Over the 3 years during which a fellow is on tenure, the NSF gives $30K/year in “stipend” and $10.5K/year in “cost of education allowance,” also known as “tuition supplement.” The fellow doesn’t see a cent of this directly: it goes to the school. Graduate tuition at top institutions these days runs at $40K/year — outrageous, but that’s what it is. Then standard research and teaching assistantships are $25K/year. To the school, $65K/year is the standard price for a graduate student. NSF gives it $40.5K/year for free, so the price has been reduced to $24.5K/year. That’s a super deal for the school, but here’s the funny thing — some schools don’t see it that way.

To the school, the $10.5K/year in “cost of education allowance” given by NSF is just another source of general funds. Kaching! Now, being generous, the school passes on the $30K/year in “stipend” to the fellow instead of the $25K/year they’d normally pay, but then charges a “tuition shortfall” of $29.5K/year ($40K – $10.5K) to the fellow! What is the total value of the NSF fellowship now? $500/year is your answer.

Of course, the school, in a rare stroke of humanity, doesn’t expect you to actually live on $500/year, so instead of ponying up the remainder of the tuition like they are supposed to (per their tacit agreement with the NSF), they coerce the fellow to seek regular funding in a research or teaching assistantship and pay back all of the stipend from that. This quid pro quo service to the institution for purely financial reasons is about as blatant a violation of both the letter as well as the spirit of the fellowship terms as you can get.

Now I’ve brought up this ridiculous situation on several occasions when the NSF solicited commentary much like this survey and I’ve even called NSF, but NSF does not want anything to do with it, preferring to defer to the school’s coordinating officer — essentially letting the school’s own financial decisions override program policy. The student is caught in the middle. This is unconscionable bureaucratic buck-passing. For practical purposes, the true benefit of the fellowship, financial or otherwise, is not seen by the student, and this miserly arrangement does not befit the fellowship’s ostensible prestige.

The cooperative eye hypothesis is that human eyes have a lot of white for ease of cooperation just by looking at eye movement.

In a new study that is one of the first direct tests of this theory, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany looked at what effect head and eye movements had on redirecting the gaze of great apes versus human infants.

In the study, a human experimenter did one of the following:

- Closed his eyes, but tilted his head up toward the ceiling
- Kept head stationary while looking at the ceiling
- Looked at the ceiling with both head and eyes
- Kept head stationary while looking straight ahead

Results showed that the great apes … were more likely to follow the experimenter’s gaze when he moved only his head. In contrast, the 40 human infants looked up more often when the experimenter moved only his eyes.

Now, look… something must have gotten lost or this is a piece of pointless research that says nothing. I don’t see how this is a test of the hypothesis at all. Human eyeballs are more visible than ape eyeballs, so humans are more used to following eyeballs and apes are more used to following heads out of necessity. But this has nothing to do with evolution, has it? How does it show that cooperation necessitates more visible eyeballs? And what about cats and owls, who also have highly contrasting eyeballs?