WTW72: Campus Reform Calls Out "Outrageous" Scientific Studies But Doesn't Understand How Science Works
Emily Sturge of Campus Reform is on the case, folks. Under her watch, the National Institute of Health will never misspend another dollar ever again. Lydia debunks the outrage from the Campus Reform article outlining 10 "outrageous" scientific inquiries funded with taxpayer money that the Right wants DOGE to "investigate." Shrimp on treadmills Crab on treadmills Louchébem - Parisian Butcher language Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here, and it's coming for everything, everything, everything, everything, everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green M&M will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's a Woke.
I'm Thomas.
That over there is my amazing wife, Lydia Smith.
How are you doing, Lydia?
Oh, I'm doing pretty well.
I spent a lot of time on the NIH website, actually.
Yeah, to prep for what we're going to talk about today.
Looking up...
Ridiculous studies.
Oh, okay.
I thought I was going to say, here I thought our NIH was all on serious inquiries only.
I had to do a big record scratch.
What?
We're talking NIH over here, too?
We are.
What, is it Christmas?
I know.
It was.
Oh.
Wow.
Look at that.
So I stumbled on this campus reform article that was titled, 10 Outrageous Taxpayer-Funded Higher Ed Research Projects Doge Can Investigate.
And so I investigated them, and we're going to talk about that today.
Oh, I can't wait.
I bet this is going to be really dumb.
Yes.
However...
You'd be right.
I'm all for if someone finds a government wastey thing.
Sure, I mean, Doge is stupid and shouldn't exist, but...
Oh, wait, you know, I just realized they have a thing that does that already.
Yeah.
It's, like, redundant to have two of them.
It's kind of funny.
Yeah.
Yeah, as Matt pointed out, it's kind of silly to have two things that are both trying to...
Take care of government waste and redundancy.
Let's make a third one.
We need another one.
I think that's the key.
Odd numbers, you know, because that has to be able to eliminate the other ones.
You need a tiebreaker vote.
Because they would probably vote against each other.
They probably would.
Game theory-wise, they'd be like, well, we're the better efficiency department.
Right.
Yeah, so you've got to have that.
Call Yvette.
Yeah, we're one more department of efficiency away from efficiency.
I'm telling you, we're right there.
Yeah.
All right, well, we're going to take our usual break, and when we return, we will find out what those crazy wokists are spending our government, hard-earned government, Dime on.
Yeah.
So, hey, sportsshowpatreon.com slash wherethere'swoke.
Get bonus fun stuff.
I think we have a fun bonus fun stuff.
I gotta say, it's fun in the same way that I think all of our listening audience is probably masochists.
You know, let's be real.
They're freaks.
We're all freaks here.
It's the freak show, yeah.
Because the thing that's the bonus is very painful.
It's the worst.
It's James Lindsay leading a panel.
He is...
Full-on conservative.
It's shocking.
He's actually turning into Dr. Phil, too, in a weird way.
Like, he sounds like him.
He's starting to look like him more.
Mannerisms.
Very weird.
Comedy where he accidentally consumed Dr. Phil's essence scientifically in a lab and he's like...
A nutty professor.
Yeah.
It's like how Tim Allen turns into Santa Claus, but instead it's Dr. Phil and he's slowly doing it.
Oh my God.
I would break that contract so fast I'd be like, no.
Oh man.
It sucks.
It's painful.
But hey, we all know you're a bunch of freaks, you guys.
Let's be real.
That's why you support us to harm you.
Psychologically.
We know where it's at.
And we're willing to provide that service.
We don't ask any questions.
We don't judge.
So, patreon.com slash where there's woke.
And it'll show up in a totally discreet package.
Unmarked.
Exactly.
White, wrapped, packed.
No one will know.
No one will be the wiser.
They'll be like, oh, Patreon, where there's, look, that must be a fun, cool, normal thing.
Yep, totally.
Completely normal.
All right, where do we begin?
Is this like one of those top ten situations?
Like we can do a David Letterman top ten list?
It is ten.
I'm probably going to jump around because I don't think the author has set this up in a way that like really...
You have notes?
Yeah, yeah.
You have formatting notes?
I do, I do.
I want to start, though, with who is this author?
Her name is Emily Sturge.
She's class of 2025, so she's coming up on graduation pretty soon out of the University of...
Oh, that's right, because it's like the actual campus-y people.
I always forget.
Yeah, she's at the University of Florida studying political science and journalism, and wouldn't you know it, she's already had appearances on Fox News.
And so I sent you a clip so we can hear from Emily on how she got involved with campus reform.
At what point are they just going to be hiring conservative toddlers?
Yeah, I mean, the pipeline is real.
As our ideology gets dumber and dumber, we have to start sooner and sooner.
Welcome back.
It is Young Conservatives Week here on Mornings with Maria.
My next guest is another promising young conservative speaking out against wokeness on college campuses and how she's standing her ground in the face of censorship.
