Directing science where you want it to go.

6 posts / 0 new

Sun, 2010-02-07 20:42

Brian White

I have a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVYRcHOqDW8 that is called "flaws in how science is funded" or something like that. I think it is informative to look at it. My proposal is that science funding is immune to public input and it is decided by people who are put there for political reasons.

And this situation must be fixed. You cannot just pump money into the "sexy" bits of science and expect it to devellop properly. It ends up like a house without a foundation.

I also have a playlist which inspired the video

http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists?pi=0&ps=20&sa=0&dm=0&p=5099F55F935FC... which has a couple of videos of an english scientist after failing and succeeding in getting funding for projects. Just check out those 2 videos and ask yourself if that scientist has ANY influence in the direction that science is moving in?

I know there is a really big problem because I do solar cooker research in my back yard. Just as a hobby.

In the past few years I have done stuff that nobody else has ever done!

And I have to ask why.

I am nothing special and the amount of resources I put to it are tiny.

Why has it not been done? Governments, NGO's, environmentalists and the UN are all saying that solar cooking is a really good way to save trees in many dry tropical areas. People use wood for cooking fires. You use solar cookers and that equals saving wood. Solar cookers are provided with carbon offset money in several countries. Now they even pay people to USE solar cookers in parts of India!

So how come they have not even tried (with propper r and d) to find better shapes for solar cooker reflectors?? The latest thing I have done is called the solar design T_square. It is to be used to design solar cooker reflectors with long unattended cook times. A few people have checked it out and see nothing wrong with it. Thing is, the shapes and configurations it comes up with are nothing like those been given away to those people in India! (Mostly parabolic dishes). There are known safety issues with parabolic dishes for solar cooking but the powers that be have not done anything to design something different.

I made a prototype, recorded figures and suggested advantages with "compound parabolic" dishes a year and a half ago. Nobody followed through. Almost a year ago, I did a video that suggested that a "winston w dish" had better characteristics too but again nobody followed through.

These are available to the solar cooking community worldwide on solarcooking.org so it is not as if the powers that be do not know there are options.

The reason no research is being carried out is because no funding is provided for "appropriate" technology.

It is that simple. Now, how can we fix that?

Brian

Sun, 2010-02-07 22:18

Frustrated Mess Frustrated Mess's picture

Pardon the pun, but it isn't rocket science. Far more money goes into curing male pattern baldness than malaria. The reason is, that's where the money is. Our system directs resources not to where they are most needed, but to where there is the greatest ability to pay and then we socialize around that to normalize it.

Wed, 2010-02-10 19:45

Brian White

Frustrated Mess wrote:

Pardon the pun, but it isn't rocket science. Far more money goes into curing male pattern baldness than malaria. The reason is, that's where the money is. Our system directs resources not to where they are most needed, but to where there is the greatest ability to pay and then we socialize around that to normalize it.

Well, I get hit on the head again by the anti establishment people giving me the why it is the way it is story! ( well done to Mess, because at least she responded, Nobody else did.) None of you looked at the video either.

The futalists say, "why try change things because it is all about the money.

But the fact is it is not all about the money. Dinosaur research gets much more than appropriate tech! Well, I do not see that many people in the museums. Or dinosuars for that matter.

McGuyver is still being watched and he was SO hammy about the low tech that he used. So, there might well be interest in it from ordinary people Appropriate tech gets murdered at the funding level. so mcguyver never got to use anything really appropriate.

I can handle the right wingers being against me. Their attitude to appropriate tech for haiti is "fuck off and let them die" but I never did learn to handle it when the left wingers have so totally bought in to the system too.

And you have. You are happy that the politically appointed funding committees decide the direction of science, because you sure are not trying to change it. Why not have a couple of ordinary people on scientific funding committees? Why not have 50 50 male and female participation on the committees? Or regional representation? Why not have a few poor african women on a committee funding solar cooking research?

Why not do the research in Africa and fund it there?

