Torn between his national duties in Ottawa and his young family in Kingston, Ted Hsu is an accomplished yet humble scientist, who is determined to use his academic background and professional expertise to make a positive difference both in the House of Commons, and on the national discourse regarding scientific research and development.

Dr. Hsu would like to see discussions on national policy for Science and Technology that transcend partisanship and political divide. He is hoping to engage his colleagues in the other political parties in a constructive debate about research and innovation. He is very precise, analytical, and constructive in his understanding of the various issues at hand. “Some cuts/reallocations are more significant and need to be dealt with more urgently than others …”

In his –worth listening to– CBC interview, Gary Goodyear was very respectful of research scientists and their role in society, whether in Canada or elsewhere in the world. He was not dismissive of their  concerns. “I personally don’t like to see our scientists worried about their next level of funding,” Goodyear said. “We are trying to make sure that our scientists have the ability to do the best quality of work with the best equipment.”

He had none of the “shpeel” about scientists having to pay their fair share in the “government’s effort to return to balanced budgets”. To the contrary, he stressed that “this government doesn’t see Science and Technology spending as a cost, we see it as  an investment in job creation and our economic stability.” This is quite remarkable and commendable.

Yes, Mr. Goodyear did try to change the subject on some of the questions, by repeating that the Government had actually increased its support for R&D. This is true over all, but the problem here is about a deliberate and consistent pattern of re-allocating funding away from certain programs and not about cuts.

Goodyear also mentioned that –just like what Government did lately with its support for business oriented research– this year’s budget decision for the Tri-council was mostly a consolidation exercise because there are too many redundantly similar funding programs. He said that he would like to see “scientists spend their valuable time doing research and not filling applications and writing proposals.” Goodyear was obviously referring to the Jenkins panel, which spent a whole year consulting and researching before recommending a serious consolidation of many of the 70+ government programs to support business-oriented R&D. What is puzzling here is that it was this consolidation (à la Jenkins), which was expected to be announced in Budget 2012, and not a consolidation of programs supporting university research, which are yet to be independently reviewed.

Two other comments by Goodyear also caught my attention.

He did say that they are looking for other ways to replace or compensate for the lost funding for RTI, one of them being through the “indirect costs of research”. It would be interesting to know whether Government is actually considering an increase in their support of indirect costs for universities, with an expectation that the latter would pick up the tap on instrumentation and equipment for their researchers, or that they simply expect the universities to use their current indirect cost allocation to cover for the loss of programs such as RTI.

The other point is his assertion that what is happening now is simply “a moratorium for one year as we seek counsel from the scientific community.” It was certainly the first time that such a narrative has been used ever since the budget was announced. I guess it didn’t seem necessary then, in view of the avalanche of budget-praising press releases that emanated from universities’ PR offices.

Whether credit should be given to David Bryce and his scientists colleagues for this welcome announcement by Goodyear remains to be seen. More important is whether Canada’s scientific community will use such a golden opportunity to make itself heard. After all, there is still $74-million in the pipeline of cuts that are planned for the Tri-council in 2013-15.

“Dr. Hsu has been made aware of your blog and is interested in knowing your thoughts on the federal government’s science and technology policy.”

“It can’t be. They promised us, at the highest level of government, that there will be no cut in the funding for basic research.” That was a senior university administrator replying to scientists’ concerns as to the true effect of Budget 2012 on advanced research, but also about the self-congratulatory press releases by most universities, on the heels of a questionable one by the AUCC. And that was before we got to know the extent of the cuts undertaken by the NSERC leadership, not long after their own cheery press release, which gave no hint of the  impending  cuts.

The media did not pick up on the story until a letter initiated by Ottawa Chemist, David Bryce, started making the rounds. We reported on its draft version here. It was eventually signed by 47 senior scientists from across Canada, many of them lead and manage research laboratories and facilities funded by the –soon to be terminated– MRS program. The CBC promises to have (around 4:45 pm) a response from Gary Goodyear, the Minister of State for Science and Technology.

There was Margaret Munro’s article in the Vancouver Sun, “Federal cuts called a ‘disaster’ for Canadian science.”  The Edmonton Journal followed with “Federal funding cuts threaten Arctic research: scientists”.  Terry Myers wrote about the impact of the cuts on the Canadian Neutron Beam Centre (CNBC), which is operated by the National Research Council (NRC) at Chalk River. Zachary Jacobi, writing for the “Waterloo Engineering Coop Students”, speculates on the long term effect of such cuts on Canada’s universities.

“Allow me to take a little bit of time to talk about basic research, what it is and why it is important, because I do not know if it has ever been explained in detail in this House by somebody who has spent many years working on it.” That was MP Ted Hsu last week in the House of Commons.

Hsu was followed by Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC. “When I saw $67 million in the budget for the National Research Council, I was pleased. However, when I saw it was specifically required under the terms of the budget to be “business-led and industry-relevant”, I asked myself what Albert Einstein would have done with that. The greatest inventions of the modern era have been made by brilliant minds operating unfettered. In other words, it was basic research with an element of serendipity, not trying to get people to make a better widget and confine the human brain to the most base commercial elements. Would my hon. colleague (G. Goodyear) agree that is where the best inventions have been found?”

Wow! Two MPs speaking up for “basic research” in the House of Commons. That is surely something to celebrate. But our colleagues in the UK are far ahead of us. They have delivered today a coffin (picture above) to 10 Downing Street to protest about “the death of British science”. They have been having major issues with the new ways of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which is NSERC’s counterpart in the UK.

In response, the EPSRC tried to imply that the protestors are unrepresentative by firing off the following tweet: “Proportion of attendees (85) to whole EPSRC community of applicants (29,443) = 0.28%.”

What an unintended lesson for frontline researchers everywhere to speak up “en masse”!

We all know the story by now. The federal government reduced the Tri-council operating budget by $37-million in each of the next three years. On the other hand, each council was  allowed to keep their piece of the 2012-13 projected cut, as long as they re-allocate it to “partnership” programs. At least 2 out of the 3 Council presidents issued self-congratulatory press releases. The AUCC is happy. University presidents are happy and VP-Research across the country were asked to be happy. A re-allocation surely beats a cut, but what if NSERC is proceeding to re-allocate more than the government decreed $15-million away from basic research and advanced academic training?

NSERC has revealed to the VP-Rs its plan for dealing with the government mandated re-allocation: 1) Terminate the MRS and the RTI programs; 2) Cut the administrative cost by 10%; 3) Share with the 2 other councils a 28% cut to the NCE program.

Then came the following comment from a co-chair of one of the Evaluation Groups. “It is particularly helpful to keep the numbers in mind. The most recent “Facts and Figures” on NSERC’s web site tell us that in 2010-2011 NSERC spent the following: $326.2M Discovery Grants (of which $309.0M is devoted to individual grants), $31.4M on Research Tools and Instruments (RTI), and $35.2M on Major Resources Support (MRS). I read this as a cut of more than 20% in the support for basic research in Canada. This is certainly nothing to crow about. “Disaster” is the operative word here.”

