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

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111–120 of 204 posts

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

#111
post #92

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..

The US state is officially atheist, yet somehow requires people to be non-atheist to become a govt official. There has been only one avowed atheist in Congress in recent memory, and several more who felt necessary to lie about being non-atheist.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/atheists-in-congre...

Several US states are in fact officially theist and requires the same to become a govt official (despite apparently violating the US Constitution.)

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2009/12/15/which-states-...

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

#112
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here is an article on the subject: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html ("Why Chinese is So Damn Hard")

And evin bad spelers can riit undrstandabbel englush.

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

#113
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can bluff your way through English spelling and let the computer fix 90+% of it and let human readers fix most of the remainder. Can you do that with Mandarin characters?

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

#114
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

"Involuntary Sterilization and Castration in Sweden and the Nordic Countries"

"In 1934, the first sterilisation act was enacted in Sweden followed by the first castration act in 1944. In 1972, Sweden became the first country in the world to enact legislation for the amendment of legally registered sex, however preconditioned on sterilisation. In the implementation of all these laws, voluntary and involuntary interventions have been made with legislative support... The involuntarily castrated [in the period 1972-2013] have still not received any reparations from the Swedish State [2018]"

https://www.soclaw.lu.se/en/node/394

It seems that authists and trans people were actively targetted for a long period of time.

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

#115
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. Also in such a situation. What makes Familia the best vs. gensim/NLTK?

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

I certainly did not expect you to have built a project around quantifying repo quality. Interesting.

Wonder if there are cross-cultural differences in starring/issue-opening frequencies, since the assumption here is that there are none

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not necessarily a sampling issue. Of course they could work with scientists that go back. You work with them, then they go back. The implication is clearly that the parent could have already worked with scientists that have gone back and that isn't occuring.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Closed issues do not necessarily imply that problems are being addressed. Sometimes issues are closed because the maintainer has decided not to address the problem. Sometimes the project simply uses an external bug tracker instead of GitHub issues. Some projects do fix bugs reported in an issue, but they don't have a dedicated person managing issues, so they remain open long after the problem has been solved.

I think a high star/open-issue ratio is only a very weak indicator, that you should only use when you have hundreds of repos to evaluate and no domain expertise to decide which actually solves your problem.

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

#118
post #42
post #36

TLDR; China has started the The Thousand Talent program to recruit professors from all over the world: http://www.1000plan.org/en/ . Also, Chinese govt now offering international students scholarships to cover the cost if they enroll: https://www.scholarshipsads.com/china-scholarships/ .

Oh my, the name could hardly be more unfortunate as it evokes the "Let a 1000 flowers blossom" campaign. https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/226950.html

"1000" is an idiom for "many" in Chinese. it only evokes that to you because "1000" isn't an idiom for "many" in your language.

In English, we'd have a "Million Dollar Talent" program and a Chinese would say it unfortunately evokes "Millon Dollar Baby"

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

#119
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).

Chinese AI/CS papers are definitely not going to be ignored. They are really strong on that front, for they have a huge domestic industry to sustain such level of researches and there is economical benefit to going after.

[deleted]

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

#120
As a former researcher I am not surprised to see another nation capitalizing on the counter-productive politicization of US science.

I used to be a researcher and writing proposals suddenly started taking up much more time around 2010 to 2013 because each grant became much smaller. Each grant also became more specific in what science you were expected to produce, which essentially made us all contractors for NSF plus DOE and winning a grant was sometimes more about politics than producing excellent scholarship. This pushed a lot of great scientists out of the field.

After I left research radical leftists started a more expansive politicized attack on science that is further politisizing who gets tenure or grants essential to making scientific progress.

- Biology as a subject is the most affected right now [1], because biology shows that there are biological differences that contribute to individuals choices in a way that invalidates the univariant equity doctrine political explanations. Women on average does are as capable as men in the sciences, but they differences in choices increase the more equal the societies are.

- Science as a competence hierarchy is under attack by the equity initiatives [2], making it so that the most important factors for getting grants and tenure is often not competence.

The fact is unfortunately that these programs have been shown to not increase the production of great science [3]. Moreover, these efforts further demoralize and alienate scientists.

We should at this point not be under any doubt that unless we defeat the politicization of science the US will not remain competitive. We should ask ourselves if we want to be equal on a sinking ship or make life better by allowing everyone to compete as individuals regardless of which identity you think they belong to.

[1] https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-activists-campaign-ag... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/when-wil...

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