I was hopeful, perhaps naively, that sending some knowledge workers into the rural regions of our country (U.S.) might help to alleviate both the cultural and economic divides that plague our society.
I cannot see how the "public/private partnership" programs, here or anywhere else, are not going to be focused on spreading that network. Perhaps I'm unduly pessimistic.
Maybe it’s my low expectations, but I don’t expect a US organization that primarily serves the US to start holding conferences outside the US.
The article mentions the availability of short-term postdoctoral fellowships from three European institutions to the “global south”. But they’re in Europe. Of course they’re biased toward Europe because that’s who they’re serving.
The actual issue seems that for whatever reason incumbent US and European institutions look down on peer institutions in other counties (the part about the gatekeepers). Everything else is a hack around that.
It's quite remarkable how isolated from the world the people named in that document seem to be. It is as if they had never travelled anywhere outside the US before starting the project. Or if they had they had been stunningly unobservant.
The author does not explain why govt-sponsored nanotech research elsewhere (Russia, China) turned out just as fruitless and the same kind of rebranding enterprise as in USA.
> "[The Beaker people] are not prepared to collaborate on enormous labour-mobilising projects; their society is more de-centralised," said Prof Parker Pearson. "We don't have a good expression for it, but the Americans do, and that is: nobody is willing to work for 'The Man'."
I'm sorry that I feel this way but this seems completely pointless. It's very much "young scholars get to meet First Lady Hillary Clinton" feel-good bullshit. It's the kind of thing that a certain type of "gifted" non-technical smart person likes to pat themselves on the back about. "We want it to bring humanity together" yet nobody else on planet Earth gives a shit about any of it. I have immense sympathy for the no doubt dozens of Pinterest mood boards that were created and destroyed in pursuit of this project.
I'm referring to the fact that there was no national policy, enforcement and only a waffled set of guidelines. And moreso that the experts were pushed to the side for political expediency. As an aside, I'm a U.S. citizen and will publicly state that I'm going to do more to isolate (and we've already been on the more extreme edge of isolation). We should ALL do more.
But I guess Google & others don't care.
reply