If i could see my money would all help research efforts in the fields of...innovative green power, genetic mutation... health as well as many others i would donate $1000 - $10000... with all the rules and regulations involved as well as bureaucrats getting half the money, I'm not sure it would reach it's full potential.
Given how things work for #SciFund, we have an 8% overhead to rockethub and about a 2-5% for folk at universities (although this varies) since it goes through a different channel than government grants. And we have projects looking at greenerpowerapplications as well as problems of global good production. So, great! Sounds like a perfect match for you!
I have been fascinated by the comments in this thread. And I realize perhaps I mis-stated the question. The tacit assumption seems to have been that this may be a potential replacement for NSF/NIH funding or otherwise that can completely support a research lab.
And maybe it can. But I agree with all the posters that the chances of crowdfunding as a complete replacement for more traditional funding sources are highly unlikely. As everyone has noted, #SciFund is targeting pieces of research programs rather than whole labs (although we do have some folk trying for a chunk of their salary). And perhaps it is no accident that the first time around, the disciplines and scientists that have been attracted to #SciFund are not ones who are trying to purchase or use multi-million dollar pieces of equipment.
So, perhaps the question should be, Crowdfunding for science - when and where can it be used successfully?
Because, really, the answer to the first question, can it succeed at all for any project, no matter the size, rests on folk like you. But what are its best uses? That's a bigger issue that I'd love to hear more thoughts about, as we're still grappling with it.
(FYI, we'll also be doing a formal analysis of all of the projects and their funding records at the end of the 45 day funding period - #SciFund runs through Dec 15th, so, we have pulled in $40K now, but we still have a month left to get more, if you want to contribute and help us figure out what projects are really capturing people's imagination when it comes to funding.)
Not always. Entire projects in, say, Ecology can be done for the cost of one sequence. Theoretical modeling can require little more than a laptop, pen, and paper. Already, many prototype or preliminary research experiments get done on the shoestring budget at the end of a grant. Big Science does not always mean Big Money. And maybe that's the kind of research crowdfunding is suited for.
Yup, this is indeed small for now. If you total up all of the projects and what we're shooting for, though, it's about $250K, so, not tiny. Although, to give you context, we actually told all of the scientists to start small as this has never been tried on this scale before. It's an experiment, really, to see if it can work at all. Phase 2 is scaling up.
It should be noted, though, that many projects are asking for amounts that are reasonable within their discipline. We have a lot of ecologists whose needs for running and analyzing experiments often fall in the $1-5K range, rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, I'm seeking ~$7K to fund two days of sampling in kelp forests in the California Channel Islands. It's not huge, but it's what is needed for the kind of data I collect.
Needs vary greatly between disciplines and projects.
As one of the co-founders of #SciFund, I'm curious, after you slashdotters go and look at the projects at http://scifund.rockethub.com and their videos and rewards, would YOU crowdfund these projects? (and if you would, then by all means, do so!) This is the first time we're trying this on any scale, and so have chosen to start with small projects that, if they don't get funded, won't set back anyone's research program. What we're really curious is if the science literate and science interested people like YOU would go over, see what scientists have up, and say "Yeah, I'll fund that."?
I'm betting that the company knows exactly what will happen, and they know that people won't care, and they'll rake in the dough.
Of course, this always makes me wonder quite a bit about how we view gender and sexuality out here in 1-on-1 chats on the 'net, but I feel like that might be someone's dissertation topic. Oy.
Uplink a fantastic small game by introversion and ported to the mac by ambriosia (whom I adore) - yes, it's not a PRETTY graphics based game, and it can be a bit cheesy at times, but VERY immersive, and puts you in a fundamentally different role than a shot-em-up or make-my-army-win kind of game. Darwinia isn't half bad either.
I'm actually guessing that, like having to use 555 for phone numbers in movies so that they don't match any real phone number, the usage of 10.2.2.2 was to so that it would not match an ip address in the real world. I mean, can you imagine having the IP that was shown being hacked by Trinity the day after scores of both real geeks and script kiddies went to see Reloaded. Holy shit, man! You could kiss your data goodbye, and a lawsuit of Reloaded hello.
OTOH, it would have been hilarious if they used 127.0.0.1 - not from a practical standpoint - that just would have been lame - but more from a "Sound of thousands of ignorant script-kiddies writhing in pain as they realized the box they just completely fucked up was their own" standpoint.
