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US Losing its Scientific Dominance
ScaredSilly writes "The New York Times is reporting that the US is losing its dominance in the sciences. They cite lowering research budgets, increased military spending and 'reverse brain-drain': fewer techies staying in the US after school. I personally think that our comparatively crappy K-12 educational system, and an increased dominance of military research over core scientific research plays a big role. (It's easy to get DARPA, DoD and DoE funding, but difficult to get NSF funding). What do you folks think?"
The education system in this country is a mess. Sure there's a few bright spots here and there, but for the most part it has fallen apart into arguments of political correctness, violence, and debates over evolution vs. creation. More school funding is given to non-science activities such as sports, instead of funding a new science lab.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
from the DOD and other areas because they have modernized their websites and bid / awards area. Most likely this is because of the money they receive from the government, but running a small scientific firm I know that I get at least four mailings about how to apply for DOD grants for scientific research while I get none from any other government agency. I have appled for grants through NSA and others so they have our company information. I think science in general in the public sector is poor. The whole thing, from NASA to NSA to their websites looks like it was developed with the 1960's in mind. Beyond medical and geographic reasearch, public scientific information and research is very limited.
There is a rage in me to defy the order of the stars, despite their pretty patterns.
I wonder if the post-9/11 paranoia has something to do with it?
One of the US's major strengths in research has always been the ability to attract top scientists from all over the world, but with the more and more draconian immigration and visa laws it's becoming harder and harder for foreign scientists to work in the US...
If you are on a university campus this morning...take a look around; it's no big suprise. Even more so, sit in on some general credit classes...or hell, *simple* college math courses. That's not to say those on higher levels aren't there, but damn, it just seems as though there is a huge influx of...just well, morons. Graduating too many highschoolers thinking they are headed for 13th grade. Sad really....we have so much potential to do better, but we can't get the fucking congress to fund education to the top of the list. We'll get our paybacks soon enough :(
11:21am, "MSNBC Looks At Patent Abusers' Victims"
12:15pm, "US Losing its Scientific Dominance"
Well duh! Let's spend a load of time doing science, I'm sure we won't have to spend millions on a legal defense when somebody sues us for using an obvious idea...
Hmmm, actually there's a lot of science and engineering that goes into military spending. You'd be surprised at some of the great minds they have here where I work (at a defense contractor). The military, although sometimes it has some crazy ideas (Star Wars), is almost always on the tip of new technology and they're usually the first to get and test technology before it (ever) becomes commercial - ARPANet anybody?
Also, it seems that less Americans want to go into the sciences - they'd rather do easy, joke majors in school like Communications or Psychology... and even further before that, in elementary and middle school, being smart and interested in science/engineering/reading isn't "cool" and people tend to shun those types, while elementary/middle schools abroad tend to rever the more intelligent students.
America is the epitome of short attention spans, loud colorfull comercials, and above all, the need to convince our children that spending is the most important thing they can do.
The corporations that are supported by politicians that YOU DIDNT BOTHER VOTING AGAINST helped this happen. If your child is too busy collecting pokemon cards (because you have been guilted by society into working 60 hours a week to buy them) to pay attention to petty things like math or science, well... tough luck.
Quit lowering the education standards in the US so that anyone that wants to go to college gets in. Not everyone is entitled to go just because they want to. Give me a break. Colleges are offering remedial education to those who do not meet the minimal accepted criteria for getting into college in the first place! Colleges have become a business and education is not a priority. Pay college graduates for what they've learned not just because they can toss a football or slam dunk a hoop.
I don't believe it's where the funding goes that's the big problem. I came from a school district that had pleanty of money for all areas. It just wasn't cool to be smart. The smart kids go teased and beat up. Who wants that.
There is also an increase in laziness in the US. Kids today don't want to work hard for anything. Just take the easy road. I know because they are my friends. They think I am nuts for reading and working hard at things.
So, in K-12 education it's not cool to be smart and you get torn into if you are added with the US laziness equals less qualified people to do the jobs
Example: in college engineering 4 of the top 5 students were foreign. Either Arabic or Asian.
Evolution or ID?
I, personally, think it's a side effect of "offshoring."
I work in the College of Engineering at a large university. I haven't seen the actual statistics but my impression is that the MAJORITY of our students are citizens of other countries. Why is this, you ask? It's because American kids are SMART.
Engineering is a DIFFICULT field of study. So are Computer Science, Math, Chemistry and Physics. We have students who graduate and HAVE to go to graduate school because they can't get a job in the US at the B.S. level. They (the jobs) have all been "offshored" to India, China, Malaysia and other low wage countries. American kids are just too damned smart to work as hard as they have to in order to earn a degree in the hard sciences or Engineering if there's no payoff for their four (in most cases five) years of grind.
Just my US$0.02
utter rubbish
I've begun to notice that entrepenuers are following the design and production. This business model is generating hot beds of innovation out side the country. If you follow the history of technological innovation, the production and design areas are critical. Sarnoff, Menlo Park, Xerox Park, Silicon valley, etc. You can't design in a vacuum and being near the technicians and engineers that actually make what you are working on is essential.
The way our military is currently structured, I can't believe that anyone would consider loosing scientific dominance would not be a matter of national security.
Our business here have this wierd notion that China and India are second class academically so it is okay to outsource engineering and techinal work because American's will always be the innovators. I have always thought that this was stupid and I'm seeing now that this is simply isn't true.
Every year there is a huge influx of morons into first year.
:P
And also, every year there is a huge *outflux* of morons from first and second years who finally realize they can't hack it.
Every decent university sees this. They encourage it. Hell most overbook themselves on the basis that only 65% of students stay past their first year.
The reason? Why turn away a morons first year tution?
"We stand at a pivotal moment," Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader, recently said at a policy forum in Washington at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation's top general science group. "For all our past successes, there are disturbing signs that America's dominant position in the scientific world is being shaken."
I thought science was the one area where there should be no borders. Why is it so disturbing that other countries are doing well in scientifical-type stuff?
Mr. Daschle accused the Bush administration of weakening the nation's science base by failing to provide enough money for cutting-edge research.
Okay - this is ridiculous. The graphs cover 20 years - 1983-2003. Bush has been in office for ~3 years. Explain again how this is his fault...??
PS I'm not defending Bush - I'm defending basic math skills.
Oh, and here is a link to the printer-friendly version. Kudos to the submitter for including a link to the reg-free version.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
The primary problems lies in economics. Most advanced students in science who don't actually *love* what they are doing plan to leave science. If not for industry (which is still science), then to IP Law or consulting. Most grad students simply don't want to be poor for another few years after receiving their Ph.D. A lot of this perception in remaining poor is fed by the lack of research funding and the very real salaries that 1st year postdocs receive. When looking around in the scientific community, many foreign nationals abound but few Americans actually remain. Following their American Postdoctoral training, most of these foreign nationals inevitably return to their home country.
My family has been working as teachers and staffers in my town's public school system for almost 30 years. In those 30 years, the school budget has been approved only 28 times. No one wants to pay for education. However, people are more than happy to pay for our HS's absurd sports program. Every year the administration tries to move money from sports to academic programs, but outraged parents always reverse the decision. Last year the administration faced such a budget shortfall that they put a referrendum out to the town - Cut the sport's budget by 50% or cut music/wood|metalshop/arts/home-economics entirely from the budget. Guess which one the people chose?
The DoD will fund a lot of different things. Many different scientific areas. Not just bombs and missles. They fund so many different areas because most of the Military isn't guns and missles. It's logistics. They fund materials, methods, health related things and more. They may get used by the DoD later but they can have many purposes. They are a great springboard for science.
Evolution or ID?
Dominance Down!
Dumbinance Up!
* Film at 11 *
the US will have lost its dominance except militarily. we will not have high tech jobs, all workers will be working at service jobs, and the only way we will not fall apart is to, at some point in the next 2 decades, do a structured pull back from the level of influence and projected power we currently have.
I personally think that Europe is headed for the same fate and the 3rd world due to sheer numbers and industrial output will have surged into the same power league as the EU and the US.
this power struggle will be the cause of the 3rd world war, after which, the balkanization of nations and cultures will begin to disappear and we will come together as a planet some time near the end of this century.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Our culture is becomming exceedingly more materialistic and money-driven in my not-so-expert opinion. Consequently, people are shifting towards jobs that pay higher and better. Among the most popular majors here at Princeton are (last I knew) Economics and Operations Research & Financial Engineering.
To me, the problem is, people view a job as something you do to make money, and there isn't that much one can do in the pure sciences beyond research (unless you're exceedingly lucky/brilliant and come up with some essential new product) which for the most part, in my limited knowledge, doesn't pay that well compared to other things one can do w/ a similar education (science/engineering people are VERY desired in the financial industry which often pays VERY well).
Solutions I have come up with: a) make culture less materialistic - not happening anytime soon; b) give a lot more funding to pure research so that it'll pay better and also be easier to do - bigger budget means getting more of the toys you need for your experiments
Europe and Asia are ascendant, analysts say, even if their achievements go unnoticed in the United States. In March, for example, European scientists announced that one of their planetary probes had detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars -- a possible sign that alien microbes live beneath the planet's surface. The finding made headlines from Paris to Melbourne. But most Americans, bombarded with images from America's own rovers successfully exploring the red planet, missed the foreign news.
... er, Spanish ... er, British ... er, American, damn it! ... cultural arrogance. We've been the most powerful country in the world in every way -- not just militarily, but scientifically, economically, culturally, and politically -- for somewhere between six decades and a century, depending on your specific measure. We're used to thinking of that state of affairs as though it will last forever, as though it were personally handed to us on a silver platter by God Himself. But it doesn't work that way.
... but there were and are other nations fitting this description that didn't get so far. The reverse is also true; consider that (just barely) within living memory, a small island in the North Sea controlled the biggest empire the world has ever seen, and its language and culture are still the closest thing to universal in human history. A nation's position on the world stage is primarily determined by its culture.
IOW, the real problem is Roman
Ideally, of course, it doesn't matter where the knowledge is -- knowledge is knowledge, and an American is not diminished if the latest miracle drug or neat gizmo he uses to make his life better comes originally from outside our borders. But it adds up over time. Part of the reason for America's dominance of most of the 20th c. was simply that we were a huge nation with lots of natural resources
We are not, hopefully, going to turn into Russia: a Third World nation with nukes. But if we don't pay attention, we are going to see the permanent decline in living standards for the average American, in not only relative but absolute terms. This trend has already begun. That's not the future I want for myself and my children.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It does simply boil down in the end to a total lack of government concern about the education system.
Most states have lowered the amount of funding they are providing to education at all levels.
From K-12 through the college system the amount of funding is in constant decline and is doing nothing more than hurting the youth of america today and hurting america as a whole in the future.
If that were not enough, those students who are actually prone to creative and/or intelligent thought are often stifled by a system that looks more like the Special Olympics with the every student is equal approach that prevents them from advancing at the proper pace.
5 Ways to Improve the system:
1. More available private school systems
2. More funding for education programs
3. Allow students with talent to advance
4. Advanced schooling for aforementioned students
5. In college, more research opportunities for undergrads.
The last one may seem a bit iffy but I can state from personal experience that I would have loved to get more time actually working on stuff in my field and be left out because I wasn't a grad student yet.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
"Reverse Brain Drain"? No, when people you've educated tend to move away, its simply 'Brain Drain'. Canada has been suffering its effects for years to the US. It just so happens that it used to be the US was the beneficiary of brain drain in other countries. That would be the 'reverse'.
This is not a sig.
As a Grad Student rushing/hating to finish his Master's Thesis, I think I can offer something here.
Typically there are two sectors where research is done, academia or industry. In the USA, Industrial research unfortunately is usually the first to take a hit during bad economic conditions as we are presently in. Furthermore although some companies still do longterm innovative research that may not yield results for many years, this is becoming less common. What little research is still being done is done more for immediate application based work.
The traditional research for the general betterment of society without much regard for profit happens in academia. Unfortunately, academic research is suffering recently in the US. First as mentioned, due to the recent emphasis in defense funding and more grants available from DARPA, DoE, DoHomelandSecurity, research is focused into the application/results based work these agencies require rather than the open knowledge for discovery's sake approach of the NSF.
Furthermore, the core element of academic research are the Grad Students that do all the grunt work. In the US, most Science/Engineering grad students are international students. Given current visa restrictions, harrasement and a host of other problems, international student applications to the US have dropped significantly. This is having a noticable impact on research in universities.
