9 ms·

Microryza - Grow the next generation of ideas

60 points by duck 14y ago

rfrey 14y ago
This looks fun, I hope it catches on. I wish more projects told me what they intended to do with the money, though. For example, why does the mathematician need $2200 to investigate neural network stability? Is it to buy a bunch of GPUs? Or to pay an intern? Or to buy ramen for himself? I found the projects that gave that detail ($1200 to go to Costa Rica and collect tissue samples from 5 butterflies, $1100 for components for an analogue computer plus an intern) more compelling because it feels like I'm enabling something concrete.
pradocchia 14y ago
FYI, Microryza is a pun on mycorrhiza, "a symbiotic association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular plant": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza http://mycorrhizas.info/ http://mycorrhizas.info/
- jamesrcole 14y ago
  It's a bit of a shame that it's a hard to remember name. I'm not even sure how to pronounce it.
  - irollboozers 14y ago
    Micro - rye - zah
- Luc 14y ago
  First thing I thought of (since they're in the news so much): ΣΥΡΙΖΑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_Radical_Left http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_Radical_Left
law 14y ago
I love the concept: crowd-sourced research can provide an enormous amount of help to research groups barely clinging onto life (financially). However, there's an enormous issue that also needs to be addressed: the impact of university affiliations on the results obtained. In an ideal world, crowd-funded research would lead to public domain research papers (no copyright) and inventions (no patents). Clearly, that's not the real world... More often than not, universities have air-tight intellectual property agreements with all professors and graduate students that grant all right, title, and interest in any inventions or discoveries back to that university. Effectively, it's this that enables major publishers to maintain their choke-hold on the industry.
- tjr 14y ago
  I would like to think a lot of interesting research could be done by educated individuals who view it more as a side-project than as a full-time endeavor. In those cases, having an extra couple thousand dollars to help pay for something or other could be very nice, and would not necessarily put the results under the jurisdiction of a university.
tansey 14y ago
I was just speaking with a friend about effectively this same idea the other day. He was super excited and thought it could revolutionize the way research funding works. It won't. I'm sorry, but it just won't. There are several reasons why a kickstarter for academic/scientific research is doomed: 1) People underestimate the amount of money required to fund research. Starting this Fall, I'll be receiving a grant from the NSF for one year of funding. That funding pays me approx. $1800/mo, plus covers my health insurance ($800/mo), tuition ($5k/semester), and travel ($7000/yr). The university also provides me with facilities and access to faculty and thus have overhead that need to be covered. This grant is shared among 3 PhD students and totals over $180,000. 2) Progress does not happen in leaps and bounds, it happens in inches. Kickstarter projects go from conception or prototype to finished product. Research does not work that way. You go from previous algorithm to slightly updated algorithm. It's a marathon, not a sprint to production. 3) You get nothing. Kickstarter projects give you a cool gadget or game or piece of art or whatever. When you fund a Kickstarter project, you get to see a video of some prototype or sketches that look like they'll be awesome. By the end of it, it's finished and you have this cool new thing that you can enjoy. You will not get any cool new thing from researchers, because they don't even know what it is they're trying to make yet. At best they will produce a conference or journal paper, maybe with a neat little demo of low production quality, and then they're on to the next problem. Scientists are not interested in building production-ready toys, they are searching purely for knowledge. So you as the funder get nothing tangible. 4) Most science is boring to the average person. Researchers live on the edge of human knowledge. They are tackling problems for which there is no known answer. Odds are, if you're in a sexy area like neuroscience, robotics, etc., then the problems you want to solve have been looked at for decades by people much smarter than you. Thus, you are not going to make some gigantic breakthrough that leads to strong AI-- you're hopefully going to develop a new learning algorithm that performs 3% better than the state of the art on a handful of benchmark datasets. Exciting, right? Overall, it'd be great if we had democratized funding that worked. Unfortunately, due to the costly, slow, intangible, esoteric nature of scientific research, it's unlikely that will happen. Most academics have a hard enough time convincing experts, who have dedicated their lives to the area, that their work is worth funding. I just don't see how it could possibly work.
- tjr 14y ago
kanamekun 14y ago
Congrats on an exciting site! How are you guys differentiating your site from Petridish.org? http://www.petridish.org/ http://www.petridish.org/

