Starship Asterisk*

Republican Majority Leader-Elect Eric Cantor (R-VA) is asking citizens to choose their own cuts to federal spending -- and he's started with the National Science Foundation.

On his website, Cantor is urging citizens to search the NSF for "questionable projects" by searching for terms like "success, culture, media, games, social norms, lawyers, museum, lesiure, stimulus." (No word on why these particular terms were chosen.) Then, citizens are urged to submit the grant number and comment on why the grants are wasteful. Cantor's office says it will publish a report on the grants identified.

To get taxpayers started, the website pinpoints several allegedly wasteful grants, including "$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players." One problem: That research isn't just about soccer.

LiveScience did some digging and found that the money went to Northwestern University engineering professor Luis Amaral, who has created models to rank soccer player success. But the work is more broadly applicable to understanding the contributions of team members in any organization, including workplaces, the researchers wrote in a paper published in June in the open-access journal PLoS One. Amaral also researches other complex systems like the stock market and ecosystems, as well as the impact of scientific research and the performance of individual scientists and institutions.

A recent Republican initiative asking citizens to review grants funded by the National Science Foundation gets the basic facts about several of those grants wrong, LiveScience has found.

In a video on YouTube, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.) calls for Americans to search the NSF database and report "wasteful" grants, citing two such projects: One, a $750,000 NSF grant "to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contribution of soccer players." The second "questionable" grant is one in which scientists "received $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game and movie industries." Smith's video is part of a larger Republican initiative called "YouCut."

But the researchers behind these projects say Smith has misrepresented their work and the amount of money spent on the projects.

"This was not $750,000 given by NSF for us to develop an algorithm to look at the performance of soccer players," Northwestern University engineering professor Luis Amaral told LiveScience. Amaral, who was the lead investigator on the soccer study cited by Smith, called the congressman's portrayal of his work "not only incorrect, but misleading."

"This was $750,000 that was given to a larger team of researchers to study a very broad range of questions related to creating provocative, efficient teams of researchers who innovate," Amaral said.

Cornell University computer scientist Doug James, the lead researcher of the sound-modeling study, had a similar reaction to Smith's characterization of his work.

"It is a gross misrepresentation of our activities and their intent," James wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience.

I just came across this video, in which Republican House science committee member Adrian Smith of Nebraska calls upon the public to sift through government research grants to identify waste, and here’s part of the text that accompanies the video:

• NSF makes more than 10,000 new grant awards annually, many of these grants fund worthy research in the hard sciences. Recently, however NSF has funded some more questionable projects – $750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.

So here’s the problem. These scientific grants are peer reviewed. You can look at them in an offhand way and decide that hey, they involve soccer or video games, and therefore infer that they’re stupid and wasteful–but that’s not a fair way of going about it. Just because research involves these subjects doesn’t mean it’s not scientifically meritorious.

Let’s look at some of the research in question, and see if it really is so silly. The first grant, concerning “soccer”? As Live Science explains:

• LiveScience did some digging and found that the money went to Northwestern University engineering professor Luis Amaral, who has created models to rank soccer player success. But the work is more broadly applicable to understanding the contributions of team members in any organization, including workplaces, the researchers wrote in a paper published in June in the open-access journal PLoS One. Amaral also researches other complex systems like the stock market and ecosystems, as well as the impact of scientific research and the performance of individual scientists and institutions.

And the second grant, concerning “video games”? It appears to be this Cornell research, which of course was also deemed meritorious by peer review:

• Computational physics can help us animate crashing rigid and deformable bodies, or fracturing solids, or splashing water, but the results are silent movies. Virtually no practical algorithms exist for synthesizing synchronized sounds automatically. Instead, sound recordings are edited manually for pre-produced animations or triggered automatically in interactive settings. The former is labor intensive and inflexible, while the latter produces awkward, repetitive results. This situation is a serious obstacle to building realistic, interactive simulations (whether for entertainment, training, or other applications), which require sound to be compelling,. In this research the PIs will begin filling this broad void by pursuing fundamental advances in computational methods while solving several particularly challenging sound rendering problems. The goal is to produce some of the first viable methods in this area, upon which many more can be built. Successful implementation of this program will fundamentally transform our relationship with our increasingly convincing simulated realities, because for the first time we will be able to hear them as well as see them. To these ends, the PIs will develop fundamental algorithms that address the problems of simulating the vibrations that cause sound and computing the sound field produced by those vibrations….

This latter research, to me, sounds very much like just the kind of basic science that can trigger technological innovations that will, in turn, create jobs. Isn’t that what we want the government funding?

More generally, why does Rep. Smith think that this approach–let’s call it the “citizens Googling” method–is a good way of evaluating research grants, as opposed to the merit-based peer review system?