Finally, meaningful R&D is now not exclusive to the US as it was a few decades ago. Many other countries are now making breakthroughs, or striving to establish resesarch institutions. For example, Indians know that their outsourcing days are limited, either 'cause either the outsourcing trend will stop or someone else (Phillipines, etc) will do it for even cheaper. So their next big thrust is to bring R&D into the country.
Nothing too organized there, just a few random musings that I thought could add to the discussion.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
I asked a guy I worked with to write a C function to compute the distance between two points.
He didn't know how. So I wrote the formula down for him.
"What's that", he asked, pointing to the symbol for square root.
I asked if he had a high school diploma.
"Of course", he exclaimed.
Now, how does someone get through high school not knowing what a square root symbol is?
Then there are the smart kids that get bored after going over the same material year after year. Why? Because Johnny half-brain needs the lesson again. And since we're all just have to be one big happy group of robots, all the same, well, we'll just have to wait for him to catch up so that we're all equal at the end.
There's plenty more to complain about. Am I bitter? Sure. I was tested gifted. I was a clever kid. I should have gone to a university when I was 18. Instead, I was going to summer-school just to graduate.
Why? Because the lesson of public education isn't education, it's busy work. Well, I didn't need busy work like Johnny half brain to understand the lesson. My punishment for understanding the material without doing all the busy work was failure.
I was intellectually a free spirit and I wouldn't follow their plan.
And I payed for it. I'm still paying for it.
I don't know if we previously performed better, but for the past 7 years, when I've been tracking a few of the world wide computer science challange competitions, I've always felt conflicted about the fact that even the most prestigious U.S. C.S. Universities (MIT, Stanford, etc...) never achieve higher than 4th or 5th place. Inevitably, there are Russian, Chinese, or Indian universities that whup our butt.
Yet, people live and die to go to these U.S. Universities, and never consider going international.
and in order to do it right you have to have people who really want to learn it, and live it.
Our culture does not tend to produce such people. America tends to think on the very, very short term (this is an inevitable consequence of allowing corporate/profit oriented thinking to dominate our culture) and it should come as no surprise that the get rich quick philosophy by which we define success is incompatible with good scientific training. There are always some people who will be scientists, but if you want a lot of them you can't just do nothing to promote science and then expect results.
Frank Herbert said it best - "short term decisions tend to fail in the long term". We constantly make short term decisions - we don't accept anything except instant gratification. So as a consequence the hard, long term skills tend to go undeveloped.
The question we need to ask ourselves is - do we care? I don't mean you or me, but as a country, and as a society, do we value science and other difficult skills enough to give up some of our short term gratification attitude in order to socially promote the long term view? If not, then the result is inevitable. I rather suspect we don't care, as long as our quality of life doesn't drop. The future isn't of much interest to America - we're too busy living in the present. Until that changes, and we start to value long term thinking and decisions (like putting ATTENTION, not $$, into education - $$ are just a feel good measure and do nothing to solve the real problem) we will continue to fall behind.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
"It just wasn't cool to be smart. The smart kids go teased and beat up."
How is this a new phenomena?
-m
Why would students take math?
Math causes more problems in public schools than it is worth. Students who do not grasp the concepts have their self esteem suffer and don't feel very good.
Personally, I believe that math and science courses should be reduced in schools. We could teach more tolerance classes and fire science teachers to buy laptops for kids.
Laptops can do the math that students can't. Anything that the laptop cannot do can be outsourced to India.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Parent is flamebait.
This has nothing to do with "who is running the country" today. The results we see today are a consequence of 30 years or more of problems. This kind of thing just doesn't creep in overnight. What we're seeing is a consequence of the actions of the past, not the present.
I agree with the poster that it's the education system. A couple weeks ago in NYC parents and students protested a 3rd grade proficiency test which they claimed was racist. Children needed to get a 40% on the test in order to matriculate to the 4th grade. Parents and some "public officials" claimed the test was racially biased, but never backed up their claims. This is just one example of where our education system is going. We can't even demand a 40% proficiency from a child before he's pushed ahead.
Social promotion is the KEY problem in our education system. My father was a teacher in Illinois in the 70s. He tells stories of parents complaining about the bad grades of their children, going to the administration, and then they letting the children pass onto the next grade. This kind of social promotion weakens the child's ability to grasp more complicated subjects. If a child can't understand fractions, how are they going to get Algebra or Geometry? It's a slipperty slope.
On another instance, attempts by the "right wing dominancy" is provide a "way out" through school vouchers to inner city children has been beaten by the liberals to death. School vouchers' intentions are to move kids with potential out of the "slum schools" and into private schools that put more an emphasis on education than on checking children for knives as they walk in through the door in the morning.
And finally, the NEA is terribly corrupt. They spend more money from dues collected by teachers for lobbying Washington politicians than they spend on continuing the education of their own teachers or ANY OTHER activity. We have a union that's just as corrupt as any big company that lobbies the Congress for their own special interests, except you never hear about THIS special interest because it's one the liberals support.
King of the Hill (yes, cartoon) had an interesting commentary on cultural impacts of studies in our public schools. While, yes, it was maybe drawn out a little bit, it shows how historical facts (like in this case the story of the Alamo) are being drowned out for oblivious and unimportant facts like what the state cactus is. The point is, don't talk about the Alamo because it'll offend someone.
And I have to agree. As a freshman in high school, we used 30 year old ancient history books as opposed to the new ones because the teacher felt the new books were loaded down with crap and didn't have any real substance. He then would proceed to fill us in with the "latest discoveries" in Egypt, Greece, Italy, etc in order to bring us up to date.
1. An administration that restricts basic research based on religious principles. I'm mainly thinking stem-cell research, but there are other areas as well. (51 comments and no-one has mentioned this yet?!)
2. A lack of corporate interest in basic research. If a project doesn't show some return for shareholders in the near-term, it gets no love. This attitude has had a stifling effect on non-government funded research.
3. Shoddy treatment of objective science. Okay, call it bashing, but I have to say that the Bush administration's treatment of science has been apalling. If the research doesn't support the agenda, the scientists must be replaced by industry shills.
4. Lack of funding for basic research from government. This has being going on for longer than the current Bush administration, but it echoes the corporate trend of demanding short-term results. If a program is unlikely to show benefit within the current election cycle, it's hard-pressed to find funding.
5. Complacency. Without an external "threat" (the Soviet launch of Sputnik), science programs like Apollo are hard to fund. This applies in both the government and corporate arenas.
I wish I had solutions to go with my observations.
Bander
What we need more of is science!
I would not blame Public Education entirely...
What disappoints me about the US is its screwed up immigration policy. I am University educated and hold a degree in technology. Classically what the US would like. I once tried to immigrate, but learned that all I could get is an H1B. The H1B would allow me in the US while I might get a greencard. I looked at that and said no way as I would like to build a life.
Then I read Business Week and read the article, "Aliens: A little less alientated". Essentially it talks about how illegal aliens can get bank accounts, driver's licenses, mortgages, etc. I just read that and shook my head. I am not shaking my head at the aliens, but the fact that the aliens get so many rights. On the one hand I want to do things by the book and become part of society. Then I read the way to do it is become an illegal alien in the US. IT JUST DOES MAKE SENSE...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
When I came here at the age of 16, one of the biggest cultural shocks for me was that among people my own age, intellect and doing good at school was not encouraged.. even mocked.
...
Those who are born here in the US probably don't even think about it, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks that it's incredibly stupid that when someone does well on a test, his reward is getting called a geek by the basketball players, who are on top of the social ladder.
And this stuff doesn't stop at college, when retards who can throw a football get automatic A's in their classes, and get a diploma and a million dollar contract handed to them (maybe I'm exaggerating there, but you get the point).
And with that kind of social values, what the fuck else can you expect from American education system? The opportunity to learn is there - our university system is one of, if not THE best in the world - but
I can't speak for any other country, but in Russia kids wanted to become scientists and astronauts [up until the 90's, but that's another story]. Here unfortunately, kids just don't want to become scientists, or engineers, or anyone of that sort. They want to become Brett Favre, 50 Cent, and Donald Trump (not that there's anything wrong with wanting to become a billionaire).
So my point is, until we will WANT to excel at science, we won't - it's as simple as that.
People think that by throwing money at the problem it will go away.
Money doesn't ever fix anything...
For instance High Schools are a place of social idoctrination more so then places of learning.
There are still places you can get wonderfull education, but they are private. Public schools are controlled by beuaracrates that want to fuffill feel-good BS like anti-drug education (proven over and over to be 100% inneffective), eviroemental and social bullshit.
That's were the money is going to! Why would giving the schools more computers fix this issue?
My little brother may not know how to spell properly, or not know the basics to geometry and triginometry, but DAMMIT he knows not to smoke pot, change diapers just incase he becomes a teenage dad, and he coughs loudly every time we go to eat and somebody across the room smokes a cigeratte!
Now that's what I want! A bunch of social robots telling me that SUV's kill baby seals. Hell they couldn't name you the rights garrenteed to you in the constitution but they know socialist health care is wonderfull and their teachers need to be paid more!!!
Of course 2 + 2 = 5 sometimes, but after all, that's what computers are for. It's not like they have to think anymore!
Poor Nations Stem Brain Drain
US Exports Knowledge Overseas
Will Military Research Yield New Public Sector Products?
You get the idea
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I think the laziness factor is the big one. I went to the Naval Academy, supposedly an institution that only accepts America's brightest well rounded "leaders of the future" and I lost count of the number of times I heard statements like "2.0 and go" or "Poli-Sci and fly."
The real wake up call was getting stationed in Japan and travelling around SE Asia. I simply couldn't believe the work ethics I saw. You can make all the jokes you want about Japan producing mindless robots, but the guys who worked for me didn't just stay after hours until the job was done, they stayed until the job was done right. Most of them were pretty damned creative and willing to try new things too.
I've always been impressed with America's ability to fight back to the top when we realize we are the underdog. The question simply is, when are we going to wake up?
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
And to take this problem further, why are kids thinking everything will be handed to them on a silver platter?
Oh yeah, that would be where the parents come in. Somehow, at some point, maybe it was when both parents had to start working, it became better/easier to just give the kids what they wanted rather then laying down the law.
I can understand, it must be hard to come back after a 60 hour workweek to a screaming kid, a spouse who also had an exhausting workweek. Would you have the energy to deal with all that?
-- taking over the world, we are.
It just wasn't cool to be smart. The smart kids go teased and beat up.
Is this actually true? I'm from the UK, and there is a stereotype of the American geek as small, weak, beaten up, no girlfriend etc, but I've wondered if this is accurate.
In the UK, (at least, in my highly subjective experience) this doesn't happen. I'm really geeky, and am recognised as such, but I've still got a lot of friends/girlfriends/social life, and I, nor any of my friends get "beaten up" or teased for being intelligent/liking science/computers etc.
Maybe it's a cutural thing?
In decades past many scientists went to the US to escape oppression and government control.
In the US they were free to publish, free to discuss among their peers, free to do the research that was important to them.
Anyone who follows the news these days can see this is changing. There is much more government scrutiny in all areas of life, and that freedom is beginning to erode.
If things continue along these lines, Russia will eventually be freer than the US.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
Problem is, this boom was seriously unsustainable.
What we are seeing now is a readjustment to the more normal situation, but we are still doing substantially better than pre-WWII levels in terms of science spending/graduates/jobs. I don't necessarily believe this is a zero-sum game, our investment over the past fifty years has paid off very well, and I think we are a better nation and a better world as a result.
Just to give an example of pre-WWII science job market: Feynman's first job was as a plastic chemist, and he spent some time as basically a mechanical engineer (albeit a high-powered one) before he got into the Manhattan project. The point is, only for the past 50 years has there been much money at all for "basic unapplied" research.
One of the biggest German political magazines, the Spiegel, has a story about this topic in German. Here is the automatic translation into something similar to English.
... ohhh, I should ask too, I guess.
Personally I do know at least one person that won't be allowed to study in the US anymore. She is listed in one of those mysterious lists and as a consequence isn't allowed to study in the US anymore. She can't figure out how and for what reason she came into that list. Perhaps she knows the wrong people like some of my friends and
One of the reasons our schools are ineffective is this: If we had standards, a lot more kids would flunk out of school, putting more criminals on the street.
The reason for that is that parents don't teach a work ethic. School is "uncool", and work sucks.
In the short term, raising standards would create more delinquents and criminals. If we did introduce standards it would take more than a few generations to undo the damage and bring the passing rates back up.