There is definitely something to ponder here. Indeed, even if one factors in that some of the MRS-funded projects (around $5M?) will not be discontinued but simply transfered to other Discovery envelopes, the re-allocated amounts are still high: almost $60M, which amply exceeds the government imposed $45 M$ target in cuts/reallocations over the next 3 years.

But let’s keep in mind that, even though the termination of the RTI program could free up cash immediately (beginning next year), the cuts in the MRS program will have to be phased out over a number of years depending on the duration of the grants, which are already in the pipeline. Still, take a look at the slopes in the following graph starting in the year 2005-06, then include (I was too lazy to do it) an additional $60M cut from the Discovery program over the next 3-4 years. and decide for yourself on where support for basic research is heading.

But the story doesn’t end here. The PDF and doctoral scholarships, which were supposed to be as “protected” as the Discovery grants, are both down about 25% even compared to last year’s already deeply gutted program. Only 98 PDFs out of 1254 applications were awarded this year, which corresponds to an 8% success rate.

Actually, in response to one of our posts, NSERC claimed last year that “if the budget remains stable, NSERC would expect the total number of PDFs supported in a given year to also remain stable”. This should have meant that they were aiming to support approximately 400 (133+264) PDF’s in total each year. It looks however that they are now supporting at most 230 (and perhaps less in view of those from last year who are no longer holding their award).

So what happened then to the 2012 federal budget statement committing that “programming in support of basic research, student scholarships, and industry-related research initiatives and collaborations are preserved”? The answer lies in what NSERC also wrote last year to “Piece of Mind”.  “Some reassignment has taken place to manage pressures within the S&F suite of programs – for instance, increasing the funding available for Industrial Postgraduate Scholarships and the CREATE  program.” This was also re-iterated in the preamble to the 2012 statistics.

In other words, NSERC has dramatically reduced the number of academic postdoctoral fellowships and doctoral scholarships (by about 170 PDF’s and 217 doctoral students) in order to fund more “Industrial Postgraduate Scholarships,” and more HQPs in the “CREATE program”, which by the way has now added industrial opportunities as of 2012. So technically, the total number of fellowships/scholarships may have been preserved, but if this is not another re-allocation away from advanced and basic academic research, what is?

Still, it is surprising that the “People” graph above has been declining since 2008-09, in spite of the addition of the CERCs, the Bantings and the Vaniers.

According to the following comment sent recently to “Piece of Mind” by one of Canada’s depressingly dispirited researchers, the bleeding is not only real but also widely accepted, even by those who are supposed to protect the integrity of academic research.“What I’ve heard more than once from VP-research and associate Deans (research) when asked about the erosion of basic research funding is that we better stop complaining and change the research that we do.”

Dear colleague: You obviously deserve better leadership at your institution, but I am more interested in knowing what was your own reaction to such a “door-matic” attitude.

James H. Simons, is well known to the mathematical, physical and computational sciences communities, but also to those who are doing research on Autism. He has already donated more than $150-million to Stony Brook University alone, including a huge contribution to its Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. He has also donated to UC-Berkeley and MIT, but also to the Mathematical Science Research Institute (MSRI), to Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), and even to the Beirut-based Center for Advanced Mathematical Sciences (CAMS) –the latter for the establishment of the Michael Attiyah Chair.

Jim and Marilyn Simons had established and endowed the Simons Foundation with “a mission to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences”. The Foundation “sponsors a range of programs that aim to promote a deeper understanding of our world.” In 2006, he recruited my good friend and my accomplice in the founding of the Banff International Research Station, David Eisenbud, to be the Foundation’s first director for Mathematics and the Physical Sciences (MPS).

The Simons Foundation is essentially a counterpart/supplement to the National Science Foundation. In 2010, its MPS program issued its first requests for grant applications for post-doctoral fellowships, travel grants to promote collaboration between researchers, endowed chairs to create professorships that combine mathematics with other fields (such as energy, and the biological sciences), and now a major grant to endow an institute for theoretical computer science. Other projects include the Africa Mathematics Project, intended to bolster mathematics scholarship on the African continent, and an oral history project consisting of interviews with renowned mathematicians and scientists.

The Simons Foundation also supports the life sciences by funding research that promotes synergy between biology and mathematics. Such projects have included quantitative biology programs at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), and the Rockefeller University. The Foundation’s single largest initiative has been in autism research, which seeks to improve the diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorders.

But who is Jim Simons? Well, the man is a practicing mathematician, a differential geometer to be precise. But you guessed it, this is not how he made his fortune. And no, he didn’t make his billions by writing a simpleton computer program for a glorified super webpage à la Mark Zuckerberg.

In 1968, James Simons was simply the chairman of the mathematics department at Stony Brook University. For his seminal work on differential geometry, especially his discovery with Shiing-Shen Chern of the so-called “Chern-Simons invariants,” he was awarded the 1976 Oswald Veblen Prize by the American Mathematical Society. This work had made him a household name among mathematicians and physicists, particularly string theorists. In 1978, he left academia to run an investment fund that traded in commodities and financial instruments on a discretionary basis.

He eventually founded Renaissance Technologies’ hedge funds, which employs mathematical models to analyze and execute trades. Renaissance uses computer-based models to predict price changes in easily traded financial instruments. These models are based on analyzing as much data as can be gathered, then looking for non-random movements to make predictions. To do that, Renaissance mostly employs grads and post-grads in mathematics, physics and statistics.

And do you remember when mathematical models were miscast as villains in some accounts –including those by the NY Times– of the current financial crisis? Well, it turned out that these mathematical models were responsible for keeping the hedge funds of Simons’ firm spectacularly profitable. Forbes magazine estimates his current worth at $10.6 billion. Some people say that, “in a classic case of giving back, profits from those funds are now being used to benefit the discipline from which the models emerged”.

What about this new Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing? Well, it will cover everything from complexity theory, algorithms, machine learning, randomness and pseudo-randomness, zero-knowledge proof, computer networks, to computer vision, robotics, and streaming algorithms.

The institute’s first director? As expected, Simons and Eisenbud went for the very best, Richard Karp, known for his contributions to the theory of algorithms and bio-informatics, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985, The Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2004, and the Kyoto Prize in 2008.

Yes, this country is lucky to have Mike Lazaridis, who has been the patron saint of Theoretical Physics in Canada, including his magic touch to attract government support. But to involve the rest of us in the universal quest for a deeper understanding of our world, Canada may yet need a Jim Simons.

More than 11,000 have already signed off on Elsevier worldwide. The number of mathematicians is creeping up to 2,000, leading Tim Gowers to express his wish, “that it will pass that milestone soon, and keep on climbing.”  Will we ever succeed?

On May 02, Elsevier sent its second communiqué to the world’s mathematics community. I wonder if they are also doing the same with the other disciplines, or is it that mathematics –thanks to Gowers and the likes– is again punching above its weight on behalf of all disciplines. Actually, whole fields of research are conspicuous by their virtual absence from the Cost of Knowledge list. Could they be the fields, where Elsevier own most of the high-impact journals? This could make a good case for getting disciplines to diversify their publication and dissemination outlets!

