4 ms·

Funding Models and Progress

49 points by jasoncrawford 7y ago

Twisell 7y ago
After 10 years working as data-analyst I felt the urge to do PHD to improve something I was always struggling with in operational projects. Was backed up by a potential mentor a the uni. Was partly backed up by my Boss. Most logical funding available for my case was denied by the authority "because that would have set a precedend... Look your idea is nice, useful and all, but we never actually activated this (fully defined by law) funding and we fear other might come and ask for it if we do it for you"... Project is still in a corner of my mind but in standby (also for personals reasons beyond funding). So yeah I can pretty much relate!
RobertoG 7y ago
I find the article strangely void of content. If we are investigating funding of discoveries to find a formula to repeat, it seems to me the way to go is, to find the most relevant discoveries and see who funded them. So, I would like to know: who funded Alexander Fleming work? who funded the Oxford lab that followed the work? Why they were underfunded?
smitty1e 7y ago
> Progress doesn’t happen automatically when the scientific or technical prerequisites for it are in place. It only happens when people work on it, and that almost always requires funding. This is among the reasons why, for all I love free software, it tends not to be a driver of innovation.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Free software is actually a big driver of cheap innovation, precisely because it's so funding-constrained in the first place. It's one of those places where you would expect more funding to help quite a bit.
linguae 7y ago
As a computer science researcher working toward a PhD, I've been very interested in learning about the history of funding and also thinking about alternative funding models. Speaking from the standpoint of computer science, I believe the golden age of scientific funding was between WWII through the early 1990s. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC invented a lot of the technologies that we rely on today, and there is still an untapped reservoir of research that has yet to be fully applied (I still believe that Smalltalk80 is quite futuristic in many ways despite its being 40 years old). DARPA and its predecessor ARPA was key for funding a lot of fundamental computer science work. Back in the 1960s ARPA had a funding model that emphasized "funding people, not projects." Alan Kay discusses this more at http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/ http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/. Unfortunately, since the 1990s (and possibly before then), both industry and government have shifted to the model of "funding projects, not people," and there's a greater emphasis on delivering short-term results instead of funding medium- and long-term research efforts. There is also the PhD production problem, where more PhDs are being produced than there are research jobs available for them, whether they are in academia, government, or industry. This results in plenty of computer science PhDs working as software engineers in non-research environments. For a few years I've been considering becoming a professor at a teaching-oriented university; computer science professors have been in high demand at teaching universities for the past few years, and there are fewer "publish-or-perish" and funding pressures for teaching-oriented professors than for professors at research universities. But now with the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden shift to online education, I am concerned that this shift to online education, as well as the economic fallout of COVID-19, may dry up opportunities at teaching universities. Because I still want to pursue a career in research even if traditional opportunities dry up, I am interested in alternative funding models that will ensure that researchers could still make a living in a world that demands instant results.
- btrettel 7y ago
  > Because I still want to pursue a career in research even if traditional opportunities dry up, I am interested in alternative funding models that will ensure that researchers could still make a living in a world that demands instant results. I too am interested in alternative funding models for research. I've looked at the teaching faculty jobs you mentioned, but there aren't too many of them in my field as-is, so I don't consider those to be a good option for most. The model I'm currently looking at uses ideas from the financial independence/early retirement community. Basically, I'll do research independently and live as cheaply as possible so that what money I do get goes farther. (It helps that grad school has made me live very cheaply already...) I don't require expensive equipment to do my research, so I think this is doable. As for how to make money, I'm looking at multiple options including working a full time job for a while to build capital, starting a small business, grants, getting money from patrons, etc. While adjunct pay isn't good, working as an adjunct every once in a while might not be a bad idea to find new collaborators and get library access. I'm also told that the UT Austin engineering schools pays about $10K per class for an adjunct, which again, isn't fantastic, but would actually cover about half of my estimated yearly costs. Ultimately I think I can spend much less time raising funds than tenured professors do, which I've seen estimated at around 40% of their time! https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/04/25/chasing-grants/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/04/25/chasing-grants/ For starting a small business, I'd expect many to require a lot of time up front, but I'm willing to do that if it means that longer-term I can make reliable income with minimal investment on my part. I'm starting with consulting, which I don't expect will be a huge source of income for me, but I'll take what I can get. Ultimately I'll probably have to have multiple income sources, which isn't entirely bad. If any one source dries up then I shouldn't be much worse off. This seems to be the largest online meeting place for independent researchers: https://forum.igdore.org/ https://forum.igdore.org/
mootzville 7y ago
Funding is always limited, so if you are going to allocate funds with limited resources you might base it on a model nature provides: Diversity. While there is no guaranteed way of choosing the right research to fund, an allocation of those funds among a set of common projects with similarities and dissimilarities would yield the most progress -- or at least, the highest probability of achieving progress. But how do you go about calculating the allocation? There is a good set of papers that describes a framework for performing such an analysis. M. Weitzman et al., 1992 M. Weitzman et al., 1998 H. Simianer et al., 2003 We built an implementation of the framework described in those papers, and though we are targeting the agricultural sector, we'd be curious to see it applied for other purposes such as measuring research progress, and allocating funds for it. You can check it out here: https://mostdiverse.com https://mostdiverse.com Reach out if you want to run some of your own data, we are happy to see this applied to areas outside our expertise. P.S. We are trying to get funding too! Ha!
- btrettel 7y ago
  What are the complete citations for those papers? In the decision analysis class I took 3 years ago they proposed the framework in the following paper: Matheson, James E., Michael M. Menke, and Stephen L. Derby. "Managing R&D portfolios for improved profitability and productivity." The Journal of Science Policy and Research Management 4, no. 4 (1989): 400-412. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=6205534201169943688&hl=en&as_sdt=5,33&sciodt=0,33 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=62055342011699436...
  - mootzville 7y ago
    Nice, thanks...now I have some bedtime reading. The papers are: 1. On Diversity (1992) - M. Weitzman 2. The Noah's Ark Problem (1998) - M. Weitzman 3. An approach to the optimal allocation of conservation funds tominimize loss of genetic diversity between livestock breeds (2003) - H. Simianer
    - btrettel 7y ago
      Here are the links to the articles moozville mentioned: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/107/2/363/1838289 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/107/2/363/1838... https://www.jstor.org/stable/2999617 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2999617 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800903000922 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...

