IYA House Resolution on the Floor Wednesday

Published by Marcos on July 8, 2008 under General

Tune in to C-SPAN tomorrow morning, because H.Con.Res. 375, honoring the goal of the International Year of Astronomy, is scheduled for floor time. You can see the full House schedule (PDF link) via the House Majority Leader’s site.

Update It should be taken up around 10:45AM, but that’s an estimate. These sort of bills pass by voice vote, so it will go by quickly.

Update II The resolution was taken up and passed by voice vote under suspension of the rules.
C-SPAN has a nifty archive site of today’s events. You can see the IYA resolution pass here. Unfortunately the CSPAN flash player isn’t embedable, or I’d have the video here on the post. Any web gurus out there who can figure out how to capture this video into another format (C-SPAN footage of the Congress is in the public domain), let me know.

Update III I have to say I’m impressed with the C-SPAN site. But they seem to prefer to chop up the segments by speaker, and the links include start and stop timecodes, which is why the clip may have stopped before Rep. Giffords finished speaking. I believe I have tweaked the link above so you can view through the end of the debate now.

That said, you can also view the segment by speaker, with transcript.

The AAS is very grateful to Rep. Giffords and her office for sponsoring and helping move this resolution forward, to the staff of the House Science and Technology committee, and to Rep. Lampson and Rep. Feeney for their kind words and support on the floor.

Science Spending as a fraction of GDP

Published by Marcos on June 30, 2008 under General

The National Science Foundation has an excellent statistics in the appendices to the 2008 Science and Engineering Indicators Report.

I used the excel versions of Tables 4-1, Gross domestic product and implicit price deflators: 1953–2007, and Table 4-32, Federal obligations for total research, by detailed S&E field: FY 1986–2007 to produce this chart:

To be clear, I took the constant 2000 dollar values for Physics and Astronomy and Physical Sciences spending from Table 4-32, and divided those into the constant dollars GDP number from Table 4-1.

Physical Sciences, Astronomy, and Physics spending as a fraction of GDP

Click on the image for a larger version.

Download a High Resolution PNG here

According the data, all Physical Science spending in 2005 is equal to Physics spending alone 20 years ago. Grim.