Joining me right now is campus reform correspondent and University of Florida.
Our activists are people whose classmates were killed in a shooting.
That's the left's activists.
And they're like, okay, fuck, this sucks.
I never asked for this.
This is horrible.
Or it's a girl who doesn't want the planet to die.
That's the activists that I see as children on the left.
But for real, it's like a lot of shooting victims.
It's people who have had actual harm happen to them and the people around them and are like, wow, this fucking sucks.
Hey, adults, oh, you're not doing anything?
Oh, okay, we'll try to do something.
That's ours.
Theirs is like, hey, we're running a little fascism beauty pageant.
And we're little Nazis.
Nazis and tiaras, yeah.
Yeah, pretty much.
Yeah, I can't think of everyone.
You beat, you won.
Thank you.
I watch a lot of reality TV. Nazis and tiaras.
Pretty much.
And it's like, they have their little talking points and they're just, it's all, God, it's so...
Ah, okay.
All right, here we go.
Student Emily Sturge.
Emily, great to see you.
Thanks very much for being here.
Assess the situation for us.
What do you see regularly in college?
Well, I see the money and opportunity.
Good morning, and thank you so much for having me.
As a student at the University of Florida, I've seen firsthand how America's college campuses have become sites of blatant leftist indoctrination, punishing and, well, punishing conservative views on college campuses.
She's going to be so close to her.
As I was a freshman during my freshman year of college, I saw that this is what was happening in the classrooms, and I decided to start speaking out.
Mom's doing her exact routine, like in the wings.
Like in Mean Girls, Amy Poehler.
Against it.
I vowed to fight against the leftist indoctrination that I was seeing in the classroom, and that's why I started reporting for CampusReform.org.
At CampusReform.org, we discuss what's happening on America's college campuses, and through my reporting, I've seen real changes happen on my own college campus.
God, she might as well be created in a lab.
It's so artificial.
Yeah.
And I don't mean that as a comment on her looks.
Literally, she's an artificial creation of this system, is all I mean.
Totally.
Yeah, it's so generic.
Yeah, they're trying to create like mini Tommy Lahrens or something.
But she's not as like firebrand sort of Tommy Lahren.
She's kind of boring, honestly, and just espouses this ambiguous rhetoric that doesn't actually mean anything when she's on there.
She set up this article basically saying that Doge needs to cut back waste and fraud in higher education.
Much wasteful spending is happening on America's college campuses.
Doge chiefs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy can push Congress to launch a thorough investigation into these questionable expenditures, particularly federally funded research projects that push far-left ideologies.
All right, so what are these far-left ideologies?
We're going to go through some of these studies.
The first one that she highlights.
Gambling for pigeons.
The NIH granted $465,000.
From their point of view, I just, yep, nope, that's what we're into.
Woke leftists.
We just want pigeons to be gambling.
That's our next thing.
So stupid.
The National Institute of Health granted $465,339 to researchers at Reed College in Portland to create a token-based economy where pigeons are taught to gamble with slot machines.
So I looked into this, and yes.
That's cool.
Yeah, that is correct.
An NIH-funded study, I could verify the dollar amount.
Some of these, I could not verify the dollar amount that she was saying.
But we're looking at $465,000 approximately out of Reed College.
The grant that is offered, that $460K, is for three years.
And specifically, it's from the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
And what they're looking at is...
If we turn people into pigeons, will they stop their gambling problems?
Yeah.
They're specifically looking at behavior when something is starting to become, like, activating that addictive part of the brain.
And so they're doing it with pigeons because this is...
Because fuck pigeons.
Because, I mean, like, yeah, you look at, like, pigeons, you look at rats, you look at primates.
Now, birds are weirdly smart.
It's crazy.
They are.
They are.
And, yeah, and you can teach them to use tools and things like that.
Yeah, and you know how we know that?
Dumb shit like this.
Right.
In their world, should we just not know things?
We just not know things.
Yeah.
You know, like any little fact, any whatever, like this.
Hey, did you know if you give a crow a fucking...
A crowbar?
That's why they call it a crowbar.
No, they give them a tool.
If you give them the game Operation, they'll successfully do it.
It's like that stuff.
It's like, that's cool.
I like that we know stuff like that.
It's cool.
Yeah, and so this study that they did was giving pigeons tokens that they could choose to earn, accumulate, spend, or gamble on slot machines.
And so they wanted to kind of study, like, when pigeons are making those decisions, what's happening there.
Now, Reed College does not receive much in NIH funding.
And this opportunity explicitly did not allow clinical trials using humans, right?
So they developed something that could be done with animals.
People in bird suits, like, yep, definitely just pigeons, guys.
We're just totally going to test these absolutely pigeons.
Since receiving this grant, I've seen three other funding opportunities for Reed that they earned.
One was for $420,000, which was looking at the impact of gender on alcohol use in peer drinking contexts.
