University of Waterloo

[rangersfan]

University of Waterloo has received $76 million dollars for Quantum computing research from the federal government as part of a 900 million dollar investment across 13 universities.

Laurier, UW, McMaster and the University of Saskatchewan are collaborating on a project called 'Global Water Futures: Solutions to Water Threats in an Era of Global Change' and received 77.8 million dollars.

[rangersfan]

New UW lab helping to build the cars of tomorrow
http://m.therecord.com/news-story/684516...f-tomorrow

[rangersfan]

Some new federal funds for UW:

http://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/mobile/8-9-m...-1.3428237

[rangersfan]

UW starting a Problem Lab to help would be entrepreneurs understand and target real world problems.

[rangersfan]

Cisco is contributing $1 million dollars to 5G research at UW and putting money into a couple of other projects.

https://www.therecord.com/news-story/838...rch-at-uw/

[rangersfan]

UW recently launched the Artificial Intelligence Institute.

https://mobilesyrup.com/2018/04/09/unive...institute/

[Spokes]

I can't believe it wasn't mentioned, but:

Donna Strickland, a University of Waterloo scientist first woman to win Nobel Prize in physics (https://www.therecord.com/news-story/894...n-decades/)

Pretty exciting news.

[Viewfromthe42]

First woman in more than half a century, third ever.

[panamaniac]

First woman in more than half a century, third ever.

And first Canadian woman in a scientific field.

[KevinL]

Born in Guelph, got her undergrad at McMaster, did the work that won the Nobel at Rochester. Been with UW since 1997.

[jamincan]

Also, probably one of the few, if not only, people to receive a Nobel Prize without a full professorship. Also, apparently not important enough to warrant a wikipedia page prior to her Nobel Prize. https://qz.com/1410909/wikipedia-had-rej...us-enough/

[tomh009]

Also, probably one of the few, if not only, people to receive a Nobel Prize without a full professorship. Also, apparently not important enough to warrant a wikipedia page prior to her Nobel Prize. https://qz.com/1410909/wikipedia-had-rej...us-enough/

Regardless of whether this is super rare or not, full professorship is not just a promotion based on merit. In fact, the professor needs to apply for it, usually after being granted tenure. Dr Strickland said that she had never bothered to apply for full professorship, she did not see the value in it.

From the Record article:

There's been a lot of attention on your position as an associate professor and not a full professor. What has been your response to that?

That I'm very sorry for the university because it's not their fault.
This is what people I don't think get, a full professor although it's a different name it doesn't carry necessarily a pay raise and I don't lose my job (if I don't apply to be a full professor). So I never filled out the paper work.
It's all on me. I think people are thinking it's because I'm a woman, I'm being held back.
I'm just a lazy person. I do what I want to do and that wasn't worth doing.

[jamincan]

After further reading, the wikipedia thing is quite a bit different than initial stories. It's relatively common for Nobel prize winners not to have a Wikipedia page prior to winning the prize. Also, although a draft page was made and rejected earlier this year, it was rejected because the sources were not considered independent. There are likely still systemic issues in Wikipedia at play here, but it's not really a straight-cut case of her not receiving recognition because she's female.

[ijmorlan]

After further reading, the wikipedia thing is quite a bit different than initial stories. It's relatively common for Nobel prize winners not to have a Wikipedia page prior to winning the prize. Also, although a draft page was made and rejected earlier this year, it was rejected because the sources were not considered independent. There are likely still systemic issues in Wikipedia at play here, but it's not really a straight-cut case of her not receiving recognition because she's female.

My thought was that if the Nobel committee was able to figure out that she deserved a Nobel, Wikipedia should have been able to figure out that she deserved a Wikipedia page. Except… Wikipedia doesn’t claim to systematically evaluate every possible page for inclusion; if the specific submission made relative to her was poorly sourced, it may well have deserved rejection, and that is not evidence of any sort of bias.

Actually, more generally, I’ve seen a lot of very questionable claims around the bias issue. For example, I saw a number of how many Wikipedia entries about people are about women compared to men, given in a context which seemed to suggest we were supposed to infer a bias at Wikipedia. It’s a fairly small percentage. But historically, isn’t it a fact that most of the people considered important have been men? So of course an encyclopedia will reflect that. Now, I think a major, probably even the main, reason for this is that historically women were excluded from participation in society; of course a group that is kept out of an activity won’t contribute much to that activity. But the problem isn’t the encyclopedia that summarizes the historical record; it’s the attitudes which led to this exclusion, attitudes which still exist today.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t bias at Wikipedia, but surely part of being progressive is being rational and evaluating evidence correctly.

It further occurs to me this bears a similarity to climate change. People will frequently observe a hot/cold year and tie it to climate change or a lack of climate change, depending on their pre-existing opinions. But it’s the overall trend, not individual cases, that constitutes the evidence for climate change and its causes.