And all the different ways you can “train” a model

Non-blog life has been very busy, and events have been changing rapidly, but I thought it would be a good idea to give a brief bulleted list of updates regarding the NSF and associated issues: A court decision regarding who has the authority to fire probationary federal workers has led to the NSF hiring back 84 of the employees that it had previously dismissed, at least for now.  The Office of Personnel Management is still altering their wording on this. There is likely some kind of continuing resolution in the offing in Congress, as the current funding stopgap expires on March 14.  If a CR passes that extends to the rest of the fiscal year (Sept 30), that would stave off any big cuts until next FY's budget. At the same time, a number of NSF-funded research experience for undergraduate programs are being cancelled for this year.  This is very unfortunate, as REU programs are many undergrads' first exposure to real research, while also being a critical mechanism for students at non-research-heavy institutions to get research experience. The concerns about next year's funding are real.  As I've written before, cuts and programmatic changes have been proposed by past presidents (including this one in his first term), but historically Congressional appropriators have tended not to follow those.  It seems very likely that the White House's budget proposal will be very bleak for science.  The big question is the degree to which Congress will ignore that.   In addition to the budget, agencies (including NSF) have been ordered to prepare plans for reductions in force - staffing cuts - with deadlines to prepare those plans by 13 March and another set of plans by 14 April.  Because of all this, a number of universities are cutting back on doctoral program admissions (either in specific departments or more broadly).  My sense is that universities with very large components of NIH funding thanks to medical schools are being particularly cautious.  Schools are being careful because many places guarantee some amount of support for at least several years, and it's difficult for them to be full-speed-ahead given uncertainties in federal sponsor budgets, possible endowment taxes, possible revisions to indirect cost policies, etc. Enormous uncertainty remains in the wake of all of this activity, and this period of comparative quiet before the staffing plans and CR are due is an eerie calm.  (Reminds me of the line from here, about how it can be unsettling when a day goes by and you don't hear anything about the horse loose in the hospital.) In other news, there is a national Stand Up for Science set of rallies tomorrow.  Hopefully the net impact of this will be positive.  The public and our legislators need to understand that support for basic science is not a partisan issue and has been the underpinning of enormous economic and technological progress.

In 2006 (yes, it was that long ago – yikes) the International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially adopted the definition of dwarf planet – they are large enough for their gravity to pull themselves into a sphere, they orbit the sun and not another larger body, but they don’t gravitationally dominate their orbit. That last criterion […] The post Where Are All the Dwarf Planets? first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

I’ve worked on topological quantum computation, one of Alexei Kitaev’s brilliant innovations, for around 15 years now.  It’s hard to find a more beautiful physics problem, combining spectacular quantum phenomena (non-Abelian anyons) with the promise of transformative technological advances (inherently … Continue reading →

Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among species. The post A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems first appeared on Quanta Magazine