David sends me an article about $200 million spent to recruit 19 researchers to Canada via a program called the Canada Excellence Research Chairs. Two of these positions are, not too surprisingly, in quantum computing/communication: David Cory (formerly from MIT, now at Waterloo) and Bertrand Reulet (formerly from Université Paris-Sud XI, now at Université de Sherbrooke) Congrats to these two for receiving these chairs! Programs like this are always interesting and it will be fascinating to see how effective they are over time.
In related news, there is no such program in the United States. 🙂
O brave new quantum world!
In related news, there is no such program in the United States. 🙂
In general, the USA is the place that other countries most often try to attract their best scientists back from.
Living in Eastern Ontario, this is great news. The oddest comment from one of the American scientists was that he’d have to get used to drinking milk out of plastic bags! He did have Tim Horton’s mastered though.
You don’t have milk in plastic bags in the States? How odd.
It’s actually just an eastern Canada thing now. Western provinces stopped using them years ago, for some reason. On that subject, way to go U of A!
Tips for living in Canada no. 5895: It is usually a good idea to pour the milk out of the bag and into a glass before attempting to drink it.
What disappointed me, however, is that Dr. Bernardine Healy, former Director of the NIH, was a guest and that she didn’t slap Maher down hard for his idiotic statements about vaccines and Pasteur.
Cool news, Dave! Two high-profile academic appointments going to areas that we quantum systems engineers care passionately about: polarization transport mechanisms (Cory) and quantum/classical noise (Reulet).
Now if only more quantum physicists would become comfortable in relaxing their working assumption that QM has a Hilbert state-space … then we could *really* accelerate practical engineering progress. 🙂
Two of these positions are, not too surprisingly, in quantum computing/communication
Apparently there was a huge backlash against the assignment because there were no new Humanities and Social Sciences positions awarded this time. My question is, ironically, why would there be research chairs for Humanities and Social Sciences? Do they do some sort of major research? Plus, in a refreshing change of pace, it was only mentioned in passing that none of the 19 were women (as opposed to people demanding a pointless, expensive inquiry into sexism of research funding agencies.)
“My question is, ironically, why would there be research chairs for Humanities and Social Sciences? Do they do some sort of major research? ”
Yes.
“Plus, in a refreshing change of pace, it was only mentioned in passing that none of the 19 were women (as opposed to people demanding a pointless, expensive inquiry into sexism of research funding agencies.)”
Ah yes its so wonderful that woman are discriminated against in research fields. You know if you close your eyes long enough all your problems just melt away.
“Ah yes its so wonderful that woman are discriminated against in research fields. You know if you close your eyes long enough all your problems just melt away.”
That’s not what I said at all; I’m a *very* strong proponent of completely equal treatment of men and women. What I was referring to is that almost every time there’s some coincidental happening where men get a better roll of the die, feminists (i.e. sexists) hold protests demanding public inquiries. The same happens with tons of other miscellaneous everyday coincidences too, so the government of Canada ends up wasting tons of money on public inquiries that eventually just conclude that nothing wrong was done, even if there WAS something blatantly wrong done. If they could actually get to the bottom of anything instead of wasting all of their time and money investigating so many completely innocuous or obvious things, I’d be all for them trying to come up with a way to encourage more women to do scientific research. I just don’t think that the bureaucrats can be reasonably trusted to do that right.
The selection processes that Paul Beame describes to make a sure seems to suggest gender bias, and it is instructive to work through the numbers.
Consider the lack-of-bias hypothesis “The selection of top candidates is unbiased and the fraction of top candidates that are male is X.”
Now consider the evidence “36 consecutive selections for the top pool were male”.
In order not to reject the lack-of-bias hypothesis with P < 0.05, we have to assume that X > 0.92.
This leads us to ask a common-sense question: is it really true that only eight percent (or less) of top younger scientists are female?
To me, the answer is “no” … and thus, the conclusion that significant gender bias was present is reasonable, on both statistical and common-sense grounds.
The original article may not have discussed a backlash but discussions over the following week generated significant backlash. It turns out that none of the 36 finalists who were seriously considered were women either.