I'd have to say the Aliens mod to doom was what did it to me. I still remember, late at night, all of the lights turned off, headphones with the colume cranked way up, I was scared shitless.
I introduced it to a few friends when they were over one night, and with the lights off, sound cranked on headphones, you'd forget that it all wasn't real going on around you - I still remember after 15 min of playing when one of my friends touched my shoulder and I flipped out. Scary as shit.
I HIGHLY reccomend downloading "A Night on Thundera" (no, I'm not going to link to it - I'm ashamed I even know the title), and then have your mac read it back to you (the simpletext speech thang) - I haven't been that frightened or laughed that loud.
HA! If only it were all true - there's actually an interesting point here. When colonists came to America, they brought a whole host of diseases, parasites, etc. with them. They weren't as saturated among the colonies as in Europe, however, leading to some interesting outcomes - e.g. Smallpox. Many colonial Americans were not exposed to it as children in the same manner as Europeans were, making smallpox a highly feared disease that would break out at random amongst the colonies killing many adults. Hell, it almost changed the course of the revolutionary war - for a good review, check out Pox Americana by Elizabeth Fenn.
Well, common sense would dictate that in order for an organism to survive and reproduce in the first place, and hence invade, it has to be able to get its food from somewhere - there's an immense literature out there about attempts by man to introduce a variety of organisms for aquaculture, farming, etc, and failing due to those organisms not being able to eat, reproduce, or what have you. It follows then that if we see a succesful non-native organisms, its pappy was able to eat something when he first landed, and so can it!
At the same time, said new individual may be emerging into an environment it is totally unprepared for. Think of a plant going into an environment with lots of herbivores. While all of the native plants may have evolved nasty chemicals and physical defenses which have co-evolved with the local herbivores, the non-native plant has bupkis, and gets hammered as soon as it establishes itself.
Of course, there are a huge number of other wrinkles to this - higher dispersive ability and more efficient resource usage due to a the new plant not devoting any energy to costly defenses, etc., but this hypothesis was by no means a sure thing - that it has borne out is really quite extraordinary, and may yield some interesting insite into top-down versus bottom-up control of species invasions.
I'm just curious how they're going to get a female of an elephant to gestate an organism that doesn't even share the same genetic code of the species, let alone have half of it come from the mother.
In your blog, you sound continually suprised at the huge turnouts at your book signings. Given how you approach the show, did you in anyway anticipate the following you'd get - particularly the (food)geek following? What do you think of your popularity in the geek community?
First off, as a longtime reader and marine biologist, let me express my glee that we finally get something in/. - we're geeks too! heehee.
Secondly, on the dolphin note.....well, funny y'all should mention this, as recently, a few marine bio friends and i were having a discussion on just this topic...It all started from how saying you were a marine biologist interested in learning the secret language of dolphins could be a great pickup line at a bar... The smell... well, isn't that what colgne is for!
Hey, my girlfriend didn't my dead rockfish aroma TOO much....at first..
Re:Culture clash: biologists and programmers
on
Bioinformatics
·
· Score: 1
  It's interesting to read this...for some background, I'm an undergraduate graduating (in 2 weeks! yeah!) with a degree in biology, specifically marine ecology. The lines of hard and soft sciences seems to be blurring more and more. Chatting with a few friends the other day, the topic came up that biology itself as an integrated discipline seemed to be falling apart. The only real glue holding it together seems to be the genetiscists. Otherwise, you have your molecular bio folk, you have your organismal bio folk, and your ecologists. There's a lot of back and forth, but the real interdisciplinary biologists (by which i mean bridging the gap between the three aforementioned biology subdisciplines) are the evolutionists. The answers evolutionary biology has been yielding up, in no small part thanks to the wealth of sequence data in genbank, are amazing. They lead to answers in each and evry subdiscipline of biology.
  Still, though, between everybody else there is a great deal of culture clash. Lab v. field. Human v. Non-human. Who can get the funding. Who's work is 'important'. It's fascinating to watch.
  What is changing, as it is changing everywhere, is the degree of technical literacy of everyone in these fields. Talking to an old teacher of mine, he remarked that ecology has really become a hard science in comparison to what it used it be. Pick up any modelling book. It's a different world than the early descriptive studies. This is due in no small part to the large number of applied math folk that have sauntered into the field, as well as the continuing need for massive data crunching needed by the evolutionists who so often share departments with ecologists.
