I graduated from college and immediately went to grad school. In the sciences, math, and engineering, students generally get paid stipends to go to grad school. Oh, sure, it wasn’t a huge stipend, but it was enough not only to pay the bills but also to let me squirrel away some savings. I was in graduate school during the big financial bust of 2008, but I kept working and kept getting that stipend, thanks in part to the fact that my university valued its grad students enough to guarantee our funding, and in part to support my lab received from various organizations, including NASA – an agency of the federal government.

Immediately after I finished my degree, I got a job. In fact, I even had to push my start date back a little bit, because I needed some time to finish up university obligations and organize my final dissertation. My total period of unemployment was about a week, in early 2011, and then I started working. As it happens, the job I took is with a major commercial spacecraft company; the biggest program we are working right now is a batch of satellites that the US Air Force bought to replace older models.

So, here’s one person’s story: I’ve directly benefited from a government and from institutions that value advanced education, basic research, high technology, and infrastructure investments. And the recession didn’t touch me.

Huh. How about that.

But, fear not, intrepid reader who has been sticking it out hoping for another crazy notion to appear here! You see, my research group at Cornell is still working at churning out wild ideas. And you can participate!

Check out this message from Zac, who was starting his Ph.D. as I was on my way out:

Zac has set up a page on KickStarter, which you can jump to by visiting KickSat.org. The idea behind KickSat is to make a bare-bones 10x10x10 cm CubeSat which contains hundreds or thousands of microchip-sized satellites called Sprites and will deploy them all in low Earth orbit. The KickStarter platform means that, if you want, you can sponsor your very own Sprite – Zac has even defined a sponsorship level at which you get to write your own flight code for the tiny spacecraft to run in orbit!

The spacecraft, which each could fit comfortably in the palm of your hand, are very simplistic as far as spacecraft go – they consist of solar cells to charge a little bank of capacitors, a teeny TI processor for a brain, and a little antenna. These are proof-of-concept spacecraft, and are actually derived from three test units which my lab group sent up to the Space Station on the last launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour! In the future, they hope to integrate other sensors onto the chips to give Sprites more capabilities. One of the ideas batted around during lab meetings that I consider a personal favorite: put “lab-on-chip” detectors on a Sprite to look for characteristic organic compounds (like nucleic acids!) and program them to simply send a chirp back if they get a positive result. Send a million Sprites to Mars, and listen to the peeps – and then you know where on the Red Planet the next big flagship mission has just got to go!

Imagine if you got the shot at writing the flight code. If you could put a solar cell in space and make it beep, what could you measure? How creative can you get in getting the Sprite’s whisper of a radio signal to carry information? Could you receive enough data to tell how fast the chip is spinning and seeing the Sun, or how much average power it has to work with, or how long it lasts before an errant proton from the solar wind blasts your Sprite out of the sky? The chance to put your own code on a spacecraft, even such a simplistic one, offers a lot of learning opportunities.

(Incidentally: one question that Zac and his research advisor, Dr. Mason Peck, get a lot is some variation on: “Hey, paint flecs moving at orbital velocity are enough to crash through the Space Shuttle windows. Aren’t these Sprites going to become dangerous space junk?” The answer is that yes, the Sprites could be hazardous as long as they are in orbit; but the orbit that KickSat will reach is going to be within just enough of the Earth’s atmosphere that all the Sprites will get dragged down in a couple days. The special property Sprites have that influences this fast orbital decay – and other effects – is a high surface-area-to-mass ratio.)

KickSat has already reached its minimum fundraising goal to start building hardware. However, the project is still looking for more backers to secure a commercial launch opportunity, which will offer more certainty than applying for a free launch program through NASA. But if Zac gets to about $300,000 of funding, he thinks that will be enough to start looking at new technologies to shrink the Sprite chips down to even smaller sizes – and offer even more capability in the future!

Cool stuff. I’m glad to see the Cornell Space Systems Design Studio keeping the wild space ideas flowing!

“Aerospace engineering,” I said.

“Cool,” he replied. “Just don’t ever work for Lockheed Martin.”

(Ha.) I asked him why not. His answer: “They build weapons.”

This student was also extremely frightened of the “Big Dog” robot, which had just exploded onto the Internet in a series of awesome demonstration videos on YouTube. Why? “Just imagine what the military will be doing with that. They’re funding it, you know.” Did he have any specific examples or concerns? No. And I pointed out how invaluable such a robot would be in, say, rugged-terrain search and rescue or disaster response efforts. But none of that mattered, this student insisted, because the project received military funding. Somehow, in his mind, if the Red Cross shelled out millions for the development of Big Dog, it would be okay – but not if that money came from the US Army.

