. The partnership will also focus on increasing the diversity of new teachers and improving the science teacher preparation program in the higher education institutions. This will be done through innovative recruitment programs, the development and refinement of courses, and carefully planned interactions between the colleges and school districts.

The website’s a bit sparse, but the educator and professional development sections are pretty robust. There’s a Facebook group as well (search on NCOSP).

If you’d like to find resources closer to home (assuming you don’t live in Washington), here’s the home page for the NSF MSP Program. You can look up partnerships in your state/region. You can also look at the research that’s resulted from the program. It’s a good example of how funding commitments made for the long haul can result in useful learning about what works.

“Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) is NSF’s bold five-year initiative to create revolutionary science and engineering research outcomes made possible by innovations and advances in computational thinking…CDI seeks ambitious, transformative, multidisciplinary research proposals within or across the following three thematic areas: From Data to Knowledge: enhancing human cognition and generating new knowledge from a wealth of heterogeneous digital data;Understanding Complexity in Natural, Built, and Social Systems: deriving fundamental insights on systems comprising multiple interacting elements; and Virtual Organizations: enhancing discovery and innovation by bringing people and resources together across institutional, geographical and cultural boundaries.”

Deadline: 2/4/2010

Amount: See details ($1M+)

Limited Submissions: No

“The Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS) program supports fundamental scientific research, particularly advances in social, organizational and design science understanding, directed at advancing the understanding of how to develop virtual organizations and under what conditions virtual organizations can enable and enhance scientific, engineering, and education production and innovation…VOSS does not support proposals that aim to implement or evaluate individual virtual organizations.”

Deadline: 1/25/2010

Amount: $50K-$4M

Limited: No

The NSF “invites investigators at U.S. organizations to submit proposals to conduct research about the Arctic. Arctic research includes field and modeling studies and data analysis in and about the arctic region.The goal of the NSF Division of Arctic Sciences is to gain a better understanding of the Arctic’s physical, biological, geological, chemical, social and cultural processes, and the interactions of ocean, land, atmosphere, biological, and human systems in the Arctic.”

Deadline: 1/14/2010

Amount: $5K-$1.5M

Limited Submissions: No

I haven’t been posting in a while because I’ve been busy with preparing NSF grant proposals (which have shifted their deadlines this year from spring to December).  In the interest of getting out a post (and procrastinating), I’m going to write today about my great passion as a researcher: grant writing.  Seriously, I do sometimes enjoy the opportunity to plan out a research agenda for the next 3-5 years, and always the proposals I write do inform the research I will do in the future.  Also, so far I’ve also been really lucky with  grants, with a hit rate of about 60% (we’ll see how it goes this year now that we have a toddler around the house).  When your grants are funded, the grant writing process is much more fun!

Here are some of the tricks that I’ve learned for good grants.  Mostly these are from my experiences with NSF grants but they have been useful for other agencies.  I’d love to hear about some other ideas in the comments section.

The Introduction:

• Nail Motivation: Start with the problem you are trying to solve.  Show that solving this problem has big implications, hopefully outside your own narrow area of work; and that your research will take significant steps towards solving the problem
• Nail Novelty: What is it about your approach that will cause you to succeed where others have failed?  What unique ideas/tools/techniques do you bring to the problem?
• Expose a gap: As early as possible in the proposal, describe a gap in current research
• Don’t repeat: Don’t repeat text from the grant summary in the intro of your grant!  This risks starting a bad precedent of the reader skipping over parts of your grant.
• Pull in the reader. Write a first sentence for both the summary and intro that is controversial, asks an interesting question, evokes strong emotions (hopefully not disgust , etc.

The body:

• Less is More: Don’t tack on ideas or problems that you don’t really understand.  The reviewers will uncover your ignorance and your grant will be skewered.  The main constraint on conveying ideas is not the page length, but rather  reviewers time.  Expect a reviewer to spend about 30 minutes on your grant.  You can really only get across a couple of clear ideas in this time.  I know this from experience – whole sections of my grants have been misunderstood by reviewers in the past because I tried to cram too much in.  Make it clear what the grant will not cover as well as what it will cover.
• Pictures are crucial: Spend as much time putting in 2-3 useful figures as you would writing a section of the grant
• Related Work is crucial: You’re proposal should be like an exciting conversation with the research community.  Thread related work throughout your proposal – be generous with praise for great ideas, and make it clear how your efforts fit into the broader scheme.  If you make the related work look exciting, your own research will look more exciting.  Don’t miss anything that is remotely relevant to your work.  A common way to have a grant shot down is a review like: “This proposal ignores results  from the work of researcher X”.
• Technical depth: a portion of your proposal (maybe a third?) can and should be addressed to the experts.  This is the place to include proofs, equations and enough technical details to convince the experts you have a good idea.
• Try to give something to the reader:  teach the reader something new, include an interesting story or analogy, describe a cool problem.  The reader will appreciate anything that breaks the monotony of reading grant proposals.

