NSF Sets Up Successor to RANN Program.

The National Science Foundation finally has unveiled its successor to the Research Applied to National Needs (RANN) program. It comes under the initials ASRA, which stand for Applied Science & Research Applications. Although the ASRA name rings with redundancy, the architects of the new setup labored long and hard to give it managerial consistency in an effort to satisfy the heartiest of RANN boosters as well as its harshest of critics. ASRA went through a couple of name changes (Science Applications Directorate and Science & Engineering Applications Directorate) before taking its present easy-on-the-tongue initials. But its director remains the same physicist Jack Sanderson, a 42-year-old NSF veteran. He is excited over the prospects and thinks NSF finally may have the right organizational and conceptual formula for giving applied science an intellectual integrity and a concrete usefulness without the imminence-of-success braggadocio that accompanied some of the RANN promotion and eventually did it in. A...