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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

#131

Post by asabjorn »

citilife wrote: 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).

When I did research and at grad school a large percentage of my peers were either Asian American or Asian, with a large percentage being immigrants from China. As a researcher in the US you spend too much time writing grants and now equity initiatives introduce extra risk in the tenure system for anyone of the wrong identity. I would not underestimate the lure of easy access to grants and a less politicized tenure track system for anyone of Asian or Asian American heritage.

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

#134

Post by azinman2 »

tanilama wrote: post #86
citilife wrote: 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.

I was just at Ubicomp, and I'd say the level of quality coming out of China was lacking (and a lot of universities outside of China to be fair). But only the papers from China raised red flags if their results were real or not...

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

#135

Post by mc32 »

gowld wrote: post #108
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn’t too long ago (the 90s?) when all foreigners were thought to be spies and needed minders to travel outside of big cities. It is obviously much better now, but not all of that sentiment has washed out (see recent Beijing subway posters encouraging girls not to spill state secrets to foreign boyfriends). I’m not really sure when someone would say bias has crossed over into xenophobia, they are not very disting…

Do Chinese girls know a lot of state secrets? No need to answer if you are still in China at the moment.

Not parent but I think secrets in this case are similar to the divide of information between FTEs and Contractors in many companies. In addition, this is more of an exercise in cementing patriotic duty in the minds of citizens rather than actually preventing classified information leakage.

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

#136

Post by JesseAldridge »

voxl wrote: post #126
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

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 us…

In theory you are correct, but in my practical experience, I've found that the ratio does in fact convey quality quite strongly.

The original motivation behind this project was this: I wrote a script to take a screenshot of my desktop every 10 seconds and upload them to S3. I used boto to do the uploading (https://github.com/boto/boto). Boto leaked memory and eventually the background script would cause my laptop to crash. When I figured out the problem I noticed boto has a large number of open issues (http://repoq.com/boto/boto). This indicates that the project is not well maintained.

Obviously this is not a perfect heuristic. But it's a lot better than one might think.

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

#137

Post by JesseAldridge »

yorwba wrote: post #117
JesseAldridge wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Closing issues without addressing them does indeed present a problem for this approach. The guy behind lodash is especially aggressive about this which is why lodash is the #1 repo on all of GitHub according to this metric (http://repoq.com/lodash/lodash/).

But I find that people closing issues without addressing them is actually a very rare thing. Far more common is for a project to be abandoned by the maintainer. And this heuristic is quite good at raising a red flag in that situation.

Taking a deep dive into a library is of course the most reliable option. But in my experience, really getting an understanding of a large project is a multi-day or even multi-week affair, and this thing serves as an excellent first pass filter.

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

#138

Post by fspeech »

asabjorn wrote: post #131
citilife wrote: 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).

When I did research and at grad school a large percentage of my peers were either Asian American or Asian, with a large percentage being immigrants from China. As a researcher in the US you spend too much time writing grants and now equity initiatives introduce extra risk in the tenure system for anyone of the wrong identity. I would not underestimate the lure of easy access to grants and a less politicized tenure tr…

It is probably true for the proverbial early birds who went to China, but these days grants won't be that easy unless you are established or well-connected. There are also a lot of complaints about "politicized tenure track system".

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

#140

Post by koboll »

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.

As bad as the US is in many different ways, China is immeasurably worse. A future dominated by a hegemonic China would be a dark world. Little steps like these are helping to contribute to that possibility in 50-100 years.
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