Watch out academic NSF award recipients! The American Public will soon be searching for you at this website. If you do "silly work" that has been funded with public $, then you may receive a lot of thumbs down and social shame. While I am a big fan of the NSF system, this doesn't strike me to be a crazy exercise. Academics should be held accountable for our work. There are many Departments at my University where I would like to know what their faculty do all day long. This new austerity process may nudge some of these academics to make a short case for why they and their field matters in 2013. Here is a quote;
"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."
