> The money didn’t influence his work, Mr. Heald said, and Google issued no conditions: “They said, ‘If you take this $20,000 and open up a doughnut shop with it—we’ll never give you any more money—but that’s fine.’”
At a glance, this seems like the funds are no-strings-attached. But when you think for a minute, you realize it's the exact opposite.
Google is saying that if they don't like what you do with the money, they won't give you any more — but if they do like what you do with it then you might get more. This incentivizes the professor to use the money to do things that Google would like, which is the opposite of no-strings-attached.
There technically are no strings attached to this money, but the possibility of future payments (which ranged from $5k to $400k) is a pretty big enticement.
But that's how most research funding works. The same is true if you get a government research grant - do what you want, but if they don't like your results, they are unlikely to fund you another round.
This reflects a lack of understanding about academic research. All researchers look for future funding from the same sources, and the same effect occurs. Oddly, given the small size of Google grants (compared to other sources) and the fact that it's rare to get them one after another, they really are very close to no-strings-attached grants.
Also, Google grants, oddly, are actually less intellectually restrictive than NSF grants. Sure, neither type of grant places any restriction, but there is actually more of a chilling effect of the NSF process than the Google one. The process Google uses for giving out grants is if there is a senior engineer or two who like your proposal, you get some funds (I'm simplifying a bit, but it's actually not much more complex than that). The NSF, on the other hand, is much more likely to consider things that I think most folks would agree shouldn't be considered, such as the political views of senior government officials.
I don't deny that Google has engineers more interested in certain problems than others, but the work that gets funded results in open research papers, so people are free to look at the work even if they don't work at Google. And that's better than Google just hiring the researchers -- as they and many other companies do -- and keeping the work for themselves.
But what Google does is as far as any sane donator/sponsor would go. We can't really expect them to keep sponsoring more doughnut shops after they find out their money is not being put into good use.
Of course it has a chilling effect on the researchers. If Google stops paying for your research you would have to find another source of money, that's not easy for everyone. So they will tend to write stuff in a Google-friendly fashion just to secure the money. That does not mean they will spin everything but it will surely influence the tone of their publications.
Given the rationalization the scientist makes, its probably wise to be skeptical of his judgements overall.
A direct quid pro quo / payment for services rendered is more honest than this model which is Google buying the professor vs. buying specific research. That's a serious ethical issue.
I know that the story is nonsense -- I am part of a research group that's gotten such grants before. This is basically a story aiming to confuse those who don't understand how research works. Google is funding work that aligns with what they do, but the grants they give are no-strings-attached and are tiny. (Government grants are much bigger.)
Sure, Google only funds things that are related to what they care about, but of course that's the case. And these days the NSF is partnering with Intel, VMware, and others to give out grants on things that align with those companies.
The WSJ has been sniffing around for this for a long time, and actually was trying to get professors' private email claiming that their email should be in the public domain. (I don't know if they succeeded.) I actually see this as part of the larger trend of trying to discredit research.
Edited to add: the story focuses on policy and law research, which is easier to attack, and I don't have any interest in defending that. But I'm willing to bet that the amount of grant money Google gives out for that work is probably tiny compared to funding they give for CS research. And it's the latter I'm familiar with.
Who funds a research should be written in bold on the first page together with their interest in the topic and any potential conflicts of interest.
The fact that the contributions were not disclosed is highly suspicious. Google is also not merely funding works that aligns with what they do, it's apparently "helped finance hundreds of research papers to DEFEND against regulatory challenges of its market dominance", which puts this in a completely different perspective. Care to comment on that?
"""In some years, Google officials in Washington compiled wish lists of academic papers that included working titles, abstracts and budgets for each proposed paper -- then they searched for willing authors, according to a former employee and a former Google lobbyist.
Google promotes the research papers to government officials, and sometimes pays travel expenses for professors to meet with congressional aides and administration officials, according to the former lobbyist. The research has been used, for instance, to deflect antitrust accusations against Google by the Federal Trade Commission in 2012, according to a letter Google attorneys sent to the FTC chairman and viewed by the Journal."""
WTF? They're basically lobbying and paying professors to deflect antitrust accusations and there are people here DEFENDING them?!
the point of view of a single person, even if insider, is not the same as a well researched work.
I could counter your anecdotal point of view with mine. around here, google hire professors without any ongoing research just to access potential future research from their students and have early access to grad students entering the market. the professors in question are full time employees that have their own office in the university campus.
