9 ms·

It's unfortunate that the app was licensed out to a commercial vendor ("Peak Brain Training") when the study received funding by the National Institute for Heal

• andy_ppp 8y ago
  Because capitalism?
  • fuzz4lyfe 8y ago
    I'm not sure I understand could you go into more detail?
    • andy_ppp 8y ago
      Haha, I’m just suggesting that where there is a profit to be made human beings tend to engineer opportunities to make cash, or in some cases, tenure. I would add that this happens everywhere from The Donald and construction of the wall (I’m sure the procurement process will be astonishingly transparent) to government building anything really. Clay Davis (shiiiiiiit) refers to this in The Wire as “the golden faucet”, a mythical place within government that you can make a seemingly infinite amount of money from. Alternatively for the UK read any edition of Private Eye.
    • 0x262d 8y ago
      well, within capitalism, there is a massive amount of capital trying to find profitable investments of any kind. university research represents a promising source of such investments, so as long as private capital exists and is doing this, there will be all the socioeconomic pressure in the world for it to capture and exploit public research for private profits. sometimes this pressure results in useful things being made and sometimes it results in privatization of healthcare or research, public interest be damned. increasingly over time it is the latter.
• cptaj 8y ago
  Definitely. Public funding should come with proper licensing restrictions that force open source.
  • chriskanan 8y ago
    Much publicly funded research never leaves academia and governments want an ROI in terms of seeing the research in products. US research agencies have been trying to incentivize commercialization of research and for PhD students to pursue entrepreneurship. They launched the NSF i-corps program to facilitate that, with the intial curriculum by Steve Blank. Of course, this article is talking about UK research, but I assume the same desire to have research have impact applies.
    • mtgx 8y ago
      Isn't that a little like saying that the government expects to see a "ROI" from educating children? The positive effects of open sourcing science could be seen down the road and not in a direct way, but in more indirect ways.
      • spzb 8y ago
        Governments do expect an ROI from educating children. Educated children make employable adults who make taxable income which makes governments happy.
• vnchr 8y ago
  I'm disappointed by this too. The FTC fined Peak Brain Training competitor Lumosity $2 million because it "deceived customers about the cognitive and health benefits of its apps and online products."[1] I was more hopeful about the app if it was standalone. As for the code being open sourced, the results of the research should be publicly available but the material of the research is an asset of the university (like how the computers and beakers used in other experiments wouldn't be given away to the public). Commercialization of research ("tech transfer") involves additional costs and risks that are taken on by research institutions, researchers, and private entities. This PR announcement was likely not coincidentally following the release of the app to the public. There was likely additional costs outside of the original scope of research to make the app robust for public usage outside of the experiment setting. Personally, I'm disappointed that something that sounds promising may not have a chance to stand on its own as an example of a viable application when other "brain training" apps have shown their more akin to placebos rather. [1] https://www.statnews.com/2016/01/05/brain-training-lumosity/
  • hopler 8y ago
    There's no reason to believe that this new app is any less snake oil than Lumosity Its story has the same trajectory
    • jchook 8y ago
      I agree. Summary of findings: “Test subjects who spent hours practicing [insert proprietary game here] scored better when tested on different games that require similar skills.” Smells like a poorly designed experiment salted with commercial interests.
      • tzs 8y ago
        That's vague. Do you have specific examples of flaws in methodology or analysis in the published peer reviewed results here [1]? [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00002/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2019.0000...
      • 8y ago
• azhenley 8y ago
  Research funding in the US oddly doesn't seem to provide any rights to the IP to the taxpayers and only limited rights to the government, at least when it comes to the NSF and NIH (DoD research does seem to be different). Disclaimer: I'm a researcher in the US.
  • rustyboy 8y ago
    I've always wondered why grant funded projects are allowed to be patented, do you think just preventing the IP is enough? I've seen Mariana Mazzucato suggest the government as VC in that they get a portion of the profits from their grant projects, but then I wonder how they could safely regulate their own funding revenue?
    • azhenley 8y ago
      I'm no expert in the area of research IP and govt funding, but my interpretation so far has been that the government provides the funding with the expectation that the research will ultimately improve society (even if it is through a for-profit business). It also values the training of graduate students with the funding.
      • yayana 8y ago
        But the opposite happens because the same scientists own IP and run the study to determine its worth. So we know less and waste more than having done nothing.
    • rhino369 8y ago
      Allowing the university to get the IP is another way to fund projects. If the university didn't get any of the IP, grants would have to be larger to fund all costs.
  • sitkack 8y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Dole_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Dole_Act Is what gives universities IP rights and allows them to keep research closed. Top Five Fascist laws in the books.
• uncoder0 8y ago
  Could be due to userbase size but, I liked the assessment and decided to purchase one month of pro to see what else was involved. Once I bought pro I did another problem solving focused workout. My percentile on the assessment for this category was 53% before pro now that I'm pro and did one 'workout' It says I'm at 89%... I find that hard to believe. Edit: Upon further inspection it looks like the percentiles I was reading were for the specific game. It makes sense that for the pay-walled games there aren't as many people playing so it's not a representative sample.
