funding | Southern Fried Science

Five Experiment ocean campaigns that need your support.

Hi, it’s me, Andrew. And right now I’m crowdfunding an effort to develop an environmental baseline for microplastics in the deep sea using a historic sample archive. You can read more about it here: We need to know more about microplastics in the deep sea.

What is Experiment? Experiment is a crowdfunding platform that connects scientists with small-scale funders. It allows people to discover, fund, and disseminate scientific research and it is especially good at funding small pilot studies that are difficult to fund through traditional grant-making agencies but could lead to much more significant funding down the road. And right now, they have a campaign to fund ocean research.

You can check out my campaign: Establishing a baseline for microplastic accumulation in deep-sea animals using an historical sample archive but you should also check out some of the other ocean science projects currently running on Experiment.

Establishing the first technological network for long term ocean observations in Costa Rica

Costa Rica lacks extended time series of oceanographic data. To address this issue, our goal is to deploy and maintain an array of smart mooring devices that will provide real-time data of temperature, waves and wind. We aim to describe how these variables associate to coastal erosion/coral bleaching in the Caribbean and coastal upwelling/ENSO coupling in the Pacific. Our mission is to provide open-access data to improve management of Marine Protected Areas and blue economy projects.

Are deep-sea metals powering bioelectrical eco-evolution?

The deep sea is enriched with metals and amazing life forms. Electroactive microbes can get energy from metals, creating conditions that could sustain high animal diversity in the abyss. With genomic data to expand a large, public diversity dataset, we can use multi-omics and phylogenetics to reveal the electrobiogeochemical basis of biodiversity maintenance. It is urgent to know the role that metals play in such eco-evolutionary mechanisms before they are removed by the deep-sea mining rush.

Measuring CO2 mineralization rates in a simulated ocean environment for the characterization of low-cost sensors

Direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 is a technology for low-cost and scalable carbon dioxide removal (CDR). These systems will collect and concentrate CO2 from around 400ppm to approximately 20% CO2 by volume. The use of ocean based mineralization and enhanced weathering processes present a huge opportunity for gigaton sequestration of CO2. This project will explore low-cost sensors to quantify the mineralization and reaction rate of CO2 in a simulated ocean environment.

Improving the Knowledge of Skates and Rays in Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad and Tobago is home to many species of skates and rays but exactly how many and their locations are still unknown. There is a lack of knowledge on skate and ray biodiversity, life-history and ecology, however at least a third are thought to be on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. They are commonly caught as bycatch, and increasingly being kept for commercial sale. It is important to close these gaps in support of conservation and management.

The many, many ways I screwed up my first science crowdfunding campaign.

Posted on September 26, 2017 by Andrew Thaler

Four generations of field hardened OpenCTDs.

It’s been over five years since Kersey Sturdivant and I launched Oceanography for Everyone – The OpenCTD, my first attempt at crowdfunding science. Over the years, that initial effort has grown into Oceanography for Everyone, a community of researchers, educators, and citizen scientists, and has created new open-source tools for open-source, open-science hardware. The OpenCTD is the finest oceanographic instrument that you can build in your own home for less than $300.

The crowdfunding campaign was a total disaster.

Since then, I’ve written several articles on how scientists can launch and managed crowdfunding campaigns:

…but I’ve never written explicitly about what we did wrong during that campaign and how it impacted our success. Now that the final reward from that campaign has been delivered (yes, five years later, talk about the eternally delayed crowdfunding campaign), it’s the right moment to look back and think about how everything went so wrong.

I went with lesser-known platforms. We launched the OpenCTD on RocketHub. At the time, RocketHub was hosting the #SciFund Challenge, a campaign to encourage scientists to launch science crowdfunding campaigns. Both the #SciFundChallenge and RocketHub were relatively small players in the nascent crowdfunding world. RocketHub doesn’t even appear to do crowdfunding anymore, they’ve pivoted to a “social network for entrepreneurs”. The old OpenCTD campaign page is long deprecated. #SciFund Challenge’s website hasn’t been updated in almost half a year.

Here’s the thing with crowdfunding, and especially crowdfunding in the early days: There are two dominant communities that you can rely on. There’s the community of people who want to support what you’re doing and there’s the community of people enamored with the idea of crowdfunding. Being a crowdfunding “investor” is a hobby in and of itself and many of the biggest donors are people who support dozens of different campaigns. So the larger and more popular the platform, the more crowdfunding enthusiasts you’ll attract. Heck, since backing the very first OpenROV, I’ve backed 23 other projects on Kickstarter, most recently Public Lab’s Balloon Mapping kits.

By going with RocketHub, I committed our campaign to a smaller potential audience. Considering Kickstarter was garnering huge press at the time, this was a near-fatal mistake.

Why do wizards go adventuring ? Or …. you thought that your tenure requirements were tough?!

Posted on February 23, 2017 by Chris Parsons

Something that has been bothering me for a while, is why do wizards go adventuring?

Source: ClipArtLord.com

Now if you are a big geek like me, you’ll know that practically every adventuring party has a wizard. But these wizards are incredibly unprepared for exploring dungeons and have a shockingly high mortality rate. In the dungeons and dragons* of my youth, a starting wizard had a mere 1 to 4 hit points and was equipped with dagger (or is they were luck a staff). Did these budding Gandalfs get armor? Of course not, they faced ogres and basilisks in the fantasy equivalent of sweat pants.

The statistics of a starting wizard meant that they could easily be killed by a house cat. Also they had just one spell. Cast “light” so that your party could see in a cave, and you were done for the day. If you had the most destructive spell of the first level wizard, you would fire a “magic missile” that always hit, but did a miserable 2 to 5 (1d4+1) points of damage. So if jumped by above mentioned angry house cat, you literally had a 50/50 chance of killing it before it killed you**.

So why do all these highly educated, highly intelligent wizards leave their ivory (or mithril) towers and trudge through cold, dank dungeons with groups of characters that generally make the knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail look like Seal Team 6 in comparison?

Why does every early career academic pursue elusive gold and put their common sense and lives on the line? Why…? To get tenure of course…

R1 research universities – is a biased, flawed ranking system crippling academia?

Posted on February 16, 2017 by Chris Parsons

If you are at a university that has graduate students, you have probably heard about whether your university is an R1 or R2 or R-whatever research institution. Universities tout their position in this ranking system, awarded by the Carnegie Foundation, to denote how “prestigious” they are in terms of research. From 1994, the ranking used to be given according to how much federal research funding they were awarded.

Source: clipart panda

Because of this, all the ranking told you was how much federal money a particular university received. This system is incredibly flawed. For example, if you have faculty more dedicated to writing grants and less dedicated to teaching, mentoring graduate students, publishing articles or doing other activities that are supposed to be the mainstay of academia, then certainly you will get more money. However, this will be at the expense of teaching, mentoring, publishing, etc. Read More