Group items tagged

crowdsourcing science funding ...

there have been a few of these popping out lately, thanks to Kickstarter's incredible success. This one http://www.petridish.org/ launched last month, and has a lot of projects already, including a fully funded one (219 backers, $12,247 raised) to "find the first exomoon": http://www.petridish.org/projects/help-us-find-the-first-exomoon

I like this one "The kind of idle pastime that might amuse physicists is to imagine drafting Einstein's grant applications in 1905. "I propose to investigate the idea that light travels in little bits," one might say. "I will explore the possibility that time slows down as things speed up," goes another. Imagine what comments these would have elicited from reviewers for the German Science Funding Agency, had such a thing existed. Instead, Einstein just did the work anyway while drawing his wages as a technical expert third-class at the Bern patent office. And that is how he invented quantum physics and relativity." There is an even more pointer example of the Prussian academy of sciences reviewing the Dr. application of Hertz ...

Shocking. What is federal research funding for? No, wrong question. Instead maybe: What is federally funded review for?

"Some segments of the research community would get their preferences under the House spending bill. For example, it matches the president's request for a 1.5% increase for NASA, to $19 billion, including a 12% increase, to $5 billion, for the space science program. Legislators had already worked out a deal with the White House on the future of the manned space program, and they included funding for an additional shuttle flight in 2011. They even added $35 million to the $20 million increase that the president requested for NASA's education programs, boosting them by a whopping 30% to $180 million. "

Some segments of the research community would get their preferences under the House spending bill. For example, it matches the president's request for a 1.5% increase for NASA, to $19 billion, including a 12% increase, to $5 billion, for the space science program. Legislators had already worked out a deal with the White House on the future of the manned space program, and they included funding for an additional shuttle flight in 2011. They even added $35 million to the $20 million increase that the president requested for NASA's education programs, boosting them by a whopping 30% to $180 million.

space-related kickstarters moving from cubesats to space telescopes. This funding campaign was launched today, and will last for 32 days. They are asking for 1M USD.

"Since the formation of Planetary Resources, our primary goal has been to build technology enabling us to prospect and mine asteroids. We've spent the last year making great leaps in the development of these technologies." - Damn we need to get in touch with these people..!

winners of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship competition (informally) announced

Hopefully the money wasted on the brain project will be offset by the gains on graphene... When I heard the proposals presentations on fet11 conference back in 2011, the graphene project was my bet.. Although its motivations were mostly political ("everyone else is working on graphene so if Europe won't do something, we'll soon be far behind"), in contrast to other projects it appeared to have well defined tangible objectives and gave hope of actually delivering something.

"Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the very forefront of open research".

They made it :) fund raised and project kicked. + they aaplied to SOCIS

Worth following for inspiration?

Yes, definitely!

"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com." In other words, UK is not part of the world...

Sounds relevant. Does ESA need to have a position on this question?

This was on Slashdot now, with a link to the paper. It quite an iteresting study actually. "The scenarios most closely reflecting the reality of our world today are found in the third group of experiments (see section 5.3), where we introduced economic stratification. Under such conditions, we find that collapse is difficult to avoid."

Interesting, but is it new? In general, I would say that history has shown us that it is inevitable that civilisations get replaced by new concepts (much is published about this, read eg Fog of War by Jona Lendering on the struggles between civilisations in ancient history, which have remarkably similar issues as today, yet on a different scale of course). "While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing." I guess this bang on it, the ones that can change the system, are not benefitted by doing so, hence enrichment, depletion, short term gain remain and might even accelerate to compensate for the loss in the rest of the system.

why are we not getting these type of startups in Europe .... btw: Will is british

I agree, the mentality is different, it's hard to find VC funding for hardware stuff, even more so if you wanna shoot your HW into space. but there is movement, e.g. pioneers.io, they are in vienna and are actively trying to get more VC funding (in europe) for HW and other engineering startups

thanks for the link ... just read this blog ... http://pioneers.io/blog/space-race-2-0-putting-satellites-into-the-hands-of-everyone a lot of selling talk but fundamentally I agree that they have a point ... and as ACT we will face the criticism in not so long that we have not managed (nor tried hard enough) to convince ESA about the need to embrace this "new space"

This is becoming a mess :)

I see your point, and I agree that funding was also promoted through the energy players and their political influence. A coincident parallel interest which is irrelevant to the fact that the question remains vital. How do we affect climate and how does it respond. Huge complex system to analyse which responds in various time scales which could obscure the trend. What if we made a conceptual parallelism with the L Ácquila case : Is the scientific method guilty or the interpretation of uncertainty in terms of societal mobilization? Should we leave the humanitarian aspect outside any scientific activity?