60 points by duck 14y ago

rfrey 14y ago

This looks fun, I hope it catches on. I wish more projects told me what they intended to do with the money, though. For example, why does the mathematician need $2200 to investigate neural network stability? Is it to buy a bunch of GPUs? Or to pay an intern? Or to buy ramen for himself? I found the projects that gave that detail ($1200 to go to Costa Rica and collect tissue samples from 5 butterflies, $1100 for components for an analogue computer plus an intern) more compelling because it feels like I'm enabling something concrete.

pradocchia 14y ago

FYI, Microryza is a pun on mycorrhiza, "a symbiotic association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular plant": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza http://mycorrhizas.info/ http://mycorrhizas.info/

jamesrcole 14y ago
It's a bit of a shame that it's a hard to remember name. I'm not even sure how to pronounce it.
- irollboozers 14y ago
  Micro - rye - zah
Luc 14y ago
First thing I thought of (since they're in the news so much): ΣΥΡΙΖΑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_Radical_Left http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_Radical_Left

law 14y ago

I love the concept: crowd-sourced research can provide an enormous amount of help to research groups barely clinging onto life (financially). However, there's an enormous issue that also needs to be addressed: the impact of university affiliations on the results obtained. In an ideal world, crowd-funded research would lead to public domain research papers (no copyright) and inventions (no patents). Clearly, that's not the real world... More often than not, universities have air-tight intellectual property agreements with all professors and graduate students that grant all right, title, and interest in any inventions or discoveries back to that university. Effectively, it's this that enables major publishers to maintain their choke-hold on the industry.

tjr 14y ago
I would like to think a lot of interesting research could be done by educated individuals who view it more as a side-project than as a full-time endeavor. In those cases, having an extra couple thousand dollars to help pay for something or other could be very nice, and would not necessarily put the results under the jurisdiction of a university.

tansey 14y ago

I was just speaking with a friend about effectively this same idea the other day. He was super excited and thought it could revolutionize the way research funding works. It won't. I'm sorry, but it just won't. There are several reasons why a kickstarter for academic/scientific research is doomed: 1) People underestimate the amount of money required to fund research. Starting this Fall, I'll be receiving a grant from the NSF for one year of funding. That funding pays me approx. $1800/mo, plus covers my health insurance ($800/mo), tuition ($5k/semester), and travel ($7000/yr). The university also provides me with facilities and access to faculty and thus have overhead that need to be covered. This grant is shared among 3 PhD students and totals over $180,000. 2) Progress does not happen in leaps and bounds, it happens in inches. Kickstarter projects go from conception or prototype to finished product. Research does not work that way. You go from previous algorithm to slightly updated algorithm. It's a marathon, not a sprint to production. 3) You get nothing. Kickstarter projects give you a cool gadget or game or piece of art or whatever. When you fund a Kickstarter project, you get to see a video of some prototype or sketches that look like they'll be awesome. By the end of it, it's finished and you have this cool new thing that you can enjoy. You will not get any cool new thing from researchers, because they don't even know what it is they're trying to make yet. At best they will produce a conference or journal paper, maybe with a neat little demo of low production quality, and then they're on to the next problem. Scientists are not interested in building production-ready toys, they are searching purely for knowledge. So you as the funder get nothing tangible. 4) Most science is boring to the average person. Researchers live on the edge of human knowledge. They are tackling problems for which there is no known answer. Odds are, if you're in a sexy area like neuroscience, robotics, etc., then the problems you want to solve have been looked at for decades by people much smarter than you. Thus, you are not going to make some gigantic breakthrough that leads to strong AI-- you're hopefully going to develop a new learning algorithm that performs 3% better than the state of the art on a handful of benchmark datasets. Exciting, right? Overall, it'd be great if we had democratized funding that worked. Unfortunately, due to the costly, slow, intangible, esoteric nature of scientific research, it's unlikely that will happen. Most academics have a hard enough time convincing experts, who have dedicated their lives to the area, that their work is worth funding. I just don't see how it could possibly work.

tjr 14y ago

kanamekun 14y ago

Congrats on an exciting site! How are you guys differentiating your site from Petridish.org? http://www.petridish.org/ http://www.petridish.org/