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A comment on MIT Gets $140M Pledge from Anonymous Donor. Parent comment

Re:MIT Gets $140M Pledge from Anonymous Donor by dluan on Thursday June 08, 2017 @02:47AM (#14512387)
Anecdotal. A big grant paying off doesn't outweigh all the other countless iterative and great leaps forward that led to the detector which led to the higgs. Those efforts were also funded by small grants, graduate student stipends, or out-of-pocket in pubs and libraries.

The reason why they measured impact in that way is because that's what most funding agencies today are speculating in for their decision making processes. And as data shows, most funding agencies are getting it wrong.

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Re:MIT Gets $140M Pledge from Anonymous Donor by orbifold on Thursday June 08, 2017 @05:27AM (#14512962)
Pretty much all large scale physics projects have payoff profiles like that and that is probably known to funding agencies, so I severely doubt that funding agencies have truly used this as their measure. That way to measure impact is simply wrong and would have prevented many significant discoveries in high energy physics and astronomy.

ITER, Wendelstein-X, LIGO, Planck, I could go on. In all those cases any results happened >10 years after the funding started or might still only happen in the future. In the case of the LHC, but also many other Detector experiments individual grants to research groups were typically (not just anecdotally) way beyond 700000€.

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