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China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

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61–70 of 204 posts

Re: China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

#61
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely, but most Chinese scientists would still publish their best research in English journals/conferences.

That's true of most scientists from non-English-speaking countries. By the by, there's a market for proofreading those translations (e.g. ThinkScience for the Japanese-to-English market). You won't learn Chinese, but if you're learning Chinese, it might be a good way to see how the Chinese make mistakes going back to English.

as one of the few native english speakers in my grad lab this was definitely a job of mine.

Re: China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

#62
Two easy ways to encourage foreign talent. Put huge investments into English training within the country. Or as they could. Put huge investments into a far simpler language such as Esperanto to create an easier to learn (world) language. Secondly, drop the firewall so that foreign talent and local talent don’t feel so divided.

Re: China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

#63
post #23

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So you think cutting off limbs of live humans — referred to as “logs” by the Japanese — is science?

You could have just said: “what do the Nazis have to do with Chinese academics conducting research at universities?”

Re: China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

#64
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I guess the first step would be luring Chinese scientists currently in US back to China (many of those have US citizenship and would also be counted as US scientists)

I work with lots of Chinese scientists and they say they are never going back. They don't trust Chinese papers or labs at all.

You would not be able to work with Chinese scientists that goes back. Sampling issue.

Re: China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

#65

Two easy ways to encourage foreign talent. Put huge investments into English training within the country. Or as they could. Put huge investments into a far simpler language such as Esperanto to create an easier to learn (world) language. Secondly, drop the firewall so that foreign talent and local talent don’t feel so divided.

China already has a history with Esperanto and has hosted 2 Esperanto World Congresses (http://www.china.org.cn/china/2016-07/26/content_38959660.ht...)

Re: China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

#66
post #3

I don't really think China is luring too many U.S. scientists... Most of the scientists I know pretty much ignore research out of China, because a large portion of it is just not replicable (and / or lies).

China has been progressing quite quickly considering how young their academic/research institutions are.

A very common path for Chinese scientists is to go to a western university for their doctorate and post-doc, develop a research program, and return to a faculty position in China.

Many Chinese grants include salary for the PI, so an investigator getting multiple grants can earn a lot of money. It's an attractive incentive that appears to be working quite well (from my limited exposure).

As for reliability, there are certainly some issues, but I hesitate to paint with a broad brush. Science is often very discipline-specific in terms of reproducibility, openness of collaboration, funding, etc. etc. There absolutely are fields where the Chinese are quite strong.

Re: China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

#67

Frankly, it's embarrassing how an absolutist regime can create a sense of more on-the-ground intellectual freedom than can a supposedly free country. Socially enforced censorship of painfully obvious facts in the west has gotten out of control, and unless we place limits on our newfound authoritarian impulses, we're going to be out-competed. While it's true that we've been very successful for a long time, success bre…

Are you saying the west should allow human experiments on innocent (to-be-born) humans like in China just to keep the pace ? The right to decide what we do to your body, the right to not serve as guinea pig to experiments that aim to achieve a Nazi-like goal of creating a superior race... These are "vague" ethics? If you were currently dieing because of secondary effects due to an experiment we did on you as an embryo (and that you never needed) maybe you wouldn't find those "vague" ethics so useless.

Re: China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

#68
post #23

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When you're fanning the flames of nationalist fear like this, comparing the rising power to Nazis.. are you thinking of yourself as an anti-nazi?

Anyone could pull up 3 links about the USA, UK or Russia being really bad to Muslims.. why single out China? Do we want cooperation or do we want to fight it out?

Re: China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

#69
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So you think cutting off limbs of live humans — referred to as “logs” by the Japanese — is science? You could have just said: “what do the Nazis have to do with Chinese academics conducting research at universities?”

> So you think cutting off limbs of live humans — referred to as “logs” by the Japanese — is science?

No true scotsman? .

The Americans certainly thought so. And you should check out the length of this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio... .

How do you define science?

> You could have just said: “what do the Nazis have to do with Chinese academics conducting research at universities?”

I could if that's what I wanted to say.

Science doesn't have morals. You hypothesise, you experiment, you observe, you document. That's why we have ethics courses.

Re: China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists and Students

#70

Frankly, it's embarrassing how an absolutist regime can create a sense of more on-the-ground intellectual freedom than can a supposedly free country. Socially enforced censorship of painfully obvious facts in the west has gotten out of control, and unless we place limits on our newfound authoritarian impulses, we're going to be out-competed. While it's true that we've been very successful for a long time, success bre…

I don’t think the ethical grounds for objecting to gene editing are vague at all. Taken to logical extremes, the ability to edit out ‘undesirable’ qualities in our descendants should ring alarm bells in anyone - who decides what is undesirable?

There are plenty of practical grounds too. They don’t just turn off the cancer switch - gene editing ‘turns off’ some deep cellular function that is involved in cancer developing. But that function might regulate something else we don’t understand - we don’t yet know the consequences 40,50 or 100 years later of doing that.

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