Category Archives: academia

Tell Congress to increase NIH funding

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Cross-posted from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!.

For your consideration: a Change.org petition asking the U.S. Congress to increase funding to the National Institutes of Health by 3% in next year’s Federal budget. NIH is one of the biggest sources of public research funds in the U.S., and its support goes well beyond things immediately connected to human health and medicine—I did many analyses for my dissertation research on Joshua trees and yucca moths on a supercomputing cluster supported, in large part, by NIH funds.

Some would argue that the private sector should take over some of the lost funding for academic, basic research. The sad fact is that the private sector does not support the type of basic research that the NIH does; they take the results NIH-funded research and apply it to drug development. In addition, many entities in the private sector are currently slashing their Research & Development (R&D) budgets! For example, Pfizer recently cut its R & D budget by 1.5 billion.

Consider the following numbers. For 2011 budget, U.S. spending on:
Social security was $2564 per citizen (20.8% of the budget)
Defense was $2203 per citizen (18% of the budget)
Medicare was $1569 per citizen (12.8% of the budget)
Medicaid was $1172 per citizen (7.8% of the budget)
NIH was $99 per citizen (0.8% of the budget)

The original idea, as I understand it, is for this to be an “open letter” to Congress from working scientists across the nation, but supportive non-scientists should definitely sign on, too. ◼

Haven’t written this much html in a while

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I just built my first course webpage, for the Mammalogy lab I’ll be leading for this semester’s teaching assistantship. It pulls together a bunch of resources I developed for the same lab last year—photos of lab specimens taken by students (thanks to a little extra credit for inducement) and Anki decks. Now I need to get started on the slides for my first week’s lecture …

I want to teach this course

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Via io9: BIOL 103, “Biology in Science Fiction”, at Kenyon College. Sure, the lesson on tribbles is probably just about density-dependent population growth. But it’s a lesson on tribbles.

Better e-flashcards: Anki

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Following up on my previous post about Genius, an electronic flashcard program I was thinking about using as a resource for my students in this semester’s mammalogy lab. (There’s a double benefit here — I’m no mammalogist, so I’m really creating study materials for myself, but it’s nice if I can pass them on to the students.) Anyway, I think I’ve found something better than Genius: Anki.

Anki is basically the same thing as Genius, but with cross-platform compatibility where Genius is Mac-only, and with a utility to find and upload decks of virtual flashcards from a server full of shared user-created material. So I can put the cards online, and any student who installs Anki just has to type “Mammalian” into the search function to use them.

Anki also makes use of “spaced repetition” to schedule individual cards during study sessions; it’s less clear to me how useful that will be. To plan spaced repetitions, Anki doesn’t ask you to type in answers as Genius does, but to recall an answer, reveal the correct one, and rate how easy the recall was. That seems less helpful, but we’ll see how it goes.

Funding creative science

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Stephen Quake laments the grant-approval process of most U.S. federal funding agencies, and suggests making room for risky proposals:

I wonder if this should also be the time to rethink the basic foundations of how science is funded. Could we stimulate more discovery and creativity if more scientists had the security of their own salary and a long-term commitment to a minimal level of research support? Would this encourage risk-taking and lead to an overall improvement in the quality of science?

The NIH model Quake describes – which sets aside specific funding sources for out-of-the-box proposals – seems sensible, given additional funds for such use.