Science and Technology Medals Awarded

An anonymous reader writes "The Boston Globe is reporting that President Bush awarded science and technology achievement medals today to 15 laureates. The list of medal winners includes those who have done work that has 'revolutionized organ transplants, led to development of global positioning systems, and helped feed millions around the world.' "

Re:And They Receive?

[jcorno]

No prize money, just the medal. This is a U.S. government thing. There's no way any significant prize would be approved by Congress. http://www.technology.gov/medal/ [technology.gov]

Hey, I go there....

[dhasenan]

And the math department's decent, surprisingly. Good in geometry; for instance, Stony Brook is responsible for FIST (Fast Industrial Strength Triangulation), which was commissioned by Sun for the standard Java library. (Triangulation is basically separating a polygon into a set of triangles.)

In case you were wondering, here's Dr. Sullivan's website: http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~dennis/ [sunysb.edu]

Congrats to George Lucas

[Sundroid]

Glad to hear that Industrial Light and Magic, a movie special effects company founded by George Lucas, is one of the recipients of this award. Obviously this piece of news was drowned out by the sound of one certain shotgun blast in Texas.

A trivia about ILM -- John Lasseter (director of Toy Story) worked for ILM in the early 1980s as a computer animator. The computer graphics department, now known as Pixar, was eventually sold to Steve Jobs, which went on to create the first CG animated feature with Toy Story. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Light_and_ Magic [wikipedia.org])

Re:Great!

[slightlyspacey]

Hmmm, do you have any data to support your assertion that President Bush is indeed cutting school funding?

According to the Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2007 -- Section 4 -- Federal Government Outlays by Agency [gpoaccess.gov] that is simply not the case. Spending for the Department of Education is much higher and increased much more sharply under Bush than his predecessor (2006 EST $83 Billion versus 2000 $33 Billion). There is a sharp dropoff at 2007 to EST $64 Billion but this is still above 2004 levels -- perhaps this is the cut that you are talking about?

These sorts of accusations are of course nothing new [factcheck.org]. I would like to make a bold proposal that Slashdot posters actually take the time to read the articles, fact-check, and follow up with relevant posts.

Re:These are actually...

[This is outrageous!]

Thanks for the reference, but I don't think it shows what you say it does...:

1986 awards presented on Mar 12, 1986 [nsf.gov]
1987 awards presented on Jun 25, 1987 [nsf.gov]
1988 awards presented on Jul 15, 1988 [nsf.gov]
1989 awards presented on Oct 18, 1989 [nsf.gov]
1990 awards presented on Nov 13, 1990 [nsf.gov]
1991 awards presented on Sep 16, 1991 [nsf.gov]
1992 awards presented on Jun 23, 1992 [nsf.gov]
1993 awards presented on Sep 30, 1993 [nsf.gov]
1994 awards presented on Dec 19, 1994 [nsf.gov]
1995 awards presented on Oct 18, 1995 [nsf.gov]
1996 awards presented on Jul 26, 1996 [nsf.gov]
1997 awards presented on Dec 17, 1997 [nsf.gov]
1998 awards presented on Apr 27, 1999 [nsf.gov]
1999 awards presented on Mar 14, 2000 [nsf.gov]
2000 awards presented on Dec 1, 2000 [nsf.gov]
2001 awards presented on Jun 12, 2002 [nsf.gov]
2002 awards presented on Nov 6, 2003 [nsf.gov]
2003 awards presented on Mar 14, 2005 [nsf.gov]
2004 awards presented on Feb 13, 2006

Re:These are actually...

[satcomdaddy1]

and yet, from The NSF, [nsf.gov] and I quoth:

The award recipients for 2005 have not yet been named.

Assuming the site to lag behing the news for a day or so, it seems the awardees were just recently named!
I think we can all agree the President has more pressing matters to attend to than spending his time beatin' up the NSF for not producing those names.


Had some great flamebait attached to the end of this, but decided to let it go.