Slashdot Mirror
Romanian Science In Freefall
ananyo writes "In 2011, Romania took a step towards changing its cronyism-ridden research landscape by allocating government grants for science solely on the basis of performance. In 2012, a new government eliminated those rules, then slashed science funding — and since then things have gotten a whole lot worse. The entire National Research Council, Romania's main research-funding agency, has resigned in protest and 900 scientists signed a petition addressed to Prime Minister Victor Ponta, demanding that the research budget and quality control be restored. Ponta himself unfortunately has been accused of academic plagiarism so seems an unlikely figure to address corruption in the scientific establishment. The new science minister, Ecaterina Andronescu, is experienced — she's held the post twice before and is a rector at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest. But she's already reversed conflict of interest rules brought in by the previous government that were designed to end cronyism. And no wonder — they would have meant that she couldn't be science minister and run a university at the same time. Oh, she has also been accused of plagiarism."
This is a worldwide issue - when budgets get tight, science and research programs are always the first to go, despite the fact that it's been shown that increased funds to research and basic technology development benefits the economy much more than financial investments, and even more than education programs.
It's always confirmation bias!
I don't think you need a presidential pardon for a stupid thing you did in college. Heck, Plagiarism is not even illegal, just wrong.
Are you telling me you did not do worse in college?
This has largely to do with the way education works in most Eastern Europe. A monolithic communist system designed to produce engineers and scientists for the glory of the motherland was left without an economy that can mold and absorb it's academic output. The universities are largely going by inertia of days long gone, in an environment of endemic corruption, academic fraud and lack of real competition (there are some for-profit schools in Romania but they are even worse than the public schools). Academic titles are largely awarded by seniority.
This is the environment that produced the Prime minister Ponta, who word-for-word plagiarized about 2/3 of his doctoral degree yet denies it adamantly. There was a push for a research-driven reform but the old communist mentalities die hard and there was major blow back which Ponta manipulated for political purposes, silencing his detractors etc.
Despite of this mess and the lack of published papers, the upper echelon of Romanian graduates are leaving the country in droves and are hired by major international companies and research labs. The communist era curricula is very dense in mathematics and basic science education, to the point where western courses of an equivalent level seem designed for differently abled students, if I can say so about my first reaction.
I don't think you need a presidential pardon for a stupid thing you did in college.
Biden has plagiarized far more recently than that. During his 1988 presidential campaign, we was caught plagiarizing his speeches from Neil Kinnock. Biden has been in politics his entire adult life. He is sort of like a replicant in Blade Runner that has to steal other people's dreams and memories in order to look like a real person.
It would be really easy to go for the cheap shot and say the euphemism most global climate change advocates are rooting for when speaking of "Deniers" is not "Heretic", but "Deluded". That said , I think there's an important place for deniers, they keep the scientific majority honest, pressure them to dot 'I's and cross 'T's. The problem has never been deniers, but corporate interests who use the denier's debate no matter it's validity, to justify continuing full steam ahead in crashing the environment in the name of quarterly profits.
Scholarly debate is essential to good science. Cherry picking conversations, data, and spending millions on promoting FUD, is bad social policy, economics and global resource management.
Just because the "scientific facts" bear out a round earth, evolution, relativity and anthropic global climate change, doesn't make these things either a religion, or a conspiracy. Consider instead that the huge, network of supporting research simply means that the probability of these things not being so, is now vanishingly small. Sorry if the truth isn't convenient. The good news is that there are solutions to current problems that open opportunities even for deniers, so we can all still walk away winners.
Bringing GWB into this discussion makes exactly as much sense as bringing in Biden.