In the letter, Elsevier wants “to inform you of some new initiatives we have undertaken based upon the feedback we have received from the community.” Fortunately, Tim Gowers is here to explain and clarify for the rest of us the subtleties in some of Elsevier’s proposals for “reform”, including their commitment to a “Freedom Collection”, which can’t help but remind Tim and the rest of us of the famous Freedom Fries. “Nothing that Elsevier has said gives us any reason to end the boycott. They are behaving much as one would expect: offering minimal concessions that will look as good as possible while keeping their profits intact.”  

I will surely take Tim’s word and his analysis over the statements of the Elsevier PR personnel anytime. I wish more academic editors of Elsevier journals would, and let’s face it, the campaign would have led to reform more quickly, had many of the editorial boards proceeded to resign, or at least threaten to resign “en masse”. It is indeed intriguing and troubling to see the denial that some of our colleagues are living while hanging on to their positions in order “to serve” the community and “to protect” its academic standards. “Elsevier is reaching out and we are having our say in meetings with their managers.” But why didn’t you speak up before the Gowers’ call for a boycott? And would these managers have bothered to call for a meeting with your editorial board if it wasn’t for this initiative?

A couple of months ago, there was a bold comment from MIT’s Scott Aaronson indicating that non-participation in the Elsevier boycott could lead to professional stigmatization, at least while  “evaluating  (say) a faculty or tenure candidate”. However, I am yet to see any attempt to shame Elsevier editors out of their –apparently coveted– positions “to serve” the community?

In any case, there appears to be a significant movement towards open-access mandates, at least in Europe and the United States. There was recently,

• an announcement by the Wellcome Trust stating that it would insist on open access for the research it funds.
• a statement by Harvard University Library, affirming that the current system is unsustainable.
• an announcement by the British Government that it has plans to make all taxpayer-funded research available online.
• a decision by the Technical University of Munich mathematics department to cancel all its Elsevier subscriptions by 2013.

I think the war on the exploiters of scientific publishing is being won. “They said it would never happen — but it just has“. Hopefully, we can soon turn our attention to the textbook racket.

Here are some excerpts from the (draft) letter, which also comes with an appendix that points to the various research projects affected by the cancellation of the Major Resources Support (MRS) program. Even more projects will be touched by the cancellation of the Research Tools and Instrument (RTI) program. As I said before, it seems that the NSERC leadership is trying its best to soften the blow, hoping that the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) will pick up the tab, at least for the experimental facilities. Still, letters and petitions such as this one can only help. After all, people in positions of power need to know the impact of their decision-making, even when negative. They need to want to know about the dreams, aspirations and priorities of their constituents, and not simply hear the unwarranted cheerleading of those who can’t do otherwise. (See also the illuminating comment of John Stockie below).

Here is the final version of the letter and the signatories.

April 26, 2012

Re: NSERC MRS and RTI programs

To: Dr. Suzanne Fortier and the members of NSERC Council

…  We are writing to express our deep concern over the elimination of the Major Resources Support (MRS) and Research Tools and Instrument (RTI) programs of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). The cutting of these programs will have drastic and potentially irreversible effects on fundamental science and engineering research across Canada.

Quoting from NSERC itself, “the objective of the MRS program is to facilitate the effective access by Canadian academic researchers to major and unique national or international (based in Canada) experimental or thematic research resources by financially assisting these resources to remain in a state of readiness for researchers to use.”

Quoting from NSERC itself, “Research Tools and Instruments (RTI) grants foster and enhance the discovery, innovation and training capability of university researchers in the natural sciences and engineering by supporting the purchase of research equipment and installations.”

These are programs so essential to research in Canada that, prior to hearing of their termination, to think they would even be considered for elimination was inconceivable. The federal government, through cuts to NSERC, has now slashed these programs. Along with NSERC’s Discovery Grant, the RTI and the MRS programs are those which support fundamental research. The loss of the RTI and MRS programs means there are now no NSERC funding streams dedicated to the purchase of scientific equipment or to operate nationally and internationally unique resources. The loss of the MRS program in particular means that millions of dollars of equipment purchased through taxpayers’ money is as the risk of sitting idle and gathering dust due to a lack of operating funds. A list of projects funded through the MRS program in 2010-2011 is provided as an appendix to this letter.

NSERC suggests that the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) may pick up the slack in these two areas. However, the reality is that CFI is a different organization with different objectives. CFI programs do not compensate for the loss of two core programs at NSERC.

Similarly, investments by the government in industrial and/or targeted research programs at NSERC do not compensate for the loss of the two core programs which enable fundamental research. Action must be taken to reinstate the core RTI and MRS programs at NSERC. The loss of these programs is nothing short of a disaster for science in Canada.

This letter will also be sent to appropriate members of government and members of parliament.

Sincerely,

Appendix: List of MRS-funded projects (2010-2011).

Ontario

• Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Ontario)
• Laboratory for the analysis of natural and synthetic environmental toxicants (Ontario)
• National ultrahigh-field NMR facility for solids (Ontario)
• Hatch lab: isotope and noble gas geochemistry for earth and environmental sciences (Ontario)
• IsoTrace AMS facility (Ontario)
• Canadian Phycological Culture Centre: a facility supporting research on algae and cyanobacteria (Ontario)
• Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) (Ontario)
• Canadian resource center for zebrafish genetics (Ontario)
• A neuroendocrinology assay laboratory at the University of Western Ontario (Ontario)
• Canadian centre for DNA barcoding (Ontario)
• Portable Observatories for Lithospheric Analysis and Research Investigating (POLARIS) (Ontario)
• Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics/Institut Canadian d’astrophysique theorique (Ontario)
• Brockhouse institute for materials research (Ontario)
• St. John’s centrifuge modelling facility (Ontario)

Quebec

• Canadian participation in the integrated ocean drilling program (Quebec)
• The canadian research icebreaker Amundsen: a national resource with an international mandate (Quebec)
• Canadian participation in the international continental drilling program (Quebec)
• Quebec/Eastern Canada high field NMR facility (Quebec)
• Félix d’Hérelle reference center for bacterial viruses (Quebec)
• CRM’s major 5-year plan: Investing in people and intellectual capacities, supporting cutting edge mathematical research, exceptional new opportunities, partnerships and synergies (Quebec)
• Canadian neutron beam laboratory (Quebec)
• The Compute/Calcul Canada (CC) (Quebec)
• Access to the national advanced laser light source (ALLS) facility (Quebec)
• Station de recherche de Whapmagoostui-Kuujjuarapik (Quebec)

Alberta

• Kluane Lake Research Station (Alberta)
• Nanofabrication facility support (Alberta)
• NANUC: a national facility for high field NMR resource for applications in chemistry (Alberta)
• Infrastructure support for the Canadian Center for Innovative Geochronology (Alberta)
• Resource for the Innovation of Engineering Materials (Alberta)
• Biogeoscience Institute (Alberta)
• University of Alberta microfungus collection and herbarium (UAMH) (Alberta)
• The Banff International Research Station