I do not think there is anyone arguing that the question is not interesting and complex. The debate, instead, addresses the predictive value of the models produced so far. Are they good enough to be used outside of the scientific process aimed at improving them? Or should one wait for "the scientific method" to bring forth substantial improvements to the current understanding and only then start using its results? One can take both stand points, but some recent developments will bring many towards the second approach.

At the link below you find additional information about the projects: Education: Ten weeks to save the world http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100915/full/467266a.html

well, most good ideas probably take only a second to be formulated, it's the details that take years :-)

I do not think the point of the SU is to formulate new ideas (infact there is nothing new in the projects chosen). Their mission is to build and maintain a network of contacts among who they believe will be the 'future leaders' of space ... very similar to our beloved ISU.

Funded!!!

"Because, quite simply, we think ours will be better!"

"Right hand rules!"

Good to see "The Netherlands" not in the top list... Btw Fraud detection becoming hot potato in EU funding...

not surprising since usually EC staff has no clue what people do with their funds once the are allocated ... as long as there is a report and a website :-)

(don't forget to turn your hype-filters on...) MoNETA (http://cns.bu.edu/nl/moneta.html) stands for "MOdular Neural Exploring Traveling Agent". It is one of projects participating in the DARPA-funded SyNAPSE project ("Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics"): http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/bio/biologically/synapse/index.htm http://www.darpa.mil/dso/solicitations/baa08-28.html

haha. this guy won't have any new friends with this article! I kind of agree but making your code public doesn't mean you are doing good science...and inversely! He takes experimental physics as a counter example but even there, some teams keep their little secrets on the details of the experiment to have a bit of advance on other labs. Research is competitive in its current state, and I think only collaborations can overcome this fact.

My view is that the only proper way to do scientific communication is full transparency: methodologies, tests, codes, etc. Everything else should be unacceptable. This should hold both for publicly funded science (for which there is the additional moral requirement to give back to the public domain what was produced with taxpayers' money) and privately-funded science (where the need to turn a profit should be of lesser importance than the proper application of the scientifc method).

Same battle we are fighting since a few years....

University Alliance for Low Carbon Energy   Three universities, including Tsinghua University, University of Cambridge, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have fostered up an alliance on November 15, 2009 to advocate low carbon energy and climate change adaptation The alliance will mainly work on 6 major areas: clean coal technology and CCS, homebuilding energy efficiency, industrial energy efficiency and sustainable transport, biomass energy and other renewable energy, advanced nuclear energy, intelligent power grid, and energy policies/planning. A steering panel made up of the senior experts from the three universities (two from each) will be established to review, evaluate, and endorse the goals, projects, fund raising activities, and collaborations under the alliance. With the Headquarters at the campus of Tsinghua University and branch offices at other two universities, the alliance will be chaired by a scientist selected from Tsinghua University.   According to a briefing, the alliance will need a budget of USD 3-5 million, mainly from the donations of government, industry, and all walks of life. In this context, the R&D findings derived from the alliance will find its applications in improving people's life.

they used names of scientists and research centres without these actually knowing about their involvement it seems.... I am wondering what they actually reported back in terms of results? randomly generated papers? Christos?

Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'm very pessimistic. I guess they will impose even more control, ask for even more detailed description of the results that will be delivered and concentrate even more on project funding instead of funding open research.

maybe this is what happen when there is so much paper involved... a simple phone call to one of the research scientist and the fraud is unveiled :) or maybe the "bored project officer" has a brand new mercedes...