Making movies for #SciFund

The next round of #SciFund is coming! I do not have a project in this round myself, as I’ll be too busy finally going on my expedition that I raised funds for in rounds 1 and 2! But I’ll still be active in helping out and offering advice.

In my rounds, I was pleased by some of the positive feedback I got for the videos I made. Here’s how I did them.

The idea almost always starts with movie music: that sets the tone and gives me a style. I find it easier to riff off an existing style of film or TV, because I know what it’s supposed to “look like.” In my second #SciFund project, I did “monster movie,” so that dictated black and white, bad dubbing.

I use Windows Live Movie Maker (built into Windows 7) for the video. I used this because it’s included on my computer, and I was too cheap at the time to buy proper video editing software. Plus, I figure limitations inspire me to be more creative. Yeah, that’s it.

I shoot any new video with just a consumer point and shoot digital camera or even my phone. The sound from my cameras is never good enough, so I always plan to add sound later rather than doing it while I'm recording video.

Some still images (like my title logos) I make from scratch in a graphics editor, because the Movie Maker text editor is very low end and limited.

I get the graphic and video elements in Movie Maker roughly in the order and duration I want. This is my first draft.

I make the audio in Audacity. Movie Maker only lets you import one audio track at a time, and I always want dialogue playing over the music. I use Audacity to combine multiple audio tracks (speech, music clips, sound effects). I usually do this in “chunks,” maybe tens of second long, depending on how long the video is supposed to be.

I spend a lot of time redoing my voice overs for maximum punch, and splicing “takes” of different sentences together. I think for some sentences, I did 30-50 takes. For instance, listen to the narration of this draft:


You can hear the hesitation a few times in my speaking. Now compare it with the final version:


I add the sound to video in Movie Maker, and fiddle with the time of the video / graphics so that the two align for maximum punch. I spend a lot of time shaving off fractions of seconds here and there.

Then I add the next chunk of audio, and repeat until done. I save it, and then upload it into YouTube and Vimeo.

Related posts

Sound over picture

Nailbiter

Round 1 of #SciFund was a rollercoaster.

Round 2 of #SciFund was a nailbiter.

About a week ago, I wrote on the #SciFund blog:

I can’t wait to see what the final week wolds. Can we hit a six digit total? At the rate we’re going, that’s not impossible.

Little did I know.

Last Friday, we passed the round 1 record of $76,230. Then, we passed $80,000, which made a combined total of $150,000 for both rounds of #SciFund and 30 funded projects. That got some attention, I can tell you. Then we had five projects hit their targets in one day.

And with just one day to go, we passed $90,000.

The possibility of $100,000 was tantalizing, but I knew raising $10,000 in a day was going to be a big ask.

During the day, while I kept obsessively checking the total, tweeting about projects, and posting on Google Plus, I kept thinking about an episode of Top Gear (Series 4, Episode 4), in which host Jeremy Clarkson has to drive from London to Edinburgh on one tank of fuel. He’s getting closer and closer to the finish, but knows he’s running out of fuel. And when he get so close to the end but not quite there, he says, “If I don’t make this, I’ll sack myself.” (Sacked as in fired.)

That’s what I felt like. That at any second, this car is going to run out of gas and we’ll be stuck on the road, embarrassed by the failure.

And yes, it would have felt like a failure. My nightmare was that we’d get to $99,999 and time would run out. (I almost need not have worried quite so much, as there are still six projects with hours to go.) The difference between $99,999 and $100,000 is not $1, psychologically speaking. Salesman have known this forever, which is why you see so many prices like $1.99 or $499.

Intellectually, $99,000 and change would still be a great success. But emotionally, it would have been one of those, “We were this close...” moments that haunt you.

Later that night, the next image that came to mind, just before and after I was doing a Google Plus hangout with SciLingual, was that this felt like a bomb ticking down in an action movie. Except that in an action movie, you’re generally sure someone is going to step in before it’s too late.

I had no such confidence here.

Other things that were rattling around in my head were the success of Amanda Palmer, fellow crowdfunding traveler in the month of May (who raised ten times what we did), and the safe return of the SpaceX Dragon to earth. It seemed to me that these, and #SciFund, were all culminations of... triumphs of small over big.

