Monday, April 27, 2009

Funding to the Sciences and Technology is off to an amazing start

National Science Foundation (NSF) Logo, reprod...

Wow, I went over the transcript of Obama's talk to the National Academy of Science, and I'm blown away. I'm actually surprised this is not bigger news.

I'm really excited about all the massive increase of money going into the Sciences. The budgets of National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institue of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Department of Energy's Department's Office of Science are all doubled.

American Universities have top notch Scientific research and attract the best talents in the world because of their abilities to provide opportunities for researchers to work. More often than not, all this concentration of talents create a network effect that spawn technologies or companies which indirectly or directly benefit Americans. This ensures that we continue to do that....

In addition, Obama created a new program for energy called Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA-E, based on the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). As a guy who worked on AI stuff for DARPA, yeah, they fund pretty wacky stuff (like da internet). But, crazy, far-out projects is exactly what the energy sector needs....

So, my hats off to John Holdren, the Science Advisor and Obama's other advisors. They done their country a great service!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

yayyyy :D

if this was fb, i would "like" it :D

Jason Tseng said...

Thanks! :)

Anonymous said...

Yes, saw this a while ago, very exciting!

Jason Tseng said...

Yeah, and not a moment too soon, anecdotally lot of the universities are having budget cuts, salary reductions, or out-right layoffs.... :(