I mentioned in passing in the Forbes post about science funding that I’m thoroughly sick of hearing about how the World Wide Web was invented at CERN. I got into an argument about this a while back on Twitter, too, but had to go do something else and couldn’t go into much detail. It’s probably… Continue reading “CERN Invented the Web” Isn’t an Argument for Anything
Category: Funding
PNAS: Mark Jackson, Crowd-Funding Entrepreneur
I’ve decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the “standard” academic science track. The fourteenth… Continue reading PNAS: Mark Jackson, Crowd-Funding Entrepreneur
Overwrought Arguments About TED Are an Existential Threat to Our Civilization
When I wrote about Benjamin Bratton’s anti-TED rant I only talked about the comment about the low success rate of TED suggestions. That was, admittedly, a small piece of his article, but the rest of it was so ludicrously overheated that I couldn’t really take it seriously. It continues to get attention, though, both in… Continue reading Overwrought Arguments About TED Are an Existential Threat to Our Civilization
On Private Science Funding
A couple of weeks back, DougT won this year’s Nobel betting pool, and requested a post on the subject of funding of wacky ieas: could you comment on this: http://www.space.com/22344-elon-musk-hyperloop-technology-revealed.html and the phenomenon of the uber-rich funding science in general. It seems to me that there used to be more private funding of science, and… Continue reading On Private Science Funding
Trickle Down Science
A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on “The Crisis of Big Science,” looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It’s somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including… Continue reading Trickle Down Science
What Does It Cost to Run a Small College Lab?
Over at io9, they have a post on the finances of running a research lab at a major university. It’s reasonably good as such things go, but very specific to the top level of research universities. As I am not at such an institution, I thought it might be worthwhile to post something about the… Continue reading What Does It Cost to Run a Small College Lab?
On the Broadening of Impact
I didn’t pay that much attention to the mini-controversy over the NSF’s proposed revision of its grant evaluation criteria when they were first released, because I was working on the book. I was asked to say something about it yesterday, though, and having gone to the trouble, I might as well say something on the… Continue reading On the Broadening of Impact
Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help
My talk at Maryland last Thursday went pretty well– the impending Snowpocalypse kept the audience down, as people tried to fit in enough work to compensate for the Friday shutdown, but the people who were there seemed to like it, and asked good questions. If you weren’t there, but want to know what I talked… Continue reading Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help
Bell Labs vs. the LHC
A number of people have commented on this LA Times op-ed by Steve Giddings about what physicists expect to come out of the Large Hadron Collider. It includes a nice list of possible particle physics discoveries plus a few things that will annoy Peter Woit, and also includes the obligatory note about spin-offs: All this… Continue reading Bell Labs vs. the LHC
Paying For Free Stuff Is a Solved Problem, Isn’t It?
A couple of days ago, the LHC Blog asked about the future funding of the arxiv pre-print server, currently hosted at Cornell. Cornell is looking to get some external funding, though: Currently the plan is to ask the “heaviest user institutions” (other university library systems) to voluntarily contribute to support arXiv operational costs. The FAQ… Continue reading Paying For Free Stuff Is a Solved Problem, Isn’t It?