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from the who-really-needs-independent-experts-anyway? dept.
Common Dreams reports
The Trump administration's anti-science bent has reached the Department of Justice (DOJ), with Attorney General Jeff Sessions saying [April 10] that the department is ending the National Commission on Forensic Science.
The 30-member panel was described by ThinkProgress as "a group of scientists, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other experts tasked by the Obama administration in 2013 with raising standards for the use of forensic evidence in criminal proceedings".
In its place, a senior forensic advisor will be appointed "to interface with forensic science stakeholders and advise department leadership", Sessions' statement said.
[...] "The reliance of law enforcement on questionable science and the overstatement of the reliability of that science has been a leading cause of the wrongful conviction of innocent people", said National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) president Barry Pollack on Monday. "The reason the National Commission on Forensic Science has been so important is that it includes leading independent scientists, allowing an unbiased expert evaluation of which techniques are scientifically valid and which are not. NACDL is terribly disappointed that even while acknowledging the crucial role played by the National Commission on Forensic Science, the Attorney General has chosen to disband it."
Additional Coverage:
Previous: Forensic Hair Matches: More Junk Science from the FBI
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 16 2017, @06:37AM
Again with the making up of bullshit.
I notice a remarkable lack of support for your assertions, whatever they may be, from the link you provided. Perhaps less projection and more looking at the very evidence you provided?
And all of the increased spending went to computer science and math.
Which is why we see medical R&D way above any of that. It has almost the same color as the math/CS curve. For someone with at least a little knowledge of US research, one would have known that there was something wrong with the interpretation when math/CS (a notoriously low cost field of study) appeared to be the highest curve.
Nearly all of it to ASCI, the program to replace nuke testing in real life with super-computer simulations in order to maintain our stockpile.
An elaborate explanation for a curve that didn't exist? Classic confirmation bias. You might want to think about what just happened here.
No matter how we choose to look at it, public funding in the US and elsewhere continues to grow while the effectiveness of that research continues to decline and private-side investment in basic research continues to dwindle. It's real convenient to claim that the problem is not enough funding, mental failwaves from the naysayers somehow holding us back, or some short term profit motive straw man. But there's no reason to expect this approach of just throwing money around to generate better science even over the course of many centuries. I'd say already that we have ample evidence that it isn't working including the earlier research on the declining effectiveness of research papers in various fields.