8 ms·

Questions raised about research by OpenAg Initiative at M.I.T. Media Lab

85 points by Anon84 7y ago

throwawawathrow 7y ago
There's a tweet from some prominent agriculture researcher pointing out that the fabled Food Computer is in fact a rehash of agricultural techniques used circa 2000. Forgot her name but the remark struck me. There should be a periodic reminder for tech-minded people to reread Ecclesiastes 1:9 every once in a while.
- ninjin 7y ago
  For those of us less well-versed in the Bible: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
  - dantheman 7y ago
    Which is complete bullshit.
  - thelazydogsback 7y ago
    "All Of This Has Happened Before And All This Will Happen Again" - related by the Lords of Kobol ? Not to be confused with: PROPHECY DIVISION. PERFORM LoopBody VARYING Day DISPLAY "Same shit" MOVE Cow TO CowsHome(Ncows) ADD 1 TO NCows END-PERFORM. UNTIL AllCowsCameHome USING CowsHome -- Lords of Cobol
    - taneq 7y ago
      The word is about, there's something evolving, whatever may come, the world keeps revolving... They say the next big thing is here, that the revolution's near, But to me it seems quite clear thats it's all just a little bit of history repeating. - The Propellerheads, History Repeating
  - booleandilemma 7y ago
    Sure, and self-driving cars are just horses all over again right? And ancient Egyptians were already using tablets.
    - throwawawathrow 7y ago
      Self-driving cars aren't real. And ancient Egyptians were using tablets, I don't know if you chose this word on purpose.
    - JetSpiegel 7y ago
      When Ancient Egyptian tablets had been carved, the Babylons/Hitites couldn't remotely wipe them.
- alevskaya 7y ago
  You're thinking of Dr. Sarah Taber, an ag tech and food safety consultant with lots of past exposure to startups as well. The relevant twitter thread: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1171895657872941056?s=20 https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/117189565787294105...
  - makomk 7y ago
    This is... not the clever revelation that she thinks it is. She worked with "room sized versions of thse back in 2001"? Well yes of course. I looked through all the documentation, etc back when this story broke and the whole original purpose of the Personal Food Computer project was to take those big room-sized setups and shrink them down to small, standardized, well-documented boxes that could be racked up and used to carry out a bunch of experimental runs in parallel quickly and cheaply. The whole damn point of the thing was that it was like those only smaller and easier to replicate. (And a few people did replicate them and grow plants in them.) I presume that was where the name came from; it was meant to be the PC to the metaphorical mainframes of the existing setups.
    - fatbird 7y ago
      Part of Taber's point was that it's harder to scale up than down. This is solved technology, and their failure to make miniaturized versions work at all is a further indictment of their project as a harvester of investor funding rather than an agricultural game-changer.
    - adambyrtek 7y ago
      Sounds pretty much like the Theranos pitch?
    - pryce 7y ago
      Her point is that this tech was outdated in 2001. Her point is that the people funding and supporting this research were mislead across multiple ways: * misled about state of the existing tech * outrageous and unsubstantiated claims of its performance * literally faking results in front of investors and stakeholders Further info Taber links to this account[1] from Babak Babakinejad, an MIT Media lab research scientist who describes an environment of research based on clear fabrication, and one in which the lies extended to the director colluding with MIT Health and Safety to actively mislead Environmental Protection Drinking Water Program officials about safety checks. > What horrified me the most was that Mr Harper, as director and operator of the permit, actively worked with senior staff at MIT Health & Safety to mislead the Environmental Protection Drinking Water Program officials about his team’s activities. The behaviour described in these threads demonstrates repeated, rampant, widespread violations of R&D integrity, without which MIT loses its capability to perform research and development at all. It is not dramatic to say that if fabrications are allowed to to be called research, and a conspiracy of lies can dismantle safety checks, the whole lab is in dire jeopardy. [1] https://twitter.com/flypolitics/status/1175099839236886528 https://twitter.com/flypolitics/status/1175099839236886528
- wolf550e 7y ago
  https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1171895657872941056 https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/117189565787294105...
msghacq 7y ago