  But as this next generation of biologists grows up, accessing genbank, running sequences, data mining, and using powerful computational tools is becoming more of the standard, as is our own familiarity with technology. Hell, tak e me for example - marine ecologists who hacks perl in his spare time as well as running OpenBSD servers. The necessity of existing in the digital age is breeding scientists with more basic knowhow of computational techniques.
  It's amazing the worlds that open up when one takes just a programming class or two. One reason which so many biologists get into this field is the fuzzyness of the answers. We like examining why anwers are so imprecise. We like figuring out how to assign and partition variance to different causes. The natural complexity of the world is wonderous, and the need and ability to use the tools out there to grasp and hold on to this.
  So where am I going with this? Well, in part, a bit of a tear on folk who think computational biology should just be applied to molevular and genetic problem. The potential for the same types of skills applied to the reams and reams of data piling up from LTER (long term ecological research) sites and other long term ecological data sets which are just starting to come to fruition is vast. Conservation issues require better models of ecosystem function in order to be attacked correctly. The exactness and certainty of computational power is ready and waiting to leap into all aspects of biology. I think bioinformatics is a first step to help codify more and more of biology into a precise science. Empiracal work is great, but it needs to be turned into a predective model at some point. The real challenge, I think, is going to be the reintegration of the fractioned disciplines of biology. How can molecular models of various biological processes be worked into a larger framework of ecosystem functions in both the short term and at evolutionary timescales? When we can really take an object oriented approach to the large scale problems of biology, and allow the specialists to work out the problems of each and every one, it's going to require biological and computer savvy to unify them into a whole picture.
  Ok, enough for me now, i think i'm going to get that book and hone my perl population biology skills.
Slashdot Mirror
If i could see my money would all help research efforts in the fields of ...innovative green power, genetic mutation ... health as well as many others i would donate $1000 - $10000... with all the rules and regulations involved as well as bureaucrats getting half the money, I'm not sure it would reach it's full potential.
Given how things work for #SciFund, we have an 8% overhead to rockethub and about a 2-5% for folk at universities (although this varies) since it goes through a different channel than government grants. And we have projects looking at greener power applications as well as problems of global good production. So, great! Sounds like a perfect match for you!
I have been fascinated by the comments in this thread. And I realize perhaps I mis-stated the question. The tacit assumption seems to have been that this may be a potential replacement for NSF/NIH funding or otherwise that can completely support a research lab.
And maybe it can. But I agree with all the posters that the chances of crowdfunding as a complete replacement for more traditional funding sources are highly unlikely. As everyone has noted, #SciFund is targeting pieces of research programs rather than whole labs (although we do have some folk trying for a chunk of their salary). And perhaps it is no accident that the first time around, the disciplines and scientists that have been attracted to #SciFund are not ones who are trying to purchase or use multi-million dollar pieces of equipment.
So, perhaps the question should be, Crowdfunding for science - when and where can it be used successfully?
Because, really, the answer to the first question, can it succeed at all for any project, no matter the size, rests on folk like you. But what are its best uses? That's a bigger issue that I'd love to hear more thoughts about, as we're still grappling with it.
(FYI, we'll also be doing a formal analysis of all of the projects and their funding records at the end of the 45 day funding period - #SciFund runs through Dec 15th, so, we have pulled in $40K now, but we still have a month left to get more, if you want to contribute and help us figure out what projects are really capturing people's imagination when it comes to funding.)
Not always. Entire projects in, say, Ecology can be done for the cost of one sequence. Theoretical modeling can require little more than a laptop, pen, and paper. Already, many prototype or preliminary research experiments get done on the shoestring budget at the end of a grant. Big Science does not always mean Big Money. And maybe that's the kind of research crowdfunding is suited for.
Yup, this is indeed small for now. If you total up all of the projects and what we're shooting for, though, it's about $250K, so, not tiny. Although, to give you context, we actually told all of the scientists to start small as this has never been tried on this scale before. It's an experiment, really, to see if it can work at all. Phase 2 is scaling up.
It should be noted, though, that many projects are asking for amounts that are reasonable within their discipline. We have a lot of ecologists whose needs for running and analyzing experiments often fall in the $1-5K range, rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, I'm seeking ~$7K to fund two days of sampling in kelp forests in the California Channel Islands. It's not huge, but it's what is needed for the kind of data I collect.
Needs vary greatly between disciplines and projects.