Some ideas about the process:

• Give a talk: I have found it useful to give a talk on preliminary results and future ideas as part of the proposal writing process.  It works well to do this for both an expert audience and a non-expert audience.  See what questions and ideas you get and use these to improve the proposal.
• Become your own worse enemy:  you absolutely need to anticipate the 2 or 3 most devastating criticisms of your grant and then address those in the proposal
• Get feedback: Get an expert and a non-expert to spend half an hour with the grant and give quick feedback,
• Be intellectually mature: Don’t pretend you’ll solve every problem.  Give credit where it is due.  Be realistic about  the research time line and the limitations of your technique.
• Try to write an hour a day on the grant to keep up momentum.
• Develop a style: I like to use a sort of dialect style where I describe problems and then solutions, or questions and then answers.  This usually determines the broad outline of my proposal.  However, there are many different writing styles and you should figure out what works best for you.

Yesterday’s meeting of BPC Alliance investigators might fall under the category of “hard fun.”  Certainly “hard learning.”  The BPC Alliances were originally funded for three years, and then could apply for a two year extension (9 alliances have passed this hurdle), and next can possibly go for a five year extension.  The bar for the five year extension is going to be very high.  Jan Cuny wanted us to realize just how high it’s going to be, so she organized “mock review panels” where we critiqued each others’ 2-year extension proposals.  Each PI presented the proposal for 10 minutes, then there was a critique where the PI could not rebut or respond to questions from other PI’s as well as other experts, then the PI was sent out of the room for the hard discussion that you might not want to do to the PI’s face.  It was fascinating and I learned a lot, but it wasn’t a lot of fun.

One of the key questions for the day was, “How would you know if you’re broadening participation in computing?”  What would you look for?  What should be in the evaluation?  The evaluators presented in the morning and highlighted the five indicators that they think are key:

• Participation: Who’s in the pipeline?
• Motivation: Are the people in the pipeline motivated to move on?
• Advancement: Do we see people moving from stage-to-stage?  For example, do we get kids into high school CS, then taking undergrad CS, then going on to careers or grad school in computing?
• Organizational capacity: Can we handle more people?  Do we have the teachers and schools to handle growth?
• Alliances: Are the stages working together to make advancement happen?

These five are not the ones that the evaluators are declaring the “Common Core Indicators,” the ones that everyone in BPC will be required to gather.  Instead, they are highlighting just three: People, Organizational Capacity, and Alliances.  They decided that Motivation and Advancement are part of the other indicators.

Teachers are an interesting case here.  If you think about training teachers, they’re part of the pipeline — they have to get started, and then improve, and then reach the point where they can teach harder classes like AP CS.  However, teachers are also part of organizational capacity.  They can be measured under either indicator.

Probably the most interesting nugget that I learned yesterday was that we don’t have a lack of African-American men in computing! We’ve thought for years that African-American men were not going into computer science, because the Taulbee report showed so very few of them.  Then the WGBH image study came out showing that African-American male students really liked computing.  Well, then, where are they?  Turns out that they’re mostly going to the community colleges, and to the DeVry and Phoenix kinds of places.  They show up in the IPEDS study.  The Taulbee report only surveys PhD-granting institutions, where the African-American men aren’t.  So, the problem is a little more complex and nuanced than what we realized — there are a lot of African-American men in computing, but they’re not going into the educational paths that lead them into the leadership positions.  We have lots, but they’re not getting the high-paying jobs.  It’s still a problem, just a more complex problem.

Yesterday I was in DC for a meeting of NSF Broadening Participation in Computing Alliance investigators.  It was a really useful and challenging meeting, where we had to go around the room and critique each others’ last proposals (!).  The goal was to improve how we’re thinking about our efforts and how we’re expressing them.  I’ll have more to say about the meeting in a moment, but first, I wanted to highlight a meme that was going around the room yesterday.

We computer science faculty have a bad rep!  Over and over yesterday, in one-on-one meetings and in group discussions, the notion that computer science faculty are a particularly grumpy and curmudgeonly group kept coming up.  Some examples:

• “Our <different kind of computing> faculty are willing to try all kinds of things to attract students and do outreach, but our Computer Science faculty insist that they will only do Scheme!  They’re just a bunch of curmudgeons!”
• A specialist in working with disabled students said that her colleagues ask her why she decided to work with computing students.  “Why did I decide to work with the most difficult and grumpy faculty on all of campus?”
• Another PI describing her efforts to inculcate change in her computer science department, “But we can’t even get the faculty to learn about new things! They’re happy with UNIX and want everyone to just do that!”