I have to admit too that people have a lot more difficulty about basic technical stuff than I gave them credit for. A student is going to do something about the pulser pump (for appropriate tech class in America). Great! His big issue is the pulses of water that it dilivers. He was having difficulty conseptualizing that. Why did the water separate into pulses? But thats how it happens. After 20 years of working like that, it is not going to suddenly be neat and tidy even flow down in California! So I have to ship him a bunch of links that explain it. (And the math of it is extremely complicated).

The thing is, that does not even matter! All you really got to do to make it and measure how much water goes through and how much gets pumped! But the math, (that nobody has to do!) is what is making people stop and turn away! I would never have thought that!

The left wing environmentalist crowd are just as top down as the other side. When I show something new to someone, the attitude is "who the fuck are you?!" Absolutely no respect because the human animal has a pecking order. Because i am a nobody, most of them will not even LOOK at the stuff with an open mind. So I have a retired Scientist (who wrote a book about solar concentrators) telling me to get university students researching the solar design t-square and the students saying "who the fuck are you!?". (The scientist , in his career, never saw anything like it).

But it gets "judged" by ordinary folk, and by the funding people who idolize high tech.

All they see is the stone mason and their minds are simply not switched on! It may even be territotorial with them. They might run home, google it and that counts for research!

Harper knows how the system works, and Bush knew and they used the system against the people. Harper is currently starving the climate scientists of money so they cannot take measurements. No measurements, no data, no proof that things are going bacly wrong. Nasa built an incredible satalite to map the climate of the entire world, (one of the climategate emails was actually about it!) and it sits on the ground in florida waiting to be launched at least 4 years later! 100 million dollars of climate science satalite sitting on the ground!

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2010/01/20/DSCOVRSatellite/

They just do not want the data!

I believe it can be changed. but if humanity acts like slugs, it will be really difficult. They didn't even have appropriate tech classes or projects 4 years ago. However, I wonder if the rich kids in those classes have any idea what it is like to be poor and what the poor can afford.

Here we have a gigantic flaw in how science is conducted and you have seen bush and harper use it to their advantage.

And the attitude of the common babbler is to say "whatever"

Not much hope for us is there?

Wed, 2010-02-10 21:48

wage zombie

Brian White wrote:

The left wing environmentalist crowd are just as top down as the other side. When I show something new to someone, the attitude is "who the fuck are you?!" Absolutely no respect because the human animal has a pecking order. Because i am a nobody, most of them will not even LOOK at the stuff with an open mind. So I have a retired Scientist (who wrote a book about solar concentrators) telling me to get university students researching the solar design t-square and the students saying "who the fuck are you!?". (The scientist , in his career, never saw anything like it).

Could you elaborate on this a bit? I'm not sure what you're saying...are you offering to pay these students money to do work for you and not finding anyone?

Fri, 2010-02-12 17:24

Brian White

wage zombie wrote:

Could you elaborate on this a bit? I'm not sure what you're saying...are you offering to pay these students money to do work for you and not finding anyone?

[/quote]

No. I did a product development course when I was a student. Nobody gets paid.

And products to devellop are not that easy to find. Even phoney products to devellop are hard to find. It is actually a bonus for a student to have an open device like this to prove his or her worth.

Remember that as part of their courses, they have access to a lot of equipment and measuring devices. And mentoring. And this is not just university students.

There are science fairs every year where students do useful work.

A guy who mentored me just a tiny bit many years ago is Dr Norman McMillian back in ireland. He is Canadian, by the way. Well one of his claims to fame is that he guided a pair of kids to win the young scientist of the year competition. That was a college professor in his spare time and lab equipment from a school.

(Dr Norman also tried to get funding in ireland to test the pulser pump. They did not give it to him and did not tell him why either).

My solar cooker stuff, which is scientifically simpler, cannot get independent testing. I thought the compound parabolic dishes I did might get it because they are safer than parabolic dishes. (No danger of burning a hole in your skin) but it never happened. Just as easy to make in a factory as a parabolic dish, by the way.