It doesn't matter if there are no strings attached. As a scientist (and particularly, as a human being), you would feel some degree of gratefulness for the grant that Google gave you - This is enough to bias the research at least a tiny little bit... If only a couple of extra friendly words in the conclusion or executive summary.
After many years of stacking up those "almost perfect" bricks, the tower starts to lean to one side just a little.
Your comment has essentially zero content. If you have a genuine interest in making an argument rather than just an interest in making a post for people who agree with you before reading the article to upvote you, you should provide some actual points.
Google has an immense lobbying arm; the linked article discloses how Google funds a lot of public policy research that happens to agree with its positions. It's either disingenuous or naive to argue that professors won't be influenced to support Google's positions when it's unlikely Google will continue to fund researchers who start to disagree with them.
It would be rather frightening if we found out that tobacco companies had funded hundreds of studies into whether tobacco is healthy (oh, wait), regardless of whether or not the outcome were predetermined, just because any reasonable person can see that there will be a conflict of interest.
Why are we so willing to assume that one corporation whose only interest is profit is so different from another?
To be fair, similar tactics are standard practice in many non-tech fields: pharmaceuticals, law, and agronomy to name a few. What's perhaps different here is that researchers may not be accustomed to disclosing financial support that is only weakly connected to the research in question.
Sure. Nobody's saying that Google's invented a new strategy here. We've all known Phillip Morris, Monsanto, and the like to do this, but generally such companies have been derided for the behavior. People are generally hesitant to group Google in the same class of corporate actor.
It's difficult to understand the purpose of your comment except as a Google apology, which I'm sure they can do fine without, seeing that they're a huge corporation paying a lot of money to have the friendly ear of government representatives.
Yes, there's a lot of things going wrong in the world. Today we discuss Google, tomorrow Microsoft, etc. There's enough for everybody.
Hi folks - below is an article I read recently which opened my eyes to the risks of corporate funded research. Companies have long funded research to back their interests that can have serious ramifications on public safety and use of public resources.
Well, that is the alternative? Forbidding privately-funded research? Submitting it to gigantic bureaucratic committees?
The only proposal I back is forcing publicly-funded researchers to disclose all gifts and grants, similarly to public officials, but even that is a massive bureaucratic ordeal.
Research is not a regulated environment, and it should not be one.
> Look, I’m stupid, all right? I’m not some brilliant person. I’m a little child. You know the emperor’s new clothes? I can see the naked emperor, just because I’m a little child-minded person. I’m not smart. I mean, good scientists are like that. They have the minds of children, to see through all this façade of all this other stuff that they know is stupid nonsense. They just don’t see it the way other people see it.
I for one indeed have never heard to of him before, and I'll have to learn more; and that on top of the article and the subject matter of it being vitally important! Thanks again.
Because some groups have a vested interest (no pun intended) in building and protecting the notion that professors, scientists, and researchers* are angels without financial conflicts, personal biases, or even emotions. If people realize that they're all humans with flaws just like the rest of us, people might stop and think instead of blindly accepting their conclusions as Truth.
* Except for the professors, scientists, and researchers funded by those other guys, they're malicious, biased liars trying to destroy the world.
This kind of dismissal is at best unhelpful and at worst even suspicious. Why does it bother you that people discuss this topic? Science influences policy and influences our behaviour and well-being, of course we want to know when it's biased.
The fact that it's not "new" is irrelevant. A lot of bad things are happening and sometimes we forget about a particular bad thing. Some of us genuinely don't know.
Several papers argued that Google’s search engine should be allowed to link to books and other intellectual property that authors and publishers say should be paid for—a group that includes News Corp, which owns the Journal. News Corp formally complained to European regulators about Google’s handling of news articles in search results.
Yeah.
And all those graphs showing how big Google is have nothing to do with the story. News Corp wants an anti-trust investigation into Google in the US too.
History repeats. This was a tactic by Microsoft in the old MS vs. Mac days. They gave 'no strings' funding to top tier uni professors with the tacit expectation everything was to be PC based and to support MS in general.
A company using the skyhigh profits it makes from it's market dominance to fund academic research arguing that it doesn't abuse it's market dominance? Perfect.
If you're looking for arguments for antitrust in this area beyond consumer welfare you've found them. The concentrated wealth produced by big monopolistic firms has a gravity field of it's own, distorting public information and opinion.
