Now we know why they like global warming so much – it’s hot.
Excerpts below of the original story here: Porn surfing rampant at U.S. science foundation
EXCLUSIVE:
Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography from their government computers, grew sixfold last year inside the taxpayer-funded foundation that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants, according to budget documents and other records obtained by The Washington Times.
The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency’s inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.
“To manage this dramatic increase without an increase in staff required us to significantly reduce our efforts to investigate grant fraud,” the inspector general recently told Congress in a budget request. “We anticipate a significant decline in investigative recoveries and prosecutions in coming years as a direct result.”
The budget request doesn’t state the nature or number of the misconduct cases, but records obtained by The Times through the Freedom of Information Act laid bare the extent of the well-publicized porn problem inside the government-backed foundation.
For instance, one senior executive spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer and chatting online with nude or partially clad women without being detected, the records show.
When finally caught, the NSF official retired. He even offered, among other explanations, a humanitarian defense, suggesting that he frequented the porn sites to provide a living to the poor overseas women. Investigators put the cost to taxpayers of the senior official’s porn surfing at between $13,800 and about $58,000.
Read the rest of the article at the Washington Times here
Have a friend or acquaintance that works at NSF? Send them an Ecard here
h/t to Charles the moderator
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I hope they’re mopping up with tissue made out of recycled paper…
So is this how all the silly “research” grants make it through, submit the proposal with a little porn for incentive?
They give you fever
when you kiss them
Fever if you really learned
Fever
Till you sizzlen
But what a lovely way to burn
But what a lovely way to burn
But what a lovely way to burn
But what a lovely way to burn
Bill Marsh (09:29:14) : “We now have content/URL filtering in place and run checks looking for unacceptable files/pics on computers.”
*sigh* Back to solitaire.
That yellow sign… where’s his other hand?
Hey, give ’em a break. Why should climate modelers have all the fun?
The domain name “sex.com” sold for millions of dollars. Porn is one of the largest money makers on the internet. While we might like to think that it is all about rational things, a few billion years of evolution wins out. Just wish I’d realized that when picking a domain name ( I picked a geeky one worth nothing in the early days …)
I’ve been the computer guy who had to enforce rules against such activities and frankly, I think it isn’t worth it. If somebody is going to goof off, they can just as easily do it looking at the football team site or putting their paper money in serial number order. You just end up wasting 2 peoples time instead of one. Better, IMHO, is just measure productivity and manage to deliverables.
I also was on contract at one site with an FBI ‘clearance’ in their security department. Google searched for a particular Unix update and clicked on what looked like a reasonable download site. My machine was flooded with porn popups faster than I could kill them. Inside 20 seconds I killed power (there was the risk of embedded trojan horses or viruses). However: Had anyone seen my screen then OR if an automated tracking system had flagged me, it could have been “very bad” for my contract. (Though a simple demo probably would have cleared me, as long as the site still functioned and I could find it again…)
So yeah, they ought not to be doing it, but I don’t want to be the guy who has to waste his day “policing” it. (At another contract where I was project manager, there were 2 folks employed full time. One was the “spam guy” who just maintained the email spam filters, the other was the “porn guy” who maintained the content filters and site prohibition lists. 2 full time staff “wasted” on trash. Probably better now a half decade later. No, I don’t have a solution; I just wish folks had more brains and wasted mine less.)
News flash
Government workers also rank the highest in using the employer telephone and making free long distance call.
Government workers also rank highest in using the web at work to place orders on comercial sites.
“Every Gov’t agency, et al, that I’ve worked with has very strong router filters in place… w/ user habits monitored and logged~”
Yup, the NSF paid to develop much of that technology (bro-ids.org), and it’s very effective. Their management just doesn’t think it’s important for them to use it for some reason.
This is why we need more women in the workplace. Women may spend time looking at shoe retail sites, but when they’re finished and get back to work, they’re not left all… ummm…. aroused.
It’s been obvious they haven’t been doing science. Now it’s public knowledge just what they *have* been doing.
They should change their acronym from NSF to NSFW.
Rich, good one.
I just checked RC for any response to yesterdays kerfuffle. Nada. But the RC post from yesterday only has 27 comments on it, so you can be sure the censors were working overtime.
I wonder if any heads rolled. I know a person, formerly employed where I work, who passed on an inappropriate email and was terminated. It was a long-time employee who had been doing well in their job, too.
Scientists need love too.
re: Rich (09:01:47): That was a REALLY good one!
A friend at OSI told me 75% of internet traffic is porn. (I figure most of the rest is folks griping about Microsoft, which isn’t all that different.)
I used to surf semiconductor company web sites. My very non-engineer boss probably considered that obscene.
If we could get Congress to surf porn sites, they wouldn’t have as much time to spend money or pass Cap & Tax bills. NSF may be on to something.
It’s OK because it was alien porn, which is green and thus good. I feel a change cumin
About ten years ago I went to a satellite facility of Lawrence Livermore Lab to calibrate some large scales. I had to cart in 3,000 pounds in calibrated 50 pound weights, and I still remember that no one offered to help, not even to hold the door open.
Lots of people were in the building, but from what I could see none of them were doing much work. Most desks had newspapers and magazines, all had computers, and people clustered in small groups here and there, talking and drinking coffee.
The job took about a week, and it was like that every day. If they had lost half their employees, the ones left still wouldn’t have been overworked.
I suspect that most of 0bama’s green jobs will be even worse than that; make-work jobs at the expense of taxpayers. Since “green jobs” generally don’t produce anything of value, the deal will be: you get a job, so vote for the guy who takes more taxes from everyone and generates your unnecessary job. And of course, green jobs will be union jobs.
As the unemployment rate continues to rise [U-6 unemployment, which includes those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits and given up looking for full time work] is currently over 14% and rising. But printing money and raising taxes to provide “green” jobs will not turn the economy around. Only jobs that add real value to the economy will do that.
In other words, the carbon tax could be replaced by charging $0.01 per porn site page view paid to the Federal Government instead of bankrupting the coal and Steel industries. If use goes down so would energy use and CO2 production. Of course lawmakers would be exempt otherwise they would all go bankrupt paying the $0.01 per page fees.
“To manage this dramatic increase without an increase in staff required us to significantly reduce our efforts to investigate grant fraud,” the inspector general recently told Congress in a budget request.
“We anticipate a significant decline in investigative recoveries and prosecutions in coming years as a direct result.”
—
Right. There WILL BE a significant decline in investigative recoveries and prosecutions of grant fraud.
The predictive power of science!
PaulS (09:18:30) :
Thank you. I knew there had to be a hockey stick joke in here somewhere!
Six fold growth in browsing porn at the NSF?
Sounds like a hockey stick graph!
Cut their funding just like they did with ACORN.
I’m reposting this on Alex Jones.
So the equation goes like this:
science + politics = porn
And in these hard economic times take consolation in the fact that the number of federal employees increased by 25,000. That’s an additional 25,000 porn inspectors. It’s a hard job but somebody’s got to do it.
This is TV tabloid MSM news. They eat this type of stuff up.