British Columbia

• Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (British Columbia)
• Bamfield marine sciences centre (British Columbia)
• PNCSRF Pacific Northwest Consortium Synchrotron Radiation Facility (British Columbia)
• Access to the Canadian Scientific Submersible Facility (British Columbia)
• Centre for molecular and materials science at TRIUMF (British Columbia)
• Pacific centre for isotopic and geochemical research (British Columbia)

Nova Scotia

• Canadian cosmogenic nuclide exposure dating facility (Nova Scotia)
• Major resources support for the aquatron laboratory (Nova Scotia)
• Atlantic Regional Facilities for Materials Characterization (Nova Scotia)

Saskatchewan

• Canadian light source inc. (Saskatchewan)
• Canadian Light Source Inc. – Additional Support (Saskatchewan)
• The Canadian SuperDARN/PolarDARN facility (Saskatchewan)

“I am very sad to tell you that my father Joram died this morning, the 29th of April, in his home”

I will not elaborate here on Joram’s mathematical contributions. They are numerous and will surely be described by many, hopefully also by myself, in the next few months. You can already read Gilles Pisier’s account in the latest Bulletin of the AMS, on Joram’s defining role (with Alexander Pelczynski) in uncovering the true impact and depth of Grothendick’s “Résumé”. I have also worked with Joram on several projects, and hearing that he is also gone only a few months after another friend and co-author, William J. Davis, passed away, could only be a bad dream.

I was a 22-year old “kid” when I first met Joram Lindenstrauss. It was in Columbus, Ohio. He was already a leader in my field of research of that time. It is fair to say that Joram was a “feared leader”. He had extremely high scientific standards, he was tough and he never minced his words. I will never understand why I never felt intimidated by him, though I was well aware that the other –often smarter– mathematicians around me, were. Was it because they were all essentially his students and I wasn’t? Was it because I was still too young and obnoxious to be self-conscious and adequately intimidated by revered celebrities?

The truth is that I knew deep inside that Joram Lindenstrauss liked me, though I will never know why. In return, I loved the man. So tough on the outside but, was I the only one who could feel how gentle, even soft he was deep inside? Confirmation came several years later when I got to know his children. He was as demanding as an old-fashioned family patriarch could be, but they knew …

I was “fresh off the boat” on the American continent for a postdoctoral position. Joram Lindenstrauss was already a pillar of Israeli mathematics. He was the first Israeli I ever met. The encounter was one that would mark my life. His family had left Germany for Jerusalem as soon as the Nazis came to power. We quarreled about politics of course, yet there was always this feeling, which may look naive nowadays, that all will end up well one day. It was there and then that I first learned –and yes relatively late in life– that “what we have in common is much greater and more powerful than what divides us”. 

And this was before I met his incredibly kind wife, Naomi, and his amazing, then still young teenaged children. This is when you see humanity at its glorious best. It was on a Vancouver beach more than 28 years ago, when he first told me that his son seems to be “good”. From this understatement, so typical of Joram, I was supposed to understand that it was mathematics he was talking about, and that Elon might one day get the Fields medal. His children lived up to every expectation. He must have been so happy as he passed.

One doesn’t need to go all the way back to Proxmire’s days to witness politicians’ search for “funny sounding” research proposals to identify “wasteful” science. Back in 1995 Reform party MP Randy White, was on a mission to illustrate waste in government by trying to discredit what is now called NSERC’s discovery grant program. His staff dug up two funded proposals: one about “Lie Theory and its applications”, and the other about the “behaviour of hummingbirds”.

The staff had assumed that the first grant was about devising a theory of “lying”, not knowing that it was in fact concerned with one of the deepest mathematical theories developed by the distinguished Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie (1844-1899). I will let you guess how “humming birds” rang the alarm bells in White’s office.

I did then write a letter about it to the Vancouver Sun, which had related the story under the title, “$32,000 hummingbird study for the birds, MP fumes”. My statistician/colleague John Petkau also wrote about the “spin-offs in quite unexpected directions” of the research program regarding hummingbirds.

In more recent times, the House republicans under the leadership of Eric Cantor launched an Internet site “YouCut”, where citizens could identify potential targets for government cuts. An NSF funded research proposal to analyse “on-field contributions of soccer players”, and another to model “the sound of breaking objects,” were given as examples of “questionable projects”. 

The legislators eventually relented when they were reminded that the first research was trying to evaluate and quantify team performances in general, having chosen soccer teamwork because it is among the hardest to rank using regular statistical methods. Even more embarrassing was the fact that the second project was greatly benefiting the movie and video game industry, a “nearly one-hundred billion dollar industry,” including hugely influential companies like Pixar.

The organizations sponsoring the Golden Goose Award hope to award it annually starting this fall. Nominations will be reviewed by an eight-member selection committee that includes Bruce Alberts, the editor-in-chief of Science, and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter as well as university research officials. Nominations for the Golden Goose Award can be sent to: info@goldengooseaward.org.

Back to Paul’s tremendous idea to have a similar competition/award in Canada, I believe the prize would surely help remind people up here that even seemingly offbeat studies can produce unexpected results. I say so well aware that those pesky mathematicians will surely do well in such a contest, being the least understood of all species of researchers.

And by the way, I just learned today that one of my “purest” papers has been used by US and French economists to study the stability of “the roommate problem”. Don’t ask me how, but the paper mentions that their models “include marriage markets incorporating single-sex households, tickets in US presidential elections, team jobs such as pilot/copilot, team sports and many others.”  Do I qualify then?

Addendum: I have just realized that Today’s Washington Post has an article featuring Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), the congressman who hatched the  ”Golden Goose Award”.  Entitled, “Why ‘the sex life of the screwworm’ deserves taxpayer dollars”, the op-ed is a must-read by everyone … in Ottawa!

“Math and computer science are hard. Why bother?”

The restructuring plan proposes to cut $1.69 million from the CISE department budget at the University of Florida. “Staff positions in CISE which are currently supporting research and graduate programs would be eliminated. The activities currently covered by TAs would be reassigned to faculty and the TA budget for CISE would be eliminated. The faculty remaining in CISE would then focus their efforts on teaching and advising students in the existing Computer Science BS and MS degree programs. Their assignments would change to reflect this new educational mission with sole focus on delivering quality education for students in these degree programs.”   

“I thought I was two hours away from Disney World, but now I’m not so sure”, wrote Malini Johar Schueller, a professor of English at the University. There is lots of material out there already about this issue, but let me add a few comments.

The problem seems to have originated with the repeated and substantial cuts by the Florida Legislature to the funding of higher education in that state. What is mystifying is the announcement, which came about the same time, that Florida’s governor Rick Scott approved the creation of a brand-new public university near Tampa:  Florida Polytechnic University. Go figure!

Computer scientists have lots to learn from the mathematical community, which reacted effectively and in unison back in 1996, when the mathematics department at Rochester University was facing a similar fate. The academic world witnessed then an extraordinary surge of protest, not only from prominent mathematicians, the 32,000 strong American Mathematical Society, and the Mathematical Association of America with its 30,000 members, but also from Nobel laureates, dozens of members of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as other leaders in science and industry, including chemistry, computer science, economics, geology, biology, philosophy, and physics. The Rochester administration eventually relented.

