{"id":1502,"date":"2009-12-16T17:11:25","date_gmt":"2009-12-16T17:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=1502"},"modified":"2009-12-16T17:11:25","modified_gmt":"2009-12-16T17:11:25","slug":"research-funding-myopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/research-funding-myopia\/","title":{"rendered":"Research funding myopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

The British Government, through its higher education funding council, is currently considering the use of socio-economic impact factors when deciding the relative rankings of university departments in terms of their research quality, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), held about every five years.\u00a0\u00a0 These impact factors are intended to measure the social or economic impact of research\u00a0activities in the period of the RAE (ie, within 5 years). Since the RAE is used to allocate funds for research infrastructure to British universities these impact factors, if implemented,\u00a0will thus indirectly decide which research groups and which research will be funded.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some academic reactions to these proposals are here<\/a> and here<\/a>.
\nFrom the perspective of the national economy and technological progress,\u00a0these proposals are extremely misguided, and should be opposed by us all.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0They demonstrate a profound ignorance of where important ideas come from, of when and where and how they are applied, and of where they end up.\u00a0 In particular, they demonstrate great ignorance of the multi-disciplinary nature of most socio-economically-impactful research.
\nOne example will demonstrate this vividly.\u00a0 As more human activities move online, more tasks can be automated or semi-automated.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To enable this, autonomous computers and other machines need to be able to communicate with one using shared languages and protocols, and thus much research effort in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence these last three decades has focused on designing languages and protocols for computer-to-computer communications.\u00a0 These protocols are used in various computer systems already and are likely to be used in future-generation mobile communications and e-commerce systems.
\nDespite its deep technological nature, research in this area draws fundamentally on past research and ideas from the Humanities, including:<\/p>\n