If you are not yet aware, Steve Jobs has died. Under his tight grip, the Apple brand and its derivatives became an integral part of modern culture. Inevitably, his appearances and statements were often diverted and distorted. His death is no exception.
(Illustration from Boston Herald)
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August is supposed to be a slow month for activism on campus. Not this year. Emails started popping up on my screen about a recently announced decision of the UBC administration to rebrand the Bookstore. It was to be named “UBC Central”. The reaction of an otherwise sleepy UBC campus was swift and visceral: “What the hell is “UBC Central”? A Greyhound bus(t) station?” A few weeks later, I witnessed an equally visceral counter-reaction. It was at a meeting of the Board of Governors. The two solitudes were never more apparent on our campus. Continue reading
Providing faculty housing is partly how Stanford grew from nowhere in 1960 to elite in 1980. Columbia’s renaissance in the 1980′s as one of the top Ivy league institutions has been credited to opportunistic housing purchases around campus which allowed the university to pursue a transformational faculty and staff housing assistance policy. UBC President Stephen Toope identified housing as “the biggest challenge that UBC faces going forward in terms of recruitment and retention both of students and faculty.” We couldn’t agree more. Continue reading
Last week, UBC inaugurated its new Law building. So what? You may say. What’s the big deal about yet another building in UBC’s amazing journey of development and renewal? Well, to me, the story behind the completion of this major project is as important as the feat of having it built and operating before the start of the academic year. It is a story of good governance, of credible leadership, and of trust. Continue reading
One month after more than 100 academics, including six Nobel laureates, wrote to the British prime minister to complain about cuts to chemistry by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), today’s Guardian reports that the mathematicians of the UK have followed suit by writing their own letter to David Cameron. The letter is signed by 25 senior mathematicians, including four winners of the Fields Medal, a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, a former president of the Royal Society, the director of the IAS in Princeton, and several “Sirs”. Continue reading
A few hours after our last post was up, NSERC produced a reply to the letter of the chair of the Math/NSERC Liaison committee regarding term limits. All what I can say for now, is that if the staffer had applied correctly the logic on which she thought she was basing her arguments, she would have arrived to exactly the opposite conclusion, without having to break 4 times NSERC’s own term limits rules (see below). Then, I saw this. Continue reading
Not long after the most controversial Discovery grant competition ever –at least for the Evaluation Group for Mathematics and Statistics (EG 1508)– NSERC announced that 3 out of the 4 members of that EG Executive –who were at the center of last year’s public controversy– will remain in their position for a second year in a row. Moreover, the only new executive member, who will be chairing the “pure mathematics” group within the EG is the director of the Computational Finance Program at Purdue University in Indiana. This raises several issues, not the least of which being questions of term limits and … judgment. Continue reading
An old friend of mine (and a superb analyst/probabilist/mathematical biologist & geneticist) e-mailed me last January. “I am sitting here in the meeting of the nominating committee at the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The committee hopes that you will consider being one of two candidates to stand for election of the board of trustees of the AMS. This is a very important body for charting the future course of the society. It is a five year term but the trustees meet only twice a year for 1-2 days. And hey, there is always the chance that you will have the honor of being nominated and not have to serve if you are not elected.” Continue reading
Viewed so far by 153,373 people, retweeted 2302 times, this creation by PhD student, Matushiq Sotak, became an overnight sensation when it appeared about a month ago. I have asked him if he can make a new grid on how Professors, Postdocs, Graduate students, Politicians and Granting Agencies Bureaucrats see each other. Stay tuned!
I surely hope that’s not how my postdocs see me! Continue reading
Do you remember last year’s Washington, D.C.’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? Well, here is a banner from the march, that was held high by an obviously concerned, though non-identifiable, Ottawa bureaucrat. Continue reading
No wonder Indira Samarasekera had stressed in her submission to the R&D panel, that NSERC should “distinguish its funding of solution-driven research from basic discovery research.” The President of the University of Alberta must know a thing or two about the fate of organizations suffering from a “dual mandate syndrome”. NSERC’s president, Suzanne Fortier, doesn’t even think the review is needed. “Enough reports. We’ve seen enough,” she said in a recent interview with the Globe & Mail. Soon we should know what University of Toronto’s President, David Naylor thinks! Continue reading
“… the attitude that professional administrators with little scientific knowledge can arbitrarily decide the fate of UK science is arrogant, contemptuous of the scientific community and just wrong.” A storm is indeed brewing in the scientific circles of the UK against the current leadership of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Continue reading
NSERC Communications replied to our guest blogger Karel Casteels, about his post regarding the dwindling numbers of graduate and postgraduate fellowships (CGS and PGS and PDFs). Cutting through the maze of budgetary reporting, the key to the story lies in the following NSERC statement: “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.” Here come again the magic words! Continue reading
Very sad news this morning. Canada lost a good politician, Jack Layton, a decent and likable man with a great heart, who has been able to transcend the bitterness that politics seems to breed. His untimely death is so damn unfair! Here are some excerpts from a letter he penned in his final days. Continue reading
Here is a very recent exchange between two UK mathematicians. It hit so close to home –riots and all, Hockey or not– that I couldn’t resist! The subject was the recent acts of “dirigisme” at the UK’s “Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council” (EPSRC). The only difference between our story and the one across the Atlantic is in the names of the scientific disciplines who are accepting the “local anaesthetic” treatment. Continue reading
“Apres moi le deluge?”. Not so for Governor General’s Gold Medalist Scholar, Karel Casteels, who was the one who alerted us to the dramatic drop in NSERC’s graduate and postgraduate fellowships. He wrote then: “I recently finished my own PhD. I was rejected for a PDF in the 2009 competition, but fortunately I was able to find a good postdoc in the US (ironically one more prestigious and much better paying than an NSERC PDF). However I have many friends still in grad school, some of whom were denied an NSERC PDF this past year, and so for their sakes, I felt it important to bring this whole matter to your (and other’s) attention.”
Now that Karel saw NSERC’s response, he did more digging and here is what he found out! Continue reading
Last December, during a lively public debate with Isabelle Blain, NSERC’s Vice-President for Research Grants & Scholarships, my colleague Martin tried to bring a positive note to the conversation by stating that at least NSERC’s new ways are not as bad as those of its counterpart in the UK, the “Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council” (EPSRC). Now that I read the latest blog post by my old friend Fields medalist and Cambridge Professor, Timothy Gowers, I see that Martin may have been right. Micromanagement of the research enterprise, lack of consultation with the academic community, picking winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas, commissioning then ignoring the findings of international panels, not to mention the grand statements and the bureaucratic jargon used to announce it all –on the internet– to a stunned British scientific community. Canada’s scientists are wary, in spite of a sense of a deja-vu! Continue reading
Encouraged by NSERC’s response to explain the reasons behind the drop in the numbers of their graduate scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships, we decided to push our luck and inquire for the reasons behind the substantial decline in the budgets of almost all “Evaluation Groups” (EG) of the Discovery Grants Program. NSERC data for the total amounts awarded in all EG’s for individual discovery grants shows the following changes between 2006 and 2011. Continue reading
In response to our last blog post, “Piece of Mind” received the following memo from NSERC communications.
NSERC offered fewer CGS-PGS awards in 2011 for two reasons:
First, the Government of Canada’s Economic Action Plan (EAP) came to an end, which had provided an additional 400 CGS master’s-level awards in the 2009 and 2010 competitions, and an additional 200 doctoral-level awards in 2009. With the conclusion of the EAP, the number of available awards reverted to the 2008 baseline. Continue reading
Piece of Mind 