Ridiculous! This is how ALL academic funding works. The headline might as well read NSF/NIH is paying professors for propagating "views". Given that Murdoch owns WSJ, fundamental science like evolution and global warming morph into "views", not facts/axioms.
This is nothing new. Happens with sugar lobby, happened with big tobacco and happens on climate change etc...
These are questions whose context depends on how you frame the debate. Those who frame it get to decide the playground. Helps too if you have the regulators in the same framework as well.
By framing one can argue that google is a monopoly vs it's a small player in global advertising etc...
Vs Facebook etc.. same thing with net neutrality.
I think the Europeans are probably further ahead of the us on asking the right questions.
We seem to have fallen backwards where foreign power influence on our elections is reframed away.
dont be evil. i remember that. i remember when the internet was a promise....a promise to level the playing field. to give ordinary people something they never had. access. a new space. a new frontier. where we would build a better world, better than the one we came from. without worries about corrupt power hierarchies, without endless greed, without pointless cruelty. we were there to make something. to build. to create. to make this new world beautiful, a better version of ourselves. how far we have fallen. how much we have forgotten, forgotten where we came from or why we trekked here. they reached us after all, never more than a deal away, their sickness contagious, we all caught it, we are all guilty of it now. no more new world. just new greed. new corruption. new power hierarchies.
Sadly, this has been a known fact for a long time, and it never gets a lot of attention. Joshua Wright, the former FTC Commissioner, was one of the professors previously paid to write 'academic studies' for Google.
[+] [-] gnicholas|8 years ago|reply
At a glance, this seems like the funds are no-strings-attached. But when you think for a minute, you realize it's the exact opposite.
Google is saying that if they don't like what you do with the money, they won't give you any more — but if they do like what you do with it then you might get more. This incentivizes the professor to use the money to do things that Google would like, which is the opposite of no-strings-attached.
There technically are no strings attached to this money, but the possibility of future payments (which ranged from $5k to $400k) is a pretty big enticement.
[+] [-] __bjoernd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sapote|8 years ago|reply
Also, Google grants, oddly, are actually less intellectually restrictive than NSF grants. Sure, neither type of grant places any restriction, but there is actually more of a chilling effect of the NSF process than the Google one. The process Google uses for giving out grants is if there is a senior engineer or two who like your proposal, you get some funds (I'm simplifying a bit, but it's actually not much more complex than that). The NSF, on the other hand, is much more likely to consider things that I think most folks would agree shouldn't be considered, such as the political views of senior government officials.
I don't deny that Google has engineers more interested in certain problems than others, but the work that gets funded results in open research papers, so people are free to look at the work even if they don't work at Google. And that's better than Google just hiring the researchers -- as they and many other companies do -- and keeping the work for themselves.
[+] [-] valas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chplushsieh|8 years ago|reply
But what Google does is as far as any sane donator/sponsor would go. We can't really expect them to keep sponsoring more doughnut shops after they find out their money is not being put into good use.
[+] [-] dna_polymerase|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
A direct quid pro quo / payment for services rendered is more honest than this model which is Google buying the professor vs. buying specific research. That's a serious ethical issue.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sapote|8 years ago|reply
Sure, Google only funds things that are related to what they care about, but of course that's the case. And these days the NSF is partnering with Intel, VMware, and others to give out grants on things that align with those companies.
The WSJ has been sniffing around for this for a long time, and actually was trying to get professors' private email claiming that their email should be in the public domain. (I don't know if they succeeded.) I actually see this as part of the larger trend of trying to discredit research.
Edited to add: the story focuses on policy and law research, which is easier to attack, and I don't have any interest in defending that. But I'm willing to bet that the amount of grant money Google gives out for that work is probably tiny compared to funding they give for CS research. And it's the latter I'm familiar with.
[+] [-] blub|8 years ago|reply
The fact that the contributions were not disclosed is highly suspicious. Google is also not merely funding works that aligns with what they do, it's apparently "helped finance hundreds of research papers to DEFEND against regulatory challenges of its market dominance", which puts this in a completely different perspective. Care to comment on that?
I found another quote which is frankly mind-boggling (http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/07/11/paying-profes...):
"""In some years, Google officials in Washington compiled wish lists of academic papers that included working titles, abstracts and budgets for each proposed paper -- then they searched for willing authors, according to a former employee and a former Google lobbyist.