The computer science world is somewhat reacting to the events at the University of Florida, but certainly not at the required level of participation, intensity, discipline diversity, and prominence, though it has been covered by Forbes and by a NY Times blog post.

Last but not least, we should all be conscious of the fact that downgrading an academic department’s program comes nowadays in various shapes and forms, which can be as damaging as the non-subtle move of Dean Abernathy. ‘Gypsy faculty’, ‘road scholars’, and ‘teaching-only’ positions are becoming more and more desirable, if not yet the norm, by administrators who are more concerned with the bottom line than with building an honest-to-goodness  university. The continuing fragmentation of an academic’s job is what all universities and all disciplines should be concerned about.

Deep in the 4th paragraph, we are eventually told that “similar to other departments and agencies”, NSERC and CIHR will each be reduced by $15 million in the 2012-13 fiscal year and $30 million thereafter. However, not only the discovery grants, fellowships and scholarships are protected, but both press releases tell us that the budget document itself says so. “… these measures explicitly spare critical programs such as the Discovery Grants Program, and scholarships and fellowships programs.” We are reminded by NSERC that “A similar statement appears on page 268 relating to CIHR”.

This piece of overstated good news is actually quite telling, and we shall come back to this aspect of the story later in this post. We all know by now that each council has to re-allocate $15 million to partnership programs in the upcoming year, and maybe cut as much from their budgets in each of the following fiscal years. So what are they planning to do in order to offset this government imposed re-allocation?

First, they are cutting 10% from their administrative budgets. I am not 100% sure about my numbers since I wasn’t present at the meeting with the VP-Rs, but I –and of course the readers– welcome any correction coming our way from the Tri-council.

Another cut will land on the Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE) program. I heard of a combined figure of 28% from the 3 councils, with the biggest share coming from CIHR and SSHRC. This is not really surprising as it is common knowledge that neither SSHRC nor even CIHR have been getting their fair share from that program, since over the last 15 years or so, most successful NCE applications have been based on disciplines under the NSERC mandate.

What about the other programs that support academic research? Well, NSERC has finally pulled the plug on the Major Resource Support (MRS) program. Formerly known as the Major Facilities Access (MFA), this program used to assist major and unique national or international (but Canadian-based) experimental and thematic research resources to cover their operating and maintenance costs. The phasing out of the MRS had actually started right after NSERC took a 5% cut in the 2009 federal stimulus budget. The program used to support  the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon, the Neutrino Observatory in Sudbury, the NEPTUNE and VENUS ocean observatories headquartered in Victoria,  l‘Observatoire du mont Mégantic, the “Polar Environmental Atmospheric Research Laboratory” (PEARL), but also the thematic institutes, such as Fields, PIMS, CRM, BIRS and CITA. The thinking here is that the relatively well endowed Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) should/could pick up the tab for these projects, since the Foundation was anyway instrumental in the creation of many of these facilities.

We got word that the thematic facilities, such as the institutes, will be protected by getting them moved to the discovery envelopes of their respective disciplines. Considering how interdisciplinary these institutions are, this default solution is not ideal but is much better than the alternative. In any case, this is a positive development and the NSERC leadership should be congratulated for this creative solution.

The last but not the least important piece of the re-allocation puzzle, is the cancellation of the “Research Tools and Instrumentation” (RTI) program. This is the one that allows researchers to purchase small to medium research equipment and installations, from personal computers to medium size laboratory instruments. This program is key to basic researchers and that’s where the cut will be felt most acutely by university labs. There is a faint  hope that the CFI will also pick up this piece, now that  NSERC has to give it up, but reliable sources say that the president of CFI is not interested in starting a program for such “relatively small expenditures”. What effect will this have? Well, researchers will now be forced to use their discovery grants to purchase these instruments, hence there will be less funding for students and for postdocs.

So much for the overly re-assuring statements about how “these measures explicitly spare critical programs such as the Discovery Grants Program, and scholarships and fellowships programs.” After all, it suffices to look at this graph to see that, contrary to all the rhetoric emanating from the councils, the AUCC and university presidents, and in spite of all the reassuring statements, no one has managed yet to seriously convince government of the important role and the positive impact of the basic research that is done at Canada’s universities.

In other words, and even if we did after all fare better than many –such as the Canadian Space Agency and others, which suffered deeper cuts– there is no place for the self-congratulatory statements and there is no reason to rejoice. The core programs haven’t been cut, but their data show a substantial attrition rate that Canada cannot afford anymore. There is still lots of work ahead. The kind of work that will require a sustained and concerted effort by all those willing and capable to “speak scientific truth to power”.

Indeed, the House and Senate Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittees (CJS) marked up their respective bills this week, and here are the FY 2013 budget numbers for the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Senate CJS subcommittee, which is controlled by the democrats,  has given NSF a FY 2013 budget of $7.273 billion, which is an increase of $240 million over FY 2012 (which was at $7.033 billion)

On the other hand, the House CJS subcommittee, which is controlled by the republicans, has given NSF a FY 2013 budget of $7.333 billion, which is an increase of $299 million over FY 2012.

The difference between the Republican House and the Democratic Senate recommendations is $59 million! Interesting, Eh!

Here are the details for the House CJS NSF budget

1. Research and related activities (R&RA) $5,942,693,000

2. Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) $196,170,000

3. Education and Human Resources (HER) $875,610,000

4. Agency Operations and Award Management (AOAM) $299,400,000

5. National Science Board (NSB) $4,400,000

6. Office of Inspector General (OIG) $14,200,000

What is –or must be– on the menu for tomorrow’s Friday the 13th meeting at the Tri-council? Well, every item below deserves its own blog post, but they may have to settle –for now– for these abbreviated versions. I have already written about some of NSERC’s challenges. Jo VanEvery has also described the broader implications on the Tri-council of the 2012 budget, with her expert emphasis on the SSHRC programs.

1. First of all, the Presidents of NSERC, SSHRC and CIHR will say how “positive” the latest federal budget has been for Canada’s R&D. “Bien-entendu”, they were asked to “be pursuing operational efficiencies and reallocation of funding from lower-priority programs to generate savings.” In return, “The Government will fully reinvest 2012–13 savings in priority areas of the granting councils, particularly in industry-academic partnerships.” Yes, it is $37-million worth of re-allocation to these partnership programs, but the presidents will be re-assuring by promising to do so without affecting their “core” programming.

I do hope that enlightened university officials will ask for more details about what is meant by “core” programs. NSERC’s President, for one, will pledge to protect the discovery grants, but what about the other programs under the “Research Grants and Scholarships” envelope? Will the re-allocations affect the number of postdoctoral fellowships, of graduate scholarships, and of CREATE opportunities? Will this re-allocation finish off the “Major Resources Support program” (MRS), which was already hit by the 2009 “stimulus budget” cuts?

Are these programs less important than the Industrial Postgraduate Scholarships, the Industrial R&D Fellowships, the Industrial Undergraduate Student Research Awards, the Strategic Workshops, and Frontiers? Are the above expenditures less relevant than NSERC’s regional offices? Will NSERC cut its under-subscribed, yet partnership-driven programs?