Many students do poorly in school due to lack of work ethic in their parents. Many students, such as myself, do poorly in school, because school really sucks, due to the lack of work ethic in other students. (I did great in college.)
Many teachers see this and feel like it would be futile to try to fight the status quo.
As a scientist in the US, I have to say the biggest fixable problem is the ridiculous immigration policies that have been adopted after 9/11. Sure, public education needs improvement, but most of the world's smartest people never have and never will be born in a country representing 6% of the world population. The lab I work in has three Europeans, one Chinese, one Australian, and two Americans (including me), and it's great. The success of the US scientific enterprise has been (and should be) dependent upon concentrating the best talent from other countries in one place, and the US is going in the wrong direction. I personally know plenty of foreign students and postdocs getting screwed, and news has gotten back to their universities. A friend of a friend was barred re-entry into the US from Portugal after a speeding ticket and forced to drop out of the top theoretical physics PhD program on the West Coast. A coworker has been unable to visit home (China) for six years because if she leaves the country there's a 50% chance she will be denied re-entry for a six-month waiting period, which would destroy all of her experiments. A very good friend of mine was in deportation danger for smashing a guy's car window (the guy deserved it). There was a component of the Patriot Act that required attendance to be taken at all graduate school courses, and a missed class by any foreign graduate student (including Canadians) to be documented and justified.
It's a testament to the strength of American science that foreign applications to US grad schools have decreased by only 25% in spite of the ridiculous situation placed on us by the current government. Funding issues and stem cells aside, things have to change in November.
This is a side-effect of the 'greed is good' culture of the 1980's. It used to be that a car manufacturer was about making cars, a movie maker was about making movies, etc, and if they did a good job at what they were about, money came. If they were also good about handling their money, they were profitable and got the chance to make more cars, movies, etc, and make more money to keep doing it.
/. crowd would like to extend it to recorded music, too.
After the 80's this shifted. Whatever you made, it was about making money, and cars, movies, or whatever simply became a way to get the money, but the money came first. The corollary of this is that top management USED to be car or movie men (or women) who also knew how to manage money. Now top management BECAME money men (or women) who *might* also know something about cars or movies.
There are two net results out of this:
* First, it leads our young adults to chase money instead of chasing cars or movies, for careers. It actually denigrates the act of creating cars and movies in favor of managing the money to fund those cars and movies. The best and brightest go where they perceive the best careers are.
* Second, it leads to inferior products. Since those at the top are not really car and movie men, (or women) they don't have the best instincts about their products. Hence you tend get 'follow the herd' products. I can't do too well with the cars, but with movies you get sequel-itis, comic book adaptations, and Michael Crichton movies. Not that Crichton's books are bad, or make bad movies, it's just that you get *too much* repetition of known-good formulas. (Nothing wrong with a known-good formula, we need new stuff, too.)
I've used the samples of cars and movies. I'm sure the
Other causes:
Advertisers and the people to hire them may not even admit it to themselves, but they tend to want to turn us all into consuming idiots who buy their products without thinking. Hence advertising which attempts to bypass the consiousness and go for the glandular reactions.
Another part of the 80's money culture: Get the quarterly report looking good. Research is a drain on this quarter. Of course it's good in the long run, but we must 'balance' the long run against the quarterly results. Guess which way the balance usually ends up tilting.
In the long run, a culture works as long as the most competent rise to the most responsible positions. Education is seen as key in our culture, and we have 'tried' to make it available to all. Aside from the fact that we haven't 'tried' hard enough, take a look at college: It's the gate to the top positions. If you want to take this as a class warfare issue, it's in the interest of the wealthy for colleges to be expensive. That way only the children of the wealthy can qualify for the top positions. In that light, it's simply enforcing a class system while paying lip service to equal opportunity and objective standards. But the real sin to our society is the smart, poor kid who can't afford the education while an academically mediocre rich kid can, and gets the associated opportunities.
Enough.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The dominance of military research is nothing new in the U.S. The U.S., with its very strong belief in free market economics, has always had a hard time with federally-sponsored R&D. In the past, however, we've always done it, yet called the vast majority of it military, even though it often wasn't. Military research floated all boats, the way that space research does. [Similarly, we don't directly subsidize Boeing's production of airliners, the way the EU subsidizes Airbus, but we do give Boeing big contracts to build military aircraft.]
:-)
IMHO what has changed recently is that military research sponsors (notably DARPA) now call for very short-term turnaround in research results. Typically they like to see substantial results from a project in six months now. This means that there are new difficulties for using DARPA funding for basic research.
At the same time that military funding has been emphasizing short-term versus long term research, industrial research labs, and general industrial support for research, have collapsed. Essentially, corporate funders have been deterred by examples like Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, and IBM labs. They don't believe that corporate research generates results for the funding enterprise. This suggests that research must be funded as a social good, like highways, etc.
Unfortunately, military and enterprise funding for research has gone away at precisely a time when ideological sympathy for funding social goods through taxation is at an all-time low. And, of course, the federal budget is squeezed between tax cuts, recession, and the war effort. On the up-side, we don't have to balance the budget any more...
And to take this problem further, why are kids thinking everything will be handed to them on a silver platter?
But I'm sure every generation for the past 200 years has said that, "Kids today aren't willing to work as hard". It can't have been true every time, or otherwise we would have died out by now.
Oh yeah, that would be where the parents come in. Somehow, at some point, maybe it was when both parents had to start working, it became better/easier to just give the kids what they wanted rather then laying down the law.
That makes a lot more sense than the usual assumption that it's just some failure of will on a large scale. The question is what do you do about it? Unless the economy gets so good that one parent can stay home it's not going to get better. And I think the chances of that are very, very slim.
I went to High School in the seventies, the class valedictorian was by far the most respected student there. He was not in any sports but was the nicest guy in the entire school. He is now our family doctor. Things are different today, it's not that we didn't have some of the same things going on. But today it's just more extreme. People got beat up in school or about something that happened at school that never got settled, not often but it happened. Today people get killed in school,not often but it happens. There is a big difference. The popular songs talked about alot of things. Sex, drugs, love etc. Now I hear songs that talk about popping a cap in someones ass. Or a dead girl friend in the trunk. Things are different, while alot of themes are similiar, it's just alot more extreme.
American culture does not value intellect. In a country dominated by dogmatic religion and banal entertainment, anyone with half a brain is looked down upon for wasting tax dollars or being too "nerdy." Image is what matters, not content.
U.S. schools focus on passing limited tests that show nothing about creativity; teaching real problem solving skills is much less important than shoveling students through an impersonal and over-wrought system.
When was the last time you saw the President lauding a group of scientists at the White House? Unless your research is focused on new and creative ways of killing people, you're pretty much ignored; religious ideology replaces the scientific method, and society devolves into polarized camps that react rather than think.
Perhaps I'm too blunt, but I'm tired of watching my once-great nation devolve into an international bully, abandoning its legacy of achievement.
All about me
"c me and free me" was the saying at my school. But this has always been the way, its not a new trend.
We know Japanese work long hours. We also know they don't work nearly as hard as Americans.
I do not agree that laziness is a major issue, as much as greed. Management is the number one issue.
Managers or CEOs make almost exclusively short term decisions to make themselves look better; Then they leave for a better job before the piper has to be paid.
America is capitalist, but we are becomming short term only capitalist. Mortgaging our future on almost every single issue.
I have no doubt that our primary education is at fault for the lack of strong math, science and analytical thinking skills in the US, and the institutions are colluding to dumb-down our students in math and science every day.
Case-in-point: Our single most important indicator of student ability, the S.A.T., is administered by a unabashedly profit-driven agency, the College Board. The Board has proposed a major revision to the test beginning in 2005 which will raise the total points possible to 2400 by tacking on an essay and a grammar section, while eliminating analogies (the closest thing to a real 'logic' quiz on the verbal section) and quantitative comparisons. The claim is that this shift is designed to (*cough* increase fees *cough*) better address learned knowledge of students, rather than raw ability (the test was initially intended to be sort of a IQ test you could prepare for).
So what are we saying to kids? 2/3 of the MOST important indicator of student ability tests language (and just white america's OWN language!)? 2/3 of your time as a student should be devoted to learning how to read and write in english? Is it really that hard, or important, to test students on the ENGLISH language as a primary indicator of their potential? The fact is this: schools are increasingly prone to test what they know students are good at, and what better way to soften up scores than add an entire section which, by nature, must be graded on complete subjectivity? Schools *know* they cannot teach math/science well, perhaps due to students' reluctance to embrace the subject, perhaps due to the pathetically low salaries and disrespect the average american pays to primary school teachers...so they just test what students are good at, and do it in a way that is so fluid that they can literally raise the scores of a nation with this "essay dial" whenever they need to answer to the neo-conservatives and the bitching liberals.
Universities have seen all forms of gov't grants diminish. It's hard for universities to get funding for research. Why is funding shrinking? G. W. Bush thinks that private companies should be picking up the tab...
So, unless you're researching something that Monsanto (or any other large corporation) is interested in, you're going to have a hard time finding grants. This is the sad truth.
But, I think a shot at government funded research is missing the target. And, the military research budget as a portion of GDP, is nowhere near a high. It is more visible because they've made the bid process less secretive, but overall, still relatively low in comparison to other time periods in the last 50 years. But, the government has never even been the majority player in research. Private industry has been behind the majority of the research efforts in the US.
Don't forget that we're about 15 years into the aftereffects after the transition away from pure research by many of the large private firms. With the exception of a few stragglers, most corporations now have firm policies that all research must be aiming at a clear corporate payoff. So, true blue sky research has been heavily cut by private industry. This was the shortsightedness of the '90s. We heavily shifted research towards the short term. So we essentially pulled researchers off the task of making fuel for the future, and put them on burning the fuel of the past. This gave us a blazing decade, but has left us with ruins.
I can't say I have actual numbers for this, but in my experience, both Americans and Japanese put the same amount of energy into their work. Where you see a difference is the mentality that their work must be done right and on time... in Japan, the greater-good mentality pushes everyone to work as hard and as fast as they can. In America, the individualism approach tends to make the over-achievers work harder, and the rest just cruise along at mediocrity.
Looking at the broader picture, I think that in a lot of cases, the American school and support system for sciences probably produces a lot of very talented people, but they're less interested in serving the country that helped them than they are in furthering their careers (by moving abroad etc). Which is not a bad thing. In a choice between having a stable life working for a foreign company and staying at home and living in uncertainty, any well-educated talented person would have to choose stability.
It's a question of making the work environment at home more friendly to talent.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Is this actually true? I'm from the UK, and there is a stereotype of the American geek as small, weak, beaten up, no girlfriend etc, but I've wondered if this is accurate.
I can tell you from personal experience that this is accurate, at least in high school. But then you grow up and then people realize that nerdiness is a good thing. You get stuff women really want: earning potential and stability.
In exactly that order.
Ahem.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Maybe we can start having decent kids if families can afford to have one parent stay at home.
The problem isn't entirely schools and teachers. Sure, they can be contributors - but like most problems there are multiple factors.
The single, largest factor is the child's immediate social group. Typically starting with parents, branching out to siblings, then to cousins & friends. If this social group puts no value on an education, does not read, is not curious - then the child is almost guaranteed not to develop much intellectually. Oh sure, there are exceptions, but just that.
And the parents can almost completely compensate for a poor school system if they want, here's how:
1. restrict all non-productive distractions. This includes television, gameboys, and computer games. In my household there is ZERO broadcast television, ZERO non-public radio, ZERO gameboys, and about 2-4 hours of computer games a week. Some folks think this is hard it isn't - you especially realize this when you find that your children never beg for toys around christmas time - they just don't see the commercials.
2. read stories to your children every day. There's a wealth of great children's literature, and I have yet to find a pack of boys that could resist for a moment a reading of Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Once the television is off, once you start reading the good stuff, and there butts will be solidly planted. You can give them paper & pencils to draw with as well. BTW, I'd consider the fun authors to read: Roald Dahl, Kipling, EB White, Grahame, Mary Norton, Sid Fleischman, Elenor Estes, Joan Aiken, Louis Sachar, Walter Brooks, etc. Oh yeah, and if you've waited until your kids are 15 to start this it might not work. Sometimes it does, sometimes it's too late.
3. Provide them books as gifts
4. Fill the house with books
5. Spend time with them at the library every week
6. Help the children find interesting ways to approach homework
7. Encourage good grades (with allowances tied to grades, etc)
8. Pursue your imagination with them: just do things that are fun and interesting that they can learn from: - bulid a trebuchet - travel to a foreign country - every night read a poem - join a story-telling group - just use your imagination I've got two boys that are in the top of their class in a pretty good school system. We never pushed them - we simply read to them. That's all it took. Once their imaginations were engages the rest happened all of its own.
