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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

#141

Post by r0m4n0 »

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…

I am employed by one of the big tech companies in the bay and was recently chosen to interview candidates for our new grad program. I was astonished by how many top of class graduate students we brought into the program that had identical backgrounds. Around 90% had studied in and were from China, usually undergrad there and Ivy League grad school with close to perfect GPAs. If they are keeping their students, I haven’t seen it yet. Will see how it plays out in the near future

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

#142

Post by scarcely »

yorwba wrote: post #127
gowld wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When I was little a game I would often play with myself is to switch on the Pinyin IME, keep pressing random keys for a minute or two, and then try to make sense of the ridiculous stuff I typed out. It was a lot of fun because you can always make some kind of sense of it.

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

#143

Post by oh-kumudo »

stochastic_monk wrote: post #56
whatshisface wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is not the easiest language to learn, but Mandarin is among the hardest.

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.

English CAN be easy for several reasons:

1. Very analytical, wake in inflections.

2. No genders for nouns.(As an Eastern Asian, I have serious problem understanding the motivation of introducing such concept into a language.)

3. Reasonable number of tenses comparing with rest of European languages, with the exception of probably present perfect tense, which can be fairly confusing.

It CAN be hard for the following reasons:

1. Huge amount of French/Latin borrowed words that don't follow the orthodoxical way of word construction in Germanic language family, unlike German. This leads to a lot of cognitive overhead having to memorize those words since they tend to appear more often in advanced writings.

2. Related to the first argument, English pronunciation CANNOT be reliably inferred from its letter representation. Again leads to a lot of mistakes and force memorization.

I think English is easier as a language for everyday use. But to read and write academic text, it still requires years of training. Personally, it takes me about 10 years to reach a certain level of confidence in writing and conversation, for speaking it is even longer.

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

#144

Post by xvilka »

tinyhouse wrote: post #133

The research quality and funding is just one factor. The more important factor is quality of life. Things like air quality and being able to get along without knowing Chinese.

Air quality improves every year, and cities try to plant as much as trees as possible. What I like - they even plant ivy or similar things to climb highway pylons. It looks very beautiful during the summer.

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

#145

Post by sidlls »

bllguo wrote: post #121
my_first_acct wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your belief needs evidence. Or a more precise definition of "learning" and "education." My experience, both East and West, is that the typical person is just too busy trying to survive to care much about learning or education (in almost any sense).

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

#147

Post by hopfscotch »

koboll wrote: post #140
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.

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.

If current trends prevail, it's inevitable. When all else is equal, won't the largest countries dominate?

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

#149

Post by gus_massa »

quotemstr wrote: post #72
westiseast wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 develop…

If you had the option to grant your child the ability to live to 150 in perfect health, and if, experimentally determined, the risk of negative side effects were the same as, say, postponing childbirth by five years, would you withold this advantage from your child, sentencing him or her to a shorter and more miserable life? How could a responsible parent choose to do that?

> and if, experimentally determined, the risk of negative side effects were the same as, say, postponing childbirth by five years,

To determine that some change is safe during the expected 150 year of life, you must measure the effects during … at least 150 years (preferability more).

How would be you sure that there are no tradeoff? Perhaps it reduce the chance of reproduction by a 1%. Perhaps it affect the ability to climb very tall mountains or very deep scuba diving. Perhaps it will make your grandgrandchildren more weak during a famine (sooner or later, some of your descendants will suffer a famine) or an epidemic. What are the good genes for surviving a war? How do you average the advantages and disadvantages of the normal times and the war times? And there are some adaptations that cause problems but makes you more resistant to malaria, how long you expect your descendants to live in a malaria free zone?

How are you sure that the proposed changes are real advantages and not just some fads? (Consider that it's not clear how many eggs should you eat weekly, the recommendation changes every ten years.)

What about exchanging 10 years of life for a 1% more chance of reproduction. Perhaps 1% is small, but it accumulates during the generations.

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