ScienceMag has a post about this result [0]. From that text:
"Perhaps the Cubists were right. Researchers have found that when everything from icebergs to rocks breaks apart, their pieces tend to resemble cubes. The finding suggests a universal rule of fragmentation at scales ranging from the microscopic to the planetary."
It's kind of surprising to me that Microsoft Research is the all-time leader, gathering more best paper awards than any top university. Wow. This in itself tells a story about Microsoft Research.
Do you happen to have a time series on this? Would be interesting to see the trends in your data, e.g. to check how industrial research fares vs. academic research as a function of time. (There are some theories suggesting that industrial research is in a general decline [0]. Though the "best paper awards" metric is surely far from being perfect, it might still be viable as a proxy for corporate research performance.)
Thanks for the comments. I don't have it in time-series format. You could scrape the page pretty easily to get it (even just a grep should get you most of what you want). I'm not sure if the N is big enough per year to give a reliable trend graph, but you're welcome to try.
Do you have any references to back this up? There are many large US and European companies doing business in China, and it is very hard to believe they all hand over all their IP willingly.
> There are many large US and European companies doing business in China
The rush into China 20+ years ago forced the less willing to follow, just to stay cost competitive. And it's not like the original flood of businesses went in agreeing to give up all their IP, or expecting to wed themselves to Chinese manufacturing. They all went in chasing gold--cheaper production, access to what was to become the world's largest market. And like every gold rush in history expectations were foiled and people ended up making compromises they wouldn't have otherwise made.
I remember a graduation party I attended in 2000. A friend's parents flew in from India, where they owned several textile factories. I asked the father some questions about the direction of Indian and Chinese manufacturing, which caused him to launch into a long lament about the speculative investments flowing into China. So many investments were flowing into China they were making garments below the cost of inputs, and that's with the already low cost of labor, and without government financial aid. It made it impossible for him to compete fairly in the global markets.
The Chinese government knew what it was doing. They deliberately hyped the prospect of the Chinese domestic market to no end, holding it out as bait, and American businesses bought it hook, line, and sinker. They situated not only their most crucial industrial assets in China, but sent boatloads of cash and, more importantly, expertise on top of it. It's hard to exaggerate the irrational exuberance that played out over two decades.
Slowly, but surely, these mistakes are becoming apparent--not that any American MBA would ever admit to a personal error in judgment, or that they're prepared to make an about-face. This notion that it will all be worth it some day as the Chinese market matures still holds sway.
Of course, the potential of the Chinese market was always there, and still is. The error in judgement was believing China was dumb enough to just hand it over to the West, and to do so without exacting a price. That price is turning out to be far larger, and the first-mover advantages far more meager, than if the integration of China into the global market had occurred more organically and gradually, without American industry falling over themselves clambering across the Pacific, easy targets for industrial exploitation. Japan seems to have done a better job of it, as have many other countries. It's mostly the Americans that look like idiots.
I think we also can’t overlook the competition factor. If you main competitor is relocating production to China at 1/10 of the price then you really have no choice, but to follow.
Just a Google away... this isn’t exactly a new topic. I don’t think they all hand over IP exactly as the GP stated, but it effectively happens through various means including what the GP said:
I've not met a (large) company that didn't take active measures against IP theft in China. Its not highlighted anywhere for the same reason security back home isn't highlighted: you don't want to share any info and you don't want to make a hard relationship any harder (by offending Chinese leadership).
A large portion of what they produce has backdoors and large companies in china are government owned to some degree due to its different system of governance, this makes it more comparably to one large (and aggressively anti-compedative) company doing all of this rather than a country.
I can't find the source for it now but there was a story on Marketplace probably a year ago about how a lot of Western companies were scared to report the theft for years to their respective governments due to the fear that if the Chinese government found out, they could be at risk of losing their license to operate in China.
Do some digging and it’s easy to find. During the Carly days the people I was friendly with at HP were all fired up about a bunch of their network and storage connectivity components being pirated by the manufacturing partner.
The management at these companies in general are pretty dumb.
There’s a reason why in an age where all of the things are being computerized, most computer companies perform very poorly. When I followed this industry segment closely, Macs made more profit than HP, Dell, Lenovo and Asus combined.
This is a great piece. It provides a clear framing to interpret how institutions (and individuals) act when faced with social injustice. The article cites several interesting cases to make the point: the injustice itself can be very real, or it can be just something "assumed" but magnified by social media.
The author argues that there's an important distinction between socially vs. economically radical (re)actions to injustice. The socially radical approach is relatively easy to follow through but also quite ineffective, or even counter-productive (e.g. appointing the first female board member in a corporation, or instantly fire an employee who's been blamed on social media). On the other hand, an economically radical reaction is costly but can lead to real change (e.g. stop selling to a business partner who violates our own values).
And, as the article points out, leaders of institutions typically have personal incentives to follow the "soft" version: making some PR moves without caring too much about the real problems.
If we look at the IT sector we had several examples of this lately [0-4].
I think he hits the nail in the head. He's main observation is this:
"...digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare. You're stuck choosing between staying silent and entering the fray, with few options in between. If you have little reason to believe that other reasonable people will back you up, you're going to stick with the default: silence."
In this permanent work from home situation, I can relate...
Being anonymous seems to be an exception to this. Social barriers are removed and then its just a question of the energy needed to type somethong out. Of course there are all kinds of tradeoffs, but it's striking how much online communication has been de-anonymized over the last 20 years.
This is very interesting, not just in terms of the controversial statement itself, but also on a meta-level. When should a scientific community exclude a statement from thorough discussion?
I cannot judge how well-founded his arguments are, but I think he's right with the meta-topic: their analysis seems to meet the basic requirements of scientific reasoning, so they deserve an open discussion. Especially because the statement is so controversial.
(He explains that this finding, if true, may have far reaching consequences not just on a political level, but also on how certain virology studies may or may not be conducted in the future.)
"Perhaps the Cubists were right. Researchers have found that when everything from icebergs to rocks breaks apart, their pieces tend to resemble cubes. The finding suggests a universal rule of fragmentation at scales ranging from the microscopic to the planetary."
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/rocks-icebergs-natur...