The President of SSHRC may have a more challenging task. Transferring $7-million from core programs to a much less developed SSHRC academic-business partnership program will be painful. This may explain why they are not releasing the results of the “Insight” competition until mid-April.

2. And can someone please ask the question of why the Tri-council (and hence the universities) keep losing out to the National Research Council (NRC)? Why did the government –in spite of a damning Jenkins report– give $65M to the NRC and another $110 million per year for its Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), while asking the tri-council to pursue operational efficiencies, to re-allocate $37-million for this year, and to likely cut the same amount from each of their next two budgets?

3. What about the role of the universities in the future of academic-business research partnerships?  Are they capable and willing to contemplate the consequences of having the NRC serve as a “concierge” and a common application portal and service to help businesses find the right programs for their needs,” including those of the Tri-council? Is the NRC the right vehicle to lead the peer-review process (if any), and ultimately the decision-making on Networks of Centres of Excellence, CRDs, strategic grants, among other programs?

Advanced education is the soil from which “innovation” grows. The universities must play a leading role in structuring and implementing how best their researchers can contribute to this important process. That Ottawa is so far away –geographically and operationally– from most of them, should not prevent academic leadership from being actively engaged with their government in the process of stimulating and supporting research, discovery, development, innovation, commercialization, and job creation.

What are the issues? Well, contrary to what the AUCC president, Paul Davidson, hastily announced last week, the 2012 federal budget will not preserve current levels of basic research and scholarships funding. The research councils were actually asked a few months ago by government to put forward plans for a potential 5-10% cut to their budgets. On the surface, it looks like the Tri-council has managed to dodge the bullet, since instead of proceeding with these cuts, the government asked them to re-direct some of their funds to industry-academic research partnership programs. So where is the problem?

Well, unless NSERC had the foresight to recommend that all of its potential cuts should  come from its Research Partnership Program (RPP) –a highly unlikely occurence in view of this joint submission to Flaherty– then Suzanne Fortier will have to immediately re-allocate $15-million from NSERC’s discovery and scholarship programs in favor of its RPP programs. The situation is even worse for SSHRC and CIHR since their industry-academic partnership programs are not as developed as NSERC’s in comparison to their core programs. I will let you decide whether this is a headache worth sharing with Canada’s VP-Rs, who will surely be on the receiving end of their researchers wrath once they hear about their continually shrinking discovery grants.

But there is another important issue that I hope the VP-Rs will not shy away from putting on the discussion table in Ottawa. The Jenkins report has recommended the creation of an “Industrial Research and Innovation Council” (IRIC) to deliver the federal government’s business innovation programs. It was not announced in the budget, but is surely in the works. What is noticeable however, is that Gary Goodyear seems to be aiming to park  IRIC within the National Research Council (NRC), since it is supposed to encompass the “Industrial Research Assistance Program” (IRAP), the latter being a darling of government –having received $110 million per year “to double its support to companies”. Word on the street is that the $65M for the NRC from the 2012 budget “to help it refocus on business-led, industry-relevant research”, is essentially a downpayment for Goodyear’s vision of IRIC, as “a common application portal and service to help businesses find the right programs for their needs (a “concierge”),” within the NRC.

Needless to say, the existence of IRIC could make the Tri-council involvement in partnership programs redundant, including the Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE), and sooner or later, there will be pressure to consolidate and move the RPP and NCE programs (and hence, their budgets) to the NRC, including the $37-million top-up (and probably double that, next year) which the Tri-council is supposed to cough up for partnership programs,  as well as the additional $12-million per year earmarked for the Business-Led Networks of Centres of Excellence program.

This scenario should sound alarm bells for the VP-Rs of Canada’s universities. They should be pondering what will happen to the industry-academic research partnership initiatives, once they move to an outlet that has hardly had any interaction with the universities since the founding of the Tri-council, several decades ago. What will be the role, influence and scale of industry-academic research within an organization whose mandate is to deliver the federal government’s business innovation programs, without either the capacity of reaching out to the academic world, or a sufficient understanding of the role of higher education in the innovation system?

In January of 2012, BIRS installed a system of cameras, microphones, and automation technology in its main lecture hall in order to fully automate the production, recording, broadcasting, and distribution of high-quality lecture videos. An overview of how it works is posted here. Since then, our Technology Manager, Brent Kearney,  has been busy writing software, adding features, and tweaking the behaviour of the system. BIRS participants now have the ability to record and broadcast their lectures at the touch of a button.

Plans for the future

Many thanks to all past and future contributors to this important new resource for the world’s scientific community.

My friend had called from Ottawa right after the budget lock-up to “re-assure me” that the three research councils did OK. The AUCC president, Paul Davidson, had also issued a press release offering praise for “investments (that) will preserve current levels of basic research and scholarships funding”. Most universities websites followed suit in congratulating government. Then came the email, “With NSERC, it is as we feared! They have extracted and diverted substantial funds. See the CIC press release below. The response given on UBC’s website is just wrong on the facts!” 

The 2012 budget indicates indeed that Government has directed Canada’s research granting councils to pursue internal savings of $74 million phased in over 2012/13 and 2013/14. Although $37 million in savings are being reallocated within the granting councils in 2012/13, these are targeted to industry-academic research partnership initiatives. For example, in NSERC’s case, this directive may amount to essentially re-allocating $15M from its Discovery Grant Program, where basic research is supported, to its Research Partnership Program. This depends of course on the suggested potential cuts put forward by NSERC as part of the government’s 5-10% cost cutting exercise. I guess we will know soon enough.

One could of course try to rationalize this move as essential in the context of a cost-cutting budget, where government needs to find some cash to support companies R&D effort. But then one realizes that what was supposed to be a “transformational” budget for R&D, has instead turned out to be a treasure trove for those who count on government money to do D&C (i.e., Development and Commercialization).

Indeed, Chapter 3 of the 2012 budget provides $65M for the NRC to help it refocus on business-led, industry-relevant research, $110 million per year to double support to companies through the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), $400 million to help increase private sector investments in early-stage risk capital, and to support the creation of large-scale venture capital funds led by the private sector, $100 million to the Business Development Bank of Canada to support its venture capital activities, $12 million per year to make the Business-Led Networks of Centres of Excellence program permanent, $105 million over two years to support forestry innovation and market development, $95 million over three years, starting in 2013–14, and $40 million per year thereafter to make the Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program permanent and to add a military procurement component.

What did the universities get? Essentially, $500M for Canada’s Foundation for Innovation (CFI) over 5 years to build research infrastructure, but not before the universities (and their provincial governments) divert their own resources to find 60% in matching funds. Is this why the AUCC is rejoicing?

That the government has elected to direct its cuts on Tri-council programs, which support thousands of researchers at Canada’s universities, is surely the prerogative of an elected majority government, but why are the universities cheering on? Why can’t they at least say how short-sighted it is to be spending so generously on development and commercialization, while continuing a multi-year trend of cutting support for advanced basic research at universities, which is the key to any future development?

The universities cannot ignore what is being articulated and said by their best scholars, the likes of Richard Hawkins, a Canada Research Chair in the Social Context of Technology, at the University of Calgary.