This attitude struck me as extremely naive. (And not just because this first-year was wearing a chai.) Some of the best work in science, engineering, and medicine gets funding from the military, because the military is naturally interested in those things. But I don’t think that means that even the pacifists among us should abandon all those lines of inquiry. You see, I believe in the adage that technology is neither good nor evil – it’s how we choose to use it that defines our goodness or evilness.

I have long since come to terms with the fact that many of the engineering challenges and scientific problems that I want to solve have both military and civilian applications. I want to, for example, land robots on Europa or Titan. Doing such a thing will require precision guidance and pointing systems – exactly the same kinds of systems that could control ballistic missiles or smart bombs. Some of the same technologies that let us aim the Hubble telescope precisely enough to image galaxies billions of light-years away can aim the airborne cannons on an AC-130. The rockets that bring astronauts to the International Space Station, a peaceful, collaborative venture between many nations, operate on the same principles and use the same fuels and control systems that go into ballistic missiles. The key difference in all of these cases is in where we, the human operators of such devices, point them to go.

To take an extreme example: the most devastating weapon we are capable of producing is the nuclear warhead. It is a terrible weapon, and nobody in their right mind would tell you otherwise. Some activists out there are so vehemently set against this weapon that they oppose all use of nuclear power and all refinement of nuclear isotopes. But here’s the thing: high-grade plutonium isotopes are what power all interplanetary probes to the outer Solar System! (Beyond about Mars orbit, sunlight is too weak for solar panels to provide enough power for a spacecraft.) Our country has stopped refining high-grade plutonium, and this is actually a big problem in the planetary science community. Again, I want my Europa and Titan landers…and I can’t have them without a stash of plutonium-238!

(For those astute readers who point out that Pu-238 isn’t weapons-grade plutonium, I would argue that the refining techniques are the same. And, for good measure, here’s one of the most peaceful people ever to walk the face of the Earth explaining a constructive use of the nuclear weapons themselves. Though nowadays we view that concept as not very practical, the next iteration might be antimatter-powered rockets capable of taking humans across light-years – but these would be even more destructive if used as weapons.)

In my doctoral research, I worked on new technologies for spacecraft. Fortunately for my moral ideals, flux-pinning interfaces for modular spacecraft are something that we had a hard time coming up with direct military applications for. Nevertheless, they may exist: we thought of looking for a way to develop a device that uses flux pinning to grab onto a target spacecraft without touching it – tractor-beam style. That I am sure that DARPA would be interested in. We did even end up pursuing that idea down a related, non-flux-pinning line to a small-scale proof-of-concept demo. (Our target application was rescuing derelict or malfunctioning satellites.)

Recently, I heard an Air Force colonel refer to GPS, which is a military-developed technology, as a “weapons system.” Now that I’ve gone from university research into the commercial spacecraft industry, I contribute to systems like GPS satellites, so this observation hits close to home. How many people out there using Garmins or iPhones or Google Maps would have thought that they were using something that the military considers to be a weapons system? GPS guides aircraft, boats, and cars throughout the civilian community. It gives researchers a powerful tool to advance geoscience. (Did you know that nowadays we directly measure continental drift speeds with GPS?!) And keep in mind that GPS is what gives us the capability for automated farm equipment to efficiently produce more food, or aid workers to reach remote destinations, or emergency responders to locate missing people and map out disaster zones. I am more than happy to contribute to those endeavors!

So, do we use our knowledge of particle physics to make the most devastating weapons the world has ever known, or do we use it to power the probes that will help explain our origins and find our place in the universe? For me, the answer is clear; but it is also clear that science isn’t necessarily good or evil. (Neither are scientists, for that matter.) Making it one or the other is entirely up to human decisions.

This whole thing was a really interesting and fun experience for me. It all started with some idle speculation on space battles, which turned into one of Gizmodo’s hottest articles in December ’09, which ended up with a Nat Geo producer calling me on the phone. To my immense grad-student pleasure, he asked me what my research was about. And ta-da, our lab got featured on one of their shows!

Kids: let this be a lesson to you about what happens when you have thoughts and put them on the Internet in a blog!

