March 6, 2015

CALL FOR A NATIONAL IoT STRATEGY: Four senators -- Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.); Kelly Ayotte, (R-N.H).; and  Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) -- want a strategy to "incentivize the development of the Internet of Things in a way that maximizes the promise connected technologies hold to empower consumers, foster future economic growth, and improve our collective social well-being." They say accelerating the IoT's development should be a priority, but should occur in a way that "responsibly protects against misuse." The IoT, which connects billions of devices worldwide using sensors and software, has raised concern about hacking and violations of privacy. A report put out by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) criticizes what it calls the auto industry's "alarmingly inconsistent and incomplete" security and privacy practices.

NNMI EXPANSION IN JEOPARDY: Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who chairs the Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science subcommittee, joined GOP House critics of the Obama administration's plan for two new institutes in the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. The $150 million budgeted "is discretionary funding that the Department simply cannot afford," Shelby declared at a Feb. 26 hearing.  

SMALL STATURE, OUTSIZED INFLUENCE: The research community may to wait years for a champion with clout comparable to that of 4-foot-11 Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who announced she'll retire at the end of 2016. From a state dependent on federal science funding, home to powerhouse universities, NASA facilities, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, she brought 30 years of seniority, a shrewd political sense, and a bulldozer personality to her fight for R&D appropriations.

OUTCOMES-BASED FUNDING (OBF)

Sort of a next-gen performance-based funding, OBF seeks to: "align state higher education funding method with the state’s higher education attainment goals and student success priorities; align institutional priorities with those of the state and support the scaling of proven student success practices; and hold institutions accountable for performance and their role in achieving state attainment goals." A paper by HCM Strategists, paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, describes four levels, with Type IV being the most advanced. Learn more.

NANO INFRASTRUCTURE CONTEST: The National Science Foundation has launched "a competition for individual university user facility sites positioned across the nation. A Coordinating Office will then be selected competitively at a later stage from among the selected sites to enhance their impact as a national infrastructure of user facility sites. The ultimate selection of user facility sites will include capabilities and instrumentation addressing current and anticipated future user needs across the broad areas of nanoscale science, engineering, and technology." This program, National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), is a successor to the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network. Learn more.

TEMPTING TARGETS:  "NSF-funded scientific instruments are specialized, highly visible assets that present attractive targets for both unintentional errors and malicious activity; untrustworthy software or a loss of integrity of the data collected by a scientific instrument may mean corrupt, skewed or incomplete results." So states a solicitation for Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure program, seeking "development and deployment of hardware and software technologies and techniques to protect research cyberinfrastructure across every stage of the scientific workflow. "

EFRI DEADLINE: Full proposals for NSF's Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation are due March 30.

GRANTS FOR YOUNG FACULTY: Our fellow society, ASME, alerts us to a NASA solicitation for university proposals "on behalf of outstanding early-career faculty members who are beginning independent research careers." The grants, up to $200,000 each per year, will fund research on "unique, disruptive or transformational space technologies in areas such as dynamic tensegrity technologies for space science and exploration, high-temperature solar cells, fundamental aerothermodynamic model development and synthetic biology technologies for space exploration." Learn more. 

ENGLISH-SPEAKING UNION: It's OK -- even encouraged -- to partner with British researchers as part of the Pentagon's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, according to ScienceInsider. The online publication quotes Robert Staffin, director of DOD’s basic research office as saying: ““There’s been a recognition at senior levels of government that this [international collaboration] is something we should try … to accelerate progress in some key research areas.”

THE REAL ONLINE REVOLUTION ISN'T MOOCs: "The failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and getting better," writes Kevin Carey in the New York Times. Carey directs the education policy program at the New America Foundation. MOOCs don't confer degrees, and  that is mostly what college students are paying for. But innovators are working on "a parallel system of free or low-fee credentials, not controlled by traditional colleges, that leads to jobs." The Mozilla Foundation's Open Badges project will create electronic credentials that "indicate specific skills and knowledge, backed by links to electronic evidence of how and why, exactly, the badge was earned." Michigan State, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NASA, and the Smithsonian -- among others -- are experimenting with the same concept.