Over at the Singularity Institute, a new fundraising campaign, the "2010 Research Challenge" has been launched this Christmas:

Offering unusually good philanthropic returns — meaning greater odds of a positive Singularity and lesser odds of human extinction — the Singularity Institute has launched a new challenge campaign. The sponsors, Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik, have generously put up $100,000 of matching funds, so that every donation you make until February 28th will be matched dollar for dollar. If the campaign is successful, it will raise a full $200,000 to fund SIAI's 2010 activities.

—this seems like a great opportunity to donate to the Singularity Institute!

On the Grant Proposals section, we see a whole host of valuable academic papers proposed, including

• Containing Superintelligence: Feasibility and Strategies
• The Coherence of Human Goals
• Machine Ethics and Superintelligence
• Anthropic Reasoning and Decision Theory: What We Don't Know, and Why It Matters

Clearly these are important topics, and overwhelmingly deserve to be funded. Definitely worth a look.