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Why does the Foundation concentrate its support on basic rather than applied research Basic research is the very heart of science, and its cumulative product is the capital of scientific progress, a capital that must be constantly increased as the demands upon it rise. The goal of basic research is understanding, for its own sake. Understanding of the structure of the atom or the nerve cell, the explosion of a spiral nebula or the distribution of cosmic dust, the causes of earthquakes and droughts, or of man as a behaving creature and of the social forces that are created whenever two or more human beings come into contact with one another--the scope is staggering, but the commitment to truth is the same. If the commitment were to a particular result, conflicting evidence might be overlooked or, with the best will in the world, simply not appreciated. Moreover, the practical applications of basic research frequently cannot be anticipated. When Roentgen, the physicist, discovered X-rays, he had no idea of their usefulness to medicine. Applied research, undertaken to solve specific practical problems, has an immediate attractiveness because the results can be seen and enjoyed. For practical reasons, the sums spent on applied research in any country always far exceed those for basic research, and the proportions are more unequal in the less developed countries. Leaving aside the funds devoted to research by industry--which is naturally far more concerned with applied aspects because these increase profits quickly--the funds the U.S. Government allots to basic research currently amount to about 7 percent of its overall research and development funds. Unless adequate safeguards are provided, applied research invariably tends to drive out basic. Then, as Dr. Waterman has pointed out, "Developments will inevitably be undertaken prematurely, career incentives will gravitate strongly toward applied science, and the opportunities for making major scientific discoveries will be lost. Unfortunately, pressures to emphasize new developments, without corresponding emphasis upon pure science tend to degrade the quality of the nation’s technology in the long run, rather than to improve it.\ The federal government ______.
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《建设工程质量管理条例》规定，在正常使用条件下，有防水要求的卫生间工程最低保修期限是( )年。
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For Emily Dickinson there were three worlds, and she lived in all of them, making them the substance of everything that she thought and wrote. There was the world of nature, the things and the creatures that she saw, heard, felt about her, there was the "estate" that was the world of friendship. And there was the world of the unseen and unheard. From her youth she was looked upon as different. She was direct, impulsive, original, and the droll wit who said unconventional things which others thought but dared not speak, and said them incomparably well. The characteristics which made her inscrutable to those who knew her continue to bewilder and surprise, for she lived by paradoxes. Certainly the greatest paradox was the fact that the three most pervasive friendships were the most elusive. She saw the Reverend Charles Wadsworth of Philadelphia but three or four times in the course of her life, and then briefly, yet her admiration of him as an ideal and her yearning for him as a person were of us surpassed importance in her growth as a poet. She sought out for professional advice the critic and publicist Thomas Wentworth Higginson and invited his aid as mentor for more than twenty years, though she never once adopted any counsel he dared to hazard. In the last decade of her life, she came to be a warm admirer of the poet and novelist Helen Hunt Jackson, the only qualified judge among Emily Dickinson’s contemporaries who believed her to be a great poet, yet Emily Dickinson steadfastly refused to publish even though Mrs. Jackson’s importunity was insistent. According to the passage, many of the people who knew Emily Dickinson thought of her as ______.
Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus became part of the greatest story ever told. Many things have changed in the intervening years. The hotel industry worries more about overbuilding than overcrowding, and if they had to meet an unexpected influx, few inns would have a manger to accommodate the weary guests. Now it is the census taker that does the traveling in the fond hope that a highly mobile population will stay put long enough to get a good sampling. Methods of gathering, recording, and evaluating information have presumably been improved a great deal. And where then it was the modest purpose of Rome to obtain a simple head count as an adequate basis for levying taxes, now batteries of complicated statistical series furnished by governmental agencies and private organizations are eagerly scanned and interpreted by sages and seers to get a clue to future events. The Bible does not tell us how the Roman census takers made out, and as regards our more immediate concern, the reliability of present day economic forecasting, there are considerable differences of opinion. They were aired at the celebration of the 125th anniversary of the American Statistical Association. There was the thought that business forecasting might well be on its way from an art to a science, and some speakers talked about newfangled computers and highfalutin mathematical systems in terms of excitement and endearment which we, at least in our younger years when these things mattered, would have associated more readily with the description of a fair maiden. But others pointed to the deplorable record of highly esteemed forecasts and forecasters with a batting average below that of the Mets, and the President-elect of the Association cautioned that "high powered statistical methods are usually in order where the facts are crude and inadequate, the exact contrary of what crude and inadequate statisticians assume". We left his birthday party somewhere between hope and despair and with the conviction, not really newly acquired, that proper statistical methods applied to ascertainable facts have their merits in economic forecasting as long as neither forecaster nor public is deluded into mistaking the delineation of probabilities and trends for a prediction of certainties of mathematical exactitude. Taxation in Roman days apparently was based on ______.
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