In a recent speech before the members of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. President Barack Obama said the United States should invest 3 percent or more of its annual gross domestic product (GDP) in basic and applied scientific research funding. A 3 percent investment would represent the largest investment in U.S. history, an even larger share of the GDP than the U.S. invested during the space race of the 1950s and 1960s. Obama said the pursuit of discovery a half century ago fueled the U.S.’s prosperity and success, and that this new commitment will fuel the nation’s success for another 50 years. Obama presented a wish list for the future, including educational software as effective as personal tutors, advanced prosthetics that could enable users to play the piano, and an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge. Obama plans to finish the 10-year doubling of the budgets for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, which would add $42.6 billion to the budgets for these agencies between 2009 and 2016. Obama also wants to launch the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a new DOE organization, and a joint initiative by the DOE and NSF that would inspire tens of thousands of U.S. students to pursue careers in science, engineering, and entrepreneurship in clean-energy programs. Obama also used the speech to name the members of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, which will include Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft’s chief research and strategy office Craig Mundie.
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Obama Announces New Commitment to R&D Funding, PCAST Members |
by sparky3887
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Obama Budget Boosts Science, Innovation |
by sparky3887
U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed spending $3.7 billion on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in his 2011 budget, including increasing funding of K-12 education by nearly 40 percent from a year ago to $1 billion. Obama’s plan also calls for tripling the number of U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships to 3,000 by 2013, providing $500 million to the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation Fund. Meanwhile, NSF, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology would get a 6.6 percent increase in funding to $824 million in 2011, and their budgets would be doubled within five years. A record $66 billion would be spent on non-defense research and development (R&D). Obama also wants to make the federal research and experimentation tax credit permanent, and start an approximately $12 million program for commercializing innovations in government R&D.
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$250 Million Initiative for Science, Math Teachers Planned |
by sparky3887
U.S. President Obama has announced a $250 million effort to improve science and mathematics instruction in order to help the United States compete with economic rivals. The initiative will prepare more than 10,000 new math and science school teachers and provide on-the-job training for an additional 100,000 teachers over the next five years. The plan adds to a campaign for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, increasing funding to more than $500 million. In 2007, international math testing found that U.S. fourth graders trailed students in parts of Europe and Asia, and eighth graders were behind a few key Asian powers. Similar results were found in the sciences when comparing U.S. students with their international counterparts. In response to the studies, Obama created the $4 billion Race to the Top U.S. grant competition for education reform funding. The private sector also is getting involved in STEM education. For example, Intel will offer an 80-hour math course to help elementary school teachers develop expertise in math and science. “There’s a lot of research that says if the teacher has that content knowledge, they can spark excitement,” says Intel’s Shelly Esque. Meanwhile, the Woodrow Wilson Nationals Fellowship Foundation will expand a program that places math and science teachers in hard-to-staff school districts in areas of Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The program seeks to train 700 new teachers over the next three years. Obama’s plan also includes a $13.5 million expansion of the UTeach program, through which universities plan to deliver 7,000 expert teachers by 2018.
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President Obama Touts Role of Basic Research in Innovation |
by sparky3887
In his recent address at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, N.Y., U.S. President Barack Obama cited the need for the United States to strengthen its commitment to basic research, which he says is vital to the country’s global competitiveness. He stressed that tapping the Internet’s full potential is essential to U.S. innovation, and this entails faster and more wide-scale broadband deployments and the implementation of rules to guarantee that the Internet remains fair and open to all U.S. residents. Obama noted Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s announcement of guidelines designed to achieve this goal. He announced his proposal of grants through the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation to investigate “the next communications breakthroughs, whatever they may be.” Obama also said that he has established a goal to invest three percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product into basic research and development, which he said has been badly neglected for decades. “When we fail to invest in research, we fail to invest in the future,” Obama said. “Yet, since the peak of the Space Race in the 1960s, our national commitment to research and development has steadily fallen as a share of our national income.”
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Lawmakers Strike New Tone With Proposed Bill Giving Obama Power to Shut Down Internet |
by sparky3887
The second draft of a U.S. Senate cybersecurity bill scales back language that would give the president the ability to shut down the Internet in an emergency. The bill, first introduced in April by Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), would give the president the authority to direct responses to cyberattacks and declare a cyberemergency. The bill also would give the president 180 days to implement a cybersecurity strategy after the passage of the bill. The language of the first draft of the bill, which is still in Rockefeller’s Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, was rewritten regarding the president’s authority to shut down both public and private networks, including Internet traffic involving compromised systems. Critics say that giving the president widespread power over the Internet is dangerous as private networks could be shutdown by government order, and those same networks could become subject to government-mandated security standards and technical configurations. The second draft contains more detailed language concerning the president’s control over computer networks, and removes some language referencing the Internet. The new bill qualifies the president’s authority to include “strategic national interests involving compromised federal government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network,” and says the president may direct the national response to cyberthreats by coordinating with “relevant industry sectors.”
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The Obama Administration’s Silence on Privacy |
by sparky3887
The Obama administration has started to address technology issues such as cybersecurity, network neutrality, and broadband availability, but is still trying to find its voice when it comes to privacy. During ACM’s recent Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Washington, D.C., National Economic Council member Susan Crawford mentioned the rules for behavioral advertising, but those were written under the Bush administration. However, Ohio State law professor Peter Swire suggested that the administration might be struggling with the way people who have embraced social networking tools view privacy. Although privacy advocates push to protect personal data from the government and corporations, people now want to use Web 2.0 to control their own information and to help build political and social movements. President Obama even benefited from such access to data in his campaign. “We are the consumers who have become producers of our own data,” Swire said. “We are powerful enough that we can do politically effective things with data.”
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Obama Announces New Commitment to R&D Funding, PCAST Members |
by sparky3887
In a recent speech before the members of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. President Barack Obama said the United States should invest 3 percent or more of its annual gross domestic product (GDP) in basic and applied scientific research funding. A 3 percent investment would represent the largest investment in U.S. history, an even larger share of the GDP than the U.S. invested during the space race of the 1950s and 1960s. Obama said the pursuit of discovery a half century ago fueled the U.S.’s prosperity and success, and that this new commitment will fuel the nation’s success for another 50 years. Obama presented a wish list for the future, including educational software as effective as personal tutors, advanced prosthetics that could enable users to play the piano, and an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge. Obama plans to finish the 10-year doubling of the budgets for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, which would add $42.6 billion to the budgets for these agencies between 2009 and 2016. Obama also wants to launch the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a new DOE organization, and a joint initiative by the DOE and NSF that would inspire tens of thousands of U.S. students to pursue careers in science, engineering, and entrepreneurship in clean-energy programs. Obama also used the speech to name the members of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, which will include Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft’s chief research and strategy office Craig Mundie.
For more information please visit: http://www.cpccci.com
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Report Calls for Boost in IT Research, Policies |
by sparky3887
Science (01/23/09) Charles, Dan
U.S. President Barack Obama’s transition team has received a copy of a National Academy of Sciences report that recommends several strategies the United States could follow as information technology research and development becomes increasingly globalized. Randy Katz, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-chaired the panel that wrote the report, says the top spot that the United States holds in information technology research and development is being challenged. The report suggests the United States would be a better place for innovation if small startups that want to go public did not have to contend with the costly financial reporting requirements for disclosure. The patent system should be reformed to discourage litigation, the report adds. Also, more funding is needed for research into the biggest challenges. Katz says the High-Performance Computing and Communications initiative of the 1980s and 1990s is the type of “programmatic research [that can] build communities of researchers that collaborate and also compete while pursuing a particular goal.”
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