Month: July 2023

original essay

Canadian innovation doesn’t need more money: it needs a brilliant vision

An article published this month in Science and Public Policy makes the startling claim that “between 74 and 90 per cent of total spending on support for business research and development (R&D) each year since 2000” has been distributed not as one would expect by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED), but by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). The CRA’s Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program is one of the most generous tax incentives in the world, providing “more than $3 Billion” annually, according to its website.  Viewed under this lens, programs like the Strategic Innovation Fund…

books

The Chancellor by Kati Marton

The biography is interesting both for what it says and for what it omits. It’s remarkably thin in terms of content or juicy gossip. Merkel developed deep habits of paranoia when she lived in East Germany, so much so that years later she refused to use text or email. Her inner circle was so intensely loyal that nobody spilled the beans for this book, and it’s not clear that there were any beans in the first place. A few facts do emerge: Merkel had immense stamina for diplomacy, for engaging in dialogue. Germany’s chancellor is the de facto leader of…

bookstech startups

Genius Makers by Cade Metz

This book is about the renaissance of artificial intelligence (via neural networks) in the early 2000s. The bones of the technology were developed at Cornell University in the 1950s but due to a combination of skepticism in the field and lack of computing power, the idea of the neural network lay mostly dormant for the next 30 years. The man at the centre of the book is British-Canadian professor Geoffrey Hinton, who has spent most of his academic career at the University of Toronto and had conceded that he enjoys the epithet “The Godfather of AI”. The book opens with…

bookspolar exploration

Shackleton, By Endurance We Conquer by Michael Smith

I recently read “The Last Viking”, a biography of Roald Amundsen, the first man to traverse the Northwest passage, the first to reach the North Pole by airship (and possibly at all) and the first to reach the South Pole. It opened my eyes to the heroic age of polar exploration, a time when people straddling the line between sane and insane attempted feats that defied death and often defied logic. Shackleton did not achieve any enduring heroic “firsts”, and for years his reputation played second fiddle to that of the famous Captain Scott. Shackleton is now regarded as one…