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Government

NSF Accused of Misuse of Funds In Giant Ecological Project 116

An anonymous reader writes: The National Science Foundation (NSF) and a contractor have been accused by both an audit and by Congress of a significant misuse of funds in a major ecological monitoring project costing almost a half a billion dollars. From the article: "With a construction budget of $433.7 million, NEON is planned to consist of 106 sites across the United States. Arrays of sensors at each site will monitor climate change and human impacts for 30 years, building an unprecedented continental-scale data set. Although some initially doubted its merits, the allure of big-data ecology eventually won over most scientists.

But a 2011 audit of the project's proposed construction budget stalled three times when, according to the independent Defense Contract Audit Agency, NEON's accounting proved so poor that the review could not be completed. Eventually, DCAA issued an adverse ruling, concluding that nearly 36% of NEON's budget proposal was questionable or undocumented.

When the NSF green-lit the project, the agency's inspector-general ordered the audit released on 24 November, which found unallowable expenses including a $25,000 winter holiday party, $11,000 to provide coffee for employees, $3,000 for board-of-directors dinners that included alcohol, $3,000 for t-shirts and other clothes, $83,000 for "business development" and $112,000 for lobbying."

Comment Re: Woohoo, let's explore (Score 2) 140

Durring the Apollo days, I bought a TI SR11 pocket calculator, it could do arthimatic, squares, square roots, and had a pi key and cost me $104.00! Now your car is probably 1000X electronically more capable than an Apollo capsule, Onstar would make that more like 100K. The Apollo Guidance Computer had a CPU that was made out of 2,800 dual 3-input NOR gates hand wire-wrapped and bedded in epoxy, 2K of 16 bit read-write magnetic core memory and 36 kilowords of read-only core rope memory.

So most of what you are calling a trace, was actually a 40 gage silver plated copper wire.
 

Comment Re:A tech gloss over racial profiling? (Score 1) 218

The sad truth is it's all related to the 80/20 rule or the Pareto principle, 80% of the crimes are committed by 20% of the people; 64% of the crime is commited by 4% (.8^2/.2^2) and 51% is commited by 0.8% (.8^3/.2^3). If you can the correct people off the street, the results are amazing, if you waste your time on the wrong people, the results is futility. With the numbers they're achieving, they are hitting some of the correct people, and race is a red herring.

Comment Re:There are issues to resolve... (Score 1) 262

exonerate, (especially of an official body) absolve (someone) from blame for a fault or wrongdoing, especially after due consideration of the case.
  My understanding was the Grand Jury was given broad latitude to consider multiple indictments, to question and cross examine witnesses, to examine physical evidence at length, and they determined that there was not probable cause for any charges. I've seen the autopsy reports myself and they just don't support the notion that Wilson did anything other than perform his duties and defend himself from an attack.

The really sad part is there are enough racist cops using excess force, so they didn't have to fixate on Wilson.

Comment Flare stars (Score 3, Informative) 62

Ok, I understand that, but isn't it possible for an ice bearing comet (or several) to impact the planet at some later time when the sun was cooler? Surely those planetary systems have their own equivalent of oort clouds?

The whole reason that a red dwarf is so dangerous to live around is its low gravity. It can hurl flares from its surface that ascend far out into space and reach its tight little "habitable zone", and its planets will occasionally orbit through a flare and get zapped. The flares are channeled and accelerated by electromagnetic turbulence that originates from deep inside the star. Even after the surface temperature of its photosphere finally declines, the star will continue to flare until it shrinks down to a white dwarf (which has no habitable zone at all, since its starlight is extreme ultraviolet radiation that can easily blast water molecules apart). Since M-class stars typically have expected lifetimes of trillions of years, you'd have to wait a long time to see it happen.

Comment Re:There are issues to resolve... (Score 2) 262

"Server bumping" could be solved by he same mechanism as "camera malfunctions", though implementation would admittedly be a problem: have the police face a presumption of guilt for all accusations that aren't on film.

That's pretty much how it is now, Darren Wilson found himself in such a hostile work enviroment, that he was forced to resign even though he was exonerated, then to add insult to injury, his pregnant wife was asked to resign due to her marital status. Things would have been much easier with dash cameras and body cameras.

Comment Re:News? (Score 3, Insightful) 109

One of the things about Autism is it is subjectively diagnosed based on symptoms, so there is no way to really tell for sure if it one condition or 20. With the difficulty researchers have been having in finding causes and whether the causes are genetic or enviromental, my suspicion leans toward multiple conditions with overlapping symptomologies.

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