Google promotes the research papers to government officials, and sometimes pays travel expenses for professors to meet with congressional aides and administration officials, according to the former lobbyist. The research has been used, for instance, to deflect antitrust accusations against Google by the Federal Trade Commission in 2012, according to a letter Google attorneys sent to the FTC chairman and viewed by the Journal."""
WTF? They're basically lobbying and paying professors to deflect antitrust accusations and there are people here DEFENDING them?!
[+] [-] gcb0|8 years ago|reply
I could counter your anecdotal point of view with mine. around here, google hire professors without any ongoing research just to access potential future research from their students and have early access to grad students entering the market. the professors in question are full time employees that have their own office in the university campus.
[+] [-] jondubois|8 years ago|reply
After many years of stacking up those "almost perfect" bricks, the tower starts to lean to one side just a little.
[+] [-] jonathanyc|8 years ago|reply
Google has an immense lobbying arm; the linked article discloses how Google funds a lot of public policy research that happens to agree with its positions. It's either disingenuous or naive to argue that professors won't be influenced to support Google's positions when it's unlikely Google will continue to fund researchers who start to disagree with them.
It would be rather frightening if we found out that tobacco companies had funded hundreds of studies into whether tobacco is healthy (oh, wait), regardless of whether or not the outcome were predetermined, just because any reasonable person can see that there will be a conflict of interest.
Why are we so willing to assume that one corporation whose only interest is profit is so different from another?
[+] [-] mlinksva|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euyyn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] surveilmebro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blub|8 years ago|reply
Yes, there's a lot of things going wrong in the world. Today we discuss Google, tomorrow Microsoft, etc. There's enough for everybody.
[+] [-] amoorthy|8 years ago|reply
Long read but enjoyable and informative.
[1]: The Most Important Scientist You've Never Heard Of: http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scienti...
[+] [-] ucaetano|8 years ago|reply
The only proposal I back is forcing publicly-funded researchers to disclose all gifts and grants, similarly to public officials, but even that is a massive bureaucratic ordeal.
Research is not a regulated environment, and it should not be one.
[+] [-] thinkfurther|8 years ago|reply
(here's the bit I was looking for)
> Look, I’m stupid, all right? I’m not some brilliant person. I’m a little child. You know the emperor’s new clothes? I can see the naked emperor, just because I’m a little child-minded person. I’m not smart. I mean, good scientists are like that. They have the minds of children, to see through all this façade of all this other stuff that they know is stupid nonsense. They just don’t see it the way other people see it.
I for one indeed have never heard to of him before, and I'll have to learn more; and that on top of the article and the subject matter of it being vitally important! Thanks again.
[+] [-] ucaetano|8 years ago|reply
Why is this even news? Is there a single for-profit company that funds research contrary to the company's interests?
[+] [-] caseysoftware|8 years ago|reply
* Except for the professors, scientists, and researchers funded by those other guys, they're malicious, biased liars trying to destroy the world.
[+] [-] blub|8 years ago|reply
The fact that it's not "new" is irrelevant. A lot of bad things are happening and sometimes we forget about a particular bad thing. Some of us genuinely don't know.
[+] [-] jgalt212|8 years ago|reply
And by not much, if you consider the stakes low for sustaining a monopoly as long as possible.
[+] [-] NN88|8 years ago|reply
http://archive.is/8pkAH
[+] [-] nl|8 years ago|reply
Yeah.
And all those graphs showing how big Google is have nothing to do with the story. News Corp wants an anti-trust investigation into Google in the US too.
[+] [-] Gustomaximus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frgtpsswrdlame|8 years ago|reply
If you're looking for arguments for antitrust in this area beyond consumer welfare you've found them. The concentrated wealth produced by big monopolistic firms has a gravity field of it's own, distorting public information and opinion.
[+] [-] mankash666|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|8 years ago|reply
These are questions whose context depends on how you frame the debate. Those who frame it get to decide the playground. Helps too if you have the regulators in the same framework as well.
By framing one can argue that google is a monopoly vs it's a small player in global advertising etc... Vs Facebook etc.. same thing with net neutrality.
I think the Europeans are probably further ahead of the us on asking the right questions.
We seem to have fallen backwards where foreign power influence on our elections is reframed away.
[+] [-] flyovercow|8 years ago|reply
internet is dead. long live internet.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gcb0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrickyRick|8 years ago|reply