Frequently Asked Questions, AKA FAQs
- What is the MAICgregator?
- What sources do you use?
- How do you get the school names from a particular webpage?
- Why are there no trustee results?
- Why are the trustee lists out of date?
- How do you get trustee images?
- Why are there no trustee images?
- Why does the trustee image not match the name?
- What is your logo in reference to?
- What do you think of the current financial “crisis”?
- What is “data mining”?
- Why doesn’t the website look good in IE?
What is the MAICgregator?
MAICgregator is a Firefox extension that aggregates information about colleges and universities embedded in the military-academic-industrial complex (MAIC). It searches government funding databases, private news sources, private press releases, and public information about trustees to try and produce a radical cartography of the modern university via the replacement or overlay of this information on academic websites. This is a necessary activity in light of the contemporary financial “crisis”.
MAICgregator works by searching for the relationships between a particular US academic institution (college or university) and government grants and contracts, mentions of the school in private business sources, and relationships between school trustees and business interests. This information is presented to the user in a variety of ways. On school pages, MAICgregator searches for particular locations on the page that already showcase school “news” and replaces them with the aggregated data. On pages where MAICgregator is not able to find these news areas it displays the result in a window on the page. Additionally, MAICgregator works to aggregate images of the school trustees (as well as searches on their names), partially as a means of showing the (lack of) gender, racial and ethnic diversity in the makeup of the governing boards of US schools.
This focus on the trustees is key as schools find themselves in the midst of the financial “crisis” and Boards of Trustees around the country are stating the need for decreasing the size of budgets and draws from endowments. Yet, what is little mentioned is the ways in which the trustees allowed this situation to happen in the first place, especially by giving endowment managers relatively free reign to invest in risky securities that had high returns when the market was good—-but have a void of negative returns when the market goes down. More needs to be done in order to track the relationships between schools, trustees, and the trustees’ financial interests, and we hope that MAICgregator is an opening into further work in this area.
What sources do you use?
Government Grants and Contracts
Information about government grants and contracts comes from the USAspending.gov website. At this site you can get a daily updates of spending for the current fiscal year, as well as “complete” results for previous years. By complete, we mean that we can get a lot of information about specific grants and contracts, but do not get links to detailed abstracts, or ways to use things like the “award ID” in a way that would allow us to get even more information about the grant or contract in question.
What is the difference between a grant and a contract? From the USAspending.gov glossary, a grant is:
A classification of federal assistance spending in USAspending.gov. A federal grant is an authorized expenditure to a non-federal entity for a defined public or private purpose in which services are not rendered to the federal government. This classification of spending comes in two types – “formula grants” and “project grants.”Formula grant: Allocations of money to States or their subdivisions in accordance with distribution formulas prescribed by law or administrative regulation, for activities of a continuing nature not confined to a specific project.
Project grants: The funding, for fixed or known periods, of specific projects. Project grants can include fellowships, scholarships, research grants, training grants, traineeships, experimental and demonstration grants, evaluation grants, planning grants, technical assistance grants, survey grants, and construction grants.
And a contract is defined as:
A federal contract is an agreement between the federal government and a private entity, for-profit or non-profit, to execute mandated services for a fee for the federal government. Federal contracts data contained in USAspending.gov are based on the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) government database. FPDS includes procurement contract transactions reported by approximately 65 U.S. Government, Executive Branch, departments, bureaus, agencies, and commissions and summarizes who bought what, from whom, and where.
Often, military funding comes in the form of a contract; the government gives universities a certain amount of money to design, say, new radar systems, missile guidance systems, and so on. However, the military also gives grant funding for a variety of other, seemingly unrelated purposes, such as health-related research, that is tangential to the military’s direct purpose, but also allows for (a) good public relations, and (b) the forming of relationships between the military, universities, and the commercial sector.
In MAICgregator, we search exclusively for Department of Defense research funding. While there has been much press regarding Department of Homeland Security funding, we have had more trouble finding examples of this funding in the USAspending.gov database. If you find examples of this, be sure to let us know so that we can update things in later versions of MAICgregator.
Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR)
The Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program is a means of encouraging further relationships between universities, the military, and the commercial center. It is a means of providing “an effective vehicle for moving ideas from our nation’s research institutions to the market, where they can benefit both private sector and military customers”. The STTR program provides up to $850,000 in “early stage R&D funding”. With MAICgregator we search for the school name and can get results as recent as fiscal year 2007, since recent selections have not yet made it into the DoD STTR database.