We spent the better part of a month preparing equipment in our lab for the TV shoot, and an entire working day doing the actual filming, all for a five-minute segment in the episode. I have to say, I’m impressed with how well our topic got covered in such a short time, given how long I usually spend explaining it and how much material we spent filming! There’s a lot to be said for having professional editors who want to tell your story. If you caught the episode last Thursday (it will re-run soon; I believe tomorrow at 3 PM is one slot), you saw me show the host, Johns Hopkins physicist David Kaplan, three features of magnetic flux pinning that we feel could make it the basis for a future in-space construction technology:

"Known Universe" host David Kaplan pokes at one of our levitating magnets in the lab. (Photo Credit: ©NGC)

1. Pinned magnets and superconductors can attract one another and stick together without physically touching. David best demonstrated this when he held a superconductor in one hand and a magnet in the other, and the magnet jumped across a distance of a foot or two to lock back onto the superconductor.
2. This effect does not necessarily require any power or control inputs. I explained at one point during filming that, although we have to supply liquid nitrogen or power a cryocooler in order to get flux pinning to work on Earth, a spacecraft might only need to shield its superconducting elements from sunlight. (That detail didn’t make it into the final segment.)
3. Flux pinning can not only lock structures into place, but it can also form the basis for reconfigurable multiple-module space structures that change their shape in response to changing mission goals. Our research group likes to think about morphing space telescopes, planetary orbiters, or solar power satellites, but there’s no reason why human-habitable space stations are out of the question! (If you provide flexible tubes for inhabitants to get from module to module, of course.)

If I had to criticize this TV episode, I would say two things: first, that I wish it had done a bit better job at putting everything in context (I guess I prefer my science shows to make their driving questions more explicit…) and second, that I wish more of my explanation for point #3 had made it into the edited segment. What the final show was missing in regard to that point is something like this:

If a space structure is held together by flux pinning, then it depends on magnetic fields. These fields are actually something that we can manipulate – specifically, we can introduce electromagnets or other permanent magnets to change the shape of the flux-pinned fields. Doing that actually changes how the different components of a structure interact: by turning on and off electromagnets, we could lock components together, release them, or even turn them into flux-pinned hinges. The property of a magnetic field that governs whether two flux-pinned space modules are completely locked together or have some unconstrained degree of freedom is the presence of symmetry in the magnetic fields. In the video below, my fat cryo-gloved finger demonstrates that a cylindrical magnet is stiffly pinned in five directions (three translation directions and rotations about two axes) because its field is rotationally symmetric, but a square magnet is locked to a superconductor in all six possible translations and rotations because of its asymmetric field.

If I sound a bit nitpicky here, it’s only because this was my research for several years! And I think it’s important. The bottom line here is that we can turn a space structure into a space mechanism – and back again – by flipping switches! That is not something you can do with ordinary docking adapters unless you build complicated (and potentially fragile!) mechanisms into them. You could also build your magnetic field sources in such a way that a “universal” connector could form many different kinds of joints (hinges, sliders, cylindrical joints, …almost whatever you want) or lock modules together, or even attract new modules, all depending on which settings you choose.

In other words, if you want to build a space transformer, you will get some advantages from making the connectors out of flux pinning instead of mechanical joints.

That’s the jump between David and me playing with magnets and superconductors and the air-levitated satellite mock-ups going from a line to a box and back again in the second half of our segment. And now, I’m going to move from talking about the research depicted on the show to the experience of filming!

When the production company approached us about shooting in our lab, they asked us to share with them photos and movies to give them an idea of the kinds of demonstrations we could stage on camera. One of them showed an example of two square modules that could start off pinned side by side, turn their connection into a hinge, use an electromagnetic impulse to start rotating, and pin together again in a different configuration.

Now, here’s the thing about university research: conceiving and developing the theory behind something like this is the Ph.D.-level work (i.e., my contribution). A master’s student put together the demonstration. And after that, it’s not really an interesting research problem any more. We know how to do it, in principle. We’ve demonstrated the concept in a laboratory setting. Actually building this is “just” a problem of optimization! On I went to more theoretical things, with the idea of shape-morphing spaceships in hand.

“That looks great,” said the production company, “and we love the idea of transforming a spacecraft from one shape to another. When we come to film, can you set a demo of that up for us?”

“Sure,” said we.

“And can you make it look something like this?” they asked, and pointed us to this video, which I had crudely animated up a couple years earlier when prospective grad students visited the Cornell campus.

“Um,” we said to ourselves. We thought about it, and answered, “well, we have two devices that float around on an air cushion and flux pin to each other. We could make two more, and set them up like our other hinge demo so that they push off each other with electromagnets and turn from a 2×2 square into a 4×1 line and–”

“Great! See you in a month.”

And thus began a month worth of frantic labwork while I was trying to finalize my dissertation.

