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Self-qualified intellectuals, like Texas Governor Rick Perry, have a right to know! I was born in El Paso: I have a right to know! Parents of American kids have a right to know!

Timeless and timely extracts from Science: The Endless Frontier by Vannevar Bush: Scientific Progress is Essential Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages past.

I was troubled to learn recently that: 1. NSERC awarded far fewer postdocs and grad student fellowships in 2011 vs. 2010. The official statistics reveal that NSERC awarded less than half the number of PDFs in 2011 than were awarded in 2010.

I was very happy to receive an email yesterday announcing that the Fields Institute has established a symposium to honor the Fields Medalists. Please find the text of the announcement I received posted below:

John Charles Fields was born in Hamilton Ontario in 1863, graduated from the University of Toronto in 1884, and got his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1887. Fields helped establish the National Research Council, the precursor to NSERC.

The recently released 2010 International Review of Mathematical Sciences for the UK has a timely quote for the Canadian statistical and mathematical communities to consider (see page 10): "A longstanding practice has been to divide the mathematical sciences into categories that are, by implication, close to disjoint.

Anomalous results of the 2011 NSERC Discovery Grants competition in mathematics have provoked a loss of confidence in the NSERC peer review system. To avoid a substantial loss of Canada’s scientific talent, which has been enhanced through the Canada Research Chairs program and other spectacular hiring over the past ten years, scientific policymakers need to quickly fix the broken peer review system.

Overview UTL has built, and is in the process of expanding, a suite of web-based tools that have the potential to revolutionize the research driven by scholars at the University of Toronto.

There is chatter (here is more) suggesting that the $50M from the Conservative federal government (over 5 years) and the additional $50M (also over 5 years) from the Ontario Liberal Government to the Perimeter Institute is based more on politics than on scientific merit.

Vannevar Bush was the inventor of government investment in research innovation. He was founder of the US National Science Foundation, founder of Raytheon, main organizer of the Manhattan Project which influenced Berkeley leading to Silicon Valley, etc.