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Category: Research

Asleep at the Switch…

… is the name of a new(ish) book by Bruce Smardon of York University, which looks at the history of federal research & development policies over the last half-century.  It is a book in equal measures fascinating and infuriating, but given that our recent change of government seems to be a time for re-thinking innovation policies, it’s a timely read if nothing else. Let’s start with the irritating.  It’s fairly clear that Smardon is an unreconstructed Marxist (I suppose structuralist is

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January 29, 2016 No Comments

H > A > H

I am a big fan of the economist Paul Romer, who is most famous for putting knowledge and the generation thereof at the centre of  discussions on growth.  Recently, on (roughly) the 25th anniversary of the publication of his paper on Endogeneous Technological Change, he wrote a series of blog posts looking back on some of the issues related to this theory.  The most interesting of these was one called “Human Capital and Knowledge”. The post is long-ish, and I recommend you read it

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December 7, 2015 No Comments

The Radical Implications of David Turpin’s Installation Speech

David Turpin was installed as President at the University of Alberta earlier this week.  His inaugural speech was good.  Very good.  Read a shortened version of it here. (Full disclosure: I spoke at a leadership function at the University of Alberta in August, for which I received a fee.  The University has also recently purchased two of our syndicated research products.  Make of that what you wish.) The speech starts out with what I would call some standard defences of the university, which any

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November 18, 2015 7 Comments

Times You Wish There Was a Word Other Than Research

There is something about research in modern languages (or English, as we used to call it) that sets many people’s teeth on edge, but usually for the wrong reasons. Let’s go back a few months to Congress, specifically to an article Margaret Wente wrote where she teed-off on a paper called “Sexed-up Paratext: The Moral Function of Breasts in 1940s Canadian Pulp Science Fiction”.   Her point mostly was about “whatever happened to the great texts?”  Which, you know: who cares?  The

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November 11, 2015 3 Comments

What Canadians Think About Universities, and Where Canadian Universities Want To Go

A couple of quick notes about two interesting things from Universities Canada this week. The first is the release of some public opinion polling, which they commissioned in the spring, regarding universities and other forms of higher education.  You can see the whole thing here, but I want to highlight a couple of slides, in particular. The first is this one:                   It seems Canadians are overwhelmingly positive about most post-secondary institutions

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November 6, 2015 1 Comment

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