We really struggled to get those air-floated satellite mockups going. But, with a final effort the night before the shoot, we got the four levitating modules to the point where all four air systems worked, all the superconductors could be chilled with nitrogen, and all the electromagnets could fire on remote command to trigger the transformation maneuver. Just so you know I’m not making up stories, here is a video of the electromagnetically actuated, flux-pinned hinge working. However, perhaps this video does a better job of capturing the mood in the lab at the time:

So, with everything finally shipshape, we went home and got up the next morning to meet the producer/director, host, and film crew. (I know what you’re thinking. Wait for it. I have made this mistake before.)

We spent a full work day filming. First, we took the crew to our lab (a version of my favorite lab-tour opener, “all the cool physics happens in basements,” even made it into the show!) and showed them what we could do. We did the superconductor-magnet pinning demo and pointed out all the satellite mockup hardware, all before any cameras started rolling. Kaplan, a physicist, had heard of these effects but, as he put it, his job on the show is to ask all the questions that the audience wants to ask – and the editors would then make me, the “subject matter expert,” look like the smart one.

Here was where we encountered our first surprise about filming with a TV crew. We got out our liquid nitrogen, yeah yeah, we work with this all the time, it’s just our means to an end, all very blasé and casual, and then suddenly someone on the crew remembers that liquid nitrogen can freeze stuff. And that you can smash the frozen stuff. We kind of rolled our eyes – not that smashing unexpectedly smashable things isn’t fun (it is), but we were more keen on showing off our research! Still, for the first half of the morning, we put together some footage of David discussing with me the physics of making things cold and brittle and, under the camera lens, many racketballs and a couple bouquets of carnations met their splintery, frozen ends. I was a bit relieved to see that our lab’s appearance on Known Universe didn’t waste any time on the nitrogen stuff and got right down to the superconducting physics!

Still, all that was good practice for me! I have given many lab tours. I like giving lab tours. But I’d never given a lab “tour” to a camera crew while wearing a mike, and I’d never had a director before! The first major impact on my tour shtick was that, though you see many different camera angles in the edited episode, there was only one cameraman. So, out of necessity, we filmed the “lab tour” in pieces and each bit had to be repeated three or four times: once for an overview shot, once for a close-up on David, once for a close-up on me, and once for a close shot of whatever we were doing on the lab table. I got used to hearing the director, Scott, say: “Okay, that’s enough information for now. Let’s hit the same beats, but close-up on Joe.” At that point, David and I would stop our somewhat natural interaction and try to hit the same questions, answers, and demos as we had a during the last run. (Some of the same jokes, too.) Once or twice, Scott stopped us if we accidentally covered new information, so that we could make sure they had all the material they would need. Sometimes he stopped me to have me repeat a line with different emphasis, or gave me suggestions about how to explain things, position myself, and so on.

I had to get a bit used to this. In fact, the interference between my usual explanations and the TV modus operandi led to one of the quips that did make it on air! We had just explained how the superconductor’s special properties only occur below a critical temperature, and that we have to cool it down with liquid nitrogen to get it to interact with a magnetic field. David asked me, “well, aren’t you going to make something happen?” and I turned to Scott and said, “so, here’s where I would like to set up the magnet and cool the superconductor down.” He suggested that I just answer David with something like, “Oh, that would spoil the surprise,” and David repeated the question. Boom: TV was made! And David got a good excuse to look surprised when I pulled the magnet’s supports out from under it and it started levitating. That part of the shoot was a lot of fun.

In the afternoon, though, we had to do our demo with the four interacting modules. And Murphy’s Law showed up.

The end product looks great, and as far as we are concerned, the science content of the episode is just fine. As I said before, in principle this concept works – and we even have (on our own dinky cameras!) demonstrations of all the constituent components. But getting all four air-levitated, electromagnetically interacting, wirelessly commanded modules to behave for National Geographic’s HD cameras was more than those devices wanted to contribute! First we couldn’t get the air system working, and two of the modules wouldn’t float. Then that was fixed, and a nitrogen container sprung a leak. Then I substituted a backup container, and the air system broke again. Then that was fixed, and the electromagnets cut out. And so on…

David and I supervise the flux-pinned structure as it "autonomously" reconfigures itself. (Photo Credit: ©NGC)

The maneuver broadcast on TV, in which the line of spacecraft mockup modules moves from a single-file line into a square formation and back again, is the result of two lines of effort: careful editing, and good old-fashioned laboratory jury-rigging.