The single biggest reason that most children leave school with a poor education - is probably that their parents assumed that they could simply "out-source" the responsibility of education to an institution. I suppose this is a recursion problem isn't it?
Life is just a series of decisions. People have become so split in the U.S. it's amazing we can accomplish anything at all. On the one side, you have people who work and try to prove themselves by doing the best job possible, and you have those for whom existence is all they need. Then sometimes you have people like me with contrary goals - want to work and get ahead, but also want to spend as much time with my family (and doing my own things) as possible.
Recently, right here on Slashdot, we had a lot of discussion about the 35 hour work week. I don't remember how it came about, or what the main topic was, but I got into a lengthy discussion about how I abhorred the very idea - if I wanted to work hard to get ahead, and sometimes that means working more than 40 hours (with no extra compensation, just the desire to do the best job I can), then please let me do so. We don't need the government restricting how many hours I can work.
I was actually met with resistence. A lot of people don't want to get ahead. They want to get by, and if they can do it at 35 hours a week, then they'd be happy if the government stepped in and required that employers cannot have people working more than 35 hours. Meaning that it's not optional. The government has already decided that 40 hours defines the workweek, and anything more is overtime... now some people want a maximum number of hours allowed to be set.
I don't know where everyone else works, but people where I work do plenty of overtime (mostly compensated, I'm the only one in my department on salary). They don't do it just for the money, they do it because we have drop-dead deadlines and they need to finish things, but what amazes me is, even after a long day and the possibility of overtime, they will nit-pick about things that most other people wouldn't notice and they spend time fixing every little problem they possibly can.
I know it's probably the exception to the rule, but I wanted to point out the contrast that you can see... we're becomming the nation that shuns hard work and belittles those that work hard as "tools."
Stupid sexy Flanders.
"I'm from the UK, and there is a stereotype of the American geek as small, weak, beaten up, no girlfriend etc, but I've wondered if this is accurate."
Like all stereotypes, this has an element of truth. In this case, it's a large element of truth. I'll answer each element in turn:
1) American geeks tend to be smaller and non-violent (I'm 5'8" and 170 pounds, somewhere around "average" to "small"), and tend towards software development because I'm not particularly drawn to physically demanding activities. This in itself is a relative distinction because an overwhelming number of American males in my age group are "large" due to all the huge amounts of extra fat they carry.
2) When I was growing up in the public school system, I was teased, taunted, picked on, and generally made to be a borderline social outcast because I didn't play sports (which is extremely boring stuff). I tended towards intellectual activities, something which was highly frowned upon by my peers in the U.S. I ended up learning Okinawan Kempo just for the psychological terror it inflicted upon the school bullies. A short demonstration as part of a required class presentation (subject matter was at the student's discretion) was the key to freeing me from the "targets" list.
3) Not having a girlfriend is hit and miss, as it is in most walks of life in America. Being the brunt of cruelty does a lot to damage one's self-respect, and therefore one's ability to interact with other people and with the opposite sex. Not being a part of the mainstream opens one up to this type of cruelty in America. There is also the matter of a small pool of desirable and available women, part of another very true American stereotype: more Americans than not, of both sexes, are grotesquely fat.
So yes, it's largely a cultural issue. America has turned into a cesspool of worker bees happy to pull in a small weekly paycheck in exchange for not having to stress their brains too hard.
It just wasn't cool to be smart. The smart kids go teased and beat up. Who wants that.
There is also an increase in laziness in the US. Kids today don't want to work hard for anything. Just take the easy road. I know because they are my friends. They think I am nuts for reading and working hard at things.
We send our kids to school expecting the schools to overcome our culture. Our culture is lazy. Our culture values television, movies, and sports over intelligence. Parents inadvertently raise their kids to be lazy and to have no interest in learning. Parents don't think smart is cool - they think beauty or athleticism is cool. That passes right on to their kids.
I just finished reading The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (a collection of various things Feynman said). When he was a kid, his father used to teach him to learn by teaching him to question everything. Instead of just saying "that bird is a robin", he would ask what makes that bird different that the other birds. They would then observe the bird's behavior and try to deduce reasons for what it was doing.
Example: in college engineering 4 of the top 5 students were foreign. Either Arabic or Asian.
These are cultures that value hard work and discipline. Sure, you can make the stereotype that Asians are smarter. It's not likely that they are genetically smarter. It's much more likely that they are raised with different values.
We need to start embracing responsibility and discipline. We need to start valuing hard work over luck. There is much reward in working hard and accomplishng great things. Everyone is all about the almighty dollar and not about accomplishment.
There is a definite trend of US politics having a detrimental effect on science.
The current issue of Scientific American mentions the censorship and blatant manipulation of facts by the current administration in order to further their political goals.
It is quite funny to see that someone is actually worried when their favourite country (USA) is "losing" something when the actual amount of new innovations is growing. It feels like someone thinks that in science those "other" countries do not count when they make new innovations. Standard NIH case. I find it very hard to believe that USA or any other country is losing something important if those new innovations and patents are not made there. There is always the possibility that something really good doesnt get invented at all. Like the genetic research which I believe is legally limited in the U.S. So I think it is better to lose the dominance because this technophobic time is making research harder in many western countries.
We have passed a critical point in our progress as a nation. No longer is there economic incentive to build products here as we can outsource the factories and labor to other countries. Ideas follow the means of production. If there is more production in other countries, there will be higher standards of education and higher quality minds in other countries.
We must learn to accept and integrate the new standards of globalization into our society. The question of location of means-of-production should not depend on lowered cost, but rather on benefit to society.
An obvious example would be technology and China. Yes, costs are lower for Americans but the Chinese are destroying their environment. A large element of "recycled technology" recovery occurs in China and most of the toxic products in out technology are released into the local environment. Search Google sometime for the terms "technology toxic byproduct China" and you'll be amazed by the material.
Means-of-production should be located where society can locally benefit via increased employment, etc. Until nanotech duplicators are created, we'll have to live with the status quo.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Just to play devil's advocate (I think), has it become unrealistic to have one parent work and one stay at home?
Or has consumer culture made it seem like you have to have both parents working to get a new TV, new car, etc etc.
I've seen families with both parents working who still have credit debt.
Maybe we should try and just live within our means, even if it does mean not wearing the latest fashions, etc?
We make so much money compared to the rest of the world, yet we seem to be working more and more. How can that be? Shouldn't we all be rich enough to enjoy, at the very least, our families?
-- taking over the world, we are.
DARPA, DoE, DoD, NSA, JPL etc. have done great science - science that will go down in history as groundbreaking - on their budgets.
The USA may be losing its dominance as far as "science" goes - i.e. if you take every scientific discipline as equal in utility and then delineate nations' scientific populations without prejudice, it is. But add the weight of "useful" - as in, has produced tangible benefits to humans - and the USA is still mightily dominant, with no competitor in sight.
A significant number of great advances in science and medicine have been incidental to military research; that's a fact. The entirety of the materials comprising your PC? All of it is a result of military research in some age or another. It's a sad fact, but according to history, humans only really come up with revolutionary technology when they need it to commit war. Successful, peaceful civilizations always have stagnated at a technological plateau, until either a raiding party or a trade route came their way.
Back in 1950, one might note that the U.S. was responsible for half the world's GWP. In 1965, it was down to 25%? Was this a collapse in the American economy? No -- it was Europe and Japan having sucessfully rebuilt from bombed-out postwar husks into a restored industrialized powers. Sure, the U.S. "lost its industrial dominance" in that it was no longer so far ahead of everyone else, but the only way to keep it would have been to militarily force the Europeans and Japanese to stay backwards.
Similarly, in the last 20 years we've seen South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore emerge as modern economies, and India and China reduce the stultifying power of socialism on their economies. The resulting development has been met with an increase in the amount of science and engineering they produce. Sure, the U.S. "lost its scientific dominance" in that it is no longer so far ahead of everyone else, but the only way to keep it would have been to militarily force the Asians to stay backwards.
How can I claim we've stayed even? Well, when we compare ourselves scientifically to those who were fully developed countries in 1983, we're still ahead, as pointed out in Time Europe.
The U.S. science establishment is still healthy. It's just that the science establisments in Asia are no longer invalids.
Alot of times it's true. It's the rare case which it isn't. I was/am a geek and am built like a linebacker and played football. I hung out w/ the jocks and the geeks. The biggest problem is that geeks tend to spend most of their time learning/getting better at the intellectual(or whetever) side of things. And believe it or not I think this is the problem. I found that I got lucky and was ok because I worked at the stuff I was bad at, and not what I was good at. I hit the football field, hit the weight room, got to be sociable and know the other side. As a result I was respected by them. The typical geek (and i may get flamed for this but oh well) is somewhat scared/timid, and will retreat to that which they know best and get better at it, and shrink from the rest of the world. In order to change the stereo type, we need to fit in and get better at what we're not good at...
Anywho, just a long random rant.
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
Work ethic is one of the biggest predictors of student success. For years, I have helped students who have it succeed and those who are lacking it fail (no matter how many meetings, chances, extra help, etc I give.) Unfortunately, it is a moral taught by parents, and the school system has little impact in that area. I am never surprised when I meet the parents of a failing student and find that the parents are no different from the student. I guess breeding is everything.
A half century of elevating athletic stars to godhood and excusing them any and every crime imaginable. Or pandering to anyone who happened to win the genetic lottery and be born beautiful.
Decades of worrying whether a schoolchild has his chi focused instead of making sure he or she can add two single digit numbers in their head.
And letting the clique situation in schools to progress to the level of the Lord Of The Flies hasn't helped, either. When I was in high school, I saw teacher actively engaging in making some students outcasts (usually because they were smarter). I can't imagine what it's like now with the "let's all be mediocre" mindset.
One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions - what are you going to land on - one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics.
--- Ban humanity.
"School vouchers' intentions are to move kids with potential out of the "slum schools" and into private schools that put more an emphasis on education than on checking children for knives as they walk in through the door in the morning."
If only that were the case. The reality of school vouchers is to put public money into private Christian schools, where such blather as creationism, deities, demons, Heaven, Hell, etc. can be promulgated into the squishy matter of impressionable young minds with the full endorsement of the U.S. Government.
I would otherwise be in full agreement with taking studious young intellectual talent out of the craphole that is public education and funding their development, with public money, in private schools.
Note that, to avoid flames from the Manager-Apologist camp, one has to explicitly point out what the problem is. Management makes short-term decisions, which means they completely ignore the long-term. Thus, instead of spending money on basic research, or even any research at all, they spend it on marketing campaigns, creative accounting, and themselves.
The majority of songs on the radio are about sex, love, drugs, etc. Yes, there are some violent songs, but there were violent songs in the seventies as well. Ever hear of Black Sabbath? The Rolling Stones?
Nothing has changed in music, man, nor in kids' attitudes. Smart people DO still get respect if they're not smug about it and have other aspects to their personality. Just because TV shows it the other way around doesn't mean it's true...I can't tell you how many times my brother has talked about some new friend in high school and rounded out the conversation with "He's really smart, too. He gets, like, all 90s and stuff."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
You make the decision as a couple that some things are more important than money and possessions. You deliberately allow your standard of living to be lower than it could, otherwise. My job enabled us to keep my wife home with the kids, though we don't have all the toys, travel, clothing, and house we might otherwise like.
Even now when my kids come home - from high school - there's about a 15 minute window when they spill their guts. IMHO, it has been terribly important for my wife (or me, but it generally falls to her) to be there when it happens. After that 15 minutes they clam up and generally act like teenagers, though more polite and hard-working than many I see. She also works part-time, but in a job that lets her have that contact with the kids at the end of the day.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
> We know Japanese work long hours. We also know they don't work nearly as hard as Americans.
Don't equate working long hours with working hard.
Having worked both in America and Europe I find the Germans work the har4est. They put an enormous amount of effort in while they are at work, but when the whistle blows they go home.
I think that if I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have entered a technical field. Its great money comparitively when you're first starting out, but then it tops out when you're in your 30s. Most people change careers then.
Now, in the past generations, the techies had lifelong jobs at IBM and GE. In this generation, we're all getting fucked. Its not surprising that attitudes regarding scientists have gone down.
Scientists/engineers are just a slightly more expensive cog in the machine.