As one of the co-founders of #SciFund, I'm curious, after you slashdotters go and look at the projects at http://scifund.rockethub.com and their videos and rewards, would YOU crowdfund these projects? (and if you would, then by all means, do so!) This is the first time we're trying this on any scale, and so have chosen to start with small projects that, if they don't get funded, won't set back anyone's research program. What we're really curious is if the science literate and science interested people like YOU would go over, see what scientists have up, and say "Yeah, I'll fund that."?
And if you want more background, check the articles our scientists are writing about this process.
Sausage
Festival
I'm betting that the company knows exactly what will happen, and they know that people won't care, and they'll rake in the dough.
Of course, this always makes me wonder quite a bit about how we view gender and sexuality out here in 1-on-1 chats on the 'net, but I feel like that might be someone's dissertation topic. Oy.
Uplink a fantastic small game by introversion and ported to the mac by ambriosia (whom I adore) - yes, it's not a PRETTY graphics based game, and it can be a bit cheesy at times, but VERY immersive, and puts you in a fundamentally different role than a shot-em-up or make-my-army-win kind of game. Darwinia isn't half bad either.
They may not be able to afford MATLAB, but instead, they can use octave!
http://www.octave.org/
I find I enjoy my music much more when I turn the amp up to 11. It's one higher than 10, so of course, its even louder, and therefore better.
I'm actually guessing that, like having to use 555 for phone numbers in movies so that they don't match any real phone number, the usage of 10.2.2.2 was to so that it would not match an ip address in the real world. I mean, can you imagine having the IP that was shown being hacked by Trinity the day after scores of both real geeks and script kiddies went to see Reloaded. Holy shit, man! You could kiss your data goodbye, and a lawsuit of Reloaded hello.
OTOH, it would have been hilarious if they used 127.0.0.1 - not from a practical standpoint - that just would have been lame - but more from a "Sound of thousands of ignorant script-kiddies writhing in pain as they realized the box they just completely fucked up was their own" standpoint.
So, wait, a computer simulation of what its like being locked inside of a computer simulation?
As Kenu would say, "Whoah."
At least it proves that irony is not dead, even if it is lost on some.
I'd have to say the Aliens mod to doom was what did it to me. I still remember, late at night, all of the lights turned off, headphones with the colume cranked way up, I was scared shitless.
I introduced it to a few friends when they were over one night, and with the lights off, sound cranked on headphones, you'd forget that it all wasn't real going on around you - I still remember after 15 min of playing when one of my friends touched my shoulder and I flipped out. Scary as shit.
I HIGHLY reccomend downloading "A Night on Thundera" (no, I'm not going to link to it - I'm ashamed I even know the title), and then have your mac read it back to you (the simpletext speech thang) - I haven't been that frightened or laughed that loud.
Just the way it makes Snarf say "Oh Lion-o"...
I'm going to go cry now.
Yup, I even use a Linksys Wireless router with this sort of setup and have had no problems with my OSX Powerbook.
And you think that they haven't made their way over here in droves? That, or we've raised our own native parasites! HA!
HA! If only it were all true - there's actually an interesting point here. When colonists came to America, they brought a whole host of diseases, parasites, etc. with them. They weren't as saturated among the colonies as in Europe, however, leading to some interesting outcomes - e.g. Smallpox. Many colonial Americans were not exposed to it as children in the same manner as Europeans were, making smallpox a highly feared disease that would break out at random amongst the colonies killing many adults. Hell, it almost changed the course of the revolutionary war - for a good review, check out Pox Americana by Elizabeth Fenn.
If you're somewhere that has access to Nature's archives, you can read the two original articles this one was based off of:
Release of invasive plants from fungal and viral pathogens and
Introduced species and their missing parasites
Well, common sense would dictate that in order for an organism to survive and reproduce in the first place, and hence invade, it has to be able to get its food from somewhere - there's an immense literature out there about attempts by man to introduce a variety of organisms for aquaculture, farming, etc, and failing due to those organisms not being able to eat, reproduce, or what have you. It follows then that if we see a succesful non-native organisms, its pappy was able to eat something when he first landed, and so can it!
At the same time, said new individual may be emerging into an environment it is totally unprepared for. Think of a plant going into an environment with lots of herbivores. While all of the native plants may have evolved nasty chemicals and physical defenses which have co-evolved with the local herbivores, the non-native plant has bupkis, and gets hammered as soon as it establishes itself.