First of all, the episode seems to show a smooth maneuver, but the camera angle transitions between a couple of different points for dramatic effect. As I said before: only one cameraman! Those were actually entirely separate runs of the demo. Of course, this would have happened anyway, because the editors would have wanted all those camera angles at their disposal. But given the way things were working in the lab that afternoon…they got to creatively pick those angles that best showed off what was going on. You know…those angles, and those experiment runs, in which most of the hardware worked!

Second, though, we had way too much trouble with the electromagnets and, in the interest of expediency, eventually just gave up on them. Instead, we relied on a different non-contacting force to move the modules from one shape to another: gravity! If you take a close look at the picture of David and me above, you might notice that my right hand is holding something just off the table. What I am cleverly concealing is, in fact: a screwdriver. (What can I say? Only a week before, I’d officially become a Doctor!) Behind the modules, David is holding another screwdriver wedged under the glass sheet on his end. On a signal, we both levered the glass up slightly. The two modules in the middle had their air systems off, but the modules on the end were active and so they slid frictionlessly away from us – but, thanks to the flux-pinned hinges, they swung into their proper positions! (See? We didn’t gimmick the flux-pinned hinges; the most science-fictiony part of our setup worked on its own!)

To get the modules to swing back into line from their square formation, the show’s narrator explained that we used the air system to mimic the forces provided by thrusters on a real spacecraft. True! But our thrusters didn’t actually appear on camera.

Remember, all this was to demonstrate the concept of a modular structure that could change its shape at different points in its mission. Here is how National Geographic’s CG artists presented the concept:

A "rocket-like" configuration, for thrust maneuvers.... (Photo Credit: ©NGC)

...that transforms into a ring-shaped space station! (Photo Credit: ©NGC)

Look familiar? The Nat Geo production company really focused on that concept. And I have never seen any of my concepts done with better CG! Secretly, though, I was just a little disappointed. Why? I don’t think this concept is ambitious enough!

I put together my animation in about a day, in Matlab. Yes, Matlab! Renderman it is not. My original animation is a careful sequence of pieced-together kluges: while the concept of a structure that transforms by turning “rigid” components into hinges is correct, my animation did not actually include any simulations of the physics or implementations of the control systems that would govern the spacecraft. (That took me two more years and another couple dissertation chapters to develop.) No, my animation was based on the easiest way I could illustrate the concepts at the time I put it together, and it is not necessarily easy to animate stuff in Matlab. I bet a professional animation studio has access to much better tools. So, in fact, I wish the CG artists had taken more liberties with my concept!

You see, my own vision for how flux pinning could be implemented in modular space structures is even broader than what appeared in the show. I think that “transformable” structures could be extremely versatile: whenever you want new modules, or different modules, you could add them. Your whole spacecraft could morph its shape to incorporate new modules with new capabilities. And these new modules need not be added one at a time, either: two different spacecraft could meet up, in the depths of space or above a planet, and merge themselves into one big mechanism-structure. These modular spacecraft could also split and send various sub-ships off to separate destinations. This whole space future would behave like a Lego universe!

At one point during our afternoon of filming, David commented to one of the crew that a tricky thing about interviewing scientists is that they always want their science to be presented correctly, and sometimes this makes getting nice definitive statements difficult. He pointed out, as an example, that this phenomenon is one reason why it was so hard to get a physicist on TV to say that no, the Large Hadron Collider is not going to create a black hole that will swallow the Earth – because there’s always that tiny, scientific-notation-small, 0.0000001% chance of a black hole forming, and then a similarly small chance of it lasting long enough to do damage before decaying! That may be good enough as a “no” for a scientist, but a some people hear “the chance is astronomically small” and think “that means there is a chance it will happen!” Not an hour later, David and I were on camera and he commented, “and all this docking and reconfiguring is happening without any power usage!” I looked across the table, caught my research adviser’s eye, and let out a rousing “…yessssss…” which got everybody laughing. David got the hint, and on the next take the comment was that it all “uses very little power!” Yes.

So I didn’t really expect our segment of the show to be perfect, and I knew in advance that there was no way they could reasonably cover everything in detail. But I have to say that for the length of time we got in the final episode, I’m impressed with how well our research came across! Most of the major points are there, and we got in some dramatic demonstrations. Perhaps our lab will even get a bit more media attention now.

And, hey, it’s just pretty cool to see this stuff on TV: a nice capstone to my graduate school experience!

I’m excited and nervous – excited, because this is my first real TV appearance, it’s all about the cool possibilities that could come from my graduate research, and I want to see how it comes out – but nervous, because as a researcher, I know what kind of story I want to tell about my subject, and I don’t know if it will come out the same way after editing. I know what footage we shot, but I haven’t seen the finished product yet!

