
Questions raised about research by OpenAg Initiative at M.I.T. Media Lab - Anon84
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/business/media/mit-media-lab-food-computer.html
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ocschwar
MIT is probably the only land grant campus that has no agriculture department.

That much is understandable, since ag-schools need to do actual literal field
work on test plots, and that kind of acreage is hard to come by anywhere near
Cambridge. But it also means there was nobody on campus to sanity check this
OpenAg nonsense.

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bbanyc
The land grant act specified the aims for the funded schools would be
"agricultural and mechanical." I believe Massachusetts was the only state to
divide the funds between separate agricultural (UMass) and mechanical (MIT)
universities.

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xvilka
Too bad MIT MediaLab is under scrutiny now. I really hope their PubPub[1]
project will not die. It is the only open source[2] modern scientific
publishing platform, like Authorea or Overleaf.

[1] [https://www.pubpub.org/](https://www.pubpub.org/)

[2] [https://github.com/pubpub](https://github.com/pubpub)

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throwawawathrow
There's a tweet from some prominent agriculture researcher pointing out that
the fabled _Food Computer_ is in fact a rehash of agricultural techniques used
circa 2000. Forgot her name but the remark struck me.

There should be a periodic reminder for tech-minded people to reread
Ecclesiastes 1:9 every once in a while.

~~~
ninjin
For those of us less well-versed in the Bible:

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done
is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

~~~
booleandilemma
Sure, and self-driving cars are just horses all over again right? And ancient
Egyptians were already using tablets.

~~~
JetSpiegel
When Ancient Egyptian tablets had been carved, the Babylons/Hitites couldn't
remotely wipe them.

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nullc
In one set of articles OpenAg is a therenos grade scam with everything faked,
all plants purchased instead of grown, etc.

In another set of articles, they're in trouble because the nitrate levels in
their waste water are too high: [https://www.wbur.org/edify/2019/09/20/open-
agriculture-initi...](https://www.wbur.org/edify/2019/09/20/open-agriculture-
initiative-middleton-harper)

So which is it? A total sham or a polluter? These positions sound
incompatible.

~~~
defap
It's alleged that they made misleading claims, but it's not like the whole
operation was a complete fabrication. There were plants and machines and
whatnot, as can be seen in several articles on tis topic.

So it's plausible that they illegally dumped wastewater as part of whatever it
is they're doing that isn't working as advertised.

~~~
nullc
Fair enough, though at some point it starts becoming a bit hard to distinguish
between what OpenAg was doing and what a significant fraction of all demos do.

It's typical for some amount of 'rigging' to exist in demos, particularly
because Murphy's law has an ugly way of rearing its head. At a very minimum,
almost everyone goes over the demo many times and fix or avoid any issue that
causes a failure or questions that can't be easily and decisively answered.

I really did get the impression from the first articles I read on OpenAG that
the claim was that they were doing absolutely nothing and that it was 100%
faked. The article on the nitrates discharge was surprising to me in light of
that.

I'm perhaps a bit jaded also by seeing how much computer science / signal
processing academic publication is essentially fake. "The desktop version
doesn't really exist but we have a basement version doing stuff" seems like a
fairly mild level of deception compared to many other things I've encountered.

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tlb
One of the defining qualities of the media lab was smoke-and-mirror demos. I
thought everyone understood this and was OK with it. There's a place in the
world for concept art, to inspire people with what might be possible.

This is like "Questions Raised that TED Talks Oversimplify Complex Issues".

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bbanyc
Rigged demos are the Media Lab's main output, and have been since the start.
Shut it all down.

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mhalle
I'll repeat and extend what I've said in several other Media Lab posts. The
lab has over its lifetime been a place where the creative arts, computer
science, and popular culture have come together. Have there been demos of
ideas that didn't, or possibly even couldn't, work? Yes. Has the placed helped
shape the connected world we live in? Yes. Has real stuff come out of it? Yes.

Semour Papert and Mitchel Resnick are luminaries who helped define the
landscape of computation and play for kids. E Ink came out of the lab. Todd
Machover has been influential in shaping technology in music (Guitar Hero was
developed by some of his students). Professors Muriel Cooper and John Maeda
have had similar impact in technology and graphics arts and design.

Steve Benton's Spatial Imaging Group and its student diaspora had a huge
influence on the holography and 3D display world. We developed full color
reflection holography, the first holographic video system, and the first image
predistortion algorithms for light fields. Our 1 meter sq. hologram was at the
time the world's largest computer generated 3D display. Unfortunately, Steve
died pre-Google, and his contributions are not fully recognized.

I was at the lab a long time ago (from its opening in 1985 until 1997). What
made it unique at the time was breaking down the barriers between computation,
technology, creative arts, and popular culture in a way that seems so natural
now. On a campus where hundreds of other PhD students seemed to be working on
amazing research on very detailed topics, we were building pieces of the
future and demoing them daily to industry and lay people alike. That wasn't
considered hard science at a place like MIT, but the ultimate impact on
society was huge.

One other area of huge but unsung impact was speech technology. Chris
Schmandt's Speech Research Group group envisioned and developed audio
assistants that paved the way for Siri and Alexa. His students and research
have also helped shape an entire field.

As for Nicolas Negroponte, he started the lab understanding that corporations
were going to drive the computation and Internet revolution, while the rest of
MIT was primarily government/defense funded. I have no doubt that that insight
accelerated bringing technologies to market that we now consider ubiquitous.

The current funding controversy was long after my time, as is the current work
of the lab. There's just plenty of innovation in the history of the lab.

~~~
bbanyc
I was there during the '00s. I'll admit my hostile attitude is partly sour
grapes on my part, since I deservedly flunked out (otherwise known as getting
a master's). But nearly all the bad press the lab has been getting lately
rings true to me. Thinking back to how little of what I saw there turned into
any kind of practical advances or useful products in the years since...what
was the point? And of course I'm horrified at the source of so much of the
funding.

But then I've also been souring on the value of academia and research in
general. "Publish or perish" leads to a lot of garbage getting published, as
increasingly large amounts of money are thrown at increasingly small results.
There's just not enough scientific truth to go around. The Media Lab, being
particularly prominent and press-friendly, has this worse than many other
places, but it's a problem everywhere.

~~~
omegaworks
>There's just not enough scientific truth to go around.

There's plenty of truth, just not enough resources. It's learned behavior, the
scrounging and sensationalization, that has developed in response to larger
forces driving societal investment away from academia.

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rolltiide
Anyone wanna plagiarize the article so I can read it?

Both of my mobile browsers wont let me, and they also detect private mode

~~~
just_observing
Rough copy/paste

[https://pastebin.com/iCtipMin](https://pastebin.com/iCtipMin)

Apologies for any ads that got in.

