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Countries invest in research and development. They invest in innovation. They create graduate schools dedicated to studying the innovation process and the policy surrounding it. Innovation is created through expenditure on research and development.
In 2020, to be known forever as the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is used to talking about the need for urgency, creative public policy, coordinated solutions, and major government investments.
November marks the beginning of cold weather when most of us cozy up inside and close our windows to the fresh air. This is the perfect time to begin a long-term, 90-day radon detection test kit.
Under the helm of the United Nations (UN), the 17 SDGs cover the years from 2015 to 2030, and the 2019 report informs that while some goals are on track, others are lagging behind.
As policy ‘wonks’, we exuded confidence and conviction. That got me thinking—would our group (or any group) really be able to converge on a set of policies exhibiting those factors as ‘sound’? And if we did, would that list be legitimate?
We are living through uncertain times. COVID-19 and climate change both represent collective problems where individual action must occur universally for the threat to disappear.
The plant breeding system, the agri-food supply chain, including on-farm production, and retail marketing are all being transformed by digital technologies and big data analysis.
In recent posts, I have argued that, if we want to improve the prospects for evidence-based policy making, we should pay more attention to the institutions of scientific advice than to the quantity or even the quality of the scientific research being undertaken on a subject – whether that be measured by numbers of scientists or scientific papers, patents and other evidence of IP, or the size of research budgets. The policy responses to COVID-19 have illustrated both the strengths and the limits of this argument, which, as I can hardly deny, comes from my background in political science, where the importance of institutions is a rather basic assumption of the discipline.
The plant system is in an interesting state of flux. There are more than seven million accessions of genetic materials drawn from both the natural environment and commercial breeding lines where plants are characterized in some detail. Only ten or fifteen plants are vitally important to the global food system. These plants provide the bulk of the human and animal nutrition that is foundational to our food security. What then does the digital world do to these plants?
In the last few years, attempts to establish pay-for-plasma clinics in Canada have brought urgency to debates about the commercialization of the Canadian blood supply.
It appears that the coronavirus pandemic has triggered several unusual trends in the household. The first one that makes me scratch my head is “baking bread with sourdough”.
The area of innovation is both over theorized and under examined, with dueling theories everywhere about how we get something new into the market.
The following blog post was originally published by the Canadian Science Policy Centre. https://sciencepolicy.ca/news/weknow-we-have-problem-what-exactly-itcall-data-collection-canadian-food-systemresponse
There is a lot of concern about recent trends that appear to be undermining the perceived role and credibility of science and evidence in policy making processes. Many factors contribute to these perspectives and their potential impacts on public decision-making are immense.
Municipalities across Saskatchewan will soon have a decision to make as to whether they support a policy known as Property Assessment Clean Energy (or PACE).
The following blog post was originally published as part of the Canadian Science Policy Centre Editorial Series: Response to COVID-19 Pandemic and its Impacts. https://sciencepolicy.ca/response-covid-19
The following blog post was originally published as part of the Canadian Science Policy Centre Editorial Series: Response to COVID-19 Pandemic and its Impacts. https://sciencepolicy.ca/response-covid-19
The following blog post was originally published as part of the Canadian Science Policy Centre Editorial Series: Response to COVID-19 Pandemic and its Impacts. https://sciencepolicy.ca/response-covid-19
In a previous blog post on small modular reactors (SMRs) in Saskatchewan, I noted the evidence that SMRs have enormous potential to provide clean energy across a range of applications and in a variety of contexts, some of them, such as very small reactors in rural and remote communities, especially relevant in Canada. Nevertheless, there are many challenges to a successful scale up of SMRs from the current one-off designs and experimental models to a fleet of reactors large enough to make business sense.
Artificial intelligence (AI) presents an interesting set of opportunities and challenges for regulatory systems writ large. AI has a spectrum of possible outcomes. Some people think AI will become the computer that answers all the questions that could ever be asked or go beyond our ability as human beings to compute and choose.
The fundamental question in collaborative research is how to construct more inclusive, multidisciplinary teams of individuals who are willing to move beyond their own understandings and produce something new in collaboration with others.
Canada has entered a sobering COVID-19 reality. Though we had weeks to prepare based on what we were seeing in China, Italy, Iran and other areas, Canada has only begun to put in place more aggressive public health policies of containment that are focused on slowing disease progression or flattening the curve.
So, what do scientists do and what do they look like? Well, it is hard to say, but it is definitely not what the internet is telling you.
It’s unclear whether anyone ever said that all publicity is good publicity, but city councilors in Regina have had reason to doubt that maxim after the furour that erupted around their decision to pay a substantial speaker’s fee to bring climate sceptic Patrick Moore to their conference on sustainable cities.
Three students from the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy and the Centre for the Study of Science and Innovation Policy (CSIP) presented at the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) workshop that was held in Paris, from December 12 -13, 2019. The NEA workshop titled ‘The nuclear and social science nexus: challenges and opportunities for speaking across the disciplinary divide’, offered the trio an opportunity to share their research and to learn from the diverse group of experts gathered.
Government could further the adoption and implementation of proposed or enacted policies that impact citizens by promoting public acceptance through the communication of person-centred policy pathways.
Climate policy in Canada, and in most other countries, has become trapped in an unproductive and distracting rhetorical debate. For some unfathomable reason, scientific and policy communities everywhere seem to believe they need to convince everyone of the merits of the scientific case underlying the need for policy action.
Greta Thunberg is one of the best things to happen to climate politics. It’s probably too much to expect that her sharp exchange with US Congressman Garret Graves on the relative contributions of China, the United States and Sweden to global GHG emissions, in which she exposed the basic flaw in the “we’re not the problem so we don’t have to act” argument, will have been taken on board by Saskatchewan politicians, who have repeated the same fallacy many times.
In this new edition to Making Waves, Dr. Jeremy Rayner weighs in on Premier Moe's announcement on SMRs in Saskatchewan. Politicking or promising?
A discussion with Dr. Mona Nemer, Chief Science Advisor to Canada’s Prime Minister, Minister of Science and Cabinet
Every food has some potential but some foods are better than others. The interesting thing is that, when one looks at an individual’s diet, you definitely need protein, some fiber, and a lot of micronutrients that we are increasingly finding are important for body and brain function. And so we are learning what is required.
Food security is a fascinating problem space. Most of us think of food insecurity as people who are starving because of crop failures, or a complete absence of food. Undoubtedly, we do have people who are in that category; deferentially, those people are isolated from other systems. They are not part of markets, and are beyond the effective reach of most states, so they cannot be helped and served by normal systems.
Risk assessment is a system we constructed over the last generation of government and industry working together, to standardize and drive out risks from various activities we do. It involves a combination of risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication, and is all about probabilities and causal pathways. At one level, we do not need anything that is digital to make that system work. However, as the digital systems start to gather more data, different data, and faster data, it complicates and challenges our regulatory systems that are at the heart of these risk analysis enterprises.
The digitizing of the world is creating some interesting challenges. In the first instance, it is changing what we can do and how we can do things. There are some things that we were not able to do in the past, in terms of finding meaning and value in what groups of people do.
