A note for the non-Canadians reading this: NRC is a government agency which does "in-house" research, but it is distinct from NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR, which provide funding (almost exclusively via universities) for research into the sciences-and-engineering, social sciences, and health.
I'm still not a big fan of this change, but it would be incorrect to read this as meaning that all government-funded research is limited to "social or economic gain" projects.
From Galileo to WW2, science progressed at an amazing pace with little and sporadic government support (mostly in the way of prizes). Then governments stepped in and started throwing insane amounts of money at research projects - who was going to say no? Now everyone's addicted to public funds, and waking up to the realization that who pays the piper calls the tune.
The most important sailing expeditions to the New World were funded by European crowns.
The atomic bomb was developed exclusively through government research.
The vast majority of space program was developed through government funds, and what wasn't done by them was delegated and coordinated by them (and ultimately paid for as well).
Public universities are the largest and most important institutions doing basic research, and doing a lot of the actual innovation in medical research. Fewer and fewer companies are still dedicated to that (witness HP and Xerox withdrawing from the field; IBM is pretty much the only giant still putting resources into that).
The German and Chinese governments are subsidising solar energy research to the effect that its viability as an alternative power source has increased dramatically in the last decade.
Tell me how many companies nowadays are actually spending real money into research programs where the expected outcomes will reach fruition in 20 years or more.
Through that entire time, the cost of every incremental discovery has increased exponentially. It's not that people are addicted to public research funds, it's that it's no longer possible to do experimentally-rigorous science without massive amounts of money.
You see this phenomenon all over the place, and it's impact on industries. E.g. each generation of microprocessor fab is exponentially more expensive than the last, and the result has been that companies have been spinning off their fabs until only a handful have fab capability left.
The next government will flip it around, and use NRC to further THEIR ends. Please forgive my cynicism, but the act of thinking that one political party is "better" than the other is a triumph of optimism over experience.
Meh, as a Canadian I've always been disappointed in how despite spending a lot of money on government R&D we've never really got much out of it. NRC has always been a bit of a weird beast and NSERC is still around.
"... at the NSERC conference this week. It's crazy. They don't want to fund research unless it is run in collaboration with an industry partner. It's killing primary research and making all of the scientists crazy."
If true, why veil it at all? Why not just defund it alone? The government reserves the right to not fund whatever it wants to. This will have an awful lot of collateral damage. So much so that I doubt the primary motivation was simply defunding climate science.
I think it's fairly good proof of the religious nature of climate change that anything and everything somehow must relate to it in some grand conspiracy. Sorry for being hostile, but your claim is simply ridiculous.
The NRC already was a completely captive vehicle of the government. With this change they're essentially trying to make it more self-sustaining by moving it to contract research, which obviously includes a lot of renewable energy research, health sciences, etc.
Such a change (to funded "partner" research) is short-sighted and foolish, but it's all about dollars. It isn't a "veiled attempt" at anything, yet is an obvious, open attempt at reducing costs.
Canada have also sold out public museums.. they'll only cover topics approved by the current in-power government, making them the definition of the ministry of truth.
If research is done purely in the private sector, then how do the research findings make it into the wider scientific community? Especially if the processes become patented. There is no communal well of scientific knowledge to draw from.
I find it interesting that sentence in the article that the title is taken from actually says 'they will only perform research that has “social or economic gain”'. A bit of a change. That sentence is a hyperlink to the following article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/research-counci...
Not amazing when I visited there last year. Stick to the larger cities and you should be fine, though. If you are on the West Coast of Canada, I'd highly recommend moving before October, 2014 -- that's when higher concentrations of Caesium-137 (from Fukushima) are predicted to strike our coastal waters.
It's like Stephen Harper knows he's running out of time, and he's trying to screw up as many remaining parts of the Canadian federal government as he can before the end.
This isn't limited to the Canadian government. Try to get a STEM paper published in a respectable venue in any field that has no appreciable economic utility. Nobody cares about finding things out simply because they are interesting (at least not enough to do something about it), they all have to have an obvious application that generates money.
Another way to look at this is that it's Canada's way of increasing the publication rate of its scientists.
that's a cute thought. How do you, then pick which projects aren't run by total charlatans - to fund them? I suppose you could have grant review boards. But these grant review boards are then populated with other 'expert scientists' who are merely people who were funded by the exact same process. Eventually the whole thing becomes a cyclical echo chamber populated by an elite cadre of politically connected scientists, who, because of perverse, monetary or non-monetary incentives (such as status), performance might be unhinged from any character traits actually important to science, like ability to craft smart experiments, ability to pick up scientific insight, or ability to do experiments without fudging data.
"Over the past few years, the Canadian government has been lurching into antiscience territory. For example, they’ve been muzzling scientists, essentially censoring them from talking about their research. Scientists have fought back against this, though from what I hear with limited success."
The government has not muzzled any scientific research: It is posted just as it always has been, uncensored and without any approval process.
What they did do is essentially try to reign in government paid researchers who were looking to make a name for themselves, often by providing dire sounding, attention grabbing soundbites from preliminary research to a media too ignorant to understand what they were being told. I think all of us know that the general media is horrendous at reporting on research, and when they had a complicit partner in crime who is interested in seeing their own name in print, things get ugly.
If you work for someone, they often have a say over what you do with your work. There is nothing particularly surprising about this, and the Soviet-style descriptives -- almost all of it politically motivated -- does nothing to clarify the situation.
