Golden Fleece Award
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The Golden Fleece Award is presented to those public officials in the United States whom the judges feel waste public money.
Established in 1975 by former U.S. Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin), and issued until 1988, it was revived by the Advisory Board of the Taxpayers for Common Sense in 2000. Its name is a tangential reference to the Order of the Golden Fleece, and a play on the transitive verb to fleece, as in charging excessively for goods or services.
Award winners included:
- Bureau of Land Management.
- MIT, for the Aspen Movie Map.
- NASA's SETI program for the scientific search for extraterrestrial civilizations, although he backpedaled after being visited by Dr. Carl Sagan.
- Paul Ekman's research that led to the development of the Facial Action Coding System.[1]
- National Park Service.
- Federal Aviation Administration for spending $57,800 on a study of the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the "length of the buttocks" and how their knees were arranged when they were seated.
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded project by psychologist Harris Rubin for $121,000, on developing "some objective evidence concerning marijuana's effect on sexual arousal by exposing groups of male pot-smokers to pornographic films and measuring their responses by means of sensors attached to their penises, in 1976.
- National Science Foundation for spending $84,000 on a study on love.
- National Institute for Mental Health for spending $97,000 to study, among other things, what went on in a Peruvian brothel; the researchers said they made repeated visits in the interests of accuracy.
- Office of Education for spending $219,592 in a “curriculum package” to teach college students how to watch television.
- United States Congress.
- United States Department of the Army for a 1981 study on how to buy Worcestershire sauce. (Federal Specification EE-W-600F)
- United States Department of Defense for a $3,000 study to determine if people in the military should carry umbrellas in the rain.
- United States Department of Justice for conducting a study on why prisoners want to get out of jail.
- United States Department of Energy.
- United States Department of the Interior.
- United States Department of Labor.
- United States Postal Service for spending over $3.4 million on a Madison Avenue ad campaign to make Americans write more letters to one another.
- The White House
- Reagan's Presidential Inauguration Committee
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Presentation of Television Literacy: Critical Television Viewing Skills
- C.Holden: House chops sex-pot probe. Science, April 30, 1976; 192: 450.
- ^ Ekman, Paul: An Evening with Psychologist Paul Ekman