Google News Search
We search for the university name using Google News to find out the relationships between the school and the media. Often we find mentions of a school in small-town newspapers or on various issue-oriented websites. This type of search is a good way to find out how the school is being spoken about in online media, absent the filters of the schools’ own news services. Parsing of this data is a challenge, and we primarily use the excellent Beautiful Soup parser to deal with the data. The Google News search is one of the two news components that from the available RSS feeds.
One thing we are considering is to expand these searches to blogs as well.
PR News Search
To examine the relationship between a school and the corporate world, we search for public press-releases using the PR Newswire database. Here we can find not only explicit relationships between schools and industry, as evidenced by mentions of the school in the press release, but also track where former graduates of the school go to work, as most corporations list the educational backgrounds of their principals in the public press releases. This is the second of the news sources available in the RSS feeds.
Trustee Search
Boards of Trustees (or Regents, in the case of public universities) are the primary means by which colleges and universities set wider strategy for the school, in terms of capital priorities, investment strategies, and so on, and often have the final say in tenure decisions and major issues dealing with the faculty. Trustees once were often alumni of the school in question; now, however, they are just as likely to be entirely unrelated to the school, and often come from “prominent” positions in industry. Thus, in the context of the current financial “crisis”, boards of trustees are a key place in understanding the relationships between schools, corporate entities, and endowment governance.
Universities and colleges, as private, non-profit entities, are required to file each year an IRS Form 990, a document that lays out the finances, mission, and activities of the organization in the previous fiscal year. Additionally, Form 990 lists the governance of the organization, including the president and vice president, as well as members of the board of trustees. Since it is difficult to guess, ahead of time, where to find trustee information for a particular school on the web, we primarily use the IRS Form 990 to automatically find out the names of these people. The Foundation Center 990 Finder provides a way to get access to PDFs of these documents whose contents have already been converted to an easy-to-parse text format. Nevertheless, there are still sometimes problems between the conversion of an image of the page and its text representation, something you will see in the trustee results. This is often manifested in the addition of extraneous “s“s on the page, something that we have not figured out how to deal with automatically.
Public universities are somewhat different. Since the school is chartered as a public entity, it is not possible to give money (say, from alumni or corporations) directly to the school—-it would be like giving money directly to the state. Thus, many states have set up private, non-profit “Foundations” or “Research Foundations” that take money from the public and then funnel it to the university. These foundations have a special relationship, enshrined in the laws of the state, with the college or university that they support. The “Research Foundation of the State University of New York (SUNY)” is a good case in point. Their overview page states their purposes as helping SUNY “acquire and manage grants and contracts from external sponsors; move inventions made at the campuses to the marketplace to benefit society and the New York State economy; and create environments where SUNY faculty, staff and students can collaborate with private and public organizations”. Additionally, they describe why a research foundation is necessary given certain statutory limitations. With MAICgregator we do our best to find the 990 forms of these non-profit, private entities as they are the main interface between a public university and the corporate world.
How do you get the school names from a particular webpage?
This is the easy part. We simply use the WHOIS database, a means of finding out who “owns” or “manages” domain names. For educational institutions, this is done via the non-profit educause foundation that has a tagline of “advance[ing] higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.” We can easily parse the school name from the results, with a few heuristics here and there. The relationship between schools and the educause organization is something that we need to investigate further.
Why are there no trustee results?
Blame the IRS. While we are almost always able to find the source that will give us the trustee names, often the data within the source is not accessible in any sort of automatic way. We (meaning you or I) might be able to look at the info and know immediately what names are trustees, the MAICgregator program cannot. More specifically, we use a regular expression (a sort-of formal representation of a pattern) to try and “pattern match” the trustees using what we think to be the usual pattern. Nevertheless, sometimes the data does not fit that pattern, and we lose. We have tried to come up with a lot of variations (see the source code to see the horribly ugly regular expression we came up with), but many schools slip through. If anyone has a better way of doing this, by all means let us know.
Why are the trustee lists out of date?
Blame the IRS. IRS 990 forms (from which we get the trustee names) are due six months after the end of an organization’s fiscal year. Then, it takes time for the IRS to digitize and redact private information from the form, meaning that it can take upwards of nine months after the end of the school’s fiscal year for the 990 form to be made public. Thus, for MAICgregator we only currently search for results from fiscal year 2007, therefore making some of our results out of date. We would appreciate any assistance on this issue in terms of better sources of automatically finding lists of trustees.