“The budget is at its most disappointing with respect to the role of higher education in the innovation system. This is important in that universities constitute the one part of the system that depends almost entirely upon the public purse. Statements about “reallocations” in research councils may be innocent, but they smack of government setting the research agenda; prioritizing research spending according to assumptions that one form of knowledge has more market value than another.

Economies grow largely because they are able to diversify and create new combinations of production factors. In a knowledge economy, diversity is everything, making the notion that you can pick or prioritize knowledge winners the most erroneous of all erroneous assumptions. Moreover, public investment in “blue sky” science has been shown consistently to yield the highest coefficients in terms of stimulating and supporting innovation. This unencumbered exploratory capability is also what virtually every survey has shown to be the principal value of university research to business. The Budget has a decidedly competitive agenda on the business side, but on the basic research side there is more than a tinge of winner picking.

The main focus of the Budget, however, is not on basic research, but on knowledge transfer, commercialization and industry partnerships. The problem is that there seems to be no awareness at all of how closely these outcomes are related to increasing our strengths in basic research. One cannot be prioritized and not the other. This is a lesson that our principal competitors learned long ago, but that we in Canada have yet to learn, so it seems.”

It remains to be seen, whether the 2012 federal budget will lead to a call to arms for Canada’s research community. The Canadian Consortium for Research has fired the first salvo in this press release (CCR.Press.release).  I expect to see more coming in the year ahead.

1. The Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program: The recommendations of the Jenkins panel for SR&ED go “deeper” than they look, which of course means that the government will not be able to move full tilt on reforming that program. Still, even minor changes in the spirit of the report can save the government hundreds of millions of dollars. This is cash that can be invested elsewhere in direct funding for programs supporting the innovation agenda, without affecting this year’s cost-cutting budget. So see below where the money could go.

2. The National Research Council (NRC):  Again, and in spite of the carefully chosen words, the recommendations of the Jenkins report on this front go too far towards the dismantlement of this venerable institution. Changes are to be expected but not necessarily the way the R&D panel suggests. There will definitely be a refocussing on the business and commercialization end, which is what the new president, John McDougall, is doing anyway. However, Goodyear’s talk about the NRC “hopefully being a one-stop, 1-800, ‘I have a solution for your business problem,’” may usher a net gain for the NRC. This is connected to 4) below.

3. The Tri-council: I don’t expect major cuts to the Tri-council, including to the programs that support investigator-driven basic research at universities. We are told that the presidents of the major universities, the AUCC, the CAUT have all lobbied  against any cut to these programs. Plus, you always have the specter of another “Don’t leave Canada behind” campaign…  However,  NSERC’s Research Partnership Program (RPP) seems to be getting lately an inordinate amount of praise from Gary Goodyear. This can either mean more funding to that part of NSERC or it could be some kind of “we like it so much that we are going to take it away and enhance it further”. See 4) below.

4. The creation of an “Industrial Research and Innovation Council” (IRIC) to deliver the federal government’s business innovation programs, as recommended by the Jenkins report, seems to be one of the surest things. The new council is supposed to be an “arm’s-length funding and delivery agency that will serve as a common application portal and service to help businesses find the right programs for their needs (a “concierge”).” Funny that Goodyear has used essentially the very same words to phrase his preferred “vision” for the NRC. Does it mean that IRIC will then be part of the NRC, since it is supposed to encompass IRAP anyway? On the other hand, the existence of an outlet such as IRIC could make NSERC’s RPP program redundant. Sooner or later, there will be pressure to consolidate and move the RPP programs to IRIC. Under this scenario, Naylor and his friends on the R&D panel may come to regret not having proposed this in the first place, with an additional  recommendation to the effect that the RPP cash should stay behind at NSERC in support of basic research at universities, and that new monies (from SR&ED savings) be found for IRIC.

All this could be announced tomorrow, yet will have to wait far into the future to be fully implemented. Didn’t Mr. Flaherty say, “We’re looking at 2020 and beyond. We’re not just looking at next year and the year after that.”

5. As said before, any minor reform of SRED could release some cash for more direct funding of R&D programs. Where could this money go? IRAP will surely get some, and NSERC’s RPP as usual. I am also betting on other hybrid organizations, which seem to be quite liked by government because they are showing an innovative spirit, albeit in directions of research and in their delivery mechanisms. With a nimble and flexible modus operandi, something the Tri-council lacks big time, they can react quickly to opportunities.

6. Last but not least, I believe the government will be acting on the following recommendation by the Jenkins report. “The Prime Minister should assign responsibility for innovation to a single minister, supported by awhole-of-government Innovation Advisory Committee, evolved from the current Science Technology and Innovation Council (STIC), composed of external stakeholders, who would then work with the provincial and territorial governments to initiate a collaborative dialogue to improve coordination and impact.”

This would then go to Gary Goodyear, who expects it and who has been working hard for years to earn it. If he can manage to be a tooth fairy when Jim Flaherty is being the axe man, then he would surely have the full support of the research community.

Filed under: R&D Policy ]]> http://nghoussoub.com/2012/03/29/what-to-expect-on-the-rd-front-from-tomorrows-transformational-budget/feed/ 0 ghoussoub http://nghoussoub.com/2012/03/23/we-have-a-plan/ http://nghoussoub.com/2012/03/23/we-have-a-plan/#comments Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:35:06 +0000 Ghoussoub http://nghoussoub.com/?p=7875 Continue reading →]]> A UBC Housing Action Plan that is, which –I believe– will help improve housing choice and affordability for faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students on the Vancouver campus. Actually, it is still only a discussion paper waiting for your input, before it goes to a final decision by the Board of Governors. We therefore need your help –You present and future UBCers, your children, your parents and your friends– in this final push towards an important milestone in UBC’s relentless march towards the very top of the world’s academic institutions. We invite you to read the Discussion Paper, to learn about the recommended potential housing opportunities and how we developed those options. You may also want to watch the Housing Action Plan video!

The Community Planning Task Group has been gathering feedback and information since April 2011 to help it in the development of these options and opportunities. The process began with a thorough review of UBC’s existing housing programs. Several new options were brought forward for consideration as a result of an assessment of other universities’ and jurisdictions’ housing programs and public input. Faculty, staff, and students have participated actively in three public forums, focus groups, a blog and outreach meetings between April 2011 and March 2012.

Read the Discussion Paper and have your say!

The next phase of public consultation extends from March 20 through April 2, 2012. Visit our Consultation page to participate online or register for a workshop on March 29^th. And while you’re at it, you may want to send a little note of appreciation to the folks at Campus and Community Planning for their Herculean efforts on this front over the last eleven month.

Next Steps

Following the close of the consultation period, your input, along with further technical and financial analysis, will help in developing a set of recommended program options to be included in the final housing action plan which will be considered by the Board of Governors in summer 2012.