And the other was $514,000 looking at sexually differentiated motor rhythms.
And $78,000 for creating an attractable model for metabolic disorder.
So, like, these are all varied things.
And I know Reed College tends to be one of the colleges that the right likes to go after.
I don't think we've talked about it yet on this show, the John Ronson trauma episode.
We're going to do that whole Reed College thing.
Oh, geez.
Yeah.
Wait, that's...
Oh, I didn't make a connection.
It's the same college.
So there are four different studies here that I read to you, all varied things, and they decide to pick the one that if you put it into three words, okay, yeah, like why in the world are we studying that?
But the nuance of it is it's interesting, and like you said, it's just cool.
Yeah, here's the other thing.
I don't know.
The odds that...
All this is going to be aces.
I don't know.
Maybe some of it is bullshit.
But you know whose job it is to figure that out?
Not fucking mine.
It's academics.
They'll sort it out.
Right.
And the lead author on this, Timothy Hackenberg, he's received NIH funding for this area of research for several years.
This is something where he has been studying this area.
But he's just paid by Big Pigeon.
By Big Bird.
Big Bird, yes.
He's in the pocket of Big Bird is the problem.
Yep.
So that's how we are kicking this off, is gambling for pigeons and specifically this particular funding opportunity that was posted was supposed to support small-scale research grants at institutions that don't receive substantial funding from the NIH. So they're trying to balance the issues there, like what we talked about over on SIO, that the NIH... Can be kind of a corrupting motivation for a lot of professors.
They're all going into pigeon stuff.
But this is kind of an opportunity explicitly for universities and colleges that don't normally get NIH funding because it is a very competitive...
And so that's exactly what happened here with gambling for pigeons in Timothy Hackenberg's lab.
The second study that we're going to talk about is maybe one of my favorite ones.
So this is titled Chimps Throwing Feces.
Okay, this we need to study.
Thank you!
This said that, you know, the NIH spent nearly $600,000 at Emory University to explore why chimpanzees throw feces, and then another $117,000 was necessary to conclude that most chimps are right-handed.
We're going to throw our shit at them.
Who's with me?
Give me some funding.
So this is actually really interesting because what they were looking at in this study was that the chimpanzees that were good at throwing...
more physically impressive.
So throwing, what they concluded, is probably not related to hunting.
It's not related to a skill for hunting.
That instead, it's probably more a form of communication.
It's about how aerodynamic your ship is.
No.
So the chimpanzees that were really good at throwing also seem to be better communicators They also mapped brain activity with the chimps while they were throwing things.
And obviously there's a more developed motor cortex, but also there were more connections with an area in the brain called Broca's area, which is an important part for us for speech.
So this is a really interesting study to kind of understand the connection of or the development of communication over time and like the evolution with our brain that there is specifically like a deeper connection between the motor cortex and an area for speech in chimpanzees.
Also, I want to highlight this is from 2011.
Oh, yeah.
Let's get those dollars back.
Yeah.
This is going to be kind of common with a lot of these.
2011. Are you kidding me?
No.
So she specifically writes, here are examples.
The poop is long since dried on this one.
Here are examples of university studies funded by taxpayer dollars obtained by campus reform.
Now, obtained is doing a lot of work.
Yeah.
Obtained means she did Google searches, honestly, because...
Some of these studies that I'm going to read to you have been highlighted.
Are you sure it wasn't Deep Throat that was leaking the dossier of completely insignificant expenses that we're doing?
I know, but you know, they are insignificant expenses, but you know who gets...
All riled up about these kinds of things?
Rand Paul.
Rand Paul has cited some of these studies for years, and we'll play a video clip from him a little bit later.
But these are not things that campus reform obtained.
It literally was Emily Sturge on her computer, on Google, typing things in.
They make it seem like she went into the NIH database and scoured it.
The secret woke.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's literally not what happened.
And this stuff is regurgitated garbage that has already been mocked and ridiculed by folks on the right.
And she's just copying their work, honestly.
Also I can't get the funding detail that they're getting.
Washington Examiner reported these dollar amounts, but I, like, went through the database and I can't find exactly what it is anymore.
It was funded by a center of the NIH that doesn't...
Exist anymore because they did a reorganization.
So trying to figure that out.
Lead investigator for this, Bill Hopkins, is also an established grantee with the NIH. He has looked at hemispheric specialization and communication in primates, and he's an internationally renowned expert in primate neural and psychological processes.
He knows his shit.
He has over 300 publications.
He's done hundreds of invited seminars and talks.
This is not dumb.
This is funding someone, an expert in this area, to help us understand evolution and communication.
And it just happens to be that chimpanzees like to throw their poop.
So let's take advantage of that behavior and start understanding the deeper meaning of that stuff.
Well, often they emphasize the certain quirkiness of this stuff for virality in some ways.
I don't know if we're going to talk about this, but like...
