Possibly the worst distribution of a grant in history. You gave a girl money to talk to people on the internet? Genius.
There are WAY dumber things than this that get huge grants all the time.
shareI also laughed at the idea of someone in 2013 researching how well we really know the random global netizens we video chat with. Maybe if this was 2005 or something when video chatting was still new and mysterious. As others mentioned though, grants can be given for stupid things.
shareI agree with the other posters. There have been dumber grants given out for even dumber things. I agree though, a grant isn't really necessary for what she was doing. Maybe a small grant to pay for extra storage and for the screen recording software and any other extra things that might've been necessary.
shareAlso she was a pretty girl in a chat roulette kind of thing. It would just be dudes creeping on her and that would be it.
http://werewolvesbeatingadeadhorse.blogspot.com/
The most interesting part of this thread was the 'dumb things that get grants' angle.
My favourite was a group of researchers spent months finding out how best to spread butter on toast to cover as much of the surface area as possible. When I read that I not only wondered what Uni would be stupid enough to even give money to find out something literally no one in history cared about, but also I wondered if the scientists hated themselves for studying for degrees to end up doing this.
I also came to the conclusion that evolution is clearly grinding to a half if 'studies' like this get green-lit. Can anyone top that 'study' for sheer mind-numbing, pointless idiocy?