Open-source funding for open-source science

This blog is essentially part of an attempt to persuade the Irish state to obey its own laws. I will not deny that the state's failure to do so enrages me. Moreover, it has stopped attempting to sack academics because we won all the critical battles, and made sure there was a lot of publicity. In the meantime, Dail questions have revealed that the authorities feel that universities indeed can act outside the law of the land, including bribing and threatening students and illegally dismissing academics. For example, the Irish Supreme court ruled that Paul Cahill had been ILLEGALLY, not just unfairly dismissed, and so ordered him unequivocally reinstated.

However, there is another critical issue; that of truth and how it is sought for. After the welcome decline of religious dogma, the state universities began to have an ever more critical role in this endeavor. The brief success of neoliberalism in Ireland – an increasingly faint memory - led to a corporate takeover of the universities. What is insidious here is the destruction of the truth-seeking process as taxpayers' money is used to debauch students' minds and make them into cannon fodder for corporations, while corporations get their R+D done on the cheap through mechanisms like SFI

The problem now is that the academics who prostitute themselves to achieve PI status – and as a Stanford faculty member, I can with credibility state that they produce mainly garbage in the process – hog all the taxpayer resources. This blog has consistently argued that all taxpayer-funded research should be publicly available through open-source mechanisms, rather than locked away in proprietary journals (The kind that gave Robert Maxwell his start)

A rather glaring problem remains; how to fund science outside the corrupt “public sector” mechanisms? Inevitably, scientists have now turned to mechanisms like Kickstarter.com, previously used effectively for the arts;

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/science/12crowd.html

While this is a non-optimal solution – putting it gently, in that good scientists are still being penalized for refusing to game the corporate system – hopefully the fact that such a bastion of received liberalism lie the NY Times has entered the fray might even wake up a few decision-makers in Ireland?

With a bit more time and talent, perhaps a Swiftian satire could be generated as academics look up Taskrabbit.com every day to find and bid on piecework for themselves like;

Philosopher needed 2 hours to explain Rawls' political theory
Can you come over to the tech and explain in 1 hour what Heidegger meant by “Da-sein?”
$20 to explain the Copenhagen interpretation of QM to an MBA class in 45 minutes

etc


Sean O Nuallain PhD, Ventura Hall, Stanford

12u Iuil, 2011