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

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

#91

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sgillen wrote: post #75
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #12

Well, you know, it’s not like the USA isn’t luring a lot of Chinese researchers and students already. Speaking as an American who worked as a researcher in China for almost 9 years, China is way late to the “leveraging global talent” game. They should catch up, it’s only natural.

Seems like it's much easier to leverage global talent when you are leading the research at a global level. This has arguably not been this case for (modern) china until recently.

Well, there is also a bit of xenophobia against foreigners that they have to sort out. It manifests in weird ways, like not being able to give foreigner employees options in local companies.

Keep in mind that the number of foreigners in China is about the same as the number of foreigners in Tokyo.

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

#92

Post by cat199 »

yourbandsucks wrote: post #68
eiaoa wrote: post #23

[flagged]

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?

> 3 links about the USA, UK or Russia being really bad to Muslims

and which one of these states is officially atheist and requires the same to become a govt official?

realize oversimplification is a problem, but false equivalence also runs both ways.

there is likely room in the middle, which perhaps is what you are saying..

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

#93

Post by alabato »

quotemstr wrote: post #73
alabato wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 embry…

The west performs human experimentation all the time for the sake of validating new drugs and surgical devices. While current standards are, IMHO, too strict, the system more or less works, and few people have serious ethical problems with clinical trials, despite clinical trials being literally human experimentation.

wow that's messed up :(. We experimented on a baby that :

1) never had the need of this experiment, it was not to cure him but to test the effect of messing with a certain gene.

2) we never had its consent (obviously)

I don't know about US, but in EU we don't experiment with people, without their concent and in order not to cure them, but to find how to build a stronger race.

That's a whole higher level of screwed up that just happened in China.

This is non-consenting human experiment in order not to cure but to find how to build a stronger race. This is not (as far as I know) in any way comparable to what is happening in the West

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

#94

Post by currymj »

my_first_acct wrote: post #71
dqpb wrote: post #24

This may not be accurate, but I feel like the US benefited a lot from many foreigners knowing English. This does not seem to be the case for Chinese, though I imagine that will change.

Because of the difficult writing system (thousands of characters to memorize, rather than a mere 26), Mandarin is unlikely to replace English as a world language.

i don't know about this. how much worse, really, are hanzi (which do have a loose structure to them, it's not just brute memorization) than the deranged English spelling system?

if there's anyone who learned both as additional languages I would be interested in hearing.

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

#95

Post by mc32 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #91
sgillen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like it's much easier to leverage global talent when you are leading the research at a global level. This has arguably not been this case for (modern) china until recently.

Well, there is also a bit of xenophobia against foreigners that they have to sort out. It manifests in weird ways, like not being able to give foreigner employees options in local companies. Keep in mind that the number of foreigners in China is about the same as the number of foreigners in Tokyo.

Is that really xenophobia of just bias? If it were xenophobia, why would they hire foreigners in the first place?

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

#96

Post by antod »

inciampati wrote: post #89
stochastic_monk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard similar things about English being among the harder languages to learn. I think it depends more on what kind of language you already know.

It's regular-ish grammar helps. It has simple conguation rules and almost no declensions. Its irregular pronunciation rules do not, but in practice they only make the speaker sound foreign, and do not make them unintelligible. If English isn't an easy language, what is? Is there any language that is universally easy?

I've heard English described as "fault tolerant". Sure it's hard to get completely correct, but people can still communicate usefully even while messing it up quite badly. Which helps makes it useful as a de facto standard.

Probably because even most native English speakers don't know how to get it completely correct either (I count myself in that group).

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

#97

Post by fspeech »

alabato wrote: post #67
quotemstr wrote: post #44

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 embry…

It is not allowed in China either if you are referring to the recent gene editing experiment. The researcher is widely denounced in China and will likely be in legal trouble.

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

#98

Post by yourbandsucks »

cat199 wrote: post #92
yourbandsucks wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 3 links about the USA, UK or Russia being really bad to Muslims and which one of these states is officially atheist and requires the same to become a govt official? realize oversimplification is a problem, but false equivalence also runs both ways. there is likely room in the middle, which perhaps is what you are saying..

China is officially communist, officially a republic. Actually neither.

As far as atheism goes, the government propaganda under Xi has been including a lot of Taoist imagery and references lately, from what I understand.

What I'm saying is that they're people and demonization serves nobody. I'm also saying that the demonization I've seen lately from the tech industry correlates negatively with actual knowledge of the country.

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

#99

Post by cscurmudgeon »

jackconnor wrote: post #78
eiaoa wrote: post #23

[flagged]

Do you equate the Chinese to nazis? Because that's insane and totally fear-mongering, especially if you think China is evil but other countries would use scientific research for only rainbows and puppies.

Everything is not black and white. There is a spectrum and let us not pretend that China is close to most democratic countries on this scale.

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

#100

Post by JesseAldridge »

techie128 wrote: post #81
JesseAldridge wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mainly look at the ratio of stars to open issues. I find this to be a very good heuristic: http://repoq.com/baidu/Familia/ http://repoq.com/nltk/nltk http://repoq.com/RaRe-Technologies/gensim http://repoq.com/lists/natural_language_processing

China has a population of 1.3B. Isn't it possible that a lot of them have starred it because it is in Mandarin and targeted primarily towards them? You're not accounting for bias.

Presumeably the number of open issues should be proportional, no? A high star/open-issue ratio suggests people like the library and are not having problems with it. (And if they do have problems those problems are addressed -- i.e. issues are getting closed.)
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