If you think the level of violence in Black Sabbath or Rolling Stones songs are comparable to what's being played today, you're out of your mind.
I don't necessarily agree it's the "work ethic" as people here in the US typically work over 40 hrs (laborsta.ilo.org) and take far less vacation time than other countries. This may in fact be dissolving the basic "family unit" which traditionally has helped guide us through to maturity and success.
With our techshare diminishing and our workload increasing I think we are the ones who are becoming mindless robots.
Also I heard an interesting thought from an old interview with Isaac Asimov on PBS - He mentioned that the modern idea of "education" has become something that you "finish" or "complete" rather than pursue throughout your life.
homeschooling is NOT the answer. homeschooled children either come out academically great (and/or religiously brainwashed to hell, but i'll say no more about that aspect of it for the moment), but this is for a simple reason: the process is self-selective. those who are excited and passionate about home schooling do it, and thus no wonder their kids turn out better than average.
homeschooling simply doesn't scale to a population. period.
We know Japanese work long hours. We also know they don't work nearly as hard as Americans.
Now that is funny. People assume that Americans work the hardest and are the strongest in various areas. What the NY Times article is pointing out should be a wake up call for most.
Things have changed. It really suprises me how much they have changed. One of the richest people I knew personally was a billionaire, literally. He was my Great Grandfather who was also President Trumans right hand man. In an interview he once responded to the question of how he obtained his wealth as: "The key is to work harder than everyone else and you will succeed." Up until the year 2000, I would have agreed with that statement.
There are two falicies to his logic though. There is the first falicy which is opportunity must be present for that to work, and secondly that you have a clear view of how much everyone else is doing so you can do better. What this article points out is that we have ignored the work other countries do.
Your comment on how Americans work harder was the case in some generations. In the youngest and up-coming generation, I do not believe that is the case. Look at the mentality and work force that is coming up. Where is the emphasis on higher education, in particular graduate studies?
Part of the problem I believe comes from the mentality that the youngest generation was raised with. They are the product of a highy successful, rich and full economy that is now crumbling. Many of them have the "World owes me" attitude. What they fail to realize is that noone owe them anything and being lazy will not pay off.
So to your statement, even though some people work hard, the average person in the work force in the US does their 40 hours and goes home. They don't put in long hours for free. I routinely have to put in 60 hour weeks and longer if emergencies arise. I also have to tell myself that it is ok and that I shouldn't make a big deal of the fact I am salaried and will NOT get compensated for those hours.
In other countries, they don't have to tell themselves that. The compensation for innovation, hardwork, and effort is viewed differently in other cultures.
root 10956 5164 0 Oct 22 - 0:23 sendmail: rejecting connections: load average: 70 (isn't sendmail just too kind)
In the UK, (at least, in my highly subjective experience) this doesn't happen. I'm really geeky, and am recognised as such, but I've still got a lot of friends/girlfriends/social life, and I, nor any of my friends get "beaten up" or teased for being intelligent/liking science/computers etc.
It depends on the mix of income backgrounds. You hear of kids committing suicide because they were bullied for being academically successful in the small town ("townie") schools, where the career path for the majority of students is to go on the "social" and do casual labour. That doesn't happen in the exclusive or dominantly middle class schools, where the ethos is to prepare everyone for university.
It's more of a financial thing.
The solution? It is not the economy, it is the choices that the parents make. When parents realize that they are sacrificing thier kids well being to the alter of "I must have a bigger house, and SUV", they might relize they do not need two parents working full time. Why have kids if you cannot spend the time with them to raise them? Kids today are just another check box to many people. Spouce? Check. SUV? Check. Bigger house? Check. Children? Check. Happiness? ummm?...
In high school i was just mocked incessantly for being a geek. In college I was still mocked occassionally but everyone would be my friend when they needed computer help.
My last year of college (jan 03-dec 03) I did a social experiment. When I talked with new people I expressed my interests as being motorcycles, mountain biking, that I was a Business Management student (I am), etc, but I never mentioned computers.
Not only did girls stop asking me to fix their computers all of the time, I started getting laid.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
This doesn't come as a surprise at all.
For decades the United States have relied heavily on immigration to sustain their technological dominance.
In the fourties, fifties and sixties they had the top notch european scientists which either fled europe during world war II (e.g. Einstein) or were "picked up" by the allied forced after the breakdown of Nazi germany (e.g. Wernher von Braun). Also the increased military spending during the cold war added much to the technological and scientific leadership.
And nowadays the united states benefit from Immigrants leaving China, Korea or India to come tu the US. And there are still enough euroipean scientists which choose teh US because of the excellent working conditions there compared to most european countries. Try a scientific search engine of your choice. A high percentage of the scientific papers you'll find there have at least one co-author which is not a american.
Mind you this doesn't mean that there are only immigrants doing your scientific reasearch but the US relies heavily on those brain drain of other countries.
Alas since 9/11 the US is doing everything it can to stop those immigrants from coming over to their country. Strict immigration laws. Surveillance of immigrants from countries which might be allied to the axis of terror or which didn't bend over when the US asked, etc. pp.. The first casualties of the "war on terrorism" were those scientists which wanted to work in the US.
So immigration has dropped 25% percent in the last year and the Ivy-League Colleges and Universities are already complaining because student echange programmes are not very much sought after. Many of my colleages who two years ago wanted to go to the US are now considering to work elsewhere.
The american educational system is not able to produce enough scientifically skilled people to satisfy their own demand so immigration of highly skilled people is vital to their economy.
With all the sanctions regarding immigrants these skilled people turn to other countries and are lost to the US.
Jeff
p.s. just to prevent spelling and grammar flames: I am not a native speaker.
In America, smart kids are not cool. In fact, they are liable to get beat up. In many cases, the smart kids who continue to study hard do so only because they're too small to play football or basketball or don't have musical talent enough to play in a rock band. How does this kind of mentality arise?
The powers that shape our culture (media, advertising, big business) have a vested interest in making sure that the citizenry are a bunch of uncritical consumers -- people who will ultimately buy the goods that the market pushes. Since non-artisan, commodity goods are the easiest to produce in volume (and thus the best engines of capital), it is these, along with a general consumer lifestyle, that are marketed heavily (glorified, if you will) in portrayals, analyses of and references to our culture that bombard us every day: movies, music, television news, magazines, etc., both content and explcit "advertisement" formats.
It is in not the interest of capital and its engines to produce scientists, thinkers, or other critical consumers who will only do "research" that is not profitable in the short term.
It is in the interest of capital and its engines to produce uncritical drones who will work in the same product mills that they also support with their earnings, never noticing that a continuous percentage of their time and labor (cleverly disguised as "profit margins" by these product mills) are skimmed off the top by the ultra-wealthy.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
This book was written by Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America's classrooms.
This "dumbing down" was done on purpose, and she has the paper trail to prove it. hard to go forward as effectively in research when the defaultposition is to brainwash the kids into being corporate moo slave consumers and statists instead of just a quality education.
Then look at the trends in finance where we developed the technique of corporate raiding, junk bonds, hedge funds and derivatives, and lying at top levels of the economy as a proper business model, and you can see that the get rich quick, something for nothing attitude has become more important than actually researching and producing products and services as the top priority for the nations "business community". There's no way around it, long term research won't equate a "postive cash flow" in this quarters statements, so they abandoned it. When eventually it lead to a severe decline in profits (as it was bound to), they switched to outsourcing what they could, in sourcing cheaper labor for that which couldn't be outsourced, and bribing politicians more to keep laws passed that would maintain short term profits over longer term profitability and stability.
Now look at something else, back to the children, we've also seen the most curious phenomenon of the forced drugging of children in the schools, to go along with the deliberate brainwashing and dumbing down. Been going on a long time now, now it's quite normal, but it was simply unheard of just a few decades ago, it's totally new, and completely wrong. I think it's funny as all get out, I can drive into town and go by an elementary school, outside they have a DARE sign, when inside 1/4to 1/3 of the students are drug addicts on purpose. The irony is delicious but disturbing, because few of the parents and even fewer of the JBT "drug warriors" can see it.
And my pet peeve, the thoroughly ridiculous emphasis on schools being the farm teams for the major professional sports leagues, and addicting generation after generation of people into their complete scam profits machine. And it's not just the schools, look at any local news broadcast in the evening, 1/3 of the total non commercial time is devoted to this "bread and circuses" to keep up the addiction. How much of that news time do you ever see any reference to the hard sciences, or anything actually intellectual compared to the scores for the "big games"?
We lost it culturally on purpose, it's not good enough to be our own smart workers anymore, we need managers, marketers, entertainers, middle man skimmers and gamblers, and most importantly, mercenaries-but not deep thinkers or actual productive workers. Our foreign policy now, both civilian and military, is based on L
Here is my outlook on Education in the U.S.
Who ever said that schools are funded enough is living on a different planet. In Maine, and to my knowledge most other states, High School teachers make less money than a Manager who works for McDonalds; why is that? If you want kids to take school seriously, you better damn well have teachers who can answer their questions (e.g. we should be hireing Masters for our teachers not Bachlors) and we need to re-think the way we teach. In most schools, we teach democracy but preech dictatorship. The school staff is constantly trying to control the students forcing them to rebel, forcing the teachers to tighten thire grip-- it's a downward spiral.
All too often brilliant kids "slip through the cracks" because the classes are only taught to tailor to a single style of learning. For athletic students, it's not uncommon that their "coach" talks to the teacher and lest them slip by classes... creating one click, then you have the kids who are bored with the material (not fast enough) another click (note these kids often do bad because they simply dont bother) then you have the "go with the flow" kids who do everything their told and are disliked by the other groups because they're selling their souls to satan...err the school board.
I could go on for hours listing problems with todays school system but instead I'm going to assume that you (the reader) are an inteligent being (to a certain extent, granted you probably did attend american schools...)and throw out some ideas on how to fix things:
Eliminate "Grades" as in Kindergarden, Freshmen, Senior... etc. This is a stupid concept. Why should we hold back a student from learning higher level Mathmatics because he/she is not so good at English or History? Let each subject have it's own level system and let the student advance at his/her own pace. E.g. Mathmatics level 5, English level 3, History level 8, etc. Eliminate the grouping of age with subject matter. Do this, and you will find that peer presure of not wanting to at a low level will start to make kids WANT to learn.
Let the students decide what they want to learn. The student should have an assigned Mentor (each mentor should have a limit of 10 or so students at once) which they can talk to for guidence and information. It is up to them to take the initaive to choose the course they want, choose the professor they want, and do what the professor requires for them to advance. Teaching style should be a pleathera of differnt styles with focus on individual attention if needed. E.g. secudled lectures (not too often, but long enough to get things done, like 3 hours), Labs, Trips, Recomended Reading/Viewing, etc. The student should be able to get everything he/she needs out of the text book; everything else is to help if needed. One-on-one meetings with the professor during office hours are recomended. It is up to the professor to determine weather the student is ready to advance or not, be it by interview style orally, by writen exam, or by project. None of the actual tests will go into file, instead (for quality assurance) a writen (noterised, and signed) report/certificate will be writen up (each unique, no standard form) giving a detailed review of what the student knows and that he/she has met the level requiements... Checks will be done on professors at the higher levels (if the professor teaching the next level of the subject determines that the student is not ready they must file a report on the previous professor, so many infractions and the professor risks loss of license and job)
This will teach american students that:
THEY need to take inititave (nothing will be given to them)
They need to WORK for what they want
That they ARE good at something (e.g. subject that they excell at)
And through the process, have a better idea of what they want to do in life.
Of course, this is just fragments of a plan of mine... most are against it because it requires that children be remov
Time magazine had an article in January claiming the exact opposite situation, that US laboratories and departments were the destination for thousands of European scientists. Here are two quotes:
"Some 400,000 European science and technology graduates now live in the U.S. and thousands more leave each year. A survey released in November by the European Commission found that only 13% of European science professionals working abroad currently intend to return home."
""In soccer, if you're great, another team can buy you." Science is the same, and the big buyer is the U.S.: in 2000, the U.S. spent 287 billion [euro] on research and development, 121 billion [euro] more than the E.U."
The full article is here
To begin with, yes, there are some teachers who shouldn't be in the classroom. However, I would say that this number is at worst, the exact same percentage as people in any field. Where I teach, I'd say there are about 3 teachers who should have found a different job a while back, out of a staff of about 75.