But the amount we needed kept getting smaller. Less than $5,000. Less than $2,000. (A few hours left. The tension is killing me.) Only hundreds. (Only minutes left for most projects. Jarrett is updating the totals every few minutes.) $33! (Projects are just about to start closing!)

Last night, at 11:01 pm my time, I saw this:

I was pleased.

I was also pretty emotionally spent. It was quite late and I would have happily gone to bed... but #SciFund kept calling. There was data I needed to gather about the completed projects pretty much right then, so I couldn’t go to sleep. And there was some loose ends. Like having to blog all this while it’s still fresh.

Tomorrow, I want a press release. We showed that #SciFund was no one trick pony. And with so many projects funded (30 some odd - I’ve lost count) and the important $100,000 total, we can bring some attention not just to science crowdfunding, but science funding and science engagement generally.

But I think it’s finally time for bed.




Update: Favourite analysis of #SciFund this morning, courtesy of Eddie Cardoshinsky Google Plus:

It's like the new Muppet Movie, but only for science.

One day only!

The current round of #SciFund ends today.

My own project, Beach of the Goliath Crabs, made its total a while ago. I want to talk about the overall amount we’ve raised at #SciFund. We cracked the $90,000 mark yesterday.

I cannot tell you how fantastic it would be to hit the $100,000 mark. You should check out the projects to see if there are any that would like to support, even with a dollar or two.

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/scifund


There is nothing preventing you from giving a little extra to a project that has hit 100%. If you cannot donate, please spread the word! Time is running out to make a great achievement.

Day at the beach

Whew. I haven’t been blogging here as much as I’d been expecting, because I keep having stuff to report over at the main #SciFund blog! To sum up:

• Late Friday, we passed the total amount raised in #SciFund round 1.
• On Sunday, we passed the percent of projects funded in #SciFund round 1, with two projects meeting their targets.
• On Monday, we the $80,000 mark and three more projects met their targets.

Combined, the two rounds of #SciFund have funded 30 projects and raised over $150,000 for science.

But I have more to say about my own project! This is probably my last video for this round of #SciFund. It’s dedicated to everyone who, like me, is in the lab or office today, particularly those in the United States, for whom this is (allegedly) a long weekend.




Thanks to Maritza for taking some of the footage!

Two for two!

Last night, I went to bed feeling like this.

This morning, I got up, checked my email and my day unexpectedly turned to this:

I’m now proud to have two projects crowdfunded, and to have earned the “Aviator” badge from RocketHub!

Thanks to all the supporters for your interest and trust. While my first SciFund project was about creating a long-term resource, this one should be fast and fun.

For everyone else, it’s not too late! There is no rule that says you can’t support a project that has already met its funding target! Why support a project that has already hit its target?

1. Moar cool science! I have enough money to support one student on this project. With your help, I could give another student a great research experience. Do it for future scientists!
2. Cool rewards don’t go away after someone’s hit their target. You can still get some awesome stuff from scientists for supporting their research.!
3. The target we show is not actually what ends up in the researcher’s hands; RocketHub gets a cut of that money. A few extra donations help us actually get the target amount.
   
4. Generosity just feels good. Giving is just enlightened self-interest.
5. All the smart kids are doing it. You don’t want to seem less smart than your colleagues, do you? I thought not.

Little things

We’re coming to the last stretch of the second round of SciFund. Here’s a new video about my animals for you:



You should go to RocketHub now and fuel my project!

Name that roar

My current SciFund video is inspired by old monster movies. I invite you to listen for the roar of the “monster,” Lepidopa:



In the preview, where the animals aren’t seen for long, I used the original Godzilla roar. But it didn’t fit with the images I filmed for the final video. Can you recognize what classic monster lends its voice to my Lepidopa in the video? Test your knowledge and vote below! And if you have not yet...

You should go to RocketHub and fuel my project!


A. Anguirus

B. Baragon

C. Rodan

D. Megalon

Answer is below the fold.

Fighty crab

I’m not above creating a meme to support my #SciFund project!

One of the surprising things about our local sand crabs is that while they are small, they are feisty little guys. They do have claws,and they always seem to find that one little fold of skin they can dig them into.

When I wanted to make a video about the “monstrously” large Florida sand crabs, this picture of an aggro sand crab naturally fit in.