So my experience is that there is a significant percentage of more senior faculty of all disciplines are fairly set in their ways and are rather “grumpy” about change.  Maybe I fall in that category now, so I’m blinded to the claim I heard yesterday — that computer science senior faculty are particularly resistant to change and grumpy about it.

Before Barb Owens or others call me on it — of course, there are senior CS women faculty, too.  But it is the case that CS faculty of decades past have been male, so the characterization of “grumpy old men” is not inaccurate.  And it might be that the male faculty are even grumpier than the female faculty.

I can imagine how the claim that CS faculty are particularly grumpy could be true.  Computer science is a young discipline.  Senior faculty today spent their whole careers defining and defending their turf — “This is computer science, and that isn’t.”  At the same time, computer science has had dramatic change: From computer time being more expensive than human time, to the reverse; from memory being dear, to memory being plentiful; from sequential processing being the assumption, to today’s world where parallel processors are all that we can see going forward.  How often does a discipline change so many of its base assumptions in the lifetime of a faculty member?  Change is hard for anyone, and particularly so when you’ve spent your career making arguments that are weakened or changed by time.

Now, I don’t know that it’s true that CS faculty are particularly “grumpy.” Maybe it is.  The real point of the BPC discussions was that our resistance to change is counter-productive.  We need students who don’t look like us.  There are too few students who look and act like us to provide the computing labor and insights that our society needs.  We have to break out of our assumptions and the methods that have served us well up until now.  That’s hard, but we have to get past the “grumpiness.”

Even though the federal fiscal year ended in September, the federal budget process for 2010 is far from over.  While the funding outlook for a few agencies looks positive, bills that fund the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, which support over 85 percent of federally funded life science research, have yet to be finalized.

Of the 12 appropriations bills that determine the federal budget for the coming year, only five have been signed into law.  In the meantime, Congress has kept the government afloat through a continuing resolution, which funds agencies at 2009 levels while the details of the 2010 budget are negotiated.

Agriculture-related research has received a large increase. The agriculture appropriations bill for 2010, signed by the president on Oct. 16, funds the National Institute of Food and Agriculture at $1.34 billion, a roughly 10 percent increase over 2009. This increases the budget of the Agriculture, Food and Research Initiative, the associated extramural research program, by 25 percent to $262.4 million.

In contrast, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science will see a more modest increase. The Energy and Water Appropriations bill, signed by the president Oct. 28, funds this agency at $4.9 billion, 3 percent above 2009.

The NSF budget, while not yet signed into law, is likely to get a boost.  Both the House and Senate have passed versions of the Commerce/Justice/Science appropriations bill that is responsible for the NSF budget.  The House and Senate bills both fund the NSF at around $6.9 billion, a nearly 7 percent increase from 2009.  However, a final version of this bill has yet to be agreed upon.

Unfortunately, the NIH budget remains in Congressional limbo.  In July, the House passed a version of the Labor/HHS/Education bill that would fund the NIH at nearly $31 billion, more that 3 percent above 2009.  The Senate appropriations committee has countered with a proposed 1.5 percent increase but there has been no legislative action on the NIH budget for more than three months. In meetings on Capitol Hill in September, ASBMB members asked members of Congress to support the House funding level for the NIH.

Much of the federal government will no longer be funded when the current continuing resolution expires Dec. 18.  Because time is short, Congress may combine many of the remaining bills into a larger omnibus spending bill.  Given that no version Labor/HHS/Education bill has been considered on the Senate floor, it is likely the NIH budget will end up in an omnibus package.

It may be well into December before we have a final budget for 2010.

You can follow the latest progress of the federal appropriations legislation via AAAS or on THOMAS at the Library of Congress.