Of course, there are a huge number of other wrinkles to this - higher dispersive ability and more efficient resource usage due to a the new plant not devoting any energy to costly defenses, etc., but this hypothesis was by no means a sure thing - that it has borne out is really quite extraordinary, and may yield some interesting insite into top-down versus bottom-up control of species invasions.
I'm just curious how they're going to get a female of an elephant to gestate an organism that doesn't even share the same genetic code of the species, let alone have half of it come from the mother.
syncing of their iCal with an apache web server or some such?
I'd be curious to hear
or, um, would a cheap hack just to be to ftp it over...hrm...
In your blog, you sound continually suprised at the huge turnouts at your book signings. Given how you approach the show, did you in anyway anticipate the following you'd get - particularly the (food)geek following? What do you think of your popularity in the geek community?
That's a tough one... I think it depends on how long the fish has been rotting. 3 hours in hot water to defrost.......that'll do ye. hehe.
Then again, you could be working with 3mm worms. Now THAT'S sexy.
First off, as a longtime reader and marine biologist, let me express my glee that we finally get something in /. - we're geeks too! heehee.
Secondly, on the dolphin note.....well, funny y'all should mention this, as recently, a few marine bio friends and i were having a discussion on just this topic...It all started from how saying you were a marine biologist interested in learning the secret language of dolphins could be a great pickup line at a bar... The smell... well, isn't that what colgne is for!
Hey, my girlfriend didn't my dead rockfish aroma TOO much....at first..
  It's interesting to read this...for some background, I'm an undergraduate graduating (in 2 weeks! yeah!) with a degree in biology, specifically marine ecology. The lines of hard and soft sciences seems to be blurring more and more. Chatting with a few friends the other day, the topic came up that biology itself as an integrated discipline seemed to be falling apart. The only real glue holding it together seems to be the genetiscists. Otherwise, you have your molecular bio folk, you have your organismal bio folk, and your ecologists. There's a lot of back and forth, but the real interdisciplinary biologists (by which i mean bridging the gap between the three aforementioned biology subdisciplines) are the evolutionists. The answers evolutionary biology has been yielding up, in no small part thanks to the wealth of sequence data in genbank, are amazing. They lead to answers in each and evry subdiscipline of biology.
  Still, though, between everybody else there is a great deal of culture clash. Lab v. field. Human v. Non-human. Who can get the funding. Who's work is 'important'. It's fascinating to watch.
  What is changing, as it is changing everywhere, is the degree of technical literacy of everyone in these fields. Talking to an old teacher of mine, he remarked that ecology has really become a hard science in comparison to what it used it be. Pick up any modelling book. It's a different world than the early descriptive studies. This is due in no small part to the large number of applied math folk that have sauntered into the field, as well as the continuing need for massive data crunching needed by the evolutionists who so often share departments with ecologists.
  But as this next generation of biologists grows up, accessing genbank, running sequences, data mining, and using powerful computational tools is becoming more of the standard, as is our own familiarity with technology. Hell, tak e me for example - marine ecologists who hacks perl in his spare time as well as running OpenBSD servers. The necessity of existing in the digital age is breeding scientists with more basic knowhow of computational techniques.
  It's amazing the worlds that open up when one takes just a programming class or two. One reason which so many biologists get into this field is the fuzzyness of the answers. We like examining why anwers are so imprecise. We like figuring out how to assign and partition variance to different causes. The natural complexity of the world is wonderous, and the need and ability to use the tools out there to grasp and hold on to this.
  So where am I going with this? Well, in part, a bit of a tear on folk who think computational biology should just be applied to molevular and genetic problem. The potential for the same types of skills applied to the reams and reams of data piling up from LTER (long term ecological research) sites and other long term ecological data sets which are just starting to come to fruition is vast. Conservation issues require better models of ecosystem function in order to be attacked correctly. The exactness and certainty of computational power is ready and waiting to leap into all aspects of biology. I think bioinformatics is a first step to help codify more and more of biology into a precise science. Empiracal work is great, but it needs to be turned into a predective model at some point. The real challenge, I think, is going to be the reintegration of the fractioned disciplines of biology. How can molecular models of various biological processes be worked into a larger framework of ecosystem functions in both the short term and at evolutionary timescales? When we can really take an object oriented approach to the large scale problems of biology, and allow the specialists to work out the problems of each and every one, it's going to require biological and computer savvy to unify them into a whole picture.
  Ok, enough for me now, i think i'm going to get that book and hone my perl population biology skills.