Those who want to abolish teachers unions have a point. They do tend to keep those who should go. But without the unions, teachers would be expected to be at every single school event without any extra pay. I've been at schools with bad contract negoations, and teachers were expected to supervise football and basketball games, work ticket booths, work consession stands, and clean up afterwards just to keep their jobs. All this while they're expected to get their master's degrees, keep educated on current trends in education, and in their subject area. What other profession are you expected to get up to your master's degree, but clean tables as well? If it weren't for the unions, it would be worse.
Next comes the pay. Again, with all the education, yet so little compensation. What other profession would tolerate it? People demand qualified teachers, teachers who have degrees in their subject areas, yet get upset at paying for someone who has that level of knowledge.
I'd also like to mention the students. In case any of you aren't around teen-agers on a regular basis, let me share with you. They are not always easy to deal with. I'm not saying all kids are bad. It is a difficult and confusing time in their lives, and this often leads to frustration, and they share this with whoever they come in contact with. It is also a fact of human development that teens concentrate more on themselves than anything else. They expect adults to both understand everything about every aspect of their lives as they see it, while at the same time, they don't wany adults to have anything to do with their lives. Find any human development book that discusses Freud, Piaget, and Erickson and you'll get a better picture.
Finally, there is a general trend in the US to spoil our kids. I think it comes from the depression. People were kids then decided they didn't want their kids to grow up like that, so the baby boomers were treated better than any generation before them. This has mutated into parents blindly backing their children, sometimes in ways that are not int the child's best interest. The most irritating example I run into is the old standby "I don't understand.". I've seen kids successfully pull this with their parents on the simpelest tasks. One student in my algebra class refuses to do any problem that will require him to write down more than one step. The same kids who will play "Prince of Persia" for 5 weeks straight to figure out how to get past a difficult section refuse to take 60 seconds to read a word problem, and possibly another 30 seconds to think about it.
The fault lies everywhere, not with just one group, or one person. Until everyone starts doing their jobs like they should (politicians, teachers, administrators, students, and parents), things are going to continue to go downhill.
Let's not be Polyanna here. The simple reality of today's 'music' and culture is far, far different than it was 20-30 years ago. And this is again, even more removed from the culture 20-30 years before that.
Yes, aspects of racism and injustice have been dealt with (or at least recognized as a problem), but it's been replaced increasing violence and ignorance in other areas. None of which furthers the cause of education. The music is just the reflection of a sad reality.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Yeah, after I posted I thought it wasn't quite phrased right. I know there are a lot of people who stay in the US and work for foreign companies remotely, because there aren't as many quality jobs for American companies. I know a few people that moved from Europe to the US to work for a company that ended up doing most of its work for a European corporation.
I don't know that the whole argument of scientific leadership really works as well in these times, upon reflection. If half of a major US firm's workforce is based in India, is that an American science leader, or an Indian one? If an American company is really just a shell for a European corporation, who gets the "credit"? Half the people I know in the tech industry these days work for companies outside the country they live in, but I'm not sure how they'd be counted.
I'd say the days of the US dominance in science is over, only because it's getting harder to pin down the criteria for counting.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Maybe the reason kids and schools are more worried about social activities and sports is because they want to have successful careers!
In America, MBAs think scientists and engineers with master's degrees who make as much as MBAs are overpaid. And since MBAs make all the decisions and have all the power, well you figure it out. Students are doing just what their culture rewards. Technical prowess is usually a one-way ticket to the middle class (not knocking it, personally I'm happy that way) but many of us Americans are gamblers and want a chance at the big time.
Those are very intresting ideas. Most of which I agree with.
I would like to make a few observations I have made working in various countries.
Most people do like to go home at 5:30pm. Regardless of the country. In the Uk, I never saw people working late, even in the tech culture. I worked in a building with 3 other software companies, and i was actually surprised at the laxness and lack of REALLY long hours people tended to put in compared to what I was used to on the west coast.
Lots of western european countries have laws in place to protect smaller companies, such as retail stores. Try going shopping for a TV on a sunday afternoon in even a city like Zurich. in 2000, it was not really that possible. AFIK it's still the same in Germany.
We have 5 software engineers working for me on a project we are doing. This is the 3rd project we have taken (major) and the second company the guys have worked at together. They have no problems working weekends, nights mornings, whatever.
IMHO the hardest working people I have ever met are eastern europeans. Of course, keep this in mind, i have only worked with a few dozen in Bucharest Romania, Ukrain and Poland. (After doing offshore dev teams for almost 6 years, you stick with what you know). These guys run circles around most american or european groups I have worked with. They code because they are hungry and we pay them -very- well (pretty much a western salary), we don't treat them like cheap labor. I guess if i was working for the equivilant of 200k dollars per year, I would be working my ass off too.
Anyway, the point of what i am saying. Don't discredit or generalize a generation as a whole. I hear my friends in europe saying the same thing about the younger generations that live there. I have been saying the same thing about my 17 year old sister. Imagine what your grandparents where saying about the people growing up in the 70s.
There will always be hard working people that learn to capitalize on their situations and environment. They will learn to take advantage of their skills, and domiinate their areas of influence. I don't think history has disproven that only 3-5% of the population will succeede in that way. I doubt that much will change as time goes on, and there will always be people that are splashed with a cold blast of reality and rethink what their goals are.
As for brain drain out of the United States. i believe this if it's visa workers going home, but not americans. I believe that most that leave will be back before long. I actually, don't believe for a moment that a lot of people are leaving the country for jobs off shore. Having been working in europe as an american for about 5-6 years, it's hell. It's only gotten worst since 9/11 and the generalizations that people abroad make about americans in general.
I am sure glad to be home.
You could take it one step further. If you look at Nobels as an indicator of leadership, the US are clearly ahead. Yet a very large percentage of the scientists winning those Nobels for the US are actually foreigners doing only their doctoral or post-doctoral studies and research in the US. The secondary and tertiary education that layed the foundation for their critical thinking was usually acquired in their home countries. So you have to wonder what was more important: their foundation education, or the money that enabled the research? Ideally both, but looking at the list of US Nobel Prize winners, I'm wondering if China, Germany and Russia would not be better off financing a bit more research at home to stop this brain drain to the US. Germany in particular has the resources but has been loath to put money into high-risk research with questionable ROI.
Regarding national dominance, given the globalization of the market place it's hard to pin down a particular nationality on any of the large players anymore. In particular in the high-tech field you get ingredients from all over the place. If you look at high-profile products like airplanes and cars, they're a standardized grab bag of components from all over the world. Even traditionally national brands don't really indicate country of origin anymore. If you buy Siemens or Bosch components in the US, they were most likely manufactured in the US, using components designed in Europe by engineers educated in the US--or vice versa, who knows.
There is a very simple reason why science and math education, indeed all education, is poor in America:
Quality of educators. It's a no-brainer. Anyone who is proficient in science or math is not going to waste their time teaching at the elementary or high school level.
Additionally, (and this is true of education in general), it used to be that many professions were closed to women, but teaching wasn't. Consequently, our best and brightest women used to be school teachers. This is no longer true. The brightest women, just like the men, are going into other fields.
Proverbs 21:19
Yeah, but it's HIS CHOICE to be a tool, if that's the choice he wants to make.
Actually, I do care, but I think I can see why there isn't much focus on either of these today. We're surrounded by devices that make use of math and science, but abstracted away to the point where it's completely invisible (read: computers). Computers have become synonymous with "Windows", "browsers", watching movies, playing games, etc. To the Slashdot crowd, all of these things obviously require knowledge of math and science to be able to create these programs, but the one-click interface of most of these programs require practically no knowledge of, well, anything.
.sig for rent.
I think about how my daughter is growing up; she always wants to see the back of the camera because she thinks she'll see the picture I just took of her immediately. Everywhere I look, we've developed a one-click or single button solution to the "problem" because we want it now Now NOW! And when it's all abstracted away, you really have no idea how it works, and because you're so used to it, you don't really care.
So I can see that our zeal for instant gratification, ease-of-use, and a rather arrogant demand that everything be, above all else, as simple as possible will lead more and more to think of math and science as "the hard stuff" that they are simply incapable of dealing with because it requires thought and concentration, with no "reward" being given at the end, and no understanding of how it affects their daily lives. It's like schools that teach latin with the presumption that if you know how languages are put together, you will learn the derivations easier. Most simply complain that latin isn't a good language to impress chicks with, and study something else instead.
This
Management makes short-term decisions, which means they completely ignore the long-term.
You have rightly identified one symptom. However, the markets and business schools are driving that thinking. Analysts only care about today's profit. Immediate results are everything. And they keep reinforcing this notion to American investors.
By extension then, thinking long-term is frowned on. This is picked up in the business schools and pushed out to management types. It also clouds the thinking or freezes the action of the boardroom.
Do you think the goal of medicine is to produce a more efficient, 'genetically good' human race? Actually I thought the whole point of medicine, and in fact most other economic activities (agriculture, etc) was to promote the well-being of humans as they exist, and their offspring, as they exist, not to engage in some kind of bizarre project in eugenics. Don't confuse means with ends; efficiency, economic activity, and even 'good' genes are all means to an end: the well-being of humanity. Letting people starve, even lazy people, is not an effective way to promote their well-being.
If you want an efficient system, try fascism. Yes, it's more 'efficient' than anything at increasing production numbers, getting rid of those pesky weak and sick people, etc. But there's a reason why the vast majority of people on the planet do not want it: because we're willing to put up with a few lazy people free riding on benefits and a little bit of slacking to have a generally better quality of, and respect for human life.
i think this is highly interesting. whenever i talk to americans about it, i get the feeling that american high school is hell - a place where the small get bullied, the ugly girls are outcasts, and generally there is mobbing, backstabbing, and most importantly everybody gets judged by an arbitrary and cruel standard. the dark side of the american dream.
while i am pretty sure that is not all true, in the place where i grew up (Austria, Europe) none of that was an issue. at all. sure, there were people who didn't do well in sports, and people who were uncool (like myself in my later teens for not smoking or drinking or getting any girls) but in general, those people had their place and were never terrorized. we were all part of the group. we had jocks and nerds, but they would hang out together.
i am sure part of the reason is that the class system is very different: you get a group of 25+ kids, call that a class, and they stay together for 5 years or so, teachers come by to teach classes, and there is very limited choice in subjects. e.g. you spend all your time with the same people. and there are lots of social activities with those people.
i don't think that explains it though. UK has the same system as america...
My "anecdotal stories" are only a couple examples. As I stated, my father, who was a school teacher (and still is, although not actually teaching), has first hand knowledge of social promotion. He was even instructed by his boss (the principal) to use social promotion to "get rid of the bad kids". And I think I proved how social promotion is bad by stating that skills learned in one year are needed for the next year of learning, for example.. learning fractions are later needed for Algebra and Geometry. So... you're saying that this is not the case?
I mean, look.. if a kid is not getting the basic skills in one grade, how can you expect them to perform in the next grade. This doesn't even need "scientific proof"... it just "makes sense".
Also, regarding the NEA, I said they spend more money lobbying politicians than performing REAL functions like promoting the education of their own teachers. If Microsoft was doing this, you'd think there was a problem, no? Also, do you know how much the President of the NEA makes? Maybe you should look at up, because it's very interesting.
Exactly how is questioning the scientific elite at any time in history "detrimental"? Many of the greatest discoveries came from just such opposition and debate.
SciAm has been a political organization for many years now (is it fair to say their inception?). They're working in their own best interests on many issues, which largely "tilt left" in bent. Hence, the attack on the current administration. It has much to do with competing ideologies that threaten long-standing, but still far-from-proven, theories in the biological and environmental sciences, along with ethical issues which history tells us are often tragically considered ex post facto.
The best way to raise the hackles of any scientist is to challenge their intellectual endeavors on any level. Refute their theories, threaten their funding, refocus research (money) into other fields - any of these tactics will kindle their ire. SciAm is but one mouthpiece. UCS is but one other.
And let's not forget the most important fact of all: This is a presidential election year in the United States. That, my friends, says it all.
I would agree with little brother on one point.
His teachers do need to be paid more. Teachers make such crappy salaries, it's no wonder good ones are hard to come by. I would love to teach, but since I would have to work harder and get paid about one quarter of what I make with a real job, it just isn't practical.
In the 50's it was the rockefellars and whatnot. All the smart guys were famous.
For me growing up, I read all the time.. got beat up for knowing how to read. (jealousy).. That just fed me to continue.
Now, what role models do the young men have? Nothing of any worth. The women (who are by far surpassing men in every American field now) have many many role models and a lot to look up to. I personally cannot think of a public role model who is successful and smart and not villified by the media (think Bill Gates).
