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Reuters:
Trump orders sweeping freeze for federal grants and loans
Trump order set to halt supply of HIV, malaria drugs to poor countries, sources say
Apparently based on this memo (pdf).
This seems very... crude. The question is if it's purposefully crude, if there's some structural reason it can't be better implemented, or if the person in charge is incompetent.
Also, impoundment? We'll see?
Sure is fun being a grad student in STEM and pouring every waking moment into a grant proposal due in the next few weeks to see this news today!
We’ll see if the United States decides to continue being a scientific powerhouse or if we’ll all get chased away to other countries..
Chinese value excellence. No politics in universities either, they make students take an hour or two of political theory at universities, but that's about it. Activism is not tolerated at all.
Between the demographics and all, it's quite likely at least half of cutting edge research is going to happen there.
These days you can evaluate that quite fast. The idea no doubt is to starve the beast of left-wing NGOs that infests so much of the West.
It's depressing that in Europe, the Comission of Retards funds 'climate' NGOs which are then used to justify these policies and lobby for more of it. The end result is, insofar climate is concerned dismal. Once the truly impactful policies like banning ICE in cars or banning all heating that's not a heat pump, politicians balk because it's political suicide and activists howl in outrage how they're dooming the planet.
In the US you have the same thing. Veritas, ever ready to ruin someone's horny time sent some hunk at an EPA official who then proceeded to blab about how they're throwing 'gold bricks off the Titanic' to fund the NGO complex. Of course, the funniest part is that a lot of this was happening under the "Inflation Reduction Act".
I went to American grad school. I have reviewed Chinese research papers. I can't exaggerate the sneering contempt American researchers have for them. In every way trivial and not worth publishing. People around here keep calling things "slop". This is the real slop we need not concern ourselves with.
I've worked in China a bit. I married a Chinese woman. I understand that they are smart and hardworking. If this were a computer game then their high stats would make them win. But they just don't. The factory workers can't follow instructions without a taskmaster standing over them. The researchers publish large numbers of papers worth nothing at all. Something is missing. I blame culture. Chinese people in America working as engineers are productive. Participating in our work culture cures them.
I can confirm this. I have rejected many papers from solely Chinese authors, many of which are on the spectrum from "not even wrong" to "what are you even thinking that you're doing here?!" I've now accepted one, from a guy who got his PhD in China, but then spent several years on post-docs in the west before returning to China. They're definitely not stupid, but they're still really catching up. Over time, they may take over, but the state as of today, right now, is that their fundamental scientific research output is mostly hot garbage.
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of hot garbage coming out of American universities, too. But in my discipline, your filtering algorithm would have very few false negatives if it just rejected everything from China... and it would be much more mixed with American submissions.
In the fields I'm familiar with, this was true ten years ago, but there has been significant improvement in the quality of Chinese publications since then. My understanding is that this is the result of targeted government pressure in a few areas deemed nationally significant and may not generalize.
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