The way this funding tends to work, it's not like, alright, we got a $10 million poop budget, and it's like, alright, you're paying the grad students, you're covering, like...
Positions or whatever.
It's not like there's a bunch of places where there's going to be these line items that are like crazy expensive line items usually is my understanding.
It's like, you know, you're basically covering the professor and some students' labor hours and some supplies.
Publishing fees probably.
Yeah, I really wanted to find the budget detail for all of these things through the NIH database, but I wasn't able to find it.
I even reached out to our favorite, Dr. Janessa Seymour, to...
I think we're done with that one.
I think that's over.
You thought 2011 was bad.
Here's the next one that I want to talk about, titled Bees on Cocaine.
I already love it.
Yeah, and her sentence that she said was, Why don't you pick one that is a good example?
With cocaine in their system, the bees were more likely to dance.
And so this was $240,000 from the NIH to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
They're a coke dealer.
Yeah.
This is from...
2009. So most of those bees, like, have a family by now, and they've turned it around.
They're not, you know?
Uh-huh.
Yeah, exactly.
There were actually two separate opportunities here, covering from 2005 to 2008. So we're still looking at, you know, like a three-year period to get to that $240,000.
And the proposal for this funding was looking for innovation in drug research.
So either they wanted, the NIH wanted to see new methods, new techniques, new comparative studies, you know, like animal.
Or receive research proposals from folks that are not necessarily experienced in drug research.
They're experienced in other areas, but they'd be stepping into this area for the first time and bringing their knowledge and experience in a different field.
And this is coming from a guy who knows bees.
He really, really knows bees.
His name is Gene Robinson.
And yes, we found that bees were more likely to dance, but here's what's actually going on here.
The important thing is...
Cocaine is a natural insecticide and plant-protecting compound.
And so they wanted to know, okay, if cocaine is, if it's on plants and bees are going around and pollinating, what is their response?
Are they impacted by cocaine on plants?
Previous research had said there's probably a difference between invertebrates and mammalian responses to cocaine.
And this demonstrates...
No, that bees have a similar response to cocaine as humans because they have similar neuromodulator systems.
So it's acting on the bee in a similar way to how it acts on a human.
And if you use cocaine or, you know, a compound similar to that as an insecticide, yes, it's going to protect your plants, but now you're destroying the pollinating behavior of bees and the impacts there.
So this is really interesting.
Professor has been studying bees for many, many, many years, like mapping their genome.
So this is an opportunity, again, to have better understanding of similarities between invertebrates and mammals and the impact of...
How drugs might then operate on humans as well, because there's this surprising similarity with bees in particular.
All I know is I saw the big billboard that said, Coke, it's the bee's knees.
And I thought, you know, this isn't the best use of taxpayer funds.
Okay, we're going to talk about some more substance abuse and the animal kingdom.
Now from 1987. We need the $20,000 from the 90s back.
For the government, $8 quadrillion budget.
This one, I am struggling to confirm the dollar tag that they put on there.
They said that the NIH gave $5 million to the Oregon Health and Science University to study if finches slurred their songs when alcohol was in their system.
I see three different grants in the NIH database for the primary author from this, Christopher Olson, and they're...
45,000, 47,000, 51,000 between 2009 and 2011. Let me check.
Yeah, that's 4 million.
5 million, yeah.
And then I thought, okay, maybe they're including projects under Claudio Mello because he is the lab.
Listen, I went deep on this, okay?
I don't think I would get anywhere close to 5 million.
I mean, he's received a number of other grants, but...
Again, it's like the dollar amounts are not significant.
Boy, we better alert this team to their possible error.
They're really going to thank us.
I know.
Emily's going to be like, wow, thank you for the correction.
Yeah, we went over this with a fine-tooth comb, and we missed it.
What is the incentive for them to give a shit about accuracy?
I know, I know, but I do.
They just pull it out of their ass.
But I do, and I want to fight back.
So I eventually found some funding information from the popular press that was covering the study at the time back in 2014 after it was published.
And I didn't find dollar amounts still, but it received its main financial support from the National Gene Bank in China.
That's not the NIH.
That's not America.
It also received, you know, NIH money, the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which is a 22 billion dollar institute in mostly private money that they distribute out for research purposes.
They also received money from two different Danish foundations.
Again, not America.
So maybe the five million is gathering all of that stuff up.
up and attributing China's money as the NIH giving them money.
But that's not what happened.
And what they found was that even if the bird wasn't necessarily behaving differently from alcohol ingestion, the slurred speech of the finches was still happening.
And so like mirroring that to humans, that it won't necessarily be, you know, that you're stumbling or having trouble.
I mean, like, the finches are probably still able to fly around wherever they're at, but their speech is changing.
They're already starting to slur their singing.
Yeah, well, this is already interesting even from what you said.
Like, the idea that a bird song can be slurred is super cool.
Yeah.
That's really interesting.
It reminds me of how, like, apparently there are, like, dialects and sign language, which makes total obvious sense.