All these young kids have nothing just ignorant rappers and other leeches on society that should never be role models because they are be "subversive" for money. Today, the guy in a high school who listens to classical or something non-violent would be considered "alter".
Anyway, they are all doing the same things, everywhere you look and it is sad. I suppose the world will always need trash guys and janitors, but having an entire generation of them is just plain sad.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
The typical geek (and i may get flamed for this but oh well) is somewhat scared/timid, and will retreat to that which they know best and get better at it, and shrink from the rest of the world.
You've hit the nail on the head. I was exactly this way growing up. I avoided a lot of social situations and spent my time around a small group of (equally socially inept) friends.
I think it's important for men to have a certain quality to their personality that's hard to describe. It's a form of aggression, recklessness, or self-confidence. You have to have the bravery to step up to the plate no matter what you're facing. Because trying matters most, even if you're defeated. You must be willing to put your safety on the line when it matters. That's character. You must also project the image of self-confidence. You must be sure of who you are and how you will allow yourself (and not allow yourself) to be treated by others.
I wish I had known this when I was growing up. I was smaller than everyone and constantly bullied, because they knew I would back down every time. I wish I could go back and tell that kid that he doesn't have to be bullied. Had I leveled the playing field with a 2x4, maybe I would have won, maybe not. And maybe I would have gotten busted for using a "weapon". But it would have ended the bullying then and there.
I'm teaching my sons the right way to be and act, so that it never goes that far for them. I'm teaching them to be strong, but compationate, agressive when necessary, but calm and even-handed in all things. In short, I'm not raising a pussy like my parents did.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Arg! And this doesn't sound too terribly like a troll.
Ok. Listen unto me and repeateth:
Evolution is change in a species due to a change in the environment. There is nothing magical, nothing heretical, and nothing planned about it. We will not evolve into SuperGods just by waiting around a few million years. If our environment doesn't change, then we will be exactly the same come Judgment Day.
You do not and cannot know the ramifications of eliminating genes from the pool. A quirk today will be a lifesaver in the future. The gene that we think of as "weak" and "polluting" will be the genes that resist infection or the onset of a new disease in the future.
Perhaps simpler terms are called for. Take legos. Legos are genes, the building blocks that have collected together and streamlined over time to form us. Sure there are pieces that don't seem to fit, or that we can't possibly imagine a use for, but you'd sure be sorry if it's been tossed when you do think of a use for it.
By preserving our diversity, and encouraging it, we guarantee that we as a species will survive anything that our planet throws at us and gives us a fighting chance against anything from Out There that could be a little deadly to us critters.
That's exactly why America is going down the fucking tubes. People use the intellectually lazy excuse that all candidates are the same. You may laugh at "the proles" but your elitist attude is EXACTLY why the NASCAR and God crowd has taken over the American political system.
Do you seriously think that Kerry and Bush are undifferentiated? Do you think that Kerry would have decided that the best way to take down terrorists was to attack Iraq? Do you think social programs that marry religion with social work would be emphasized so much in a Kerry administration? Do you think tax cuts at all costs would be Kerry's method of pumping economic growth?
Intellectual arrogance may make you feel better about yourself, but it won't do a fucking thing to change the state of American politics.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's not just SciAm that has observed this creeping Lysenkoism either -- see also the International Herald Tribune, and that bastion of left-leaning reporting, the Washington Post (with the sub-head, "Changes Renew Criticism That the President Puts Politics Ahead of Science").
And by the way, do you consider any and all criticism of the President in an election year invalid by virtue of perceived politicking? Sometimes things are just wrong at any time.
I call bullshit on the whole US education issue. The NASA engineers that put a man on the moon were not a random cross section of the general US populace. The engineers at PARC were not a gaggle of people picked randomly from the general US population. The scientists that developed the LASER, RADAR, every lab coat wearing nerd at JPL and The AeroSpace Corporation in El Segundo CA (the guys that actually did the work for Mercury and Gemini and GPS) - NONE of those guys were or are representative of the 'average' American High School student.
...
Those guys are the top 1% of the top 1% - always have been, always will be. The bottom 90% of the American student body can be a bunch of druggies listening to bad music (see also : the 60's (hippy movement), which also coincides with NASA putting men on the moon) and the elite of the elite will still be worlds apart and above, quite bluntly 'the best.' We have the same people in the workforce we had five years ago - their education hasn't changed one bit, unless it has gotten better via continuing education. Regardless of what is happening in K-12, the American workforce is still full of the same people that brought you all of the wonderful technology the Benedict Arnold CEO's are now saying they can't find anybody smart enough to work on here in the States. Bullshit. Complete bullshit.
What has changed? The work atmosphere, the opportunities available, the ability for those brilliant American employees to find jobs that can sustain a family in a country where the first $2,000 each month goes to taxes, the next $500 each month goes to health insurance, and the next $2,500 each month goes towards a mortgage payment, property taxes, fixed bills like electricity, water, phone, gas, etc. That is $60,000 a year before you even think about putting food in your mouth or getting in a vehicle to drive to work or putting on clothes to work in
It has nothing to do with whether or not a school has a science lab, and everything to do with whether or not there are jobs out there in science labs doing work, research. If the Benedict Arnold CEOs out there want to point fingers for lack of progress in R&D they can point them at themselves for cutting R&D budgets. The people are there to man them, same people that brought you all those nifty tech toys you currently enjoy - where the fsck are the jobs in R&D?
Anybody that thinks that American students on the average are a bunch of clueless stupid losers is correct, inasmuch as that has ALWAYS been the case. Anybody that honestly believes that the top 1% isn't easily as sharp, intelligent, and eager to excel as the top 1% of previous generations is a stupid motherfscker that needs to go visit the kids at MIT, CalPoly, etc.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
homeschooling is NOT the answer. homeschooled children either come out academically great (and/or religiously brainwashed to hell, but i'll say no more about that aspect of it for the moment)
But you're assuming the primary reason people homeschool their kids is religious in nature. I've never heard this. Usually it's to avoid a by-the-numbers education.
I did my highschool and undergrad in India. Back there, the people who were respected were not the jocks or the cool guys, but the smart ones and the toppers.
People looked upto the guy who went to science fairs and won prizes, and the guy who could solve differential equations by graphs.
Coolness was not a factor - how geniune a person you were and how smart a person you were was what mattered. Social life was not a function of how well you pretended or how well you could throw a ball - it was a function of who you were as a person.
Geek and nerd were used as complimentary terms - the smart ones were called "genes" or "genies", a friendly term respecting their intelligence and skills.
I come here and notice that being smart or good is being made fun of - this, despite the fact that I'm in one of the US's top engineering schools. The ones with the social life are the ones who show off or the ones who throw ball. Even here, being really smart or nerdy is looked down. People do not respect the need for some of us to be introverted and reclusive, and people are branded as obnoxious or stereotyped as nerds or geeks, most often in a derogatory manner.
Am I bitter? Absolutely.
I come from an environment where both my parents went to grad school, half the people in my family are PhDs and my uncle is a quantum physicist at CERN. When I was in middle and high school, I wanted to be a physicist or a mathematician. Social life was not an issue, it was always a given.
I thought that the US would be a haven for scientists and engineers, but I come here and see that except for some people in the academia, people do not really respect science. People like to use the work that scientists do, but do not like them - the populace is either scared or jealous of really smart people.
The haven that is equal for all that America once was is gone - today, all that I see is people who are scared of most foreigners, and people who discrimate against the very smart ones in your own country.
People like Jack Valenti are willing to sacrifice the rights of the smartest of America for the profits of a few. People want to justify that not going to school and getting experience is somehow better than people who work their asses through grad school. Money is your new God and Television is all that America seeks.
The guy who used to sit next to me in class and had won International Math and Physics Olympiad championships got a fellowship at CMU, but dropped out because his research needed defence approval. He is now in Tel Aviv working on the same stuff, with no hassles whatsoever.
As I write this, I see an ad on TV advertising for ITT Technical Institute saying how they will change your life, and saying how a career in IT will get you the hot babes and the cool cars. Is that why you want to do science? I wanted to do science because I loved science. I wanted to do science because since childhood, I enjoyed doing it. I did not do it because I wanted the cool cars or the hot babes (although, I did know that I will have a better salary than most and that did help a little).
If you want to set your system straight, look at the problems. Make sure the next generation knows that science and engineering saves lives and improves our quality of living. Throwing a ball does not matter, its not going to pay your bills when you are 40 and has no more entertainment value than a clown. Actors and entertainment artists are given importance. I do not see people going to Orchestras, I see people flocking to Britney Spears.
I grew up in an environment where USSR was India's friend, and had Russian comics. Misha was a popular one, and all the kids in my generation wanted to be like Yuri Gargarin. We all wanted to be as smart as Einstein. Kids wrote essays about winning the Nobel Prize. We grew up in an environment where our parents and teachers helped us make Tesla coils in our middle school, so that they can demonstrate the effects of electricity.
My school libr
I feel sick when I see people complaining about how they need two incomes while they are pumping gas for their luxury SUV that they use to drive 30 miles to work because they live on a 5 acre plot in the suburbs. Those aren't things you need, those are things you want!
My fiance and I have already discussed this and decided that I (I am the male in the relationship) will stay with the kids full time until the youngest is in school and then I will retrain as a high school physics teacher (I am currently a research engineer) so I can get summers off. To accomplish this we plan to buy a house that we can afford on her salary alone. My salary for the time before we have kids will go towards the education of our future children, and our retirement. We also plan on buying that house in a location that makes it easy for one of us to walk to work (she is currently getting her PhD in astro-physics and plans on being a proffesor, universities tend to be easier to live near...).
Anyway the important point is that you need to figure out what you need and what you want, and decide if what you want is worth the time with your kids.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
If it was just bad education or less money for science we could fix it with a bill or two in congress. Unfortunatly this reflects a deep anti-intellectualism in america. If we want americans to be good scientists and engineers we need to make it desierable to be a scientist or engieneer.
This means more than paying them more. It means making them *respected* and not mearly perpetuating the mad scientist or nerd sterotype. Unless the United States starts electing intellectual figures (like tony blair rather than george bush) and stops making fun of nerds it will keep falling in it's scientific prowess.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Rather than directing the blame of our failing science culture to any particular institution or group, let's talk about the image of scientists and engineers in the U.S. The majority of the population doesn't find much romance or excitement in pursuing new science frontiers, or developing technology. These are also the fields which many people view as difficult and arcane. We scientists are the magicians of our time, dabbling in witchery that the public doesn't understand. And doesn't want to. Why should they, when they can dream of being athletes or rock stars, or fat-cat CEOS climbing the corporate ladder. Hell, even doctors have some romantic notions attached to their profession! Why are scientists and engineers any different? I think it's because we really do have intellectually challenging jobs, and the American public is not into challenges, at least ones that don't take more than a couple of hours on a grassy field. I'm not downplaying the actual responsibility and hard work that comes along with nearly all professions. It's the image of science that is suffering. I don't know the solution to this, unless education actually starts teaching relevant material and demonstrating it's utility early on. Computers, electronics, cars, and all sorts of high-tech gadgets need to cease being black boxes to the majority of Americans. Curiosity is the key. Seeking knowledge is not a past time of most couch potatoes who are glued to their mind-raping televisions, of which few know the science behind. To address the slipping of science in America, you need to first ask why people aren't more curious about the world around them, why they don't find romance in the discovery of new technological possiblities, and why they don't wonder about the laws governing our very existence. Science needs a makeover in America, to enlist youth in the ranks of scientists and engineers and to draw support (financial and moral) from the general public. How about we go on strike, to show them how important technology really is to them?
Basically I look at science/math performance in our schools, which every 2 years or so is compared to EU and Japanese kids' scores (we always lose big-time), then point to the focus on consumerism demonstrated by things like Pizza Hut contracts with schools and insane levels of advertising everywhere. Taken together what are these facts telling us? The future of this country is being taught that it's cool to buy lots and lots of stuff, but not to work for the money.
Then I look at the tricks our govt plays to keep us on top. Examples ... the US controls so many satelites flying over Latin America that US companies have used satelite imagery to pinpoint the best farmland and buy it. The native populations don't have access to these pics (at least they didn't 5 years ago when I read about this). Sweatshops, crypto export laws, IMF debt and regulations, and under Bush the military...without these type of "cheats" to slant the playing field in the US's favor I think we would fall rapidly behind the EU and maybe even China in the upcoming decade.