But the possibilities for humour were too good to leave alone.

Generate new captions, and see existing ones, for Fighty Crab here! Or try here!

If you like Fighty Crab, you should also go to my #SciFund project!

External links

What crabs are the fightiest?

Crowdfunding, open access, and innovation: here we go again

Crowdfunding science is getting a respectable amount of attention right now, but, as I mentioned last week, there is skepticism. As I was looking at some of the comments about crowdfunding, I thought, “I recognize those arguments.”

Arguments against scientific innovation have something in common with arguments against scientific evidence: the same objections and arguments are trotted out time and again with every new issue. Whether it’s tobacco in the late 20^th century or human caused global warming in the 21^st, you hear, “The science isn’t settled.” Whether it’s evolution or vaccines, deniers will say, “Let’s just let people decide for themselves.”

The arguments that you are going to hear against crowdfunding are, and will be, the same arguments that you have heard, and continue to hear, against open access publication.

You’ll hear a lot of variations of the “quality” argument:

[Open access publishing / crowdfunded research] is bad because it is not selective enough. There is not enough peer review^*. It opens up the floodgates for crappy research.

The “not selective enough” argument was deployed against PLoS ONE, which was arguably a big success in promoting the open access model. PLoS ONE drew a lot of flak, with people saying that because it didn’t screen for importance, it would be a dumping ground. This is still lobbed at it, despite a good impact factor.

It is true that in the first round of SciFund, there wasn’t peer review. In the current round, we did do a “sanity check” on the proposals. This was good, because there was a proposal that failed it. Spectacularly.

That said, there isn’t a counter punch to anyone who brings up the quality argument now. It’s going to take a couple of years before crowdfunded research yields theses, dissertations, and that gold standard, publications in peer-reviewed academic journals.

SciFund is not the PLoS ONE (established 2006) of crowdfunding. It’s not even the PLoS Biology (established 2003) of crowdfunding. It’s the Psycoloquy (established 1990) of crowdfunding.

It could take ten years or more before someone creates a big model for crowdfunding in the way that PLoS ONE did for open access. Just as there are people who still snipe at PLoS ONE, there will still be people who will snipe at crowdfunding.

I hope to have draw some more parallels between open access and crowdfunding in the days to come.

^* There are people who still equate “open access” with “not peer reviewed.”

Why science crowdfunding is needed: a précis

Earlier this week, I put up this picture concerning crowdfunding:

It’s not surprising that others think I should have posted:

Posts about this are on Oikos Blog and Culture of Science. Jamie Vernon started an interesting exchange earlier today on Twitter on this subject. Over the month, I plan to try to develop a sort of science crowdfunding manifesto to address some of the issues others are concerned about.

It occurred to me that the Oikos Blog post was responding to what I said in just that one single blog post. But I realized that I’ve been slowly developing arguments for crowdfunding for years. Eventually, I want to write a longer and more cohesive argument, but for now, here is a short summary of some main points that I’ve been writing about over the last five (!) years, with links to my older posts.

My arguments are these.

Scientific funding in many nations have become extremely dependent on external funding, mainly federal governments. Competition for these grants have gotten ferocious.

• The feeding frenzy resume (from 2009)
• The chase for stimulus money is on (from 2009)
• Everybody chase the money! (from 2009)

The chase for money is having a distorting effect on the kind of science that gets done:

• Money and science (from 2009)
• Replace “old” with “rich” (from 2012)

Funding agencies, worried about return on investment, are looking for mega-hits:

• Original and transformative (from 2010)
• Indie spirit (from 2012)

We have to face the very real possibility that rates of federal funding are never going to go back up; at least, not by the amount scientists think would be sustainable.

• Call a cab, buddy, the party's over (from 2009)

Even if industry still had skin in the game (not as much as they used to), there are legitimate concerns with industry funding of science. The track record of dealing with conflicts of interest arising from industry money are... not good.

• Privately funded science (from 2010)
• Has American industry given up an American scientists? (from 2011)

Given those conditions, those who have been successful at establishing research (the tier one research universities) are going to fight like hell to make sure they continue to get most of that money.