I have quite a bit of stuff on the solar cooking wiki but I am beginning to think that their commercial links are preventing them from comparing different types of solar cookers. (They are linked to the biggest maker of box cookers in north america.)

I asked in their forums in september 2 years ago, why don't we try to specifically design a solar cooker reflector that is good for 2 hours of cooking?

And they (an organization with hundreds of thousands of dollars of throughput per year) cannot even begin the task! Something is really wrong there.

The biggest solar cooking organization in the world does not have a solar cooker testing devision!

It might be that your comment was a little jibe at me. Maybe so, maybe not. Why do I not pay for it?

But here is the deal. I have done a hell of a lot of basic research on this.

For free.

And my stuff went straight into the public domain. So you own it as much as I do.

William Stine and Forrest Mims are interested in seeing the results of this. They are not lightweights in science.

I talked to a student about it at green drinks on tuesday.

All he wanted was to run away,

because I am just a stonemason.

Social snobbery has gone way too far in Victoria and much of the rest of the world is similar.

I do the best with the resources available to me, I take time off work sometimes to do it too.

I am not impressed that many people cannot even bring themselves to look at it. They think it has "all been done before".

Well, I think that Mims and Stine would have seen it if it has all been done before.

They have both seen a hell of a lot more science than you or me,

but neither of them had seen the solar design t-square before or the clam shaped reflectors.

Whatever, I will have results by April or May, I suppose, if I get nice weather and not much work..

People refuse to accept that there is a problem, it seems.

Well, it cannot be fixed if you don't think it is broken. And it would seem that that is the view on babble.

It is just a shame for the people of Haiti that (if this is more cost effective that what they are currently getting), they will have to wait another 2 years (realistically speaking) to use the clam shaped solar cookers. And it will be a shame (cost wise) for donors too because they will poor bang for their charity dollars.

Brian

[quote=Brian White]

Tue, 2010-05-25 15:54

Brian White

I do hobby "mickey mouse" research of areas that others never thought of researching or areas where the others didn't do it because it was just too complicated. So when i present my results to anyone, they have no frame of reference. For instance, a couple of years ago I asked on a solar cooking website why they did not use software to design reflectors for unattended cooking. (So that the cooks do not get cooked too)

And I went off to find free software to do this. I found art of illusion among others. (So that the people who needed the good reflectors could design them themselves and bypass the research community) but even art of illusion is not that easy to use and software geeks were just not interested in helping after the initial period.

Next was making it even simpler.

So I made the solar design t-square and used it to design clam shaped reflectors. I know it works and I know other people know it works but it is impossible to get the "first follower" because humans are a herd animal. I am a "lone nut" heading off in a different direction. Even the "left wing environmentalist crowd" are a herd. 5 years ago, I would not have believed it, I had much more faith in people being openminded.

It is very hard for most people to leave the comfort of the herd. It only takes one or two but so far nobody has the courage to follow. (Clam shaped reflectors are only 3 months old).

It took over 20 YEARS for the first follower to make a pulser pump. And it wasn't someone from the scientific community or aid to poor people community.

It was just a guy in England who was curious, had an open mind and wanted to know for sure.

Here is the video of lone nut and first follower from Derek Sivers http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html

I think he is correct.

Brian

wage zombie wrote:

Brian White wrote:

The left wing environmentalist crowd are just as top down as the other side. When I show something new to someone, the attitude is "who the fuck are you?!" Absolutely no respect because the human animal has a pecking order. Because i am a nobody, most of them will not even LOOK at the stuff with an open mind. So I have a retired Scientist (who wrote a book about solar concentrators) telling me to get university students researching the solar design t-square and the students saying "who the fuck are you!?". (The scientist , in his career, never saw anything like it).

Could you elaborate on this a bit? I'm not sure what you're saying...are you offering to pay these students money to do work for you and not finding anyone?