For now, I can say this: I had a blast filming. Explaining the concepts to the host and doing demonstrations with him was a lot of fun. I think there was plenty of footage that made my research come across well.

The only downside is that I don’t have cable in my new apartment!

(I’m kidding.)

The funniest thing about this to me is that I know that the research I’ve been working on isn’t done. There are more investigations to pursue, more refinements to write into the code, more variations to try in simulation, and more experimental verification to perform. Research never stops. But at some point, we grad students have to decide, with our advisers, when we have made a sufficient contribution and should wrap up our work into a complete dissertation. Still, it doesn’t quite feel like I’m “done,” because I know that the research has much further to go! It’s kind of anticlimactic.

A rather nice capstone, though, was spending last week getting the lab ready for, and filming, a bit for the National Geographic show “Known Universe!”

To keep all eighteen of my intrepid readers happy, here is a video that recently went up on my lab group’s YouTube channel:

That’s me demonstrating the physical principles that could be used to make a real-life tractor beam that can push, pull, and manipulate spacecraft. The device would work by pumping changing magnetic fields at a target spacecraft, exciting eddy currents in the spacecraft’s aluminum skin. These currents interact with the magnetic field from the tractor beam device, allowing it to push, pull, or rotate the target.

In the video, I generate these changing magnetic fields by moving a big rare-earth magnet around. On a spacecraft, a more likely tractor beam device would be a set of electromagnet coils. I calculated that, with reasonable power requirements, such a device could exert ion-engine-scale forces on a target several meters away. More powerful electromagnets would increase that range.

I just came up with a devious new use of the software to add to all that. I do a lot of Matlab simulations these days, and they run fastest on my work desktop. However, these simulations take a long time, so I’d like to be able to set them up and get their results in short, intermittent checks while I’m traveling for the holidays. (Hey, I’m trying to move my research along efficiently and finish up my degree! Really!) But I haven’t been able to get Windows Remote Desktop to work – it seems that my department at Cornell keeps those ports closed and I haven’t been able to find a way around it.

So here’s what I did: I wrote a Matlab script that checks for the presence of other Matlab scripts in an input folder in my Dropbox. It then runs any scripts it finds, captures their output, and deposits that into another folder in my Dropbox. (I encapsulated the run command inside a try/catch block which also plops any errors into the output folder.) The script then deletes the file from the input folder and loops. If I put a file named “stop” in the input folder, the script cuts itself off. I think next I will add some code looking for a file named “clean” and responding to that by clearing all variables except those used in the wrapper loop.

From any of my computers, I can now write a Matlab script to do some simulations and copy it into the “input” folder. When my work desktop syncs up with Dropbox, the Matlab loop catches the script and runs it. I can check the Dropbox output folder later, again on any of my computers, to see what happened!

Maybe this little trick will be useful to someone else out there, so I decided to share it. Happy Hanukkah, grad students of the world!

However, when it comes to things like this, I don’t feel like I’m exaggerating: Congressman Adrian Smith is launching a “citizen review” of “wasteful” NSF projects.

The way incoming Republican Whip Eric Cantor’s web site explains the idea is:

We are launching an experiment – the first YouCut Citizen Review of a government agency. Together, we will identify wasteful spending that should be cut and begin to hold agencies accountable for how they are spending your money.

First, we will take a look at the National Science Foundation (NSF) – Congress created the NSF in 1950 to promote the progress of science. For this purpose, NSF makes more than 10,000 new grant awards annually, many of these grants fund worthy research in the hard sciences. Recently, however NSF has funded some more questionable projects – $750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game industry. Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.

(And, of course, Rep. Smith’s introductory video makes reference to those terrible “university academics” who receive this money. But the whole issue of why learning, academia, and universities are becoming more and more vilified in the political arena is a discussion for another day.)

At the bottom of the web site, there’s a form in which you can enter an NSF award number and comment on how that award is wasting your money. Anyone with an email address can do this. The thing is, while I do believe that transparency is a good thing, I don’t think that the average citizen is going to give any NSF grants the full consideration that they would need to devote to them before decreeing the grant a “waste” or not. They are more likely to make snap judgments based on descriptions like “$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players.”

What do I find so objectionable and anti-science about this?