Apparently Epstein also funded Scratch, a programming language for children: https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2014/09/17/mit-media-lab-trains-tiny-computer-programmers/ https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2014/09/17/mit-media-lab-trai... This was in 2014 after his arrest for sex with a minor. WTF was MIT/Media Lab thinking?
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  That people care far more about money than about where it comes from. That's usually a pretty safe bet. I'd like to hope that recent events will change things, but I tend to suspect this is more like one of those finance rulings where someone gets fined $1 for every $1000 they earned in an evil way, and that the underlying risk/reward profile hasn't fundamentally shifted. Still, every push in the right direction helps!
  - sieabahlpark 7y ago
    Not trying to excuse Epstein but what body would determine what is Evil? Sounds very authoritarian.
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      I think the point is that MIT, on its own initiative, might have been more careful about to whom it sold respectability. Saying 'no' to a donation is not very authoritarian.
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  Shocking, but the source is somewhat dubious and Mitchel Resnick has strongly denied that Scratch or ScratchJr took money from Epstein. https://medium.com/@mres/a-statement-about-research-funding-af274404ee3d https://medium.com/@mres/a-statement-about-research-funding-... edit: the ultimate source seems to be a press release from the Epstein Foundation, who around 2014 was surely in a PR blitz, published by Jewish Business News but since taken down. And both sources get Mitchel Resnick's name wrong, in different ways! http://archive.is/9UKAi http://archive.is/9UKAi
rolltiide 7y ago
Anyone wanna plagiarize the article so I can read it? Both of my mobile browsers wont let me, and they also detect private mode
- just_observing 7y ago
  Rough copy/paste https://pastebin.com/iCtipMin https://pastebin.com/iCtipMin Apologies for any ads that got in.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
bbanyc 7y ago
Rigged demos are the Media Lab's main output, and have been since the start. Shut it all down.
- october_sky 7y ago
  Do you have other examples we can look at?
  - yodon 7y ago
    The original goal of the Media Lab was to explore the impact of having access to far more computing power than you could possibly have access to today (for whatever is the current value of today). Not "more than most people have", but more than you could have that point in time. That's an important and valid subject to research (eg they did lots of work on understanding the impact of speaker-independent voice recognition long before we could really even do speaker-dependent voice recognition reliably) but almost by definition the only way you can study it is via rigged demos.
    - diydsp 7y ago
      I would follow up by saying that from 2004-2010, while I was a researcher there, the emphasis was on mixing ideas from places as far flung as possible. There was no need to fake a demo, as the ideas were not impossible, just uncanny. Once someone like e.g. Saul Griffith came up with the idea of Kinematic Replication [1], others could easily replicate it (or at least anyone with a laser cutter at that time). Same goes for my projects. [1.25] For goodness sake, the source code and build instructions are published so that people can replicate it. These ideas are not like Caleb Harper's claims of high productivity versions of existing processes. They're fresh formulations of concepts one might not ordinarily have had the notion and resources to combine. Just look at Hiroshi Ishii's work! [1.5] That stuff is not hard to do once you've seen it done once- but try to be the originator of some of that stuff. That's where the magic is! Take a look at my pal Brian Whitman's work [2] which was the basis of Echo Nest and eventually Spotify's recommendation engines. These algorithms are published at conferences and in journals so anyone can go in and replicate them. Brian's work isn't remarkable because it's so unbelievable it can hardly be true - it's remarkable because it dares to combine machine learning with signal processing and social media. These were all new ideas at the time and and it was up in the air whether they could work. Now they're the bread and butter of many peoples' commercial and personal activities. Anyone saying these demos are rigged is revealing their own shallowing understanding of what takes place there. I don't know much about how the culture of the lab changed after I left and Ito became the directory almost immediately after... I do know while I was there, it was actually a bit scrappy. The original "shop" in 2004 was...a 10x20 room with a single laser cutter, single waterjet cutter, a drill press, a Bridgeport-like mill and a CNC lathe. There were tools hanging over a tattered wooden workbench. When