But, like, it's so cool to think about.
Obviously, for me, I could not possibly fathom any of that.
Like, I wouldn't – it would be completely lost on me because I don't – that's not the language I speak.
But for whoever, the way that humans communicate in – Whatever way that is.
And I think it applies to animals too.
There's like dialects and stuff.
Like how fascinating is that?
So the idea that they could like slur their songs.
I know.
It's really funny to me.
I know.
But it's interesting.
Look, I made this joke over on SIO. But I guess what we need to do is only study the science that's the good, like kind of guaranteed to be the breakthrough science.
Right.
That's why it's the same.
Wait.
Just keep waiting.
My other philosophy is only buy the winning lottery ticket.
It's a good philosophy.
Yeah.
I don't know why everyone doesn't do it.
I only buy the one that's going to win.
Like, why would you buy any of the other ones?
Yeah.
The next study we're going to talk about is actually one that we mentioned in the SIO episode with Dr. Rick.
And that is...
Shrimp on treadmills.
What?
Yeah, so this is a National Science Foundation grant.
Sounds like an old-timey thing.
That place is going to shrimp on treadmills.
Like hell on hockey skates or whatever.
This is a $1.3 million grant for the College of Charleston in South Carolina.
The study was making shrimp run on tiny treadmills, but really what they were doing was trying to understand how sickness impairs mobility.
So the treadmills they found in previous research actually gets shrimp to elevate their activity level.
Crabs do the same thing.
And actually, if you want, I can send you this little video so you can kind of watch it in action.
I'll include it in the show notes so folks can watch it too since I know this is not a visual platform.
Well, crab on a treadmill.
This is our crustacean treadmill.
This is a treadmill that we have designed for the Atlantic Blue Crab, Calamectisapolis, which Lindy Thibodeau, my graduate student, has just put into the treadmill.
What we do is we simulate making them sick with a bacterial infection by injecting Sounds
pretty relevant.
Sounds like science stuff.
Yeah.
That's what it sounds like to me.
Yeah.
You know, the programs we all watched as kids that were kind of interesting, but also if you're not into it, whatever.
But like science, it sounds like science that the scientists do.
Yeah.
I mean, this is also, again, laziness from Emily's.
And this study was called out in Senator Tom Coburn's report, a senator out of Oklahoma, of wasteful government spending back in 2011 and went viral because there were actually videos of...
Shrimp and crabs walking on treadmills.
And so people really like that.
We need more shrimp money because I didn't even know shrimp could do a treadmill.
I know.
I'll be honest.
I thought they just went in cocktails.
I didn't know they actually did anything.
In cocktails.
I assumed that when people do the shrimp cocktail, they're recreating the shrimp's natural environment.
Lou Burnett.
You're saying that's not how it works.
No, no.
Lou Burnett, the primary investigator here.
Do they have little legs or something?
No, I need to know this.
This is important.
Do shrimp have little legs?
I don't know.
I hate shrimp.
I don't eat shrimp.
So it's like, I'm at a disadvantage here.
Like, I need help.
Do they have wings?
They don't have wings.
Shrimp on treadmill.
Shrimp on a treadmill.
All right, we're going to get the answers to this.
If I see these shrimp have little, like, human-like legs that pop out of their little shrimp thing, and they're just walking, they're actually really toned.
They don't skip shrimp leg day.
Oh, whoa, they have like a hundred legs.
Jesus, save some legs for the rest of us.
Oh, gross.
God, no, I'm so glad about my decision to not eat these.
Not eat them?
It's like a centipede.
Oh my God, you people eat this shit?
Disgusting.
It looks like we've blown up an image of like lice or something, you know?
Oh, yeah.
Hey, this was worth whatever amount of money that we spent to find out that no one should eat this disgusting creature.
Gross.
All right.
I gotta wipe my hard drive after a while.
I can't even...
Again, that went viral because people wanted to watch videos of shrimp and crabs walking on treadmills.
Lou Burnett, the primary investigator for this study, addressed the misinformation at that time, in 2011. And Emily is still regurgitating it here.
2011, yeah.
And he said that the money that they receive, in this case it was the National Science Foundation, goes to his lab.
And it's funding...
A lot of different projects.
Yeah.
Eels on treadmills.
Crabs on treadmills.
It's not a $1.3 million treadmill, right?
The first treadmill they built, he said it was free.
They just used scraps around the lab and kind of like...
That's what I'm talking about.
...made it fit together and stuff.
The second one was fancier and cost about $1,000.
How can we get one of those babies?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we still don't know the actual money, but it's probably, you know, yeah, the cost of the labor.
And the grad students and the whatever.
It's pretty standard.
It's basically, we pay a certain amount of minuscule money that would make no difference.
If we got rid of all of this tomorrow...
It would make no difference to anyone except science, except, like, to the taxpayer.
It would make no difference to the government, to the taxpayer, to the nothing.
