Science Prizes
There's an interesting piece in today's New York Times about the proliferation of prizes for solving scientific problems. So far, the prizes are mostly from private sources, but the National Academies have encouraged NSF to get into the act. It's a trend that definitely bears watching.
Prizes appear to have succeeded in motivating innovation: the Ansari X-prize is a notable recent example. One important benefit is that prizes bring in different players than traditional funding mechanisms. Perhaps the growth of prizes will create a new type of science career - small, fluid teams of scientists that coalesce around an investor competing for a prize. That kind of work would require very different skills and mindsets than academia. On the downside, more money for prizes probably means less money for people going the traditional route and wanting a steady, modest stream of resources.
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on Sun, Jun 29, 04:06PM
Talk about a winner-takes-all system, though!
You could spend a lot of money and time and do pretty well at approaching the problem, but still not make a living. Teams would surely disband and the members would all go into investment banking or fast food restaurant management, thus continuing the existing leaky pipeline problem. I think for big problems, potential prize-winning teams have to have some source (their own money? grants? bake sales?) of pilot-scale funding.
Look at the longitude prize. It's a contraexample to the notion that prizes are a great mechanism, since in the end the prize committee kept moving the goal lines and never gave the prize; on the other hand, John Harrison did solve the problem in the end, and he was supported with several grants of 500 pounds or more at a time during the 30 years it took him to do it.
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on Sun, Jun 29, 06:06PM
Yeah, I think the key is having an investor who is willing to spend money in pursuit of a prize. In the Ansari X-Prize case, it was Paul Allen's money (co-founcer of Microsoft) that financed Bert Rutan's team. In the end, I believe Rutan's team spent more money developing their ship than they won in prize money (though conceivably they might make some of that back in selling rocket flights to rich people)
The ranks of the exorbitantly rich have been growing pretty fast of late. I'd speculate that these kinds of prizes, if appropriately set up and marketed, might spur some of them to engage in outsider science/engineering kind of like what Paul Allen did. John Carmack, developer of Doom and other popular video games, is also busily building his own rocket. Mike Lazardis, founder of RIM (the Blackberry people), is funding his own physics institute - that seems a lot less entertaining than building rockets or solving the oil crisis or whatever else they are rolling out prize money for these days.
Longitude is on my to-read pile, but it's pretty far down. Is it worthwhile?
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on Mon, Jun 30, 09:06AM
I like the notion of an independently backed physics institute, especially if it took a skunk works approach to a bushel of problems. "Lads, I'm bored with superstrings! Let's make a rocket scooter today!"
BTW, did you know that now, mere moments after you've left, [TechShop] (http://durham.techshop.ws/) is coming to the Triangle? I'm excited.
I liked Longitude. Great story. I listened to the audiobook, though, so can't promise that it was lovely prose on the page.
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on Mon, Jun 30, 10:06AM
that little bit of markdown doesn't seem to work...
