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Category: Research

Making “Applied” Research Great Again

One of the rallying calls of part of the scientific community over the past few years is how under the Harper government there was too much of a focus on “applied” research and not enough of a focus on “pure”/”basic”/”fundamental research.  This call is reaching a fever pitch following the publication of the Naylor Report (which, to its credit, did not get into a basic/applied debate and focussed instead on whether or not the research was “investigator-driven”, which is a

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June 6, 2017 6 Comments

Diversity in Canada Research Chairs

One of the hot topics in Ottawa over the past couple of months is the issue of increasing diversity among researchers.   Top posts in academia are still disproportionately occupied by white dudes, and the federal minister of Science, Kirsty Duncan, would like to change that by threatening institutions with a loss of research funding. There’s no doubt about the nature of the problem.  As in other countries, women and minorities have trouble making it up the career ladder in academia

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May 17, 2017 1 Comment

Naylor Report, Part II

Morning all.  Sorry about the service interruption.  Nice to be back. So, I promised you some more thoughts about the Fundamental Science Review.  Now that I’ve lot of time to think about it, I think I’m actually surprised by what it doesn’t say, says and how many questions remain open. What’s best about the report?  The history and most of the analysis are pretty good.  I think a few specific recommendations (if adopted) might actually be a pretty big deal – in

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May 8, 2017 1 Comment

Naylor Report, Take 1

People are asking why I haven’t talked about the Naylor Report (aka the Review of Fundamental Science) yet.  The answer, briefly, is i) I’m swamped ii) there’s a lot to talk about in there and iii) I want to have some time to think it over.  But I did have some thoughts about chapter 3, where I think there is either an inadvertent error or the authors are trying to pull a fast one (and if it’s the latter I

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April 18, 2017 No Comments

Cluster Theory

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last twelve months, you’ll have noted that the Government of Canada has become enamoured of “innovation clusters” as a means of raising national productivity levels.  What should we make of this? For some annoying reason, the Liberals act as if cluster theory is something new rather than something which dates back to the mid-1980s (Michael Porter’s The Wealth of Nations gave the idea its first mass-market outing in 1990; six years later, Saskia

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December 8, 2016 No Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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