Watching the daily news from up here is a bit like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You can not help but watch, but at the same time you also realize that it will not end well.
From up here the prime worry/hope has been related to Nafta. Just as in the US, the gains have not been equal. Some sectors have been very much decimated, others have done quite well. So the question of fear or hope depends upon who you talk to.
However one sector that has definitely benefited from Trump so far has been “international research grad students”. From Trumps election on I have been told that applications for grad studies in the US have fallen dramatically. This is a serious threat to US universities as much of the research being done uses foreign, not American, grad students.
So it was with some interest that I read an article today about a grad student doing high end work in AI in Toronto. www.thestar.com/...
Now Hinton and Sara Sabour, a young Google researcher, are exploring an alternative mathematical technique that he calls a capsule network. The idea is to build a system that sees more like a human. If a neural network sees the world in two dimensions, a capsule network can see it in three.
Hinton, a 69-year-old British expatriate, opened Google’s artificial intelligence lab in Toronto this year. The new lab is emblematic of what some believe to be the future of cutting-edge tech research: Much of it is expected to happen outside the United States in Europe, China and longtime AI research centres, such as Toronto, that are more welcoming to immigrant researchers.
Sabour is an Iranian researcher who wound up in Toronto after the U.S. government denied her a visa to study computer vision at the University of Washington.
Her task is to turn Hinton’s conceptual idea into a mathematical reality, and the project is bearing fruit. They recently published a paper showing that in certain situations, their method can more accurately recognize objects when viewing them from unfamiliar angles.
The story pretty much speaks for itself. Canada thanks you Mr. Trump.
Oh, and just one more side note. Canada has dropped the US as one of its reference countries for comparison of drug price (The US prices are just too high and distorting the international comparison). Instead Canada will uses a wider comparison with more lower pricing countries to adjust its buying decisions. Th result is expected to be a 13.2 billion dollar savings. www.theglobeandmail.com/…
One of the biggest changes would be the removal of the United States – which has the highest drug prices in the world – from the list of countries Canada uses to determine price ceilings.
The regulatory amendments would also force pharmaceutical companies to reveal the real prices they charge to big payers, such as governments and large private insurers, that benefit from increasingly common secret discounts.