Dan Vergano at USA Today has done a piece about congressman Adrian Smith’s attempt–which we’re now calling “citizen Googling” here at “The Intersection”–to involve members of the public in determining which peer-reviewed NSF grants are a “waste.” Vergano sets the endeavor in the context of misguided attacks on government research that go all the way back to Sen. William Proxmire’s infamous “Golden Fleece” awards.

As Vergano notes, it pretty much always seems that when some politician slams a government scientific grant, the research actually turns out to be quite important and the pol is simply misinterpreting its meaning. (Hmmm, I wonder why that is?) Sure enough, that already appears to be the case with the two grants picked out by Smith. As Vergano reports:

• So, as you might expect, when we asked the National Science Foundation about the two grants that Smith mentioned, we learned a little more about them.
  
  For example, the soccer study turns out to be computer scientists studying how remotely connected teams form to conduct “nanoscience, environmental engineering, earthquake engineering, chemical sciences, media research and tobacco research.”
  
  And the “breaking things” study turns out to be acoustics experts “pursuing fundamental advances in computational methods while solving several particularly challenging sound rendering problems,” so that the U.S. military, among others, can create more realistic combat simulators for troops.
  
  “These aren’t about soccer research,” says the NSF’s Maria Zacharias. “All of these projects go through our very rigorous peer-review process,” she adds, part of what made the NSF the only one of 26 federal agencies to receive a “green” rating from the Bush administration in its initial rating of government management practices.

I really like one upshot of Vergano’s piece: If scientists don’t want their grants attacked in silly ways, it will help if they are able to get the word out about what they’re actually doing and why it really does matter. In other words, as grants come under fire, there will be a premium on good communication about your research.

I want to address another point that came up in the comments when I first posted about this.

I’m all for cutting back on wasteful government spending. I’m also in favor, incidentally, of getting the government more of the revenue it deserves–by, say, getting rid of massive fossil fuel industry tax subsidies that only hurt our economy in the long run, by discouraging clean energy investment.

But the fact is, if you seriously want to balance the budget, you don’t go looking to NSF–which, if it gets what it asks for in 2011, will receive just over $7 billion for that year. Total federal budget in 2010? $3.552 trillion. Total deficit? $1.171 trillion.

There are a thousand billions in a trillion. So NSF’s total 2011 budget request is less than 1 % of last year’s deficit.

And if NSF’s total budget is barely noticeable in the broad context of federal spending, the individual grants being singled out for attack are ridiculously inconsequential in that context. Consider a million dollar grant, for instance. There are a million millions in a trillion. So cutting such a grant would be addressing…less than one millionth of the deficit.

So to summarize: a) The criticisms of individual NSF studies always seems to misunderstand the research and its importance. And moreover: b) even if these studies were defunded (hell, even if NSF was entirely defunded!), that wouldn’t appreciably affect the budget or the deficit.

So what on Earth could the purpose of the exercise possibly be?

I’ll leave that to readers to sort out.

Under the auspices of keeping federal spending under control, Republican congressmen have launched yet another attack on the basic scientific research that could lead to useful, potentially job-creating discoveries.

House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) announced last week that the YouCut Citizen Review, a crowdsourcing tool for identifying “wasteful spending that should be cut,” would make its very first target the National Science Foundation.

One would expect science-targeting politicians to have learned caution from Sarah Palin’s fruit-fly debacle, in which the 2008 vice presidential candidate mocked the methodology of research into neurological disorders like Down syndrome and autism, both of which afflict members of her family.

But in a video introduction to the YouCut review, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Nebraska), a member of the House Committee on Science and Technology, pulls rank on peer review.

“Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars,” he asks, mentioning “university academics [who] received a $750,000 grant to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players” and “scientists [who] received $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the videogame and movie industry.”

After LiveScience and Chris Mooney of Discover picked up on Smith’s attack, USA Today science columnist Dan Vergano dug into the details of Smith’s examples.

Soccer, it turns out, happened to be a useful model for Northwestern University researchers trying to develop a framework for evaluating individual contributions to organizational success. Their work may enable better long-distance group collaboration, helping people in rural areas — like, say, Smith’s district of Nebraska — compete against big-city companies.

As for the videogame modeling, it’s the work of Cornell University researchers developing algorithms for simulating sounds in real time. Even though it’s possible to realistically model the physics of splashing water or breaking glass, sonic modeling isn’t nearly so developed. Figuring it out would “transform how sound is computed in interactive virtual environments,” say the researchers.

It’s not hard to imagine noncommercial applications for immersive computer simulations, but it certainly would help videogame and movie makers and potentially create jobs in those fields. Smith, whose district has received $8.27 billion in farm subsidies since 1995, ought to applaud when government spending helps create jobs.