the second building was constructed around 2008(?), shop size expanded about 10x. It went from a four floor building to 6 story building with maybe 8x the space. Ito was a kind of cult figure. I felt out of the loop bc ppl talked about him like an angel but couldn't explain to me what he'd done. [1] https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~saul/PhD/index.html https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~saul/PhD/index.html [1.25] https://web.archive.org/web/20100627183050/http://web.media.mit.edu/~nvawter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100627183050/http://web.media.... [1.5] https://www.media.mit.edu/people/ishii/projects/ https://www.media.mit.edu/people/ishii/projects/ [2] https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~bwhitman/ https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~bwhitman/
nullc 7y ago
In one set of articles OpenAg is a therenos grade scam with everything faked, all plants purchased instead of grown, etc. In another set of articles, they're in trouble because the nitrate levels in their waste water are too high: https://www.wbur.org/edify/2019/09/20/open-agriculture-initiative-middleton-harper https://www.wbur.org/edify/2019/09/20/open-agriculture-initi... So which is it? A total sham or a polluter? These positions sound incompatible.
- nrp 7y ago
  These don't appear to be incompatible or mutually exclusive claims. Like Theranos, it seems there was actual research, development, and small scale production work going on at OpenAg. Also like Theranos, it seems that work was nowhere near producing the results that were claimed by leadership, leading to falsifying results for the sake of publicity and funding. This means it's totally possible that the unsuccessful research they were doing was outputting wastewater containing excessive nitrogen levels while also misleading the public, press, and investors with faked demos.
- Donald 7y ago
  Why not both? It sounds like OpenAg engineers were trying various solutions for the device, but by the end of the effort, demo culture prevailed and the end-results were faked. At some point their staff decided to dump their concentrated nitrogen solution as waste water.
- defap 7y ago
  It's alleged that they made misleading claims, but it's not like the whole operation was a complete fabrication. There were plants and machines and whatnot, as can be seen in several articles on tis topic. So it's plausible that they illegally dumped wastewater as part of whatever it is they're doing that isn't working as advertised.
  - nullc 7y ago
    Fair enough, though at some point it starts becoming a bit hard to distinguish between what OpenAg was doing and what a significant fraction of all demos do. It's typical for some amount of 'rigging' to exist in demos, particularly because Murphy's law has an ugly way of rearing its head. At a very minimum, almost everyone goes over the demo many times and fix or avoid any issue that causes a failure or questions that can't be easily and decisively answered. I really did get the impression from the first articles I read on OpenAG that the claim was that they were doing absolutely nothing and that it was 100% faked. The article on the nitrates discharge was surprising to me in light of that. I'm perhaps a bit jaded also by seeing how much computer science / signal processing academic publication is essentially fake. "The desktop version doesn't really exist but we have a basement version doing stuff" seems like a fairly mild level of deception compared to many other things I've encountered.
gfrff 7y ago
Ah. Good old MIT. I remember the days when this sort of thing was only at the Media Lab.
xvilka 7y ago
Too bad MIT MediaLab is under scrutiny now. I really hope their PubPub[1] project will not die. It is the only open source[2] modern scientific publishing platform, like Authorea or Overleaf. [1] https://www.pubpub.org/ https://www.pubpub.org/ [2] https://github.com/pubpub https://github.com/pubpub
ocschwar 7y ago
MIT is probably the only land grant campus that has no agriculture department. That much is understandable, since ag-schools need to do actual literal field work on test plots, and that kind of acreage is hard to come by anywhere near Cambridge. But it also means there was nobody on campus to sanity check this OpenAg nonsense.
- bbanyc 7y ago
  The land grant act specified the aims for the funded schools would be "agricultural and mechanical." I believe Massachusetts was the only state to divide the funds between separate agricultural (UMass) and mechanical (MIT) universities.
tlb 7y ago
One of the defining qualities of the media lab was smoke-and-mirror demos. I thought everyone understood this and was OK with it. There's a place in the world for concept art, to inspire people with what might be possible. This is like "Questions Raised that TED Talks Oversimplify Complex Issues".

