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i sent your personal e-mail a message. please respond so we know it is really you.

I responded to someone from my LLU.edu address - not sure if that was you.... nothing has been received at my gmail address

Quote from: zeocrash on June 04, 2013, 07:57:25 PM

You might want to have a look into Devcoin. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Devcoin. It's an altcoin designed for funding Open source projects and such.

fascinating - thanks, I'll check it out!

Quote from: bbit on June 04, 2013, 08:03:04 PM

If your real check out Bitcoin Crowdfunding: http://www.bitcoinstarter.com

...and that as well - gracias!

Quote from: zeocrash on June 04, 2013, 08:07:09 PM

I don't think OP is a scammer, I think the "retro" design of his neuroscience lab website just comes from being in academia Tongue

haha! i'll take that as a complement! I haven't had much time to update my webpage building skills since the early 2000's

Quote from: niko on June 04, 2013, 08:24:22 PM

First of all, kudos for the brave, pioneering idea! Are there any examples of crowdfunded research at universities? I certainly have never heard of anything. Next, in order to help people consider helping your research, as opposed to spending their coins elsewhere, would you please share your thoughts on the following (taken from "the truth wears off" by J. Lehrer):

well, I'm sure I'm not the first, but maybe *among* the 1st (?) I'll have to check out those links above to see how far behind the curve I am at this point... Regarding the Crabbe experiment, it's a great study and one that I often cite to my students. One of the intents of the paper was to demonstrate that *1* paper proves nothing - science is a slow process of carefully and methodically clearing out wrong ideas until something resembling a relatively unassailable "truth" remains. Neuroscience happens to be one of the "slower" disciplines in that regard, due to the enormous complexity of the brain. The general public gets excited when a study "proves" something and then gets dismayed when the next study attacks the problem from a different perspective and disproves it. One of the repercussions of the Crabbe study is that many neuroscience labs, including mine, routinely replicate studies *within* the lab several times before publishing the data. More often than not, even intra-lab differences are usually due to the magnitude of an effect, but the overall pattern remains the same. Even though rodents are individuals and their behavior can be maddenly variable (like people, and mice are much more so than rats), most of the tests used in behavioral neuroscience have "face validity" - e.g., transgenic mice engineered to develop Alzheimer's-like neuropathology as they age are *usually* dumber in learning / memory tasks than control mice, but they are *never* smarter

(regarding variability and wasted effort in science, an even larger issue is that journals usually do not publish "negative" findings, so there is a clear publication bias toward studies in which an effect was found.... this will hopefully get better as more scientists use blogs and other "alternative" methods to spread their research)