• More for those that have the most (from 2010)
• To have and have not (Mostly not) (from 2010)
• NSF's plan for minority students (or lack thereof) (from 2010)
• Inclining the paying field (from 2010)

Consequently, there could be a Balkanization of research, with certain kinds of institutions and research being disparaged as “low quality,” which effectively squeezes them out of the picture and prevents them from making scholarly contributions.

• Balkanizing small universities (from 2010)
• I’m a pebble in the avalanche (from 2010)

There’s a lot of damn good science that is cheap and possible right now. It doesn’t need new theories, conceptual breakthrough, or new technologies. It just needs “boots on the ground” and a little money to grease the wheels.

• We’re having a sale on amazing (from 2009)
• Biological costs (from 2009)
• A patent clerk’s pay (from 2011)

As a result, we need new funding models, particularly for “small science” (a less than ideal term, but will do for now).

• Rethinking granting (from 2007)
• At last, microgrants (from 2010)
• As science funding dries up (from 2011)

All of this sets the stage for why crowdfunding is going to be part of the future of science.

I’m looking forward to exploring this more in weeks to come.

This is the future of science: SciFund returns

Yesterday, musician Amanda Palmer started a Kickstarter campaign to fund her next record, book, and tour. She reached her goal in less than a day.

When I looked at it, I was struck by the image she used to illustrate her project and video:

That picture resonated with me. She’s right.

Because of SciFund, I’ve been watching stories on crowdfunding. And I keep reading about records being broken for amounts of money raised. Stats like crowdfunding providing more money for arts than the American government. And analyses showing how crowdfunding support is growing.

I am convinced that this is not just the future of music.

(Yes, I want to be the Amanda Palmer of science crowdfunding. This does not change that I also want to be the Iggy Pop of science.)

Also yesterday, Danielle Lee wrote:

That’s it! I need MY OWN Science Benefactor/Sponsor/Sugar Daddy what have you. There are sciencey things I must do & see but I needz $$$

It struck me that so many scientists are still in the place artists were. We’re waiting to be chosen. Waiting to be given permission. Working and working and working in the hope of being given a shot at the big time by someone else with more money, power, and influence.

Traditionally, this has been the way science got done. Originally, men of letters sought out patrons. In the Victoria era, science was the domain of the wealthy. As science became professionalized in the last century, grant agencies became talent scouts, trying to guess who would be successful in the future.

It doesn’t always have to be that way now.

It’s just matter of time before some researcher breaks through with a massive science crowdfunding project. It probably won’t be me, but that doesn’t matter. We saw a hint of it in Round 1 of SciFund, with the success of the “Killer Ks”, Kristina Killgrove and Kelly Weinersmith. Looking at the SciFund projects in both rounds, it seems there is a niche for projects that would be difficult to get running through more traditional funding mechanisms, but that might be able to thrive on crowdfunding. For example, Matt Shipman provides a great example of how hard it is to get funding to do research on bed bugs.

Those are reasons why I’m more pleased than ever that SciFund is back. It’s hosted once again by the fine folks at RocketHub, and there are a whole mess of projects for you to support!

My own project is Beach of the Goliath Crabs, which you can read about here.

For Google Plus users, I’ll have a hangout about this project on Wednesday, 2 May at 3:00 pm Central time (4:00 pm Eastern, 1:00 pm Pacific). You can find my G+ profile here.

The future of science is starting now. Be part of something great.

Additional: A response on the Oikos blog.

Coming in May, 2012

Here’s a teaser trailer for a highly anticipated new project coming out in May... The Avengers? Heck no. May is the start of the next round of #SciFund!

Prepare yourself

If you are a researcher, you have only until the end of this week to sign up for round 2 of the #SciFund Challenge! Go here to sign up!

Last time, SciFund raised $75,510 dollars, and ten out of 49 projects met or exceeded their funding goals. And it was pretty darn fun.

Round two of SciFund will run through May!

Not every radical idea is right

It’s too hard to do groundbreaking science. Nicholson, who self identifies as a student (though what level is not clear), argues in forthcoming paper in BioEssays that the reason it’s hard to do original science is all because of how science is funded.

As it stands, our current system may work well in weeding out technically flawed proposals and advancing incremental work, yet truly novel ideas will rarely be funded or even tolerated.

