OK Sen. Coburn Report Shows Taxpayer Money Spent on Robots That Fold Laundry, Shrimp on Treadmills

[The Northerner]

You've probably heard of shrimp on the barbie, but what about shrimp on a treadmill?

The National Science Foundation has, and it spent $500,000 of taxpayer money researching it. It's not entirely clear what this research hoped to establish.

But it's one of a number of projects cited in a scathing new report from Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, exclusively obtained by ABC News.

It's not just shrimp on a treadmill. The foundation spent $1.5 million to create a robot that can fold laundry. But before you try to buy one to save some time, consider that it takes the robot 25 minutes to fold a single towel.

The list goes on. Lots of people love to use FarmVille on Facebook, but lots of people probably don't love the government's spending $300,000 in taxpayer money to study whether it helps build personal relationships.

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/oklahoma-sen-tom-coburn-report-shows-taxpayer-money/story?id=13689403

[Mz Pip]

1. I don't think anyone will argue

that there is no wasteful spending in the government. There's plenty, but $500,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the wasteful spending by the Pentagon and the MIC.

[blm]

3. yep......but, making Coburn look like a hero is more the intention of the post.

It's typical of the support for guys like Coburn while also posting anything that smears a Dem.

[Kingofalldems]

13. +1

Spotted it a long time ago, but nobody listens.

[blm]

16. I couldn't find ONE post against Coburn, even though there have been plenty of controversies

and plenty of threads noting Coburn's lunacy over the years.

[DefenseLawyer]

2. You can take every one of these "questionable" programs for the last 10 years

and the cost would equal what the military spends in a day. Every day. Forever.

[gratuitous]

5. Not even a whole day, I'd bet

And how much staff time did Sen. Coburn waste ferreting out these paltry couple of millions, when a .0037 second Google search would have found several times that much waste in Iraq or Afghanistan yesterday?

[DefenseLawyer]

6. Numbers I can barely get my head around

With a defense budget of 881 Billion per year, you could fund that $500,00 project every year for the next 1,762,000 years.

[blm]

15. exactly....but, then, that wouldn't fit with the agenda, would it?

.

[izquierdista]

4. I have to question that headline

Of all the treadmills I have seen, you wouldn't have to fold the shrimp to get them on.

Or did I read that wrong, are the robots folding shrimp into shirts WHILE they are on a treadmill?

[madrchsod]

7. i`m not sure about the shrimp but the robot-yes

i`d rather imagine it`s a complex problem for a robot.

[VWolf]

11. Yep. Coburn is missing the point here.

It's not about a robot that folds laundry - it's about developing systems that can perform complex, cognitive functions. I'm sure "folding laundry" was one of a number of tasks attempted.

Of course, you take it out of context and it appears superfluous.

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. I am very curious as to the reason for the treadmill experiment.

The towel/robot thing I get - it is a very simple task for a human, but unless the towel is placed before the robot lying perfectly flat, it would be incredibly difficult for a robot to do - find the corners, align them fold once, find the new corners without losing the first fold, align them again, etc.

Would 'exercising' shrimp cause faster growth, and earlier harvest?
Or is the shrimp exercise also a robot exercise, studying how multi-legged animals move, enabling us to move from wheeled to multi-legged rough terrain robots?

[Hassin Bin Sober]

9. I'd bet the shrimp treadmill has something to do with studying migration. Just a guess.

What did Carl Sagan call it? The giggle factor? Rethugs are good at it. Until it blows up in their faces - like giggling at "volcano studies".

[DefenseLawyer]

12. Here's a link that comes up when you google "shrimp on a treadmill"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15319541/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/scientists-put-shrimp-treadmill/

[Hassin Bin Sober]

14. As I suspected:

Shrimp dealing with an infection would be less active and might be limited in their ability to migrate, find food, and avoid being eaten, Scholnick said. "These studies will give us a better idea of how marine animals can perform in their native habitat when faced with increasing pathogens and immunological challenges."

What gets me is the fisherman I've know are some of the loudest mouth rethuglicans you want to know. You know the type: "I lift myself up by the bootstraps" hardworking types. Watch Deadliest Catch for an example. They ignore the help they get from the big bad gubmint. They only bitch how the gubmint won't let them bleed the fishing areas dry.

[jberryhill]

10. "It's not entirely clear what this research hoped to establish"

....because the people who write this stuff wouldn't have the first clue what ANY scientific research program is trying to establish or why.

Incidentally, there is a huge freaking shrimp industry that generates a lot of economic activity. Perhaps the authors of this article would like to explain the current state of the art in assessing shrimp population health in response to environmental or immunological challenges.

Or, maybe they'd just like to spew more oil into the Gulf of Mexico and say the shrimp are doing just fine.

We are going to drown in anti-science nitwittitude.

[BanzaiBonnie]

17. And your point in posting?

Of course there's waste. Waste and fraud that occur in private industry too.


I would not trust anything Coburn "reported" on without having some context. There's almost always more to the story.

Remember when... was it Bobby Jindal? railed against volcano monitoring? Yeah, that's just nonsense.

[Fumesucker]

18. Proxmire redux..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Proxmire

Proxmire was famous for issuing his Golden Fleece Awards, which identified what he considered wasteful government spending, between 1975 and 1988. The first was awarded in 1975 to the National Science Foundation, for funding an $84,000 study on why people fall in love. Other Golden Fleece awards over the years were "awarded" to the Justice Department for conducting a study on why prisoners wanted to get out of jail, the National Institute of Mental Health to study a Peruvian brothel ("The researchers said they made repeated visits in the interests of accuracy," reported the New York Times), and the Federal Aviation Administration, for studying "the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the 'length of the buttocks.'"<1> Proxmire was successful in stopping numerous science and academic projects which were, in his opinion, of dubious value.

Proxmire's critics claimed that some of his awards went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs, such as the Aspen Movie Map. For example, Proxmire was criticized in 1989 for the Aspen Movie Map incident by author Stewart Brand,<8> who accused Proxmire of recklessly attacking legitimate research for the crass purpose of furthering his own political career, with gross indifference as to whether his assertions were true or false as well as the long-term effects on American science and technology policy. Proxmire later apologized for several of those, including SETI.

One winner of the Golden Fleece Award, Ronald Hutchinson, was so outraged that he sued Proxmire for defamation in 1976. Proxmire claimed that his statements about Hutchinson's research were protected by the Speech or Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that that clause does not immunize members of Congress from liability for defamatory statements made outside of formal congressional proceedings (Hutchinson v. Proxmire, 443 U.S. 111 (1979)). The case was later settled out of court.<9>

[Kingofalldems]

19. Propping up one of the worst repubs ever

[LanternWaste]

20. 8.8 BILLION(!) dollars went missing in Iraq in 2004. What did he have to say about that?

WASHINGTON - Three U.S. senators have called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to account for 8.8 billion dollars entrusted to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq earlier this year but now gone missing.

(August 21, 2004 by the Inter Press Service)

[Warren DeMontague]

21. You mean Tom "Death Penalty for Abortion Doctors" Coburn?

how much is his Federal Fetus Police Force going to cost?

[Warren DeMontague]

22. wait.... there's a robot that folds laundry?

Where can I get one? I fucking HATE folding laundry.

[LeftinOH]

23. The research to find a cure for polio involved breaking a lot of eggs...

Even if the purpose of SOME kinds of research isn't immediately obvious, there is probably a pretty good reason for it -which is beyond the comprehension of Republicans.