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MIT Media Lab Europe: An Obituary
David R writes "Media Lab Europe, offspring of the famous MIT Media Lab, is closing its doors forever, as announced today. The corporate funding strategy hasn't worked out. Strangled by the stopped river of Irish government funding, the lab ceases its operations. Having worked there for quite some time, I can give you the gory details and a lot of background on MLE's closure. It has sure been the fanciest, geekiest and most open work, research and play environment I've seen. The moral? I think it is questionable whether basic or visionary, interdisciplinary (and often badly evaluated) research will be funded by private corporations. But secondly, European companies need a culture of sponsorship, which has existed in America for a long time."
I must prefix my bashing with an apology. I have friends at Media Lab Europe and they are nice, smart, and fun people. I hope you all find new jobs.
The media lab concept is to make a pretty toy with an amusing concept, and call it brilliant (demo or die!). The painful part is that despite looking really cool, many of these toys and instruments are nothing more than that, toys. All of the crap musical instruments, and artistic looking mobiles, as far as I'm concerned are worthless other then kitch value. Most of the concepts are not new and other than eye candy aspects have been done more completely. The end result has been that they have failed to push boundaries, failed to advance the state of the art, and seemingly failed to have any lasting value, other than to inflate the already gigantic ego of the institution.
I hear your cries already. " But what about this one example yada yada yada..." The fact of the matter is the world doesn't need a bunch of hyped egos running around spending unimaginable sums of money. The research community can do better than the media lab. We are doing better. With less money, less ego, and in the name of science, not profit. I spose we don't all have machined plastic demos with videos of children happily playing across internet 2 in 4 countries.
Oh well, RIP
Privately owned companies have a responsibility to deliver to their shareholders. The true test of whether a company is a monopoly or not is whether there is a willingness to fund basic research science without a myopic focus on the bottom line. Monopolies can afford this.
I think you are generalizing. I think what a monopoly does with its power is basically up to its leadership. I know of several monopoly industries who rested on their laurels and didn't innovate at all. Or where their public contribution was simply a very small token meant for public relations.
Universities wouldn't survive without Industry, but the control is definitely in Industry's hands. In other words, if someone wants such-and-such a product, or needs such-and-such information, then the lecturer will adapt what they are doing to fit. It is extremely rare for a University to do "pure" research any more, unless it's funded via the Government.
In the end, pure research will NEVER be funded by industry, because (by definition) you don't know what the outcome is. Applied research, where you know a great deal about the results in advance, but maybe not everything about the method, is not what many people would call "real research", but it is what gets the big money.
It is partly this reason that the British are very good at inventing new things but useless at exploiting the ideas. There's no bridge between the pure and the applied. It is rare for an idea to successfully cross from one realm into the other.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What they need to do is fund it by first producing a massively popular search engine, then encourage its engineers to spend one day a week working on personal projects on company time.
This flies in the face of science.
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Strangled Riverdance is a good thing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I gather that you are refering to how the US government misappropriates the earnings of its citizens to pay for research that many don't care about, fewer would support given the option they are rightfully due, and many find morally objectionable. No, I don't think it's a good idea to go down that road in Europe, too. Let the market determine the nature of research funding, and let individuals decide how to allocate their scarce resources themselves.
he was referring to sponsership from companies.
Get off your high horse and pay attention.
Also, much of the research is needed, and leads to scientific break throughs. I, for one, support government research.
eith your plan, nothing would ever get done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...and put the money to far more useful IT teaching and research.
The media lab concept was born of the 90's "ooh aah!" fascination with the Internet. It was a way to try and continue the glory of MIT's Project Athena days in the 80's (which DID produce brilliant, useful work that we all benefit from to this day), but it was poorly concieved, yielded little real benefit, and wasted a lot of money. It should have been strangled in it's crib, but dot com dollars kept it afloat while MIT polished it's reputation as a hip place to go to school. In stark contrast to the serious work at MIT and Berkeley in the 80's, the Media Lab took on more of a chic aura, kind of a Studio 54 for geeks.
Thankfully, like disco itself, these kinds of places are dying out. It's just a shame that individuals, families, and corporations that shelled out millions of dollars have watched it all dissapear into a black hole, into what was essentially a university sponsored dot com scheme.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
There are a number of mistakes in this post.
1. The Media Lab was founded in 1980 (not the 60s).
2. The average price of a house in Dublin, to the best of my knowledge, is 250,000 euros. This is equivalent to $300,000. For $300,000 in Cambridge, you might be able to get a 1 or 2 bedroom condo. Most houses here cost in excess of $600,000.
3. [Note really a mistake, but...] The Stata Center does not house the Media Lab. The Wiesner building and Cambridge Center house the Media Lab. The Stata Center is CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), which makes money hand over fist.
4. $130,000 is a lot of money, but again, houses don't cost $80,000.
On a more subjective note:
The Polaroid buildings would be a cool alternative.
The Stata Center is beautiful, IMHO.