funding neuroscience lab with bitcoin donations

[behavioralneuroscience]

Hey all,

New here - howdy! I am a neuroscientist with a lab focused on finding treatments for brain disorders like Alzheimer's disease, stroke and traumatic brain injury. Given the current paucity of funding opportunities for science, I have decided to set up a lab bitcoin address to accept crowd-sourced donations for everyday lab expenses to keep the lab running between larger grant acquisitions... If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to set up a "donations" page thanking individuals for helping to support our science.

lab web address: www.behavioralneuroscience.org
lab BTC address: 1KxqK9w8uH8gvYNxDAg4FS8Soij2RwnhWE

Thanks!
Rich

--
Rich Hartman, PhD
Associate Professor
School of Behavioral Health
Loma Linda University

[zeocrash]

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.

[bbit]

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

[zeocrash]

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.

i think it is a scam anyway.

I don't know, the website checks out. Loma linda university is a real university based in California. Looking on their website (which i navigated to from google) Richard E hartman really is a professor of psychology there.

His faculty profile links to the page given by OP. The Bitcoin address matches the one given by OP.

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


Not that i really have any interest either way in whether OP gets donations or not, i was just curious to see what kind of neuroscience lab accepted BTC

[skrazy]

Anyone had non fourm communication?

[niko]

Hey all,

New here - howdy! I am a neuroscientist with a lab focused on finding treatments for brain disorders like Alzheimer's disease, stroke and traumatic brain injury. Given the current paucity of funding opportunities for science, I have decided to set up a lab bitcoin address to accept crowd-sourced donations for everyday lab expenses to keep the lab running between larger grant acquisitions... If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to set up a "donations" page thanking individuals for helping to support our science.

lab web address: www.behavioralneuroscience.org
lab BTC address: 1KxqK9w8uH8gvYNxDAg4FS8Soij2RwnhWE

Thanks!
Rich

--
Rich Hartman, PhD
Associate Professor
School of Behavioral Health
Loma Linda University

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):

In the late nineteen-nineties, John Crabbe, a neuroscientist at the Oregon Health and Science University, conducted an experiment that showed how unknowable chance events can skew tests of replicability. He performed a series of experiments on mouse behavior in three different science labs: in Albany, New York; Edmonton, Alberta; and Portland, Oregon. Before he conducted the experiments, he tried to standardize every variable he could think of. The same strains of mice were used in each lab, shipped on the same day from the same supplier. The animals were raised in the same kind of enclosure, with the same brand of sawdust bedding. They had been exposed to the same amount of incandescent light, were living with the same number of littermates, and were fed the exact same type of chow pellets. When the mice were handled, it was with the same kind of surgical glove, and when they were tested it was on the same equipment, at the same time in the morning. 

The premise of this test of replicability, of course, is that each of the labs should have generated the same pattern of results. “If any set of experiments should have passed the test, it should have been ours,” Crabbe says. “But that’s not the way it turned out.” In one experiment, Crabbe injected a particular strain of mouse with cocaine. In Portland the mice given the drug moved, on average, six hundred centimetres more than they normally did; in Albany they moved seven hundred and one additional centimetres. But in the Edmonton lab they moved more than five thousand additional centimetres. Similar deviations were observed in a test of anxiety. Furthermore, these inconsistencies didn’t follow any detectable pattern. In Portland one strain of mouse proved most anxious, while in Albany another strain won that distinction. 

The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn’t an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a byproduct of invisible variables we don’t understand. The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected. Grants get written, follow-up studies are conducted. The end result is a scientific accident that can take years to unravel.

[behavioralneuroscience]

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

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!

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

...and that as well - gracias!

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

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

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)

[behavioralneuroscience]

well, that was quick

Newbie question - unless a donator explicitly sends me an email stating that they've deposited some BTC, is there any way for me to identify and "thank" them on my website? it seems not?

Rich

[edd]

well, that was quick

Newbie question - unless a donator explicitly sends me an email stating that they've deposited some BTC, is there any way for me to identify and "thank" them on my website? it seems not?