This is not a particularly new insight. I’ve written about it from time to time; see here. I think we disagree on the value of incremental work, though. I think most scientific progress comes from incremental work, while Nicholson seems to think we get progress from “out of the box” thinking. Nicholson asks:

If, historically, most new ideas in science have been considered heretical by experts, does it make sense to rely upon experts to judge and fund new ideas?

It is true that some now accepted ideas in science were disputed at first, but Nicholson does not seem to consider that not every “novel idea” is ultimately vindicated. Case in point:

The emphasis on being liked by the scientific community as a prerequisite to survive as a practicing scientist subsequently limits critical exchange in science. This is the case with Peter Duesberg who went from a prestigious 7-year outstanding investigator grant from the NIH to grant-less ever since because he questioned the role of oncogenes in cancer and the role of HIV in AIDS.

You’re going to use HIV denial to build your case? Seriously? In a spectacular “own goal,” Nicholson inadvertently demonstrates exactly why funding agencies are conservative: because there are some people out there who have ideas that are just wrong. There are ideas that are not worth pursuing.

And I did a double take when I read this in the acknowledgements:

I thank Peter Duesberg (UC Berkeley) for useful comments and suggestions(.)

It might not be best form to use someone who gave you feedback on an article as an example of someone who’s been treated unfairly. This is in an article that complains about how “who you know” is contaminating science.

Nicholson says:

The novelty of an idea can be measured by how many ideas and people it contradicts.

Alas, the insanity of an idea can be measured in precisely the same way.

At the end of the article, Nicholson proposes a couple of ways out of dealing with fuddy-duddy old boys’s network of granting agencies. One is to incorporate more non-scientists into the review process. I might argue that we’ve seen some of the outcomes of non-scientists getting involved in the scientific process whenever we hear about politicians ragging on certain projects as “wasteful.”

Another solution, Nicholson argues, is crowdfunding. Having been involved in a crowdfunding project (SciFund), I’ve heard concerns that cranks will use crowdfunding to get money for their goofy projects. I think that crowdfunded research projects should have some form of peer review to keep out the crazies.

Reference

Nicholson J. 2012. Collegiality and careerism trump critical questions and bold new ideas: A student's perspective and solution. BioEssays: in press. DOI: 10.1002/bies.201200001

When scientists’ and publishers’ motivations align

Continuing with the theme of the similarity between game publishing and academic publishing, I learned this morning that a game publisher had crowdfunded over $400,000 in less than 24 hours. As I look now, it’s passed half a million bucks. With 33 days to go.

As someone who worked his butt off for a month to hit a grand through crowdfunding, I am in awe.

This analysis is good. (Here’s another.) It takes apart the question if creatives need middlemen like publishers any more. But this bit made me stop and think about scientific publishing:

Are you trying to get famous or rich?
If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then it’s my opinion that you’ll still need a publisher. Why? Because your motivations are clearly aligned.

This is one reason why I don’t know if the calls to boycott Elsevier (say) can be sustained. There are a lot of scientists who are trying to get famous. (Probably not so many trying to get rich.)

For example, consider the discussions about the perceived need to publish in certain journals (here and here). I want to excerpt Björn Brembs’s description of his situation:

If you don't get any CNS papers in this field, you face only few job options, none of which mean that you’ll be able to spend much time on doing the research as you’re used to: 1) a teaching position at a small liberal arts college (and good luck with that with most of your time spent on research, but not getting a CNS) 2) salesman for the pharma industry 3) pipetteer for hire 4) flipping burgers. Which simply means that if you can't fathom doing anything else but science, you better get published in CNS.

Just take my example, which, from my experience and some statistics, is quite representative: In the last 6/7 years I have applied to about 120 tenure-track positions world-wide (i.e., North America, Japan, Australia, Europe), most applications went out before 2008, everything from small liberal arts to research one - basically I applied to anything that had ‘neuro’ somewhere in the description. Until then I had 1 Science paper, and 2-3 papers in the 7-10 IF range, approx. an average of about 1.2-1.4 papers per year, productivity wise. In total, I received less than 10 interview invitations and with very few exceptions, the other invited candidates had also all published in CNS (Cell, Nature, or Science - ZF). Informally, I was told that some positions I wasn’t invited for interview, this happened because I had to few hi-rank papers. With 60-600 applicants per tenure-track position, virtually everybody simply makes a cut at 1 CNS paper or so and then looks at the remaining candidates for a fit.