49 points by jasoncrawford 7y ago

After 10 years working as data-analyst I felt the urge to do PHD to improve something I was always struggling with in operational projects. Was backed up by a potential mentor a the uni. Was partly backed up by my Boss. Most logical funding available for my case was denied by the authority "because that would have set a precedend... Look your idea is nice, useful and all, but we never actually activated this (fully defined by law) funding and we fear other might come and ask for it if we do it for you"... Project is still in a corner of my mind but in standby (also for personals reasons beyond funding). So yeah I can pretty much relate!

RobertoG 7y ago

I find the article strangely void of content. If we are investigating funding of discoveries to find a formula to repeat, it seems to me the way to go is, to find the most relevant discoveries and see who funded them. So, I would like to know: who funded Alexander Fleming work? who funded the Oxford lab that followed the work? Why they were underfunded?

smitty1e 7y ago

> Progress doesn’t happen automatically when the scientific or technical prerequisites for it are in place. It only happens when people work on it, and that almost always requires funding. This is among the reasons why, for all I love free software, it tends not to be a driver of innovation.

zozbot234 7y ago
Free software is actually a big driver of cheap innovation, precisely because it's so funding-constrained in the first place. It's one of those places where you would expect more funding to help quite a bit.

linguae 7y ago

As a computer science researcher working toward a PhD, I've been very interested in learning about the history of funding and also thinking about alternative funding models. Speaking from the standpoint of computer science, I believe the golden age of scientific funding was between WWII through the early 1990s. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC invented a lot of the technologies that we rely on today, and there is still an untapped reservoir of research that has yet to be fully applied (I still believe that Smalltalk80 is quite futuristic in many ways despite its being 40 years old). DARPA and its predecessor ARPA was key for funding a lot of fundamental computer science work. Back in the 1960s ARPA had a funding model that emphasized "funding people, not projects." Alan Kay discusses this more at http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/ http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/. Unfortunately, since the 1990s (and possibly before then), both industry and government have shifted to the model of "funding projects, not people," and there's a greater emphasis on delivering short-term results instead of funding medium- and long-term research efforts. There is also the PhD production problem, where more PhDs are being produced than there are research jobs available for them, whether they are in academia, government, or industry. This results in plenty of computer science PhDs working as software engineers in non-research environments. For a few years I've been considering becoming a professor at a teaching-oriented university; computer science professors have been in high demand at teaching universities for the past few years, and there are fewer "publish-or-perish" and funding pressures for teaching-oriented professors than for professors at research universities. But now with the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden shift to online education, I am concerned that this shift to online education, as well as the economic fallout of COVID-19, may dry up opportunities at teaching universities. Because I still want to pursue a career in research even if traditional opportunities dry up, I am interested in alternative funding models that will ensure that researchers could still make a living in a world that demands instant results.

