mukara · HackerTrans

2 năm trướcdiscuss

For each $1 of federal research funding, the university can take a cut of as much as $0.6 owing to the fact that researchers are using university facilities and admin staff. In fact, the money itself is not even managed by the recipient researchers themselves. The university manages the funds since they use them to pay the professors, grad students, etc.

mukara

2 năm trướcdiscuss

This might be shocking to some, but when a researcher receiver a federal grant (for example), the university takes a significant cut which they refer to as Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs [1]. The F&A covers the so-called "indirect" costs of conducting research on university facilities: buildings, utilities, admin and accounting, support staff for compliance with federal regulations, etc.

Each university has its own F&A rate, which can be as much as 60% of received federal funds [2]. This rate has historically trended upward.

An example of funds allocation for a typical small NSF grant: https://austinhenley.com/blog/grantbudget.html

[1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED517263.pdf

[2] https://financeandbusiness.ucdavis.edu/finance/costing-polic...

mukara

2 năm trướcdiscuss

The story of Turia, with all sorts of terrible hardships she endured, is told in the second episode [1] of a BBC Radio 4 series [2] called "Being Roman" by the English classicist Mary Beard.

The series wonderfully contextualizes the Roman empire and its cultural mix in 8 episodes (~30 minutes each). It uses stories of six individuals from different walks of life; from the emperor Marcus Aurelius, to a (possibly enslaved) child prodigy, to a traveling Syrian man who gets married on Hadrian's wall to an enslaved English girl around 2nd century CE.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001sctb

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gq54cg/episodes/

mukara

3 năm trướcdiscuss

It is said that Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged Chaplin to make the The Great Dictator. Indeed, around the time the film was made, the two men shared political views on a lot of things. When Churchill and FDR saw a pre-release private screening of the film, they liked it. (Incidentally, Chamberlain had vowed to ban it in England for fear of angering the actual dictator.) FDR even invited Chaplin to read this very speech on his inauguration in 1941.

Ironically, this is the film that made Americans turn against him. Later that year, he was subpoenaed by a congressional committee investigating pro-war propaganda (this was a few months before the US entered the war.)

In the following years, Chaplin was extremely vilified by the Americans mainly for his pro-Soviet and communist views (or rather, for his refusal to be anti-Communist). This led to politically-motivated prosecutions, and culminated in him being exiled from the US when the president Harry Truman(!) canceled his re-entry permit while away on family vacation. (Chaplin was never an American citizen, despite living in the country for over 40 years.)

There’s a recent good book review summarizing this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/charlie-chapli...

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