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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

#121

Post by bllguo »

my_first_acct wrote: post #112
currymj wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this is fantastic, thanks. I can definitely attest that Chinese people are very proud of the difficulty of their language. One possible factor that isn't mentioned: I believe that culturally, the Chinese value learning and education more.

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

#122

Post by yorwba »

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?

> 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.

Are you talking about Chinese or English here? It would apply to both. The hard part in learning Chinese is the script, which simply requires a lot of time spent memorizing. If you're willing to settle for the literacy of an uneducated villager, learning Chinese isn't that difficult.

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

#123

Post by DevX101 »

The bigger impact isn't luring U.S. scientists to China. It's keeping top Chinese scientists/students in China. Chinese grad students/postdocs are highly represented at elite U.S. universities. With recent political changes in the U.S. making more difficult for international students to come to the U.S. or at least giving the impression that the U.S. is not as friendly to immigration, enrollment from international students have started to drop in the past 2 years.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/13/new-internati... https://cgsnet.org/first-time-over-decade-international-grad...

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

#124

Post by legionof7 »

asabjorn wrote: post #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…

I don't think biology explains away the gender gap.

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

#125

Post by withhighprod »

DevX101 wrote: post #123

The bigger impact isn't luring U.S. scientists to China. It's keeping top Chinese scientists/students in China. Chinese grad students/postdocs are highly represented at elite U.S. universities. With recent political changes in the U.S. making more difficult for international students to come to the U.S. or at least giving the impression that the U.S. is not as friendly to immigration, enrollment from international st…

[dead]

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

#126

Post by voxl »

JesseAldridge wrote: post #39
bllguo wrote: 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

The ratio does not convey quality.

Stars can indicate interest where as issues are correlated with both usage and quality. A star is not nearly as strongly correlated with either usage or quality, it is most strongly correlated with interest. I star a thing because I think it is interesting and what to learn more about it.

If I'm writing an issue on a thing I never even have to star it because I am either actively using it (and thus perhaps watching it) or I'm a drive-by issuer that just stumbled on this thing and thus will either star the project because it interests me or not.

Stars to Issues is Interest to Usage, the more interesting a thing is an the least used it is the better it scores.

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

#127

Post by yorwba »

gowld wrote: post #113
currymj wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. If you just type ahead in Pinyin and accept whatever the input method makes out of it, human readers will be able to fix the remainder. It works analogously with handwritten characters, where you don't need to remember every stroke, so long as the general shape is recognizable.

u ll maek urlself look dum tho

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

#128

Post by markdown »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #99
jackconnor wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> let us not pretend that China is close to most democratic countries on this scale.

Why not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

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

#129

Post by asabjorn »

legionof7 wrote: post #124
asabjorn wrote: post #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…

I don't think biology explains away the gender gap.

How do you then explain that the gender gap increase the more equal countries are [1, 2]?

This doesn't mean that one gender is more capable than the other, women actually do as well on average in the sciences as men, but it seems to indicate that the genders does not make the same choices if social or economic limitations are removed. Also, why are the choices women make in countries like Norway inferior to the choices they make in less gender equal countries?

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... [2] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-personality-differences-sexes-...

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

#130

Post by withhighprod »

TTPrograms wrote: post #49
fooker wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please look at the number of papers from China in top CS conferences. In general, the reviews are double blind, making it as objective as possible at this moment. Example: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2018/Schedule

For those wondering, I just clicked through a few randomly and I only saw ~1/10 from China, and it was fairly applied (i.e. not especially novel research). I'd be interested in a more thorough analysis.

You probably should search for Chinese names. While a good portion of them will live in US, the consensus is 1) The career ceiling is significantly higher in China 2) increasingly hostile social environment 3) separation with family and the culture (food) not worth it at some point 4) no underlying racial bias
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