85 points by Anon84 7y ago

There's a tweet from some prominent agriculture researcher pointing out that the fabled Food Computer is in fact a rehash of agricultural techniques used circa 2000. Forgot her name but the remark struck me. There should be a periodic reminder for tech-minded people to reread Ecclesiastes 1:9 every once in a while.

ninjin 7y ago
For those of us less well-versed in the Bible: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
- dantheman 7y ago
  Which is complete bullshit.
- thelazydogsback 7y ago
  "All Of This Has Happened Before And All This Will Happen Again" - related by the Lords of Kobol ? Not to be confused with: PROPHECY DIVISION. PERFORM LoopBody VARYING Day DISPLAY "Same shit" MOVE Cow TO CowsHome(Ncows) ADD 1 TO NCows END-PERFORM. UNTIL AllCowsCameHome USING CowsHome -- Lords of Cobol
  - taneq 7y ago
    The word is about, there's something evolving, whatever may come, the world keeps revolving... They say the next big thing is here, that the revolution's near, But to me it seems quite clear thats it's all just a little bit of history repeating. - The Propellerheads, History Repeating
- booleandilemma 7y ago
  Sure, and self-driving cars are just horses all over again right? And ancient Egyptians were already using tablets.
  - throwawawathrow 7y ago
    Self-driving cars aren't real. And ancient Egyptians were using tablets, I don't know if you chose this word on purpose.
  - JetSpiegel 7y ago
    When Ancient Egyptian tablets had been carved, the Babylons/Hitites couldn't remotely wipe them.
alevskaya 7y ago
You're thinking of Dr. Sarah Taber, an ag tech and food safety consultant with lots of past exposure to startups as well. The relevant twitter thread: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1171895657872941056?s=20 https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/117189565787294105...
- makomk 7y ago
  This is... not the clever revelation that she thinks it is. She worked with "room sized versions of thse back in 2001"? Well yes of course. I looked through all the documentation, etc back when this story broke and the whole original purpose of the Personal Food Computer project was to take those big room-sized setups and shrink them down to small, standardized, well-documented boxes that could be racked up and used to carry out a bunch of experimental runs in parallel quickly and cheaply. The whole damn point of the thing was that it was like those only smaller and easier to replicate. (And a few people did replicate them and grow plants in them.) I presume that was where the name came from; it was meant to be the PC to the metaphorical mainframes of the existing setups.
  - fatbird 7y ago
    Part of Taber's point was that it's harder to scale up than down. This is solved technology, and their failure to make miniaturized versions work at all is a further indictment of their project as a harvester of investor funding rather than an agricultural game-changer.
  - adambyrtek 7y ago
    Sounds pretty much like the Theranos pitch?
  - pryce 7y ago
    Her point is that this tech was outdated in 2001. Her point is that the people funding and supporting this research were mislead across multiple ways: * misled about state of the existing tech * outrageous and unsubstantiated claims of its performance * literally faking results in front of investors and stakeholders Further info Taber links to this account[1] from Babak Babakinejad, an MIT Media lab research scientist who describes an environment of research based on clear fabrication, and one in which the lies extended to the director colluding with MIT Health and Safety to actively mislead Environmental Protection Drinking Water Program officials about safety checks. > What horrified me the most was that Mr Harper, as director and operator of the permit, actively worked with senior staff at MIT Health & Safety to mislead the Environmental Protection Drinking Water Program officials about his team’s activities. The behaviour described in these threads demonstrates repeated, rampant, widespread violations of R&D integrity, without which MIT loses its capability to perform research and development at all. It is not dramatic to say that if fabrications are allowed to to be called research, and a conspiracy of lies can dismantle safety checks, the whole lab is in dire jeopardy. [1] https://twitter.com/flypolitics/status/1175099839236886528 https://twitter.com/flypolitics/status/1175099839236886528
wolf550e 7y ago
https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1171895657872941056 https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/117189565787294105...