btrettel 7y ago
> Because I still want to pursue a career in research even if traditional opportunities dry up, I am interested in alternative funding models that will ensure that researchers could still make a living in a world that demands instant results. I too am interested in alternative funding models for research. I've looked at the teaching faculty jobs you mentioned, but there aren't too many of them in my field as-is, so I don't consider those to be a good option for most. The model I'm currently looking at uses ideas from the financial independence/early retirement community. Basically, I'll do research independently and live as cheaply as possible so that what money I do get goes farther. (It helps that grad school has made me live very cheaply already...) I don't require expensive equipment to do my research, so I think this is doable. As for how to make money, I'm looking at multiple options including working a full time job for a while to build capital, starting a small business, grants, getting money from patrons, etc. While adjunct pay isn't good, working as an adjunct every once in a while might not be a bad idea to find new collaborators and get library access. I'm also told that the UT Austin engineering schools pays about $10K per class for an adjunct, which again, isn't fantastic, but would actually cover about half of my estimated yearly costs. Ultimately I think I can spend much less time raising funds than tenured professors do, which I've seen estimated at around 40% of their time! https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/04/25/chasing-grants/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/04/25/chasing-grants/ For starting a small business, I'd expect many to require a lot of time up front, but I'm willing to do that if it means that longer-term I can make reliable income with minimal investment on my part. I'm starting with consulting, which I don't expect will be a huge source of income for me, but I'll take what I can get. Ultimately I'll probably have to have multiple income sources, which isn't entirely bad. If any one source dries up then I shouldn't be much worse off. This seems to be the largest online meeting place for independent researchers: https://forum.igdore.org/ https://forum.igdore.org/

mootzville 7y ago

Funding is always limited, so if you are going to allocate funds with limited resources you might base it on a model nature provides: Diversity. While there is no guaranteed way of choosing the right research to fund, an allocation of those funds among a set of common projects with similarities and dissimilarities would yield the most progress -- or at least, the highest probability of achieving progress. But how do you go about calculating the allocation? There is a good set of papers that describes a framework for performing such an analysis. M. Weitzman et al., 1992 M. Weitzman et al., 1998 H. Simianer et al., 2003 We built an implementation of the framework described in those papers, and though we are targeting the agricultural sector, we'd be curious to see it applied for other purposes such as measuring research progress, and allocating funds for it. You can check it out here: https://mostdiverse.com https://mostdiverse.com Reach out if you want to run some of your own data, we are happy to see this applied to areas outside our expertise. P.S. We are trying to get funding too! Ha!

btrettel 7y ago
What are the complete citations for those papers? In the decision analysis class I took 3 years ago they proposed the framework in the following paper: Matheson, James E., Michael M. Menke, and Stephen L. Derby. "Managing R&D portfolios for improved profitability and productivity." The Journal of Science Policy and Research Management 4, no. 4 (1989): 400-412. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=6205534201169943688&hl=en&as_sdt=5,33&sciodt=0,33 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=62055342011699436...
- mootzville 7y ago
  Nice, thanks...now I have some bedtime reading. The papers are: 1. On Diversity (1992) - M. Weitzman 2. The Noah's Ark Problem (1998) - M. Weitzman 3. An approach to the optimal allocation of conservation funds tominimize loss of genetic diversity between livestock breeds (2003) - H. Simianer
  - btrettel 7y ago
    Here are the links to the articles moozville mentioned: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/107/2/363/1838289 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/107/2/363/1838... https://www.jstor.org/stable/2999617 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2999617 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800903000922 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...