Yes exactly, it was all about glory-chasing who just wanted to see their names in print. It had nothing to do with climate and environmental scientists warning of the impact of governmental policies when their studies and models fell on deaf ears.
Of course the Canadian government hasn't muzzled any research, they have just systematically defunded all research aimed at establishing the environmental impact of the petroleum industry as it operates in Canada. Experimental Lakes project? Good-bye, but of course that is not "muzzling" science. Polar Environmental research lab? Axed, because we don't need studies of the warming arctic getting in the way of those petro-dollars. And now we finally get down to brass tacks. Unless you have industry funding or backing, don't bother. And of course industry just loves to fund rigorous investigations into the externalities they create.
I don't know why you are trying so hard in this thread to shout "Nothing to be seen here!" but I really have to ask why you are trying so hard to remain oblivious. The current government's stance on the environment is pretty well established and is in no way secret. To claim ignorance of this requires serious effort, or serious dishonesty.
You appear to be knowingly disingenuous. The Cons are doing exactly what they do with their caucus and what they're trying to do to the CBC - control any message that doesn't fit Father Harper's tightly controlled script. If scientists speak out in a way that is dishonest or threatens their credibility it is the citizens of Canada and the scientific community that shall be the judge. Not the evidence-averse Conservative party.
The example from the article is really ignorant and self-defeating. Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself, he just formalized and turned into Greek squiggles what Faraday had discovered. And Faraday's claim to fame was working for Davy, doing things like inventing electric motors and lamps. So if you want to use that history as an example, it says applications come first, and hypotheses and research papers and scientific conferences and the rest of that crap are just the documentation of the new invention.
[+] [-] cperciva|13 years ago|reply
I'm still not a big fan of this change, but it would be incorrect to read this as meaning that all government-funded research is limited to "social or economic gain" projects.
[+] [-] zeteo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Daishiman|13 years ago|reply
The atomic bomb was developed exclusively through government research.
The vast majority of space program was developed through government funds, and what wasn't done by them was delegated and coordinated by them (and ultimately paid for as well).
Public universities are the largest and most important institutions doing basic research, and doing a lot of the actual innovation in medical research. Fewer and fewer companies are still dedicated to that (witness HP and Xerox withdrawing from the field; IBM is pretty much the only giant still putting resources into that).
The German and Chinese governments are subsidising solar energy research to the effect that its viability as an alternative power source has increased dramatically in the last decade.
Tell me how many companies nowadays are actually spending real money into research programs where the expected outcomes will reach fruition in 20 years or more.
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
You see this phenomenon all over the place, and it's impact on industries. E.g. each generation of microprocessor fab is exponentially more expensive than the last, and the result has been that companies have been spinning off their fabs until only a handful have fab capability left.
[+] [-] darxius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickff|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drpgq|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themstheones|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edmond_dantes|13 years ago|reply
-- My coworker
[+] [-] bhb916|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corresation|13 years ago|reply
The NRC already was a completely captive vehicle of the government. With this change they're essentially trying to make it more self-sustaining by moving it to contract research, which obviously includes a lot of renewable energy research, health sciences, etc.
Such a change (to funded "partner" research) is short-sighted and foolish, but it's all about dollars. It isn't a "veiled attempt" at anything, yet is an obvious, open attempt at reducing costs.
[+] [-] grecy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corresation|13 years ago|reply
Do you have any citation or source for this?
[+] [-] edmond_dantes|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freshhawk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thangalin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway1980|13 years ago|reply
Another way to look at this is that it's Canada's way of increasing the publication rate of its scientists.
[+] [-] ronaldx|13 years ago|reply
Government funding should be un-economic.
[+] [-] dnautics|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corresation|13 years ago|reply
The government has not muzzled any scientific research: It is posted just as it always has been, uncensored and without any approval process.
What they did do is essentially try to reign in government paid researchers who were looking to make a name for themselves, often by providing dire sounding, attention grabbing soundbites from preliminary research to a media too ignorant to understand what they were being told. I think all of us know that the general media is horrendous at reporting on research, and when they had a complicit partner in crime who is interested in seeing their own name in print, things get ugly.
If you work for someone, they often have a say over what you do with your work. There is nothing particularly surprising about this, and the Soviet-style descriptives -- almost all of it politically motivated -- does nothing to clarify the situation.
[+] [-] jgon|13 years ago|reply
Of course the Canadian government hasn't muzzled any research, they have just systematically defunded all research aimed at establishing the environmental impact of the petroleum industry as it operates in Canada. Experimental Lakes project? Good-bye, but of course that is not "muzzling" science. Polar Environmental research lab? Axed, because we don't need studies of the warming arctic getting in the way of those petro-dollars. And now we finally get down to brass tacks. Unless you have industry funding or backing, don't bother. And of course industry just loves to fund rigorous investigations into the externalities they create.
I don't know why you are trying so hard in this thread to shout "Nothing to be seen here!" but I really have to ask why you are trying so hard to remain oblivious. The current government's stance on the environment is pretty well established and is in no way secret. To claim ignorance of this requires serious effort, or serious dishonesty.
[+] [-] arcosdev|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ucee054|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mchouza|13 years ago|reply
Maxwell "invented" the displacement current:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current
[+] [-] orbital303|13 years ago|reply
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