First and foremost, this is a gross oversimplification. Scientific findings can have applications across many different fields that may or may not have anything to do with the original study or proposal. So, it’s entirely possible that the $750k grant had nothing to do with soccer, but the study turned out to have applications to analyzing soccer-player dynamics. And it’s entirely possible that a materials science group was interested in mechanical models of acoustic waves, but that research was more likely to be funded if done in partnership with a Hollywood effects studio than not, so they got $1.2 million to investigate the sounds of breaking objects. But even if the grants were explicitly for the study of soccer players or improved smashing noises in movies, they still might be worth doing because those findings might have applications to something that matters in our everyday lives, cures disease, enables new technologies, or opens up some other field of endeavor. In fact, every NSF grant proposal must include a substantial section on the “broader impacts” of the research in question, and many proposals get rejected for suggesting research that is too narrowly focused. Rep. Smith is asking people with a few minutes to kill to evaluate what NSF committees with many more qualifications have already evaluated and judged sufficiently broad-ranging.

Here’s an example of research that sounds crazy but has useful applications: a group of collaborators in Canada published a paper on the mathematical modeling of a zombie outbreak. (The paper is available online here, and is a hilarious read for anyone familiar with scientific writing!) Your first thought might be that this is a terrible waste of money, effort, and university resources; or perhaps that the journal ought to be discredited for publishing such a paper; or perhaps you think that this was a total failure of the peer-review process and that all scientists have lost their sense of perspective. But here’s the thing: the zombie modeling research actually has real-world applications. From the paper’s discussion section:

The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally, but possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.

This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first mathematical analysis of an outbreak of zombie infection. While the scenarios considered are obviously not realistic, it is nevertheless instructive to develop mathematical models for an unusual outbreak. This demonstrates the flexibility of mathematical modelling and shows how modelling can respond to a wide variety of challenges in ‘biology’.

[Munz, Hudea, Imad, and Smith, "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection," Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress, 2009]

So, yes: these scientists recognize that they worked on a project that is, on the face of it, somewhat silly. The important thing, though, is that these researchers got together, thought it would be interesting to apply their methods to a problem, and got results that have multidisciplinary impacts.

Another great example is the study of synchronicity. Scientists in the fields of mathematics, biology, physics, engineering, and computer graphics have been interested in synchronicity among many discrete entities and how it could arise without central control, just from a few simple rules that each entity follows. An example is “flocking” behavior, exhibited by groups of birds or fish. A computer graphics expert named Craig Reynolds published a paper in 1987 explaining how three simple rules could explain how birds flock together. One of the dramatic consequences of this research was better computer modeling of large groups of animals, which, of course, found its way straight into the special effects industry. Here’s a famous example that uses computer simulation of flocking behaviors to make more realistic animated animals:

So, by Rep. Smith’s logic, if any synchronicity research received NSF funding, he could put it up on the Republican Whip’s web site and say, “university academics got hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to develop computer graphics of a wildebeest herd for a Disney movie.” Shameful, right? The thing is, this application is one aspect of the research. There are many more, ranging from behavioral biology to architecture to sociology to crystallography. Yes, applications include better computer renderings of schools of fish in “Finding Nemo.” Yes, applications include being able to explain how humans at a concert can all clap in time with one another. But this research also gives us better bridges, self-assembling chemical structures, and more capable robotics. You don’t have to take my word for it – here’s a fantastic TED video of Cornell Prof. Steve Strogatz, a gifted communicator, talking about the study of synchronicity and its many applications.

Second, people submitting NSF awards to the Republicans through this program are going to end up nominating as “wasteful” awards that have to do with policies they disagree with. One of the tricky things about science is that scientists don’t get to choose what results they get; sometimes they get results that they – or politicians – don’t like. But that doesn’t mean that those areas of study aren’t deserving of scientific attention!

Anyone with an email address can submit an NSF award to this Republican web site. It would take about 30 seconds for a lobbying corporation to get a Hotmail or Gmail address that wouldn’t be traced back to the company and submit all kinds of grants that have the potential to damage them politically. How many fast food chains do you think will nominate NSF-sponsored studies relevant for obesity prevention? How many oil and gas companies will nominate research into solar cell technologies or further confirmation of climate change? How many religious nutcases will nominate research that impacts evolutionary biology? How many companies will use this as a means to try to shut down research that might make their products obsolete or less desirable?

Humans have a natural tendency to try to ignore problems unless they pose a clear and present danger. This is probably a survival instinct: focus on what’s in front of you, solve the problems you can, and whatever goes on over there is someone else’s issue. However, at some point, we do have to recognize when an issue goes from “not our problem” to “we need to solve this.” Climate change is a perfect example: among the scientific community, there is no doubt that it is happening (though there may be disagreements about the details). But for a politician, it would be unwise to say, “yes, climate change is real; no, I don’t think we should do anything about it.” A statement like that would run the risk of sending voters the message, “I don’t care about you.” Much easier (and safer at the polls) to say, “no, it’s not happening at all.” As such, these politicians will latch on to any tiny weakness in the scientific work, so that they don’t have to commit to a course of action. So how many NSF-sponsored projects into determining what the impacts of climate change might or might not be get submitted to this web site, not because we shouldn’t find out about those impacts, but because some people don’t want to know that a problem exists?