We would just live in a shittier country, which is what they want.
But it's like, this is just paying scientists to do science stuff, man.
You know, like, my own, sorry if I'm getting ahead of ourselves, but here's my takeaway.
Yeah, like, I assume they have some sort of quality control or they have some sort of whatever, like with anything government, like with COVID funding.
Obviously, you know, I supported a lot of the COVID, tons of COVID fraud, mostly perpetrated by Republicans who then later are like, how dare we forgive student loans?
But even if they weren't fraudsters, even if they were just getting help, it's like, I assume that we have an office of accountability, maybe like Doge, except real, that checks, hey, Professor Shrimp over there, is this real?
And they audit stuff, probably.
And if you commit fraud, it ruins your whole academic career, is what I would imagine.
And so like...
It's probably going to be pretty rare that, like, scientists are committing academic fraud or just fraud fraud and getting money they shouldn't get.
And I imagine that the consequences are pretty stark if they do.
And somebody's probably taking care of that.
Yeah.
And it's not just the primary investigator who's on the line.
Like, they have to get support from their provost at their school.
So the provost is also putting their name on the line.
There are a lot of people that would be impacted if they're really trying to just get away with nonsense.
All right.
So we're done with our animals, unfortunately.
But there's still some fun stuff we're going to talk about that I think is totally worth studying.
So the next one is a $500,000 study to see if selfies make you happy.
That feels relevant.
Yeah.
So this is out of UC Irvine.
And what I want to...
Demonstrate here is that the National Science Foundation provided some funding here.
And then also the Swiss National Science Foundation under a different grant and obviously Swiss money.
This is, again, from 2014. And it was for a four-year term of the grant.
So $500,000 over the course of four years.
$500,000, I don't know if that is solely from the National Science Foundation or if that is combined, again, money from...
The Swiss government and our government.
But it was not $500,000 to answer the question, do selfies make people happy?
It was $500,000 for multiple studies and published research.
So there's one promoting positive affect through smartphone photography, but there's a variety of other things that they did via this study.
From the grant abstract that they wrote, what they wanted to look for.
Studies are suggesting that multitasking with digital media is associated with errors, stress, and degraded performance.
This study provides two main research contributions.
First, to date, no one has conducted an in-situ investigation, so in the original place, of multitasking among the millennial generation.
So wherever they're at, you know.
I'm right here.
And there's this whole other question of collaboration and multitasking and how that actually works.
If connectivity leads to information overload and distraction, how online media experience affects learning, communication, and behavior offline, and the relationship between degree of connectivity and work performance.
So this is a comprehensive, very thorough set of research questions, and only one of them is this There's nothing wrong with it anyway.
It boosts your mood?
Yeah.
Well, no wonder I'm so grumpy all the time.
I've literally never taken a selfie in my life.
Does it count if it's with the kids?
I think so.
An ussy.
Oh, an ussy.
Oh, okay.
There's also one here that I don't have a lot of information about because what I could find on it was largely in French.
Essentially, there is a researcher out of the University of Connecticut who received a National Endowment for the Humanities for $30,000.
Literally nothing.
Yeah, that's nothing.
And also, again, it's not the National Institute of Health.
It's not the National Science Foundation.
It's the National Endowment for the Humanities.
So keep that in mind.
This was looking at what's referred to as the secret language of French butchers.
And I was really curious about this because I was like, what the heck?
I ended up watching a YouTube video in French with, like, English subtitles on, trying to understand what was happening.
And what it is is this was a very common way for butchers to talk to each other without a customer knowing what they're talking about.
So essentially what they would do is they would remove the first letter from the word, move it to the end.
Pig Latin.
Talk in this way.
So like if a customer asked for a particular cut of meat and they didn't have it, like they could have that conversation with their co-worker and figure out how they're going to meet that customer's need without making the customer mad.
But it is something that everybody thought was like, oh, maybe it's just gone.
And this researcher found it's not.
She actually like interviewed like 200 Parisian butchers.
Yeah.
It sounds like we're studying something.
Yeah.
They just want us to live in a dim fucking world of no knowledge.
I know.
I know.
It's just such a sad world.
Now, I'm going to close this out with one of the ones that I find so...
Interesting.
And it's also the highest price tag.
$48.
No.
$7 million.
But confirmed $7 million?
Because last millions was fake.
For sure.
For sure.
I guess I cannot necessarily confirm it 100%.
She's in on it.
She can't confirm or deny.
It's from the National Cancer Institute.
And this is for a project out of Stanford University.
And so the way that they characterize this is they say the National Cancer Institute funded nearly seven million dollars to researchers at Stanford University to build an A.I. toilet.
The toilet.
I want one.
The toilet is equipped with cameras that scans the user's waist and unique anal print.
God damn it!
I already said I want one!
I was like, I need to know more.
What this is actually doing is, and we've talked about this before too, is this is precision medicine.
If we're talking about...
Your distinct anal print?