For many scientists, their goals remain aligned with the goals of academic publishers. Clearly some of that desire for “fame” is not actually a desire to be in the public eye, but scientific fame enough to yield job security. How do we break this? Attitudes of hiring committees would have to change, dramatically and explicitly. Even then, there might be enough scientists who want fame or wealth to keep the for profit academic publishers in the game for a while yet.

Sayonara, #SciFund

And there’s the siren! The #SciFund challenge has came to an end! Here are some of my initial reactions to the experience.

Things that I didn’t expect:

Fewer people, bigger donations. I thought most donations would be small – a dollar or two – and projects would have hundreds of supporters. Instead, projects had tens of supporters contributing $10-20, and more, often much more. Consequently,  my “I make my target if everyone chips in 50 cents” pitch to my several thousand followers on Twitter and Google Plus wasn’t effective.

Traditional media still rules. The break out success story was, without a doubt, Kristina Kilgrove’s Roman DNA project. There’s no doubt that it made it because it was on the CNN website.

Cool beats practical: Given how much talk there is on how people want to see “results” and “return on investment” in traditional funding, my one post where I described how my research might have a practical pay-off to aquaculture got the least hits of anything I did to promote my project over six weeks.

Weak relationship between video views and dollars. “Duck force” got more than ten times the views of my video, but it didn’t get ten times the donations.

Front end loaded: I expected most funds to come in at the very beginning and the very end. RocketHub confirmed that this is the normal pattern. But the “bump” in the last few days was much smaller than I expected. On my project, the amount of dollars raised and time elapsed were pretty tightly correlated.

So emotional: I touched on this before here. I got way more wrapped up in this tiny little fundraising effort than most other projects.

Not much variation. Most projects raised about the same amount, regardless of their targets. $1,000 or so seems to be the sweet spot for now.

I made the right call to keep my project target small. At one point, I almost raised it, and if I had, I don’t think I would have made it. Projects that want to raise ten grand are either going to have to be brilliant or wait for the crowdfunding of science to mature.

Things that disappointed me:

Notice us! We didn’t get as much attention from science media as I expected. No coverage in the Science, Nature, The Guardian, The New York Times, Quirks and Quarks, and so on.

Whiff: Thirty-nine projects didn’t meet their targets.

Low gear: I was hoping to be one of the first projects to get past the post. I though that I would have a good shot at it, based on responses of people to whom I showed my video, and that I had one of the lowest targets.

Left undone: I had ideas for three more videos that I didn’t get to make.

Things that made me happy:

Mad skills: I learned a lot about how to make short videos. I may be doing more.

Total: Over $75,000 for science!

Hits! Ten projects met their targets.

This time, it’s personal: And one of them was mine.

If #SciFund were to go again:

I would say: Yes. Even though it’s inefficient, it’s fun. And as I noted, I’m unlikely to walk away completely empty-handed, which is usually what I get for writing big grant applications.

Stay home: I would try not to go to the biggest scientific meeting in the world for a week. I felt I lost quite a bit of momentum because of that.

More focus: Not my call, but at first we had over 200 people express interest in doing this. We ended up with 49 live projects. I wonder if even that was spreading attention too thin.

There will be much more analysis of the #SciFund challenge in the days and months to come. It was a social experiment, and we are all scientists, after all. But for now, this is...

Photo by viking_79 on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

#SciFund: Achievement unlocked!

We. have. MADE IT!

I was sitting at home, working on just one last video to try to convince people to support my #SciFund project, when I heard the sound of an email alert. When I saw it was from RocketHub, I was excited, because I had been getting close to my target. How much closer might I get?

When I read the email, I almost had a heart attack. It was enough to push me past the finish line!

My day went from this:

To this:

(Since I was sitting at a computer, of course my first move was to tweet about it.)

The #SciFund challenge isn’t over! I still want to see if I can squeeze out one more video promoting my project. We are allowed to have donations exceed the target. If there is enough money, I will take a student with me on the expedition! And RocketHub even rewards people who fuel a project after it hits its target with the Supernova badge!