Asteroid impact!

On a related note, one thing that NSF does is fund some of our programs to identify near-Earth asteroids. These are the kinds of asteroids that we have to worry about – the kind that could crash into our planet and destroy things in a cataclysmic way. What are the chances that that could happen? Any astronomer will tell you that they are, well, astronomically tiny. Still, there is value in the search – because if an asteroid is on its way to impact the Earth, we had better know about it! If we ignore the problem, then there’s a large chance that nothing happens but a small chance that we all die. If we address it, then we can try to mitigate the issue. But how many ordinary citizens will look at these programs and think, “I don’t even know what asteroids are. Are they real? What is this? My tax dollars are paying for this. Why should they?”

Third, NSF-funded research pays for graduate students! We cost money – not just our meager stipends, but also our university tuition, university overhead, and mandatory health insurance for those of us who work in labs. We also need capable computers and precise equipment to do our research. And we need to present our findings to the scientific community at research conferences. Even if our current project happens to be on better modeling of the sound things make when they break, and even if the obvious applications are in the movie and gaming industries, that’s not what we’re going to spend our whole career on. We’re learning advanced skills – skills this country desperately needs to develop. We’re pushing the boundaries in advanced fields – fields that are relevant to a wide range of applications.

What if the grad student modeling the sounds of breaking objects goes on to develop software that can analyze a terrorist’s tape of demands to determine what other activities are going on in his cave, and lets us pinpoint him and stop him? (Yeah, that’s right, I just called House Republicans soft on defense because of this NSF-skewering project!) What if the grad student modeling soccer players is talking with a friend who is doing medical research, and finds out that his soccer-player algorithms could help his friend develop a cure for cancer?

Even if our research project has limited applications, it still has the function of giving us grad students the skills, tools, and abilities that we need to become fully-functional scientists and engineers in our own right. Today, I work on algorithms to control reconfigurable modular spacecraft. But if I never touch another spacecraft-related problem again in my life, I have still learned a lot about computer programming, mathematical modeling, control strategies, physics, critical thinking, project management, systems engineering, technical paper-writing, and communication. Whether or not I keep working on spacecraft, all those things will continue to be useful. Maybe someday I will even become a professor and start making little baby scientists of my very own. And regardless of what research projects they work on, no matter how silly it seems, there is value in simply teaching them to be scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and thinkers.

For science to work properly, scientists need to be able to proceed with free and open inquiries. They need to be able to exercise their wits and apply their knowledge to all sorts of problems. Science is about looking at something in the world, watching it, and thinking, “if I put my mind to it, I can figure that out!“ It doesn’t matter if the phenomenon in question is how soccer players move on the field, why things make the sounds they do when they break, why fish school together, or even how hypothetical zombies spread their infection. It also doesn’t matter if the research has immediate applications to movies, video games, sports, or anything else. We can explain the phenomena of the universe. Working to expand the scope of our knowledge enriches us, little by little, for as long as the human race exists.

That is a philosophy that the House Republican leadership opposes with this NSF review site. If your congressperson has anything to do with it, I urge you to write them about it.

Naturally, I downloaded the paper straightaway. It appeared in the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics this month, and is on the subject of satellite formations held together by actively controlled electromagnets. Right in the second paragraph was a reference to my work with my advisor at Cornell:

And, sure enough, reference [3] is to, as it turns out, my first conference paper on this project!

(As an aside, by now I’ve done much better work than that paper – and as I edit my dissertation material, I keep thinking, ugh, how could I have written some of that stuff! – but I won’t be picky, because I understand how long the publication process can take!)

To my knowledge, this is my first outside-my-group citation. That’s a grad school milestone!

For those of you not familiar with science and engineering papers, let me explain a little. Even if this is only a sentence in the literature review, it’s still pretty important. It shows that the authors included my work within the scope of the field; it’s a sort of measure of acceptance into the community. This citation is especially cool because the MIT group that published this paper has been working on electromagnetically controlled satellite formations for a number of years, and we’ve seen our work as complimentary to theirs in a number of ways. It’s nice to see the recognition, and to see our work mentioned in the same section as other related research projects. (And I did some work out of one of Schaub’s textbooks recently.)

All right! Now I guess it’s time to try and get back to the grad studentry…