Filed under: Board of Governors, UBC Housing Action Plan ]]> http://nghoussoub.com/2012/03/23/we-have-a-plan/feed/ 6 ghoussoub http://nghoussoub.com/2012/03/21/back-to-my-almost-asbestos-free-alma-mater/ http://nghoussoub.com/2012/03/21/back-to-my-almost-asbestos-free-alma-mater/#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:51:45 +0000 Ghoussoub http://nghoussoub.com/?p=7845 Continue reading →]]> I had walked this route so many times over the years, first as a graduate student, then as a frequent visiting researcher. The little bookstore is still there, but I had to resist the urge to buy “Libération”, a daily ritual of my younger years. I had after all already read the morning news on my iphone. I was again making my way to my alma mater, l’Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI). My last visit to its Jussieu location was fourteen years ago, just before the work to remove the asbestos began.

Never mind how many years separate you from your student days, or how many talks you have given on the lecture circuit, you can’t help but get nervous before giving a talk at your alma mater.  Today was no exception. Former classmates turned professors look much older now, but the students still look as young as ever.

“The university is finally back to Jussieu”, I said. “Only the third of it, and this is after 11 years of work cleaning up the asbestos and billions of dollars in expenses,” my friend responded. We reminisced about our “guerre contre l’Amiante”. We remembered how asbestos’ dust used to fall on us from our offices’ ceilings before they were eventually sealed off with … duct tape, and how the movement to “free the university from asbestos” had started.

It took several years of protest and collective activism before the government agreed to do something about it. It didn’t help that influential scientist, socialist politician, climate change denier, and serial “gaffeur”, Claude Allègre, kept opposing the removal of asbestos, describing it as harmless and dismissing the growing concern as a form of “psychosis created by leftists”.

It was not before news that asbestos may have been at the origin of at least 22 deaths of campus personnel, in addition to 130 others with serious health problems, that the government initiated a mega-project for cleaning it up. Many had advocated for the destruction of the Jussieu campus, but some thought that its architectural type, though well know to be a miserable failure, must be protected. A couple of buildings were rented by the government at Chevaleret, in order to house the faculty in a temporary move that eventually lasted a dozen years.

Now they are back –at least some of them, including the mathematicians of Paris VI, and the same –now old– man is also back making “crêpes au jambon et fromage” on the Place Jussieu. Let’s hope they still taste as good as in 1973, when they were the only thing I could afford for lunch.

Filed under: Op-eds ]]> http://nghoussoub.com/2012/03/21/back-to-my-almost-asbestos-free-alma-mater/feed/ 1 ghoussoub http://nghoussoub.com/2012/03/18/with-the-women-of-the-laplacian-who-needs-diversity-tsars/ http://nghoussoub.com/2012/03/18/with-the-women-of-the-laplacian-who-needs-diversity-tsars/#comments Sun, 18 Mar 2012 17:55:35 +0000 Ghoussoub http://nghoussoub.com/?p=7803 Continue reading →]]> “Wherever my travels may lead, paradise is where I am.” ~Voltaire

In case you have been wondering why I haven’t been blogging lately, I am presently in Rome having too much fun working, lecturing, and enjoying life with my friends and colleagues at Sapienza Universita’ di Roma, Università di Roma Tor Vergata, and Università Roma Tre. The latter is still waiting for the professionals in communication and marketing to find for it a more sexy name. Talking mathematics with a few of the “women of the Laplacian”, Angela, Filomena, and Gabriella, is always a highlight of my visits here. No offense, Alberto, Massimiliano, Pierpaolo and Italo.

Watching the fascination of my 16-year old son with this sensual city is adding greatly to my expected dose of “plaisirs discrets de la bourgoisie”. He may have even forgiven my clumsy efforts to drag him with me on this trip: “The Coliseum holds the largest ice hockey rink in the world”. This is not totally random as I have always been convinced, ever since watching the movie “Rollerball”, that hockey players are direct descendants of gladiators, concussions and all!

Then I get this email from home about a job candidate who, upon receiving an offer from a Canadian university, requested that a similar position be given to his girlfriend! Whaaaaaat?

I had written before about how universities may be becoming family affairs, but this episode was challenging my old-fashioned ways even more than usual.  The partner is NOT in one of the advertised areas, yet she was deemed deserving to be considered for a tenure-track position. Why? Because “the university and the Faculty of Science now take very seriously the possibilities of partner hires, as part of a general policy of supporting women, and diversity in the ranks.”

But shouldn’t all hirings in public universities be based on open and fair competitions? No problem! “If the department feels that such an offer is appropriate, we will then advertise a  position (in the subject area of the partner) for a month.”

But what if a better candidate applies? No one is ready to volunteer an answer to that question. The most logical and ethical response should of course be that the university would offer the position to the most qualified candidate … even if it is in a subject area that was not deemed a priority in the first place, until the partner-hiring situation created the opportunity. Bizarre!

Back to Italy, where diversity, spousal hiring and “two-body problems”, seem to be non-issues at the universities here. “There is no need to,” I am told, which is quite believable judging by the Italian women of the “Laplacian”, who worked hard, competed, overcame and are now leading their fields, their departments and their universities. The same seems to be the case in Spain and France.

In contrast, the universities in Scandinavia are still struggling with issues of diversity and are resorting to all kind of rules and regulations to deal with them. “They legislate quotas for women on their university committees, then proceed to “import” women scientists from the South (the south of Europe, that is) in order to fulfill them,” said one friend.

And in case you are wondering who are these “women of the Laplacian”, they are my smart, charming, confident, hardworking, prolific, terrific, and super-gracious friends and colleagues, who happen to be intellectual descendants and heiresses of the Marquis Pierre-Simon de Laplace.

To Napoleon’s query, “M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator,” he is the one who replied, “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”

I am looking forward to tell this story to my son as we are visiting Napoleon’s Tomb at the “Invalides” in Paris tomorrow.  He may then get interested enough to accompany me to Rue Laplace, on my way to Rue Monge, where I am giving a lecture at my alma mater.

The first table describes the evolution of the GERD from 1986 till 2009. The UK record is so lousy that it allows Canada to brag about moving from sixth to fifth place, even though  our numbers had also declined since 2004.

The next three tables break the GERD numbers down into the various contributing sectors to R&D, starting with the business enterprise expenditure on R&D (BERD), which confirms what everyone knows about Canada’s sorry state in this domain.

Note how business spending on R&D has declined relative to GDP in the last five years. And it doesn’t look like the government had stepped up to fill the hole left by business, since Canada comes again fifth among G7 nations in terms of government expenditure on R&D (GvERD).

These numbers cannot include the $3.5-billion SRED program, which does not qualify as direct government funding, since the latter is only a tax incentive program.  On the other hand, it includes the NRC and the myriad of programs described here and recently reviewed by the Jenkins panel, minus those programs that go through the Tri-Council. These are accounted for in the following table for Higher-education expenditure on R&D (HERD):

Here the numbers for Canada are astonishing. Besides the federal funding though the Tri-Council and CFI, the numbers seem to include all provincial and federal funding for post-secondary education (with faculty salaries and all). I am told that these figures are not well accepted by the AUCC and university administrations. One also wonders, whether the $2-billion of the Knowledge Infrastructure Program is what accounts for the sharp increase in the post-recession period. This is also questionable accounting.