It’s hard to keep up with all that’s being written about postsecondary education in Canada, but there are at least 10 bloggers that I do try to read regularly. Here they are, grouped somewhat haphazardly and in no particular order:
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Another announcement by Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) and Science and Technology:
The new Youth STEM initiative will provide up to $20 million for not-for-profit organizations to enhance or expand educational science and technology outreach programs that increase young people’s awareness about the rewards of pursuing an education or career in the sciences.
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I will post later about my debate yesterday with Isabelle Blain, NSERC’s Vice-President, Research Grants and Fellowships on the topic of NSERC Discovery Grant Evaluation
Systems: New and Old. But I can already say that there was a consensus –at least in the audience– that Sir Isaac Newton could not get a discovery grant from NSERC under the newly devised system. Why? He couldn’t be bothered with HQP! More later.
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The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) made their pre-2011 Budget submission to the Minister of Finance, James Flaherty. What are the highlights of this year’s ask?
1. Support foundational research through the Tri-council, and in particular SSHRC.
2. Support the internationalization of our campuses, in particular more links with India.
3. Expand access of aboriginal Canadians to post-secondary education.
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“Enough reports. We’ve seen enough,” NSERC’s President Suzanne Fortier said in a recent interview with the Globe&Mail. “At the end of the day, we all agree that Canada needs to up its game in innovation”.
She also talks about how she found a way to double the number of companies involved in NSERC’s research partnerships with universities – to 3,000 from more than 1,500 now.
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NSERC introduced in 2009 a new “binning” system to the review process in the Discovery Grant program. The program’s success rate has been on a downward spiral since — from 71 per cent in 2008 to 64 per cent in 2009 and falling to a record-low level of 58 per cent this year.
The number of appeals rose from 122 in 2008 to 223 in 2009 to 224 in 2010. The number of successful appeals, however, remains in the 20’s, with the exception of 2009, a transition year that left NSERC scrambling. NSERC’s website states that the rate of success of appeals is less than 25%. It is actually half of that.
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For the longest time, we have been told that Government is skeptical of, even hostile to, the concept of funding basic research, and that any open criticism of NSERC could have dire consequences, since it will give politicians a good excuse to slash and burn our favorite program.
Guess what? Times must have changed. Government seems to know better than ever which programs are efficient, accountable, and desired by the research community, and which ones need to be reviewed and re-evaluated. Indeed, as promised in the 2010 budget, the Government has launched a comprehensive review of all federally funded programs in support of business Research and Development: More than 100 programs, costing the Canadian taxpayer over 7 billion dollars: essentially all the programs that are supposed to contribute in one way or another to the innovation agenda.
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Suzanne Fortier
Suzanne Fortier has been reappointed for a second 5-years term as President of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). We wish her well.
The first term of Dr. Fortier was marked by an abrupt change of government and therefore of style in dealing with traditionally independent government agencies. Remember Statistics Canada?
“Is the National Research Council (NRC) a basic research organization or an applied research organization? Does it exist to perform independent, government-sponsored research, or does it provide research services in support of the private sector? Does it perform early-stage research and then partner with industry, or is it a fee-for-service research organization?
The NRC is a mess. And this mess neatly encapsulates much that’s wrong with Canadian science policy. No direction, no cohesion, and multiple conflicting purposes.”
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Eva Szabo (pictured here on the left) was part of a team under the direction of Dr. Mick Bhatia of McMaster University’s Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute that succeeded in transforming skin cells into mature blood cells in less than thirty days. One of the most talked-about biomedical breakthroughs of 2010, this new development offers hope to sufferers from blood and immunological diseases, such as leukemia, who are often unable to find a suitable donors.
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Back in 1995, and way before Gwyn Morgan took up this role, 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 the other about the “behaviour of humming birds”. They 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.
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Knowledge Transfer
UBC has been pro-active in integrating non-academic internships into its academic programs. The Science and Applied Science Faculties, and the Sauder School already have a good track record in this direction, through the traditional Coop programs for undergraduate students. More recently, UBC has elected to host, partner with, and support the MITACS network, which is leading a paradigm shift on the national level, in graduate training and in technology and knowledge transfer.
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Bungling Bureaucrats
Throughout the scientific enterprise there is a pressing need to create a platform for communities of researchers to jointly articulate a vision for their research efforts, to devise a strategy for achieving this vision, and to be accountable for this vision by the public, by government, and by funding agencies. Without this platform, research policy is set by administrative demands: in some cases directly, by responding to government priorities with new or targeted funding, and in many instances indirectly, by changes in administrative details.
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The three amigos
The research enterprise is by definition international; if one wants to be a leader in this community, one must be tied in. The European Community has been extremely proactive in promoting collaborative research efforts by supporting European and international networks for research and training. These have had synergetic effects not only in the historically R&D challenged regions, such as Spain, Greece, Portugal and Southern Italy, but also in research powerhouses like Britain, France, and Germany.
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Testimony of the 7 CEOs of Big Tobacco
In a recent book, “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”, US historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway take on those they say have sown doubt about key scientific findings for their own political ends.
Blame it all on Al-Khawarizmi
“Is Math replacing independent thought”, screams the front page of today’s Globe and Mail (the title has been mercifully changed since this morning!). It is simply hard to believe that such a silly article can be written and published.
Let alone that the author’s definition of “algorithms” is shaky at best, what he really wants us to do is to be scared, scared and scared from this “new strain of Cholera”. Isn’t it the best way to get our attention?
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On Nov. 4, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty wrapped up Ontario’s mission to China by announcing a new Trillium Scholarship program designed to attract the world’s best graduate students to pursue doctoral studies in Ontario: 75 scholarships — each one providing $40,000 a year for up to four years, to be paid for by both the government and the universities. He made the announcement while speaking to professors and students at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
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President Stephen Toope and his wife Paula Rosen hosted a lovely reception last night at their house in honor of Julie Payette and Louis Nirenberg, this year’s recipients of UBC’s honorary degrees. With her familiar gracious and humorous style, the Chancellor, Sarah Morgan-Silvester, introduced the guests of honor and spoke about their achievements.
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The news for British universities are particularly bad as of late. Higher education will suffer major budget cuts under a recent spending review released by the British government. Excluding research support, which will remain flat, the amount of money going to higher education in England will decline by 40 percent over the next four years, from 7.1 billion pounds (about $11-billion) to 4.2 billion pounds (about $6.6-billion).
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NY Times’ conservative columnist, David Brooks, writes about what America needs to do to achieve success in the future.
“Building that America means doing everything possible to thicken connections: finance research to attract scientists; improve infrastructure to ease travel; fix immigration to funnel talent; reform taxes to attract superstars; make study abroad a rite of passage for college students; take advantage of the millions of veterans who have served overseas. The nation with the thickest and most expansive networks will define the age. ”
Amen!
Am I becoming conservative in my old age?
Piece of Mind 