• ArtWomb 8y ago
  >>> The game involves asking players to watch a series of digits from two to nine flashing up one by one, at a rate of 100 digits per minute. Over the course of five minutes, players must press a button when they start to see a sequence emerge. C'mon, this could be cloned in a weekend ;) Publish neuroscience findings in a public access journal by all means. Even including pseudocode of the sequence generation algorithm. But I am all for distributing their particular implementation via private sector partnerships. That could yield further funding and experimentation. And possibly alleviate taxpayer research dependency for their lab in future. The work itself taps into some novel neuroscience. Do we we possess a Bayesian brain that estimates probabilities in real time? Altering a belief net based on new evidence. Or are patterns hard wired and must be learned. I think this sort of training game based on integer series could work just as well with text, images, music, video, animation, etc.
  • Ragib_Zaman 8y ago
    > Do we possess a Bayesian brain that estimates probabilities in real time? You should read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" - the answer is a resounding "No".
    • no_identd 8y ago
      You might wish to read Gerd Gigerenzer as well as Keith E. Stanovich, Richard F. West & Maggie E. Toplak before citing Kahneman so quickly, and doubly so in support of such a tremendously strong claim as the one you just made. For Gigerenzer, you might wish to start out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Gigerenzer#Heuristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Gigerenzer#Heuristics https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14792779143000033 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1479277914300003... (Available here: http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/gg_how_1991.pdf http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/gg_how_1991.pdf) And for Stanovich et al., you might want to start out here: http://cognet.mit.edu/book/rationality-quotient http://cognet.mit.edu/book/rationality-quotient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysrationalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysrationalia Stanovich et al. showed that Kahneman & Tversky's classical "System 1/System 2" dual process model as one too simplistic, outlining at least 3 systems involved: * The Autonomous Mind * The Reflective Mind * The Algorithmic Mind For points addressed by both Gigerenzer as well as Stanovich et al, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rationality_Debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rationality_Debate None of this of course directly addresses your "Bayesian brain" point, however, for that, you might want to take a look at "some" articles by psychiatrist Scott Alexander, many of which speculative but citing a lot of sources you might wish to look into: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZiQqsgGX6a42Sfpii/the-apologist-and-the-revolutionary https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZiQqsgGX6a42Sfpii/the-apolog... https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/euJm4RwkAptZnP89i/bayes-for-schizophrenics-reasoning-in-delusional-disorders https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/euJm4RwkAptZnP89i/bayes-for-... https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/28/mysticism-and-pattern-matching/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/28/mysticism-and-pattern-... http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-up/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-u... http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-people-immune-to-optical-illusions/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-peo... http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-autism-and-schizophrenia/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-au... https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/10/paradigms-all-the-way-down/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/10/paradigms-all-the-way-... (And here, as a bonus, an article on dreaming, by Eliezer Yudkowsky: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8z2Fm2yaHpQz8rr5B/dreams-with-damaged-priors https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8z2Fm2yaHpQz8rr5B/dreams-wit...)
• xxpor 8y ago
  Considering the existence of crown copyright, I'm surprised you would expect anything from the UK gov to be open source or similar. One of my favorite things about the US is that works of the Federal government are public domain. It speaks to the fact the government is representative of the people themselves, not a particular person. Now granted, universities don't have to release their publicly funded work either in the US, but I think that should be changed.
  • kwhitefoot 8y ago
    One need not have an expectation of a good outcome to be disappointed that it doesn't happen.
  • tommorris 8y ago
    This goes a little off-topic, but you might be pleasantly surprised about Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright doesn't deal with university research, only with works done by the government. Pretty much everything released by central government is now licensed through the UK Government Licensing Framework under the Open Government License (OGL), which is essentially CC-BY. See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/ http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licen... Examples of loads of photos and documents that Wikimedia have taken copies of (and often reusing) under the OGL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:OGL https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:OGL
    • xxpor 8y ago
      That's good to know! I guess I was a little out of date, I mostly saw this come up when there was a big push to get stuff on en.wikipedia moved to commons, and all of the UK/AU/CA content couldn't be moved for obvious reasons.
      • tommorris 8y ago
        Canada has their own version of the OGL too. Dunno about Australia. https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada
• rayiner 8y ago
  Just because the government makes an investment in some research doesn't mean that it has bought the public rights to all commercial applications of that research. This should be obvious on HN of all places. The government is just an investor in this context. It can demand whatever terms it wants, but the terms you're proposing are basically "100% equity in return for funding initial development costs." Nobody with options would take that deal.
  • sgift 8y ago
    > Nobody with options would take that deal. There are more than enough researchers and research which have no options, but are still valuable for society. Let the others be done commercially, more public money for those that really need it.
  • Barrin92 8y ago
    The flipside here is that we're talking about a highly experimental technology that is not trivial to evaluate for consumers, and even likely snake oil (see luminosity) So the argument to "nobody would take that deal" would be: nobody would make that investment. Lots of tax payer and government money goes to projects that would otherwise not exist, as such their rights and access to information should go beyond what a usual private investor would expect. This obviously extends to academic freedom as well. If we're going down the road of treating the government as an investor in a 'university entreprise', then the government should obviously have shareholder control over a public university.
• thereisnospork 8y ago
  Researchers aren't (necessarily) philanthropists. They and the university both get a cut of the IP they develop to encourage them to both invent useful things and to get those useful things into production. If the commercially-viable fruits of this research had to be open-sourced it would be some half-commented github repo that no one would look at twice, because none of the researchers would have any incentive to make it anything more than that.
• milin 8y ago
  Thanks for Peak Brain that app is an ad hell hole.