Yeah.
We're going to solve a lot of crimes with this.
He left his anal prints everywhere.
His anal prints are all over this.
But what this toilet does, it's actually hardware and software that you can install on a normal toilet, like a standard toilet.
And it performs urinalysis and uriflometry.
And in urinalysis, the toilet deploys and retracts a strip.
That's soaked in urine.
And then they can screen across 10 biomarkers to look for presence of things like diabetes.
I mean, theoretically, also, you could find out if you're pregnant, having this thing dip and retract.
And the toilet all does it by itself.
Being able to look at urine flow, you get to look at the flow rate, time elapsed.
You might be able to identify a UTI. You might be able to identify a prostate problem, right?
However, I will say...
It requires the placement of two cameras on the bowl.
And so when they were looking at how to take care of seated users while they're peeing because their genitalia would be completely exposed and, you know, they do care about privacy and comfort, they could not figure that out for seated users.
So just men.
Or I guess if you, like, squat maybe as a woman.
But the smart toilet can also perform real-time defecation analysis.
Poop, stool.
They don't say poop.
I say poop.
As the stool falls into the toilet, they're able to, the toilet's able to run the Bristol stool form scale and measure the duration of the defecation.
So now they're able to characterize things like this.
And that's important for things like early detection of colon cancer.
Hence why the National Cancer Institute is interested in this.
Look, if these weirdos want to study people's shit, just let them do it.
Just let them do it.
I'm not doing it.
Are you going to do it?
You want to do it?
Fine, you do it.
Whatever her name was, I already forget.
Emily Sturge.
Emily, completely replaceable clone of all the other exact fucking clones.
All the Emilys.
Yeah.
You do it.
So what I have seen so far is right now, this is theoretical, but the National Cancer Institute is interested enough for them to build a prototype.
And so they say, OK, here's some money to fund this project.
This is not something where it's like the National Cancer Institute is giving them seven million dollars and then nothing happens.
They're going to take what they build and then do additional research.
And what they want to see is, will this improve patient health outcomes?
This is something everybody should be interested in.
And that they're trying to keep the cost down.
So it's something that...
People in rural environments or remote areas that don't have access to a doctor for hours from where they live.
There's still the opportunity to evaluate very important biological processes for them.
And they would make sure it's HIPAA compliant, all of those things.
They also want to look to see about sending it into space because astronauts are deployed for such a long period of time that this is another way they can kind of monitor their health and make sure that they're okay.
Now, it does sound a little what's-her-name-esque.
Yeah, Elizabeth.
Yes, thank you.
I'm so glad.
And I think that's fair, but you know how we're going to find out if that's the case?
We're going to hear the pitch person and how deep their voice is.
Okay, this toilet is totally going to change the voice.
This being funded by the federal government means there is going to be significantly more oversight than if this was funded by a venture capitalist.
If this was funded by a private company, then I think it's a lot easier to pull the wool over their eyes like Elizabeth Holmes did with Theranos.
I don't know how much federal money she got necessarily, but this right now is solely funded federally.
And it's a variety of researchers.
They have, you know, a number of authors and stuff that put together these schematics.
I looked at them.
I mean, I can't...
Schematics?
No, I'm sorry.
I'm in no position to evaluate them to see if they're reasonable or not, but they're interesting.
They have drawings and everything together.
But we'll get Emily on it.
She'll, I'm sure...
Yeah, these people are useless.
Yeah.
They're fucking useless.
And to close it out, I just want to say that, again, we are talking about not tons of money.
What is the whole fucking budget of this?
A billion dollars?
Five billion dollars.
What is it?
Eighty billion dollars?
No.
So they've had...
No, it's not 400. No.
They've had increases relatively recently.
I'm going to start here.
So in 1992, the NIH budget was about 1 percent of the federal government's operating budget.
And then from 1993 to 2001, they doubled its budget.
And so it remained flat about that time.
And then obviously we doubled it in percentage terms or in the budget in real terms.
OK, real terms.
And then the NIH budget remained flat as, you know, we were going through the 2008 recession and all of that.
And then in 2009, Congress authorized the NIH budget to go up to thirty one billion dollars effective in 2010.
And then in 2017 and 2018, they increased it again.
And so now we're looking at about thirty seven point three billion dollars annually.
Now, the NIH is composed of a ton of different entities.
That's not all going to the funding of shrimp treadmill.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's not just shrimp treadmill.
So they have a variety of, like, funding that they're doing internally in the NIH, and then they have the extramural arm, which is when they're funding research projects.
But there are 27 separate institutes and centers of different disciplines in the NIH. And some of these efforts...
I think that a lot of that stacks up with their bullshit conspiracy theories.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Coincidence?
The NIH doesn't get to just magically decide how much money they want to give.
The funding process for this, and you're familiar with this, having worked in state government, NIH funding takes about 18 months to develop.
