Comment by sureglymop
9 days ago
Unsurprising.
I downloaded the linked excel file and this is the description of the first project link I clicked on:
> "COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: CISE-MSI: DP: CPS: CYBER RESILIENT 5G ENABLED VIRTUAL POWER SYSTEM FOR GROWING POWER DEMAND"
I feel like they just go by keywords like covid, 5g, gender, women, climate change etc....
It's not based on titles. Here [1] is the proposal. It included "Furthermore, by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim at bridging the gap in institutions across the US. It will train the next generation of scholars from minority serving universities and marginalized communities in the fields of cybersecurity, utilization of renewable resources, and machine learning to address the pressing problems of this age."
Previously DEI adherence weighed into which proposals were awarded funding. They no longer do. It's unclear exactly how this is working but suspect they're flagging grants where either the entire point was DEI, or where the project was unrelated to DEI but the DEI stuff pushed it into the acceptable range (and/or drove the grant amount higher than necessary for the underlying science), and cancelling them.
[1] - https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2219701&His...
Interesting, thank you for the addendum! Do you believe it is likely that inclusions of things such as "by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim at bridging the gap in institutions across the US" result in a higher likeliness of funding? I also wonder if Hacker News would generally consider it to be ethical to use this to increase the likeliness of funding. In this case it does seem unrelated to DEI otherwise.
Definitely. The previous administration used executive power to direct various government organizations to factor DEI into all government funding, and this is also reflected in the last line of the proposal's abstract (extremely odd place for an administrative comment but that's where it is): "This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria."
If there is a point scheme being used behind the scenes, as seems reasonably probable, then selecting all grants to be eliminated was probably not much more than a single SQL query.
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https://old.reddit.com/r/PhD/comments/1ihzjsn/keywords_that_...
It's depressing that they didn't even bother to read the actual grant they were targeting.
Very generous of you to assume they have the mental ability to do that.
Wait, they put 5G on the banned list? Are they going to scrap the fifth-gen fighter aircraft too?