How do you get trustee images?
We do a Google Image search of the trustee’s name (in quotes) and take the first result, absent some cases where we have other heuristics. If we don’t find any results, we then search using the name without quotes.
Why are there no trustee images?
This could be for three reasons. First, we may not have been able to find any matching images for that particular trustee. Second, we might not have been able to find any trustees at all. Third, we might not be finished searching for the trustee images in the first place. In order to not get banned by the search engines, we stagger our searches over a relatively (in computer terms) long period of time. This means that if there are trustee images to be found—but we haven’t stored them yet—it might take upwards of 15 minutes after the first request for the images for our server to have collected them all.
Why does the trustee image not match the name?
Blame Google. While we do our best to find the most relevant image, search engine databases are (of course!) not perfect instruments. In fact, we can see this as a partial critique of the use of data mining techniques—-ones that are admittedly quite simple, indeed, but are comparable to what people use everyday to search for information. Therefore, as many others have mentioned, we should be highly suspicious of any data mining effort (including this one) given the severe difficulties in providing “accurate” results, not only because of “limitations” in technology itself, but also due to fundamental issues in the representation of information that have been the topic of interest to philosophers, primarily in the Continental tradition, for the last century.
What is your logo in reference to?
Ever seen the logo for Draper Labs?
Draper has a graduate fellow program as well as an undergraduate internship program that allows you (if you are an MIT-affiliated student) to work on such exciting areas as “Tactical Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance” with projects in “Precision Aerial Delivery” and “Guided Munitions Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C)”. Additionally, Draper is looking for partners in their “University Research and Development (URAD)“ program that has a number of specific application areas, including
The Strategic and Space GN&C Systems Critical Technical Capability addresses the hardware, algorithms and software needs that are specific for strategic and space GN&C systems. There are several items that comprise this capability, including: ascent systems, entry systems, missiles, spacecraft on-orbit control, and autonomous rendezvous and docking, to name a few. Any specific inertial technology required for this area will be drawn from the Inertial Systems capability described above. Proposals are sought in the areas of system concepts leveraging novel GN&C algorithms and inertial instruments/sensors. Application areas include (but are not limited to) spacecraft GN&C, prompt global strike, and re-entry body GN&C. Design approaches and modeling concepts for high- performance (jitter/size/power/mass) Precision Pointing Systems, low noise pointing, and/or high sensitivity (e.g. gravimetric) for space-based systems are also sought.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (even if that’s what they’re looking for) to understand that Draper is looking for people to work on space-based weapons systems.
Draper recently received nearly $150 million to work on “guidance systems” for an updated version of Trident II nuclear missiles deployed on submarines.
Draper’s headquarters is in Cambridge, MA, a couple of blocks away from MIT. Their windows are incredibly dark, likely to prevent foreign and industrial espionage. Draper has been the subject of numerous protests over the years.
Draper is one of many labs that were once part of academic institutions (as it once known as the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory). Additionally, Calspan was once known as the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory before protests in the 1970s, including the takeover of Carpenter Hall on the Cornell campus, forced Cornell to divest the laboratory from the school. While universities in the 1970s moved to remove themselves from certain types of military research relationships as a result of student protest, they entered into other agreements with corporations with haste in the 1980s. As many student protest movements are beginning to do, it is important to apply pressure to universities and colleges today in order to push them to divest of these corporate relationships as well.
What do you think of the current financial “crisis”?
We put the word “crisis” in quotes because it is a very strange term to use. Have we seen a financial “crisis”? Can we hold it in our hands? Of course not; it exists only as lower numbers in some computers somewhere, as no decrease of physical objects (except for the movement of electrons on a while) has indicated a crisis in lack of money. Crisis here is a very dangerous term to use, as it puts us in a position of complacency with regards to the use of language by powerful actors. If, as we argue, there is no crisis (because there has been no loss of money or commodities, only a decrease in numbers, or, more specifically, a change in some value somewhere that we interpret as a decrease in money), why would we use those terms? Why would we agree to do so?
This is especially true at the large research universities where, while they have experienced a huge “decrease” in their endowments, are still sitting on billions of dollars. How can they say with a straight face that they are in a crisis while thousands of other schools, many of them public, are in even worse shape given endowments in the range of tens of millions? This is especially insidious language to use, especially since endowments should exist for exactly these sorts of times.
For more on this issue, please see the statement.