And for those who watched my promo video all the way to the end, you’ll know I have another project  I promised to reveal if I met my target:

The Beach of the Goliath Crabs!

I will be revealing the secret of this project soon!

Thank you to those who have supported this project, either financially or morally!

#SciFund: Practical Procambarus

We are getting down to the wire in the #SciFund challenge. Perhaps you have seen my project, but are not yet convinced. You may be asking, "Sure, this research on the crayfish is cool, but does it have any practical benefits?"

Here's one possibility.

Marbled crayfish reproduce asexually. One of the big mysteries about asexual reproduction is why so few species use it. In theory, asexual species should overrun sexual species by dint of numbers.

Think of a female who can have four offspring in her lifetime, on average. If this species reproduces asexually, she will have four daughters, and each of those daughters can have four daughters - sixteen grand-daughters of the original female. If this species reproduces sexually, she will probably have two sons and two daughters, and those two daughters will have four offspring - eight grand-offspring of the original female.

This imbalance in numbers would get bigger every generation, of course. This is a major cost to reproducing sexually.

This is a great scientific puzzle! It's one of many reasons why studying both a sexual and asexual species that are so closely related is so fascinating.

But I said I was going to talk about something that might be more practical.

There's plenty of crayfish aquaculture around the world. What if we found out a way to flip those farmed crayfish species from sexual reproduction to asexual reproduction? At least one other crayfish species seems to be able to flip between sexual and asexual reproduction. The potential increase in yield would be tremendous.

This would be a long-term goal. Lots of legwork would have to happen before we could even think about something like that.  There are reasons it might not work.

But we won't know until we try. That's the point of research, after all.

And that is today’s reason why you should go to RocketHub and fuel my #SciFund project!

#SciFund troubleshooting

You want to fuel a #SciFund project! Joy!

The RocketHub website won’t let you! Bummer!

If this happens you, contact support@rockethub.com! They are there to help!

A few people have reported problems in contributing to their favourite #SciFund project. We asked RocketHub, who told us that a few (~1%) people do run into problems.

Possible causes:

• User error in entering data. This can often be fixed just by trying again in a couple of days.
• Old browsers - Internet Explorer 6.0 and a few other very old browsers have difficulties with the contribution process.
• High-level browser security/disabled cookies - some users have browser apps or have disabled cookies, which can make it difficult to contribute.
• Invalid card - RocketHub does not accept Maestro.
• Invalid country - certain countries can’t have their cards processed, because they are deemed “high risk.”

If you have tried to fuel a project, please try again! Don’t be discouraged! Think of the joy on all those scientists’ faces when they get the email that someone has fueled their project!

Conservatives should support #SciFund

If you are a political conservative who supports science, you should be supporting the heck out of the #SciFund challenge.

Conservatives argue for small, limited government. But arguments for “small government” don’t get a lot of traction among scientists, because funding trends are going in the wrong direction.

The main sources of scientific funding in most of the world is industry and government. Industry still funds a lot of research (which makes up most of the total), but industry is reducing funding for basic research. Industry research often focuses on maximizing the next quarter profits.

Government funding is increasingly the only game in town for basic researchers. I appreciate that there are few rewards for being efficient in the current government granting system. We desperately need alternative ways to fund science.

The #SciFund challenge is the biggest, best promoted effort to find a new way to fund scientific research in a long time. You’d better believe that a lot of other researchers are watching and waiting to see what happens. If it fails, a lot of scientists are going to say, “Crowdfunding can’t work. Therefore, more government funding to science.”

I know many conservatives would rather see government involvement in research not increase. But I hope that science-minded conservatives appreciate that research isn’t free. The most effective way to reduce government involvement in funding research is to provide alternatives. Twiddle the knobs, and make the problem go away.

Conservatives are often charged with being anti-science. I’ve criticized conservative politicians (not least in one of the most popular posts ever on this blog), but I’ve always thought that was an oversimplification. Science has received a lot of bipartisan support. Step up and show people that conservatives can and do support good science.

If the #SciFund challenge succeeds, it will be something you can point as an example of innovative thinking that promotes personal freedom, and that shows people can support science without a government middleman.

If you’re a conservative who supports science, you should go to RocketHub right now and support a #SciFund project!

P.S.—And you should spread the word about #SciFund!