U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) programs that assist specific racial and ethnic groups would be consolidated under a new proposal from the agency. According to the Obama administration’s budget recommendations for the 2011 fiscal year, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program, the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, and the Tribal Colleges and Universities Program would be replaced by the $103 million Comprehensive Broadening Participation of Undergraduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) program, which would be allotted 14 percent more in funding than the three programs currently receive. NSF director Arden L. Bement Jr. says the number of minority students majoring in the sciences was not increasing fast enough under the old approach. “Linear growth is no longer acceptable, so we have to go into geometric growth,” Bement says.
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Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) researchers recently performed a multi-part analysis of Twitter and concluded that it is a surprisingly interconnected network and an effective way to filter information. On the MSN messenger network, the median degree of separation is six. However, on Twitter, the average path length is 4.12. Because 94 percent of Twitter users are fewer than five degrees of separation from one another, it is likely that the distance between any random user and a celebrity is even shorter on Twitter than in real life. “No matter how many followers a user has, the tweet is likely to reach [an audience of a certain size] once the user’s tweet starts spreading via retweets,” write the KAIST researchers. Earlier Twitter studies suggested that the best way to get noticed was to tweet at certain times of day. “Half of retweeting occurs within an hour, and 75 percent under a day,” according to the researchers. “What is interesting is from the second hop and on is that the retweets two hops or more away from the source are much more responsive and basically occur back to back up to five hops away.”
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An upcoming President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report will address the issue of improving pre-college math and science education in the United States. Its recommendations could include grants, a new federal agency, and increasing funding to programs that let students do science themselves, says University of Maryland’s James Gates. Gates is co-chair of a PCAST working group on science, math, engineering, and technology education. Gates says the National Science Foundation, the National Defense Education Act, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have helped foster technology innovation. However, he says there is “nothing like DARPA in the education system” and something like that needs to be directed at education. Another step the federal government could take is to find ways to jumpstart market-based solutions, according to Gates. He notes that there is a change taking place in the education system, as 46 governors have agreed to sign a common core of standards in what could be a unitary thesis that will control what happens in the schools.
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