Smells of a pathetic attempt to raise a grant to me.
Smells of proper scientific research to me. You, know, all that tedious business of examining the current facts, identifying a question, formulating a hypothesis, making predictions, testing those predictions, reviewing the theory......
All the tech things we buy and use today started off as an unproven idea, often without any obvious commercial application, and probably followed on from a whole series of research ideas that came to little or nothing. Admittedly this won't be appearing in a battery for a decade, but so what? Are we to abandon all R&D that doesn't look likely to produce bankable benefits in three years?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