msghacq 7y ago

Apparently Epstein also funded Scratch, a programming language for children: https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2014/09/17/mit-media-lab-trains-tiny-computer-programmers/ https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2014/09/17/mit-media-lab-trai... This was in 2014 after his arrest for sex with a minor. WTF was MIT/Media Lab thinking?

jjoonathan 7y ago
That people care far more about money than about where it comes from. That's usually a pretty safe bet. I'd like to hope that recent events will change things, but I tend to suspect this is more like one of those finance rulings where someone gets fined $1 for every $1000 they earned in an evil way, and that the underlying risk/reward profile hasn't fundamentally shifted. Still, every push in the right direction helps!
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  Not trying to excuse Epstein but what body would determine what is Evil? Sounds very authoritarian.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    I think the point is that MIT, on its own initiative, might have been more careful about to whom it sold respectability. Saying 'no' to a donation is not very authoritarian.
tomjakubowski 7y ago
Shocking, but the source is somewhat dubious and Mitchel Resnick has strongly denied that Scratch or ScratchJr took money from Epstein. https://medium.com/@mres/a-statement-about-research-funding-af274404ee3d https://medium.com/@mres/a-statement-about-research-funding-... edit: the ultimate source seems to be a press release from the Epstein Foundation, who around 2014 was surely in a PR blitz, published by Jewish Business News but since taken down. And both sources get Mitchel Resnick's name wrong, in different ways! http://archive.is/9UKAi http://archive.is/9UKAi

rolltiide 7y ago

Anyone wanna plagiarize the article so I can read it? Both of my mobile browsers wont let me, and they also detect private mode

just_observing 7y ago
Rough copy/paste https://pastebin.com/iCtipMin https://pastebin.com/iCtipMin Apologies for any ads that got in.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

bbanyc 7y ago

Rigged demos are the Media Lab's main output, and have been since the start. Shut it all down.

october_sky 7y ago
Do you have other examples we can look at?
- yodon 7y ago
  The original goal of the Media Lab was to explore the impact of having access to far more computing power than you could possibly have access to today (for whatever is the current value of today). Not "more than most people have", but more than you could have that point in time. That's an important and valid subject to research (eg they did lots of work on understanding the impact of speaker-independent voice recognition long before we could really even do speaker-dependent voice recognition reliably) but almost by definition the only way you can study it is via rigged demos.
  - diydsp 7y ago
    I would follow up by saying that from 2004-2010, while I was a researcher there, the emphasis was on mixing ideas from places as far flung as possible. There was no need to fake a demo, as the ideas were not impossible, just uncanny. Once someone like e.g. Saul Griffith came up with the idea of Kinematic Replication [1], others could easily replicate it (or at least anyone with a laser cutter at that time). Same goes for my projects. [1.25] For goodness sake, the source code and build instructions are published so that people can replicate it. These ideas are not like Caleb Harper's claims of high productivity versions of existing processes. They're fresh formulations of concepts one might not ordinarily have had the notion and resources to combine. Just look at Hiroshi Ishii's work! [1.5] That stuff is not hard to do once you've seen it done once- but try to be the originator of some of that stuff. That's where the magic is! Take a look at my pal Brian Whitman's work [2] which was the basis of Echo Nest and eventually Spotify's recommendation engines. These algorithms are published at conferences and in journals so anyone can go in and replicate them. Brian's work isn't remarkable because it's so unbelievable it can hardly be true - it's remarkable because it dares to combine machine learning with signal processing and social media. These were all new ideas at the time and and it was up in the air whether they could work. Now they're the bread and butter of many peoples' commercial and personal activities. Anyone saying these demos are rigged is revealing their own shallowing understanding of what takes place there. I don't know much about how the culture of the lab changed after I left and Ito became the directory almost immediately after... I do know while I was there, it was actually a bit scrappy. The original "shop" in 2004 was...a 10x20 room with a single laser cutter, single waterjet cutter, a drill press, a Bridgeport-like mill and a CNC lathe. There were tools hanging over a tattered wooden workbench. When the second building was constructed around 2008(?), shop size expanded about 10x. It went from a four floor building to 6 story building with maybe 8x the space. Ito was a kind of cult figure. I felt out of the loop bc ppl talked about him like an angel but couldn't explain to me what he'd done. [1] https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~saul/PhD/index.html https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~saul/PhD/index.html [1.25] https://web.archive.org/web/20100627183050/http://web.media.mit.edu/~nvawter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100627183050/http://web.media.... [1.5] https://www.media.mit.edu/people/ishii/projects/ https://www.media.mit.edu/people/ishii/projects/ [2] https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~bwhitman/ https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~bwhitman/

