1) Government/taxes: with the dog-eat-dog, every man for himself, taxes-are-theft-and “I don’t want them going to the ‘undeserving’” culture not going anywhere anytime soon, despite the continuing efforts or many, this one cannot be counted on. Changing this culture will likely take many decades of effort. DARPA remains the one bright spot here (even if obliquely) as blue-sky, big money projects can still happen without the ROI-demanders sitting on its shoulder all the time. We should always remember that the balanced-books, transparent-everything, everyone-is-accountable culture is a double edged sword; it protects investors and the public, but it also means that big chances can not or will not be taken due to the possibility of people being taken off the project/fired/ridiculed for being “financially irresponsible.” There’s no easy answer to this one either, as there’s a fundamental conflict of values, perceived needs, and perfectly valid worries about corruption/fraud/waste.

2) Large, well-heeled companies. Right now, these probably offer our best hope for progress. The Googles and such of the world have massive cash holdings; an ostensible desire to make technological/scientific progress; a desire by its leaders to truly make their mark; and a company culture that allows significant freedom. The self-driving car and Google Glasses are two recent prominent examples. Of course, not every company has the right combination of money and culture to make this happen, but this is all we’ve really have at the moment.

3) The people directly. Unfortunately, too likely difficult to make a dent in the needs of scientific researchers and their projects. With more people every more strapped for cash (if they even still have a job), along with a bewildering array of possible choices of types of research and/or institutions to support, and an often fad-driven set of behaviors, I don’t think there’s much hope here either. Even if you could get people focused with a Kickstarter-for-science (e.g., petridish.org) the amounts needed for truly large projects that help humanity (truly long-term life extension, difficult disease research, the works) just aren’t likely to be raised. I would love be proven wrong here, but as interesting as some of the projects that get funded are (and I hope they succeed – I’m happy to hear about the evolution of cooperation in vampire bats) it’s not enough to tackle the problems and questions.

In the US and many other parts of the world have become steeped in a short-termist, fastest ROI culture which is going to be difficult to dislodge. We should also be thinking about /why/ this is. Why are we short-termist? Part of it is the zeitgeist – the world is changing more quickly than some/many are able to process; growing fears about the future, justified or not; the fear that it may just all end tomorrow – so why bother making long term investments in anything? You could even think of it as a kind of renewed undercurrent of subconscious eschatological feeling running through societies. Until we can address these issues, I think that the underfunding of science will continue. We should hope that Google and its ilk can make real progress in the interim, while trying to change the culture that leads to this (I hold out no hope whatsoever for improvements through legislation any time in the near-to-medium term.)

The CGR have been used to classify genomes between species : use a probabilistic automata [2], compute an euclidian distance or a principal component analysis [3], use a neural network (cf. your links) or whatever classifying method you want.

My feeling is that the CGR can be usefull to produce beautiful pictures and perhaps to illustrate some result. But everything you can do with CGR can be done without CGR (CGR is just a way to represent word frequencies and organize them in a 2d square). For example, suffix arrays are a far more efficient method to compute those frequencies.

If you have any question about my repport [2], ask me

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language
[2] ftp://ftp.irisa.fr/local/caps/DEPOTS/RapportsStages2006/Rapport_Henin_Thibaut.pdf
[3] http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/10/1391.full.pdf

beautiful

Brilliant. And the insight on images? Agree completely.

Mo.

I came across this blog of yours and was very impressed by the quality of your writing and choice of interesting subjects. I have written up a short profile on my own blog:

http://neurowhoa.blogspot.com/2010/03/introducing-petri-dish-talk.html