A Reblog Blog

Scientists across multiple disciplines are sounding the alarm after the White House proposed taking greater control over how scientific research gets funded and allowing political appointees to decide whether to approve scientific grants.

Critics of the proposed rule say it would codify the administration's attempts to destroy the scientific research enterprise in the US that has led to remarkable discoveries on treating cancer, HIV and rare diseases — as well as understanding weather and climate science and developing artificial intelligence. It could have far-reaching implications on what kinds of research topics get studied in the first place.

One of the main casualties in OMB's proposal would be the country's longstanding scientific peer review process for grantmaking. Peer review has been widely used since the post-World War II research boom, and relies on panels of experts in their fields judging federal funding decisions on the scientific merit of the grant proposals, rather than any politically-motivated criteria.

The proposed rule would also ban research on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as gender, and stop federally funded international scientific collaborations. And OMB's changes could target more than scientific research — applying to other federal grant awards from agencies to state and local governments.

"This proposal does not just apply to scientific research funding, it applies to other federal awards in all kinds of contexts," said Stanford Law School professor Lisa Larrimore Ouellette.

Kate Marvel, a climate scientist who recently left NASA due to political interference in climate-science research there, said peer review has long been an enabler of America's scientific leadership.

"One of the reasons the USA has historically been such a research superpower is that we've had a merit-based science funding system, where research is funded by the federal government based on the assessments of other scientists," she said.

Captions cover the spot on the screen you put the information I need

The dialogue is captioned but not the song you have playing that the dialogue is responding to

You only captioned the person on the screen, not the person off screen who is also talking

No captioning of critical sound effects (alarms, bells, dogs barking, etc)

Speakers are not labelled at moments where it is not clear on the screen who is talking.

Captions cover the spot on the screen that you put the information I need!

Other d/Deaf people welcome to add.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.