, 8 min read
My thoughts on how research funding is attributed in Canada to Computer Science
10 thoughts on “My thoughts on how research funding is attributed in Canada to Computer Science”
, 8 min read
10 thoughts on “My thoughts on how research funding is attributed in Canada to Computer Science”
Regarding point 4: Different people think in different ways. Some people prefer making concrete long-term plans, even if the plans keep changing all the time. For others, the absurd mix and match of ideas is the real plan. Some people in the latter group eventually learn how to write convincing fake plans, but it can be a harder task than the actual research.
It is definitively harder to write a proposal than to write a simple research paper. I don’t know if testing people on their ability to write proposals is the right thing to do. Yet this is the rule of the game and not just in science. Try to get funding from your bank without a business plan that is understandable…
This sounds a lot like the Cravath system–the “up or out” system where young lawyers start at a law firm and either keep getting promoted until they either “make partner”, or are washed out.
In its way it’s merciful to the less-than-capable junior faculty members where they are told, “OK, sorry, you’re not a good enough fit for academia, go find something else”. Rather than grad students/postdocs being strung along in the field forever, increasing competition for low-level/entry academic jobs.
Interesting, thanks. You mentioned a grid a couple of times – what is that?
There is a grid that summarizes the peer review manual. You can google it.
I haven’t yet read the economics paper, but from the abstract it sounds like Stagnation and Scientific Incentives by Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen might be relevant to your insights.
It is an interesting paper, but I don’t agree with the model. There may be stagnation, but I doubt it is because of the pursuit of citations.
There is a lot of junk research, and I am sure that this has much to do with the stagnation if stagnation there is, but I am quite certain we would not cure the problem if we stopped counting citations.
Note that you barely hear talk of citations during NSERC reviews, in part because it is policy to avoid simple metrics, but also, I think, because people do not take them seriously.
Do you think it is possible to measure, or at least roughly estimate, research stagnation? Do you think the Comp Sci committee should have a lever to adjust the funding budget in lean and fruitful periods? Do any of the NSERC committees perform periodic comparative analysis of other programs?
Do Canadian universities do more to assist professors with funding graduate students and post docs compared to universities in the US? The funding amounts you mentioned seem to be 10 times smaller than the typical NSF grant.
It is undeniable that NSF has large grants given out to relatively few professors while the Canadian model is more grants given out to more (relatively speaking) professors.
It is difficult to compare the systems beyond this point, however. For example, if a funding agency gives me 100k$, then these 100k$ are likely to go entirely to the students (or nearly so). That is, the school won’t take a chunk out of it for its own purposes, as is common in the US. In Canada, the school does get money as a proportion of the grants the professors receive, but it is given out through a separate process invisible to the professor. Also, the money cannot be used to pay the professor’s salary (typically) in Canada.
Furthermore, what makes the comparison difficult is that the US has a far more elitist system in general. In the US, you have these tiny elite universities getting much funding… and lots of large and relatively poorer universities. Canadian universities are far more uniform. There are, obviously, better off schools… but the differences are not so drastic.
So do you compare Canadian universities with the much smaller elite American universities, or do you compare Canadian universities against large and relatively poorer schools?