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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: Suggestions / Feedback
Thread: WCG's ethical guidelines for volunteer DC |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 139
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twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2129 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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If a research group using WCG wants to have undisclosed commercial partners who are helping fund their research, that's their call to make, not ours. I give up. I feel I've done my bit to raise awareness regarding this issue, but only WCG can do anything about it, so I doubt anything will change. Until they change the rules and make all researchers sign a "code of ethics and best conduct"-letter, where the researchers have to list all their employers during the past 24 months, current and former, the abuse will continue. Silently and out of sight. New people will start crunching, only to discovers years later that WCG's nonprofit promise was a hollow one. By then they'll be so heavily invested into this, with many thousands of dollars paid in computer related energy bills, that they'll most likely -- like many here already have -- turn to denial, criticizing anyone daring to question anything regarding the projects. Instead they'll most likely complain about nonessential matters, such as, "why do we still use this old forum software?". Here I am, trying to express an honest opinion while dodging the stones being thrown at me by the dogmatic WCG-wahhabists. Many of them have the same personality as the people who followed Jim Jones into the jungle. Others, the more moderate ones -- the ones who are still only reading this thread and not yet trying to sabotage it -- are the ones who cherished, in awe and silence, every word uttered by the late high priest of gadgets, Steve Jobs. So I'll better stop before this groups also begins to throw stones at me. Happy crunching! Your comments are pretty funny coming from someone with an obvious Messiah complex. You seem to think that anyone who disagrees with you must have some emotional, irrational reason for doing so rather than simply observing the obvious - most of us understand our place in the greater scheme of things. You seem to find the idea of cooperation between business and academia reprehensible. But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that this is how most advances happen. Govts simply do not provide enough funding to do all of the basic research needed to advance the state of human knowledge. If you knew anything at all about the reality of research in this or any other country you would realize that. Obviously you don't. Having business work with academia necessarily involves various levels of compromise. You can b*tch about that all you want but it doesn't change the facts. And from my personal point of view, if leveraging WCG allows researchers to obtain the funding that they need to push our knowledge forward, I'm OK with that. You want to paint the people here as sheeple that don't understand what's happening or why. However I would suggest that you're the one that needs to step back and try another perspective. I could now sit here and do some armchair psychoanalysis of you too, but it would be as pointless an exercise as your's has been.   [Edit 1 times, last edit by twilyth at Sep 20, 2015 12:32:20 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
@cowtipperbs
----------------------------------------The names I mentioned in the thread you're linking to are unrelated to the comments I've made in this thread. @twilyth When I wrote personality I really meant to write mindset. Mindsets can be changed, personalities can't. [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Sep 24, 2015 1:56:46 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Don't blame me for making this thread a joke - you started it with this...
You're still stuck in the artificial construct you call reality, completely ignoring everything I've written in my previous comments, especially the last one about the real world where real people live. ... all you do there is concluding, without any merits I might add, that everything I've written is nonsense. I would have posted this earlier, but I was at a beer festival yesterday and didn't make it home. I'm afraid that I was very, very drunk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cwyq3XWeHE |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Thank you IBM for hosting WCG Thank you IBM for hosting WCG |
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KLiK
Master Cruncher Croatia Joined: Nov 13, 2006 Post Count: 3108 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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The CEP2 data is made available to anyone in their online database here... https://cepdb.molecularspace.org/ The database is not updated in real time. This gives some OLED companies ample time to patent molecules ahead of corporations that don't have employees working inside the project or cooperating with the project, and that's OK, as long as the donors are aware of it. This is not the case today. I'm here to contribute to the sum of human knowledge that anyone can then use to create solutions to the world's problems. I too, but I still want transparency. I don't know why this is even debated -- or not. WCG, who is the only one able to disinfect the wound, is silent. Transparency is morally self-evident, especially when you're soliciting people for money, which is what WCG is doing when they're asking us to donate computer time and in the process ending up having to pay higher energy bills. I want to donate, but not to anybody. Let me explain. If my only concern was how to "contribute to the sum of human knowledge", I could just as well have given the money directly to an OLED company, and let them use it to pay their electric bills when their high performance computers crunch these algorithms. For obvious reasons this approach doesn't appeal to me. Why, because this approach doesn't let anyone "create solutions to the world's problems". This is what happens when some pro-profit corporations -- and all healthy corporations are entirely motivated by greed, or they wouldn't be financially healthy -- get access to pre-released data. They lock the knowledge into a proprietary solution with the sole purpose of extracting maximum financial return, as opposed to the nonprofit goal, which is to extract maximum social return. I know that having the researchers signing a "code of ethics and best conduct"-letter wont prevent leaks, but it will mitigate the problem and we will be donating our money in a more transparent manner. How can that be wrong? WCG? IBM? well I've got a problem with this! why? I don't mind that all these results get published "for all of human kind"...but if some company, like LG corp here, has an "unfair disadvantage" - than whole donoring is questionable...it just gives them FREE research resources! sorry, I'm not for that! all these molecules are FREE & not for patenting... what LG corp, or any other company, can patent is: production of those molecules & applying them on a thin film! so their "own knowledge, research & technology" - not these molecules... I just wander what would FTC would think of IBM, Harward university & LG corp in this engagement?  |
