Hawking gets visit from PM Harper in Waterloo

R&D should be fairly high on government spending list IMO. I hate the paycheck to paycheck mentality Canada has going.

harper visiting Hawking lol... now if we could just get him to jump in the black hole!

Perhaps the PM could magically get some of Steven's extrordinary intelligence.

Way better than some actorvist.

In modern times R & D has become problematic. Most areas have been well picked over. There is a lot of money spent on bad ideas in R & D. What they need more of is actually ideas. I used to work as a software programmer of real time control of machines. This would be product development. In the 1990's I estimated there were 400 such projects being worked on in Toronto. Then the USA techbubble of 2001 came along and while the Canadian economy did not go into recession it blew away all the bad computer projects in Toronto. Very few of the 400 resurfaced. Basically they were all bad ideas. So R & D can be that backward.

You know that's impossible right?

In modern times R & D has become problematic. Most areas have been well picked over. There is a lot of money spent on bad ideas in R & D. What they need more of is actually ideas. I used to work as a software programmer of real time control of machines. This would be product development. In the 1990's I estimated there were 400 such projects being worked on in Toronto. Then the USA techbubble of 2001 came along and while the Canadian economy did not go into recession it blew away all the bad computer projects in Toronto. Very few of the 400 resurfaced. Basically they were all bad ideas. So R & D can be that backward.

well, if you dont like the bust and boom of new ideas, I suggest you get a job in a grocery market.

In modern times R & D has become problematic. Most areas have been well picked over. There is a lot of money spent on bad ideas in R & D. What they need more of is actually ideas. I used to work as a software programmer of real time control of machines. This would be product development. In the 1990's I estimated there were 400 such projects being worked on in Toronto. Then the USA techbubble of 2001 came along and while the Canadian economy did not go into recession it blew away all the bad computer projects in Toronto. Very few of the 400 resurfaced. Basically they were all bad ideas. So R & D can be that backward.

well, if you dont like the bust and boom of new ideas, I suggest you get a job in a grocery market.

Actually I did, as did a lot of other people.

Much better indeed. I would rather (in my case) have a chat with him rather than take advise from Tom Cruise or Paris Hilton.

I wish he would meet with Steven Hawkings as well.

You know that's impossible right?


Ya,, but the thought made me happy

Although I'm not an expert...

You are comparing corporate R&D with government R&D funding, Bruce. The two come from very different models, one of which the money becomes yours to use if you have a thesis and experiment which is worth the money as decided by committees, and the other is continually funded by a company which, if it goes bankrupt, takes your research money and job with it.

There does need to be more R&D, and this is not directly improving the funding of it enough, imo, although I am happy with Harper doing this nonetheless! A scholarship is great for folks who are working towards their own faculty position or lab and such, but it's not expanding the entire pool of funding available, and that's what I'd like to see change. Over the past few decades the amount of people researching has exploded and there are a lot of folks who are not exactly researching important things, unlike back in the seventies and the eighties where if you were researching you were a lot more likely to be making a real contribution to the scientific community. That most scientists select themselves out for journals such as Science and Nature shows the general direction the view of research has taken over the past thirty or forty years.

At this point, there are also a lot of redundancies in the system. You only have to look to Global Warming to see this -- hundreds of papers talking about sediments in various lakes and oceans, hundreds more discussing the various atmospheric concentrations at various levels, and hundreds of other such topics vying for importance, a few of which a week get into the newspaper. A lot of these redundancies come from groups which get funding from companies or governments around the world and hence we've got a ton of people telling us the same thing as someone from three or four years ago except with some random twist like a new depth reached or a study of a new geological era in that particular lake. The funny thing is, I can probably find a few comics done by folks with PhDs who laugh and say that's what they've seen done by others. I am not slamming the research done, it's just a readily available flooded field, whereas other areas, such as the medical sciences, haven't seen enough notable expansions in research funding quantities in the past few years, and those grants you can get have been getting smaller.

The way our institutions work is not exactly conduscive to getting the next Stanford or Harvard up here either, although I'm not going to present my views about whether this is good or bad since this is another debate. But because of how our Big Five are set up, they cannot turn out the same degree of research as primarily grad institutions famed for producing high impact papers can, as well as a plethora of lower impact papers.

Canada is far from the only Western country to focus on the next quarter instead of the next quarter of a century. But I do agree we should find a field or R&D or two and strive for world-leading excellence in it.

Research in Canada is pretty limited. It used to be dominated by Nortel (far and away), IBM and Pratt and Witney in Quebec. That and the NRC. I don't know the latest, what has happened. From what I've seen of R & D it's hard coming up with worthy ideas, and research engineers feather bed with bad projects.

What do you know about research models? I believe you're talking about government awards to university professors as opposed to development projects by businesses. The government also has it's own labs as do major corporations. My own father ran a corporate lab for 15 years but they actually never invented anything much. I personnally as a technical software programmer have seen a lot of research projects up close, all pretty much pet turkey's of someone or other. (This turkey business is amazing, it's an explanation for the world.) It's tough and getting tougher.