Rich

Not really. This is one reason why it's recommended to use a different receiving address each time.

[niko]

well, that was quick

Newbie question - unless a donator explicitly sends me an email stating that they've deposited some BTC, is there any way for me to identify and "thank" them on my website? it seems not?

Rich

Unless they use the one and same sending address every time (most people don't, on the contrary), and unless this sending address is publicly known and verified to belong to that person - no. (Some publicly identified addresses are tagged on blockchain.info).

Importantly, even if someone emailed you claiming to have sent a particular donation, that doesn't mean they did. Anyone can see all the transactions, as Bitcoin ledger (a.k.a. blockchain) is public.

One way to verify is to ask this person to sign a specified message using the private key related to the sending address (or one of the sending addresses) - you can then check this digital signature.  Bitcoin.org client offers this functionality.

[behavioralneuroscience]

interesting - thanks! maybe i'll just have a page with a running total of donations along with a list of lab supplies bought with said BTCs....

[jorgen]

Just sent "Euler's number" in bitcoins 

[niko]

Just a thought - I don't think you need that coin widget just to display the donation address. It requires javascript, links to third-party servers, etc. I don't even see the donation button unless I enable javascript in my browser.

Just put the donation address there as plain text, and include an image of the QR code. Occam's razor.

[behavioralneuroscience]

Just sent "Euler's number" in bitcoins 

awesome - what a great mathematical constant! that's equivalent to a box of 700 slides, so that's a huge help

Just a thought - I don't think you need that coin widget just to display the donation address. It requires javascript, links to third-party servers, etc. I don't even see the donation button unless I enable javascript in my browser. Just put the donation address there as plain text, and include an image of the QR code. Occam's razor.

yeah, I was thinking pretty much the same thing.... parsimony - the widget's getting the axe tonight! (is the QR code thing widely used?)

[behavioralneuroscience]

actually, I was thinking of removing the widget and just replacing it with a link to the address page at blockchain.info:
https://blockchain.info/address/1KxqK9w8uH8gvYNxDAg4FS8Soij2RwnhWE

does that seem reasonable? anything I should be concerned about?

thanks for all of your help and support!
Rich

[niko]

actually, I was thinking of removing the widget and just replacing it with a link to the address page at blockchain.info:
https://blockchain.info/address/1KxqK9w8uH8gvYNxDAg4FS8Soij2RwnhWE

does that seem reasonable? anything I should be concerned about?

thanks for all of your help and support!
Rich

Code:

<a href="https://blockchain.info/address/1KxqK9w8uH8gvYNxDAg4FS8Soij2RwnhWE">1KxqK9w8uH8gvYNxDAg4FS8Soij2RwnhWE</a>

sounds good. I can still copy/paste the address into my client, or I can follow the link to get the QR code if using a mobile device with camera.

[greyhawk]

Seems his work is mostly in brain damage by external factors. Considering the "brain damage by mining rig heat stroke" stories on here there should be a plethora of case subjects.

[niko]

Seems his work is mostly in brain damage by external factors. Considering the "brain damage by mining rig heat stroke" stories on here there should be a plethora of case subjects.

...or he can devise a way to use rodents in a maze to perform hashing calculations. With gates and everything.

Seriously, though, this is a small step, but very important: rather than having to rely on centralized authorities/markets to crowdfund science (petridish.org, sciencedonors.com...) , Bitcoin enables direct, easy, worldwide p2p fundraising. If Bitcoin continues to grow, and more goods and services become available directly in exchange for btc, this may become viable funding path for many. 

[greyhawk]

Seems his work is mostly in brain damage by external factors. Considering the "brain damage by mining rig heat stroke" stories on here there should be a plethora of case subjects.

...or he can devise a way to use rodents in a maze to perform hashing calculations. With gates and everything.

Nice. You could call it AsRat: Application Specific Rodent Activated Thingamabob

[behavioralneuroscience]

Nice. You could call it AsRat: Application Specific Rodent Activated Thingamabob

hahaha! if i get enough funding, I'll hire a postdoc to work on that!