I remember my Dad complaining about Trudeau Sr's handouts for projects that had questionable value for society and then hearing nothing about the research, an end product... The apple does not fall far from the tree.
No. As I've written, the research may well have been done. My complaint is that the New Frontiers in Research Fund seems to require no confirmation that the research gets done (a serious program oversight failure) and that, in general, federally funded research isn't (where reasonable) made available to the public that funded it.
That seems to be true. And The Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families (who I wrote about a few days ago) makes all of their papers available, too. But excellent examples like those seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
As far as I'm concerned, the gold standard for government funded work is the U.S. NASA who are required by statute to make all their data freely available to the American people (along with the rest of us). That means every dataset from their James Webb platform or the Mars rover is online pretty much immediately. Why can't Canadian government research work that way?
All of this is publicly available. People would rather assume the worst than put forth effort to find it apparently (or so it would seem judging by many of the comments).
We could save tons of government money by cutting university and R&D support...but not sure that would be wise.
Penny wise and pound foolish is how much of this looks.
We could save some money by cutting out the oversight and auditors, but I'm not sure that would be any wiser.
Fair enough, I haven’t the time to investigate it to be honest. Perhaps the best solution is gov funding ought to come with the requirement for submission to a public database
Based on institutional capture alone, I would have guessed that the majority of funded research projects were somehow aligned with, or even with tangential reference to "climate change" within virtually any discipline.
It’s the age old problem with government. They assume that they are able to predict and therefore influence the future.
Hence, they fund “transformative” research which, by definition, should produce a marked change. So, even if the research itself wasn’t published, the outcome of the research (transformation of some sort) should be obvious. The trouble is that you can’t know, in advance, which research is going to yield transformative results and which will turn out to be a waste of time and money. If you could know that, you would only fund the useful stuff and not fund the useless stuff. That would require knowing the findings of the research before you even did the research, and if that were the case, then the research would not be needed.
Likewise, they figure they know which way the economy is headed, so they subsidize some industries and not others. Electric vehicles, for example. Again, they don’t really know the future, so they invest in the wrong things. Meanwhile, the really good ideas take off, without government funding. If anyone knew, ahead of time, which businesses would automatically be successful, nobody would invest in the ones that fail.
Accountability? What’s that? Just another one of those things, like monetary policy, that are beneath consideration because, Sunny Ways!
I remember my Dad complaining about Trudeau Sr's handouts for projects that had questionable value for society and then hearing nothing about the research, an end product... The apple does not fall far from the tree.
Here's the glacier sensor researcher listing 33 papers published since 2018. The remote sensing is one of three research areas she mentions. Is it your claim that she didn't do this research? https://uwaterloo.ca/geography-environmental-management/profiles/christine-dow
No. As I've written, the research may well have been done. My complaint is that the New Frontiers in Research Fund seems to require no confirmation that the research gets done (a serious program oversight failure) and that, in general, federally funded research isn't (where reasonable) made available to the public that funded it.
All of these papers are public.
That seems to be true. And The Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families (who I wrote about a few days ago) makes all of their papers available, too. But excellent examples like those seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
As far as I'm concerned, the gold standard for government funded work is the U.S. NASA who are required by statute to make all their data freely available to the American people (along with the rest of us). That means every dataset from their James Webb platform or the Mars rover is online pretty much immediately. Why can't Canadian government research work that way?
But your specific point is well taken: Christine Dow's research was probably not the best example to use.
All of this is publicly available. People would rather assume the worst than put forth effort to find it apparently (or so it would seem judging by many of the comments).
We could save tons of government money by cutting university and R&D support...but not sure that would be wise.
Penny wise and pound foolish is how much of this looks.
We could save some money by cutting out the oversight and auditors, but I'm not sure that would be any wiser.
No it isn’t all publicly available that’s the entire point of the piece? Finding one single researcher who happens to release her papers means nothing
That is what the article claims but it is false.
Go right ahead and investigate it. Most of this research will be publicly available, and if it isn't posted somewhere, make a request.
Some data will be embargoed no doubt, until IP can be secured, but most of it will be open source.
Fair enough, I haven’t the time to investigate it to be honest. Perhaps the best solution is gov funding ought to come with the requirement for submission to a public database
Based on institutional capture alone, I would have guessed that the majority of funded research projects were somehow aligned with, or even with tangential reference to "climate change" within virtually any discipline.
It’s the age old problem with government. They assume that they are able to predict and therefore influence the future.
Hence, they fund “transformative” research which, by definition, should produce a marked change. So, even if the research itself wasn’t published, the outcome of the research (transformation of some sort) should be obvious. The trouble is that you can’t know, in advance, which research is going to yield transformative results and which will turn out to be a waste of time and money. If you could know that, you would only fund the useful stuff and not fund the useless stuff. That would require knowing the findings of the research before you even did the research, and if that were the case, then the research would not be needed.
Likewise, they figure they know which way the economy is headed, so they subsidize some industries and not others. Electric vehicles, for example. Again, they don’t really know the future, so they invest in the wrong things. Meanwhile, the really good ideas take off, without government funding. If anyone knew, ahead of time, which businesses would automatically be successful, nobody would invest in the ones that fail.
You're certainly on-target with the EV example. Just today, the feds announced they'd cancelled their EV rebates (https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicles/auto-sector-seeks-end-ev-sales-mandate-rebate-cut). Months ago, I presented data showing that rebates probably hadn't had any impact on sales: https://www.theaudit.ca/p/do-electric-vehicle-subsidies-work
The perception of funding research is better than actually measuring the research outcomes. Just pathetic