Dancing Dollars Stimulate UNCC
Wolfpack researchers also reaped $770,856 for a grant to study how video games, such as Nintendo’s Wii’s Boom Box, can help improve mental health for the elderly. The effort will be a joint-project with the Georgia Institute of Technology, which received $427,824.
And about that $144,541 grant for Wake Forest University to research how monkeys react under the influence of cocaine; don’t think for a second that it’s not a job-creator. From the McCain-Coburn report:
The project, titled “Effect of Cocaine Self-Administration on Metabotropic Glutamate Systems,” would have the monkeys self-administer the drugs while researchers monitor and study their glutamate levels. When asked how studying drug-crazed primates would improve the national economy, a Wake Forest University Medical School Spokesman said, “It’s actually the continuation of a job that might not still be there if it hadn’t been for the stimulus funding. And it’s a good job.” He added, “It’s also very worthwhile research.”
The full McCain-Coburn “Summertime Blues” report is here; some of the standouts:
* $554,763 for the Forest Service to replace windows in a visitor center at Mount St. Helens in Washington. The center has been closed since 2007 and has no plans to reopen.
* $1.9 million to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and east Africa to capture, photograph, and analyze exotic ants.
* $308 million for a joint, clean-energy venture with – wait for it – British Petroleum, through Hydrogen Energy California, a LLC owned largely by BP.
* $3.8 million for a “streetscaping” project that has reduced traffic and caused a business to fire two employees.
* $39.7 million to upgrade the statehouse and political offices in Topeka, Kansas.
* $762,372 for a Georgia Tech assistant professor to study “improvised music.” The project seeks to “understand, model, and support improvisation, or real-time collaborative creativity, in the context of jazz, Indian classical, and avant-garde art music.”
* $298,543 to the Southwest Research Institute in Texas to the “atmospheric forecasting of weather and climate on other planets.”
* $500,000 to create a campaign to promote recycling in Dayton, Ohio, specifically why residents there should use their brand new, 96-gallon, rollout bins that are embedded with radio frequency identification chips to track recycling habits.
* $497,117 for San Diego State University to research whether improved nutritional and alcohol-content labeling will affect consumption of alcoholic beverages. The research includes field experiments to test the “effectiveness of different disclosure strategies under various levels of natural drunkenness.”
* $296,385 for Cornell University to study “dog domestication.”
* $712,883 for Northwestern University to develop “machine-generated humor.” According to the grant, researchers will use computers to pull jokes from the Internet and to create a “comedic performance agent” that “will be funny no matter what it is talking about.”
* $529,648 for the University of Michigan to study, according the grant, “the reciprocal relationship between population processes (marriage, fertility, and migration) and the environment (landusefcover [sic], vegetation abundance, species diversity, and consumption of natural resources) in the foothills of the Nepalese Himalayas.” In 2007, researchers received a five-year grant, worth nearly $2.5 million, for essentially the same project from the National Science Foundation.
* $677,462 for Georgia State University to study why monkeys respond negatively to inequity and unfairness: “Seven species of primates will be asked to make decisions about whether or not to accept rewards in a series of studies in which their outcomes vary relative to their social partners. The influence of social factors like group membership and individual factors like personality will also be investigated. The results of this research will clarify how decision-making is affected by unequal outcomes.”
Unequal outcomes: kind of nicely sums up the $862-billion stimulus spending spree and its purported job creation.
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