“Let’s have some fun I’m offering two grants of $5,000 for whatever you want”

Re:“Let’s have some fun I’m offering two grants of $5,000 fo... by gravypod on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @11:45PM (#14039499)

I wish other people could take this into a recurring proceess. I've experianced that it's very hard to get research funded when you do not have a hard-science goal in the scientific community. For instance, right now I'm attempting to get funding to write software to do hard-science with but that is not fundable from normal sources (NSF) despite being a very good project that will enable researchers to study things that they were previously unable to.

Most grants today are "I want you to study X" not "Do something that's really worth the money" or "Build something that will genuenly help people or improve life for everyone".

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Re:“Let’s have some fun I’m offering two grants of $5,000 fo... by nikofeyn on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @11:56PM (#14039536)

disciplined minds by jeff schmidt talks about this "i want you to study x" phenomenon and how it tricks people into thinking they are truly defining their academic research direction.

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Re:“Let’s have some fun I’m offering two grants of $5,000 fo... by hactually on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @04:27AM (#14040605)

Take a look at experiment - https://experiment.com/discover

Is that not a similar idea?

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Re:“Let’s have some fun I’m offering two grants of $5,000 fo... by tlb on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @01:57AM (#14040016)

Also, NSF likes to give large, recurring grants to big institutions, because that maximizes the $/effort ratio. Single-person software projects are below the level they like to fund. SBIRs are better for small amounts, but in practice they are so narrowly targeted that unless you lobbied 2 years ago for something to be in there, it won't be.

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