nullc 7y ago

In one set of articles OpenAg is a therenos grade scam with everything faked, all plants purchased instead of grown, etc. In another set of articles, they're in trouble because the nitrate levels in their waste water are too high: https://www.wbur.org/edify/2019/09/20/open-agriculture-initiative-middleton-harper https://www.wbur.org/edify/2019/09/20/open-agriculture-initi... So which is it? A total sham or a polluter? These positions sound incompatible.

nrp 7y ago
These don't appear to be incompatible or mutually exclusive claims. Like Theranos, it seems there was actual research, development, and small scale production work going on at OpenAg. Also like Theranos, it seems that work was nowhere near producing the results that were claimed by leadership, leading to falsifying results for the sake of publicity and funding. This means it's totally possible that the unsuccessful research they were doing was outputting wastewater containing excessive nitrogen levels while also misleading the public, press, and investors with faked demos.
Donald 7y ago
Why not both? It sounds like OpenAg engineers were trying various solutions for the device, but by the end of the effort, demo culture prevailed and the end-results were faked. At some point their staff decided to dump their concentrated nitrogen solution as waste water.
defap 7y ago
It's alleged that they made misleading claims, but it's not like the whole operation was a complete fabrication. There were plants and machines and whatnot, as can be seen in several articles on tis topic. So it's plausible that they illegally dumped wastewater as part of whatever it is they're doing that isn't working as advertised.
- nullc 7y ago
  Fair enough, though at some point it starts becoming a bit hard to distinguish between what OpenAg was doing and what a significant fraction of all demos do. It's typical for some amount of 'rigging' to exist in demos, particularly because Murphy's law has an ugly way of rearing its head. At a very minimum, almost everyone goes over the demo many times and fix or avoid any issue that causes a failure or questions that can't be easily and decisively answered. I really did get the impression from the first articles I read on OpenAG that the claim was that they were doing absolutely nothing and that it was 100% faked. The article on the nitrates discharge was surprising to me in light of that. I'm perhaps a bit jaded also by seeing how much computer science / signal processing academic publication is essentially fake. "The desktop version doesn't really exist but we have a basement version doing stuff" seems like a fairly mild level of deception compared to many other things I've encountered.

gfrff 7y ago

Ah. Good old MIT. I remember the days when this sort of thing was only at the Media Lab.

xvilka 7y ago

Too bad MIT MediaLab is under scrutiny now. I really hope their PubPub[1] project will not die. It is the only open source[2] modern scientific publishing platform, like Authorea or Overleaf. [1] https://www.pubpub.org/ https://www.pubpub.org/ [2] https://github.com/pubpub https://github.com/pubpub

ocschwar 7y ago

MIT is probably the only land grant campus that has no agriculture department. That much is understandable, since ag-schools need to do actual literal field work on test plots, and that kind of acreage is hard to come by anywhere near Cambridge. But it also means there was nobody on campus to sanity check this OpenAg nonsense.

bbanyc 7y ago
The land grant act specified the aims for the funded schools would be "agricultural and mechanical." I believe Massachusetts was the only state to divide the funds between separate agricultural (UMass) and mechanical (MIT) universities.

tlb 7y ago

One of the defining qualities of the media lab was smoke-and-mirror demos. I thought everyone understood this and was OK with it. There's a place in the world for concept art, to inspire people with what might be possible. This is like "Questions Raised that TED Talks Oversimplify Complex Issues".