So you have the individual institute and centers, the leaders of those, submit requests to NIH leadership after they've collaborated with a bunch of scientists in their area about what to fund.
What are the areas that we want to continue work in?
What are some, like, new and...
Developing areas that we hadn't really considered before, but it's like cutting-edge research.
And then they negotiate with Health and Human Services after that's gone up to them.
Health and Human Services submits it to OMB, Office of Management Budget.
And then OMB makes changes because they are the vision of the president, and so they want to make sure that the president supports it.
And then that's submitted to Congress by February for consideration of the next year's budget.
It is reasonable that it's funding areas in, you know, like cancer research, AIDS research, drug research, just all over the map.
And they are particular with offering grant money, too.
In 2016, for example, 54,220 grant applications were submitted, and overall 19% were awarded funding.
So it is a competitive process.
Like I had mentioned previously, you know, this is kind of a continuing song and dance for conservatives, especially.
And Rand Paul, this is like his favorite thing to do.
This is April 2021. And actually, Bob Menendez is kicking us off in this hearing.
So if you want to play that.
Now, let me turn.
I see Senator Portman's not with us at this moment.
So let me turn to Senator Paul.
This bill has been devised as a way to counter China by spending government funds to the National Science Foundation about $10 billion a year.
I think it's important before we add $10 billion a year to the National Science Foundation, this will be Paul Amendment 2, that we look at a little bit at how successful they've been.
We haven't authorized them in years, but we just keep funding them.
They currently spend about $8 billion.
This would more than double their budget.
Government, as we all know, lacks the profit motive and is inherently less efficient than the marketplace.
Congress has doled out money again and again to the National Science Foundation, only to see the money wasted decade after decade.
There's no evidence that will be any different this time.
In 1975, the conservative Democrat William Proxmire criticized the NSF for spending $84,000 to try to find out why people fall in love.
Now, 45 years later, the NSF is still spending money, $585,000 to be exact, to find out how people fall in love, studying online dating habits.
The late Senator Coburn similarly...
Criticize the NSF for wasting money.
I'm sure we've all heard of the infamous shrimp on a treadmill, the nearly $700,000 project to run a shrimp on an underwater treadmill.
Yeah, that was the project.
That's not all.
$700,000 in money that was to be spent on autism research was sub-granted to study whether Neil Armstrong, when he stepped on the moon, said one small step for man or one small step for a man.
That was $700,000 worth of autism research.
This is the group you're wanting to give the money to.
In the end, they listened to the tape over and over, the crackly tape from the moon, and they couldn't decide.
So what does that have to do with China?
Well, some in Congress want to pour tens of billions more into this very agency, the National Science Foundation, putting it not only in charge of science, but technology research as well.
How well will the money be spent?
Let's look at what they did with the money they already have.
$1.5 million to study how to improve how tomatoes taste.
Researchers determined that adding sugar would help.
What about $188,000 to study why Americans won't use the metric system?
$30,000 to study gambling habits in Uganda.
And $500,000 to study if you take a selfie of yourself while smiling and look at it later in the day whether that will make you happy.
Unless studying selfies is somehow a deterrent to China, what Congress is doing now...
Yeah, dude.
We should just read descriptions of their jobs and their salaries.
Hey, we pay whatever the fuck congressional salary is for some asshole to just stand there and sit there and read a page that has inaccurate descriptions and incomplete descriptions of science.
Yeah.
And then made-up shit.
Yeah, man.
We can do that for you, too.
And things that had been addressed.
I mean, like, you know, this is 2021 and time and time again, like, these researchers have had to come out and help correct the misinformation that goes viral related to their life's work, essentially, and what the funding was and why it was worthwhile.
And it's just so unreasonable that, like, everything that they have going on, that they have to spend their time doing that as well.
You should be able to just trust that.
These entities are funding things through a competitive process for research that has been argued and justified as being worthwhile for X, Y, and Z. And why do we all have to judge it?
I hate these fucking fascist clowns who want us to live in a world with no knowledge.
I can't take it anymore.
I'm saturated, hun.
That enough.
Fuck these people.
That's it.
In this upcoming 2024 election, I'm going to make sure that I don't vote for these people.
And I hope that you all...
Wait, what's the date?
Oh, never mind.
We're fucked.
Yeah.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Yep.
So we'll also...
Hear more from Emily, I'm sure, as she steps into the conservative space.
She's already written another article about five wasteful uses of taxpayer money in 2024. Lawmakers should investigate in 2025. Giving food to babies.
One of them was the National Science Foundation grants $50,000 to Boise State researchers to study white supremacist extremism.
Why in the world are we going to ask Congress to give a crap about $50,000?
Oh, because it's about what they're studying.
We're also wasting negative $10 million on that because we need to be researching it.
More money.
Give them more money, please.
Yep.
So there you have it.
Emily Sturge, her terrible article.
Things that campus reform obtained.
Oh boy, this place has gone to shrimp on a hockey skates.