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KLiK
Master Cruncher Croatia Joined: Nov 13, 2006 Post Count: 3108 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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example what we don't want in future to happen is here:
----------------------------------------http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ameri...50-per-pill-10511690.html  |
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noderaser
Senior Cruncher United States Joined: Jun 6, 2006 Post Count: 297 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I've been criticized for this, even though it's obvious people are being misled by WCG -- even longtime crunchers have not been aware of the intricate web commercial interest groups have spun around these projects. Do you have evidence of this? You've made a number of claims about the researchers and their work, but it seems you want other people to do the footwork for you, to verify or disprove these statements. |
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KLiK
Master Cruncher Croatia Joined: Nov 13, 2006 Post Count: 3108 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I've been criticized for this, even though it's obvious people are being misled by WCG -- even longtime crunchers have not been aware of the intricate web commercial interest groups have spun around these projects. Do you have evidence of this? You've made a number of claims about the researchers and their work, but it seems you want other people to do the footwork for you, to verify or disprove these statements. FA@h research, main prof. Arthur J. Olson Ph.D.: - affiliations on board members: http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/priv...ship.asp?personId=6224009 - Sapient Discovery, LLC - link: http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/priv...ot.asp?privcapId=52902206 Sapient Discovery, LLC, a biotechnology company, provides drug discovery services. It offers Genes To Leads suite of services for accelerating drug discovery, such as DynaPharm generation, virtual screening, drug-like filtering, protein-protein interactions, and protein-protein docking. The company also provides structural biology services, including protein engineering, cloning and expression, protein purification, protein production services, and X-ray crystallography services. In addition, it offers structural bioinformatics services, such as target anti-target analysis, annotations, structure based research, protein-ligand interactions, structure analysis, 3D data mining, sequence analysis, and sequence-structure relationships. Further, the company provides lead optimization services, which include protein informatics, virtual library design, structure activity relationship development, and computational prediction of ADMET parameters. Furthermore, it offers custom services, such as structure determination services; X-ray crystallographic structure determination for proteins, protein-ligands, and protein-protein complexes; fragment-based screening; and protein re-design services. Sapient Discovery, LLC was founded in 2006 and is based in San Diego, California. Same thing we do here on WCG! Would you want to search others on Google?  ---------------------------------------- [Edit 1 times, last edit by KLiK at Sep 23, 2015 6:23:16 AM] |
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twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2129 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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So what is your point - EXACTLY. Any idiot can play a game of 6 degrees of separation and make some bogus connection between Mother Theresa and Adolf Hitler. This is like grammar school playtime.
----------------------------------------SPECIFICALLY, what do you think is going on "behind the scenes" with the Fight Aids project? If the best you can do is give us a 'knowing smirk' while showing us that various projects have 'some association' with commercial interests, you're wasting our time. We already know such associations exist, so tell us something we DON'T know instead of trying to present the same bulls*** argument a dozen different ways. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
KLiK, which page are you trying to link to in the first Bloomberg link? If true, I agree, this is ended cause for yet more concern. I wonder how much more lays hidden under the surface, invisible to the volunteer crunchers? No wonder WCG doesn't want to force the researchers to publicly list all their commercial links, even though they easily could have done so. The problem seems to be endemic. We have barely scratched the surface and we can already determine the infection is widespread. Only WCG and IBM know how deep it goes.
I'm not paying any attention to the few people in this thread who only want to bury the irregularities in a discussion about details. Lawyers -- even former lawyers, such as Twilyth -- like these sort of tricks, where a serious problem is swamped in a discussion about comma placement. Transparency doesn't have to be motivated, unless you have something to hide -- especially when you're asking people to donate their money, which is what we are being asked to do when we spend money on computer related electricity bills. We -- a very small minority of crunchers -- suspect the researchers have commercial links, yes. The overwhelming majority of crunchers pretty much assume WCG weeds out these type of connections. They don't. We don't know how many commercial links there are and what kind of links. How intricate is the web and which corporations have spun it? WCG is still silent on the matter. However, it's important to point out that none of these researcher or corporations have done anything illegal. They haven't even done anything immoral, since WCG has absolutely no requirements for these type of disclosures. They don't owe us anything. WCG does. I don't think WCG has done enough to inform the would-be crunchers of the commercial involvements in these projects. If at all. |
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