มกะโปรเจคสำหรับออกแบบและสร้างเครือข่ายอินเทอร์เน็ตใหม่ (redesign-rebuild) รับเงินทุนจากรัฐบาลสหรัฐฯจำนวน 12 ล้านเหรียญ พร้อมรับบริจาคแบนด์วิธเครือข่ายความเร็ว 30 กิกะบิตต่อวินาทีเพื่ออำนวยความสะดวกระหว่างการศึกษาวิจัยโครงการ

นักวิจัยจำนวนมากเห็นด้วยกับโครงการออกแบบและสร้างเครือข่ายอินเทอร์เน็ตใหม่ โดยมองว่าการออกแบบสถาปัตยกรรมอินเทอร์เน็ตใหม่จะเป็นทางออกในการปลดขีดจำกัดในการขยายตัวและปัญหาความปลอดภัยซึ่งเครือข่ายอินเทอร์เน็ตกำลังเผชิญ อยู่ในปัจจุบัน ซึ่งเป็นผลจากการออกแบบเครือข่ายอินเทอร์เน็ตซึ่งถือกำเนิดครั้งแรกตั้งแต่ ปี 1969 หรือเมื่อ 39 ปีที่แล้ว

นับตั้งแต่ปี 1969 อินเทอร์เน็ตถูกพัฒนาต่อเนื่องจนกระทั่งปัจจุบันมีผู้ใช้หลายพันล้านคน และมีการส่งถ่ายข้อมูลด้วยความเร็วสูงแต่ก็มีปัญหาควบคู่กันไป ความกังวลว่าระบบอินเทอร์เน็ตอาจจะล่มสลาย เพราะเมื่อระบบอินเทอร์เน็ตยิ่งเติบโตมากขึ้น ปัญหาเหล่านี้ก็เติบโตตามไปด้วย กลุ่มนักเทคโนโลยีในสหรัฐฯจึงรวมตัวด้วยความหวังว่าจะแก้ไขปัญหานี้ โดยเสนอทุนวิจัยจากมูลนิธิวิทยาศาสตร์แห่งชาติของสหรัฐอเมริกา หรือ National Science Foundation (NSF)

นักเทคโนโลยีอเมริกันเสนอ 2 โครงการใหญ่คือ โครงการ GENI- Global Environment for Networking Innovations และโครงการ FIND-Future Internet Design ทั้งสองโครงการได้รับการตอบสนองจากเอ็นเอสเอฟ (NSF) บนแนวคิดระบบอินเทอร์เน็ตปราศจากรายชื่อ (Clean-slate-Internet) ซึ่งเชื่อว่าจะสร้างความหลากหลายด้านนวัตกรรมที่จะเกิดขึ้นในระบบอินเทอร์เน็ตใหม่ในอนาคต

รายงานข่าวทุนวิจัย 12 ล้านเหรียญกล่าวถึงเฉพาะโครงการ GENI ซึ่งรับผิดชอบโดยบริษัท BBN Technologies ในนามของรัฐบาลสหรัฐฯ ทำหน้าที่ตรวจสอบ วางแผน และออกแบบเครือข่ายใหม่ โดยนักวิจัยจะทดสอบแนวคิดใหม่โดยไม่กระทบต่อเครือข่ายอินเทอร์เน็ตปัจจุบัน

ทุนวิจัย 12 ล้านเหรียญจะถูกส่งผ่านมูลนิธิวิทยาศาสตร์แห่งชาติสหรัฐฯเพื่อนำไปศึกษาและสร้างโครงข่าย GENI ต้นแบบ

เพื่อทดสอบโครงข่าย GENI ต้นแบบ โครงข่ายอินเทอร์เน็ตเวอร์ชันใหม่จะต้องใช้แบนด์วิธซึ่งมีความเร็วในการส่ง ข้อมูล 10 กิกะบิตต่อวินาที การรับบริจาคแบนด์วิธทำให้นักวิจัยไม่ต้องกังวลว่า การทดสอบจะเกิดผลกระทบต่อทราฟฟิกอินเทอร์เน็ตปัจจุบัน โดยหน่วยงาน National LambdaRail ของสหรัฐฯพร้อมเปิดทางให้นักวิจัยใช้โครงข่ายความเร็ว 30 กิกะบิตต่อวินาทีบางช่วงเวลา

ความเร็ว 30 กิกะบิตต่อวินาทีถือว่าเร็วกว่ามาตรฐานอินเทอร์เน็ตความเร็วสูงตามบ้านถึง 3 เท่าตัว เทียบแล้วเท่ากับการดาวน์โหลดภาพยนตร์คุณภาพสูง 30 เรื่องผ่านเครือข่ายบ้านในครั้งเดียว

นอกจากเงินวิจัย 12 ล้านเหรียญ การสร้างเครือข่าย GENI ถูกประเมินว่าจะใช้เงินทุนก่อสร้าง 350 ล้านเหรียญในระยะเวลา 5 ปี ซึ่งสภาคองเกรสสหรัฐฯเปิดไฟเขียวอนุมัติให้ทุนในส่วนนี้แล้วเรียบร้อย

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