It looks to me like we are living off of the momentum of WW2 generation, and that momentum is running out. I know some flag-wavers are going to get pissed at this and maybe even tell me to love it or leave it. But insulting America is not the point.
The point is that when these congressional cheats are removed or overcome, I'm afraid the US won't be able to stand on its own two feet.
A British physicist predicted it, a British-born American inventor and a German physicist each independently confirmed it, a German inventor used it for a collision detection system for ships in 1904, an Italian demonstrated a low-frequency radar system in 1922, an Englishman and a New Zealander used radar to prove the existance of the ionosphere in 1924 and scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. were the first to use radar to detect aircraft in 1930.
Not so cut and dry me thinks.
The decline in the education system over the years certainly has a tremendous impact in this area but I feel it also has a lot to do with the trend to ship the jobs overseas. It started with manual labor jobs and has slowly worked it's way to the tech jobs.
.com bubble), and many of the companies folded or downsized. When people went looking for jobs elsewhere after losing their jobs, they found that the jobs they were looking for were paying too little, no longer available, or being shipped overseas.
The US has approximately a 5:1 ratio of jobs shipped into the US by foreign companies vs. jobs shipped out of the US by US companies. In other words, we gain far more jobs from foreign companies shipping jobs overseas than we lose by shipping jobs overseas.
Of course, there is a slight lag in the types of jobs being equatable. When people started complaining that jobs in the automobile industry were being shipped overseas, there was a period during which there weren't many foreign auto makers opening new plants in the US. Now, though, if you buy a Japanese or German car in the US, it's almost (or possibly more) as likely to have been built in the US as an American car.
As was the case in the past, the jobs being shipped overseas are most often jobs that require fairly limited skills that are easy for people to pick up. Additionally, people were getting used to getting paid fairly well for those jobs (in the past due to labour unions negotiating wages too high to be sustainable for the corporation--the same thing happened in some companies in the Asian auto industry in the last decade; in the case of tech jobs due to the
The simple reality is that there are fewer openings available for people in those positions, even when you include all of the openings that are now appearing overseas. Furthermore, because we've managed to reduce the expectations of customers to the point where even the higher levels of tech support are handled with fairly simple scripts, the lowest levels of support, where you'd normally hire the most people with the least amount of education, can, in many cases, be completely replaced with a computer and a handful of more highly educated individuals to support and maintain that computer (maybe even the upper-level support staff can handle some of this burden, such as adding new questions/answers to it's database).
Declines in the education system can probably be addressed with a completely new post. It's really almost irrelevant because many of the people these jobs are being shipped to are being educated specifically to perform these jobs (improving their English and studying linguistics to remove accents as best as possible in a short time), and because the level of education comes down to less than that expected (but not always shown) from a high school graduate.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
The NASA engineers that put a man on the moon were not a random cross section of the general US populace.
More than half the technical people working at NASA were not born in the United States. So, you are entirely correct.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
- No-consequence education for various reasons - a student isn't allowed to fail and is always passed through
- No respect for education, intelligence, academic achievement. The highest rewards (social and ecnomic) are for sports and sex-appeal.
- Decreased spending on research by corporations and government, and a repurposing of money towards military applications
- Europe and Asia are coming to parity with the United States.
These all have ruined the ecosystem for science. In this ecosystem some toil on esoteric Math for Math's sake and Science for Science's sake problems. What happens there trickles forward to partical applications.-
The first step are the guys researching pure, abstract science. They might be conducting an experiment bombarding a surface with a certain particle to examine the diffraction caused. In the experiment they notice certain kinds of temperture sensors spike up. These are the guys that figure out that particle causes asymetric molecules to vibrate. The diffraction experiment was a flop, by the way because the nature of the diffraction didn't produce an accurate map of the blah de blah de blah.
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The next part of the ecosystem are the guys that ask, what does this vibration mean? Can I heat something with these particles. These guys figure out particle X can be used to heat substances containing asymetric molecules like water.
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The next guy comes along and asks if this can be done efficiently? Can I make a gizmo that's small and tolerably efficient? This becomes more of an engineering problem. Some guy at DARPA decides to see if it can be used to knock missles off their trajectory by heating them.
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Then some guy at GE decides that he wants to use the gizmo to make a prototype oven. He's the highest up on the food chain from the science side. The DOD funds related research in weaponizing the particle emitter.
But the biggest hit has been the lack of funding for basic research. Without that first layer - there is nothing at the next layers to build on. Military and industry are in the 3rd and 4th layer. At that point we know there is such a phenomena/effect, but the question is can we make it into an oven or blow up incoming missles with it? This is the by-product of research that most people see. Congress credits military research for "the science" that gave rise to the fancy new oven that cooks a chicken in 30 seconds.We have no real respect for funding, advancing and promoting the layers 1 and 2. Most people don't even understand what happens in those layers. How could we not understand what gravity is at every level? Don't we know what atoms are made of? Didn't Einstein figure all that out? Until we respect, value and understand basic research there will be more interest in congressional hearings on steroid usage in sports and bare bossums on television than hearings on best US super-collider sites.
We have more respect for the management team at GE that decided to go ahead with the oven idea. In fact we have much more respect for the attractive eye-candy spokesmodel that shows off the appliance at some trade show. The fact that the two guys at stage 1 that discovered the phenomena recieved a Nobel prize some six years later doesn't even register.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
Add to that, the hoops you have to jump through to BECOME a teacher in the first place.
I graduated from college with a Bachelor's in Geology and Geophysics. I then went into the USAF and flight school, and eventually became an instructor, teaching people on the ground, in the simulator, and in the air.
After I left the USAF, my old high school contacted me about possibly coming back to teach.
And I was interested.
But the hoops I would have had to jump through, going back to college for 2 years to get "certified", when I already had been certified to teach people to deal with life-and-death-level situations, but it wasn't sufficient credentials to teach in a public school.
It's a pity. The old Earth Science teacher was about to retire, and they had the chance to get a bona-fide geologist into the job. . . but bureau-crap kept it from happening.
And THAT was 15 + years ago. . . it's gotten worse, as I see what the schools have become, from seeing my children in them.
Which is why my wife and I now homeschool: the oldest is coding Python and starting Java to prep her for coding in C, and the youngest taught **HERSELF** HTML, Photoshop, and a bunch of other graphics applications. . . they may lack "socialization" skills, but they code better than I do. . . (ok, I'm a security geek nowadays...)
"I did my highschool and undergrad in India."
By high school in India all the people that don't want to learn have dropped out. US schools are chock full of people that have no interest in learning and no ability to learn. The "average" student in an Indian english language high school is already the geek elite.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
In 1963 - 1968? If I had to guess, I would say that a most if not ALL of the tech nerds at NASA were Americans.
:-P
"All", you say? After 48 seconds of googling, I found that at a minimum, 32 of the aerospace engineers were Canadian. From this site:
Many of the engineers who lost their jobs with the Arrow's cancellation went to other aerospace firms, and 32 joined the U.S. space agency NASA, where they helped put American astronauts on the Moon.
What else did your superior U.S. education teach you?
BTW, I thought it was common knowledge that the best rocket scientists in the U.S. during the space race were Germans brought over after WWII.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
My school library was full of books written by Asimov and Clarke, and we grew up aspiring to be pioneers in science and technology.
I thought the US would be like this, but after coming here, its been a disappointment. I'm just very sad, because given your resources and your intelligentsia, you could be so much more.
My only question is, what ever gave you the idea that America (outside the NASA research labs) would be some sort of scientific mecca? It's all over the news these days about all the craziness our administration is doing. Ask any Frenchman what he thinks of American culture. And didn't any of your Indian compatriots call you and tell you what it was really like here?
For some weird reason, immigrants have been coming to this country for over 100 years with some idea that this place was paradise, the streets were paved with gold, etc., just to wake up to bitter reality when they got here. Don't you guys ever watch the news? Or better yet, talk to other people that have already come here? Wake up! This country isn't any better than most out there. If you're looking for a better situation in your life, maybe you should try cleaning up your own backyard instead of abandoning your home and moving someplace else because you've heard some myths about it being wonderful there.
Don't be bitter. Just realize that in only a few decades your society will be far more wealthy than this one. Get you education, and go home with the prestige that supplies, and get yourself a good job in a country that's on the way up, not on the way down.
The US has always had a tendency to be anti-intellectual. It once didn't matter much, as things were simple enough that most people could understand them and make the correct decision. Now absolutely nobody can, and those who can face this are abused by those who can't. We can't even hope for enclaves that aren't polluted, as the only such groups are 1) those who neither watch TV nor listen to the radios (possibly the newspapers also figure in here, but they are a much weaker influence) and 2) those who are impervious to being influenced, because they already felt that way.
The first group is divided into those who voluntarily isolate themselves from society and those who are coerced into isolation (e.g., children of Memmonites). Neither the first nor the second group make suitable leaders for a civilization. And so we are left with those whose personalities and view of the world are shaped by TV and other popular media. Which, examination quickly reveals, is a very poor model of actual reality.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I got my physics Ph.D. five years ago, and the trends mentioned in the article are both readily apparent and not unexpected.
It's important to understand that the USA has been a relatively minor player in basic science for nearly all of its history. Since World War 2 there has been a temporary reversal of this situation, because:
Because of these factors as well as a relatively liberal immigration policy, good scientists flocked to the USA beginning in the late 1930's. Others have pointed out the critical role these folks played in the early US space program, the Manhattan project, etc. Now, with the rest of the world catching up in living standards and the Cold War ending, the USA is returning to its position as a relatively minor player in basic research.
The root cause of this secondary position is cultural. The USA tends to see everything through a very pragmatic lens, where applications are valued much more than the underlying knowledge. The people who can turn basic research into successful applications are held in highest regard, people like Thomas Edison and Jonas Salk. As a Ph.D. student by far the most common question people would ask is, "But what is your research good for?" -- the implication being that if there isn't another breakthrough product or hot IPO coming out the other end, it's just not valuable.
Europe and Asia, by contrast, have long traditions of valuing scholarship/knowledge for its own sake. The role models are Einstein, Darwin, Maxwell, Confucius -- discoverers rather than inventors. They have a greater cultural willingness to fund basic research, and a more highly-educated general population to understand the results. A large fraction of CEOs in Germany have Ph.D. degrees, more evidence of a greater cultural emphasis on academics and research.
Experimental high energy physics is a good example of the differing cultural attitudes. In the USA, this research was always justified on the basis of military advantage, or at least avoiding military disadvantage. Consequently, the end of the Cold War has meant the end of this research in the USA; in another 3-4 years the USA will be effectively out of the accelerator game, with no next-generation facility to compete with CERN's LHC. If you are an experimental high-energy physicist, better start learning French.
David Goodstein, Vice Provost of CalTech on the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme which drives science education in the USA and started to fail in the 1970s and, in his words: http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm " In the course of a career, a professor in a research university turns out, on the average, about 15 Ph.D.'s. Many of these would like, themselves, to become in turn professors in research universities and turn out 15 more Ph.D.'s. After all, these were the gems that were selected at each stage of the mining and sorting operation. Becoming a professor seems to many of them the natural culmination of their successful educations. That is obviously one of the principal engines of the exponential growth that lasted for a hundred years in America. Those students are bitterly disappointed when they find out the jobs they want aren't there, and their disappointment seeps down through the ranks, turning younger students away from science. ... The problem, to reiterate, is that science education in America is designed to select a small group of elite scientists. An unintended but inevitable side effect is that everyone else is left out. As a consequence of that, 20,000 American high schools lack a single qualified physics teacher, half the math classes in American schools are taught by people who lack the qualifications to teach them, and companies will increasingly find themselves without the technical competence they need at all levels from the shop floor to the executive suite."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Without getting into the whole 'Canadians are / are not Americans' debate, a whole 32 foreigners helped with the NASA team that put men on the moon? Well golly, that's gotta be more than half, couldn't have taken more than 64 people total to do the entire couple of dozen space shots from Mercury I to the last Apollo mission.
I'm not sure you deserve a reply, since you didn't take the time to read the entire thread so far, but you're getting your tenses mixed up. Nobody claimed more than half of NASA were non-American born at the height of the space race. I was only giving evidence that not ALL were American. The comment about half was made with reference to the current NASA establishment, and I'm tired of doing the work for everyone else - google it yourself.
Just out of curiosity, where exactly were the Germans living when they were the best rocket scientists during the space race? Rhetorical question of course, they were in AMERICA.
So, you're saying there's just something in the water? Is there something in the air that makes them more industrious? They weren't smart until they came to the U.S.? Or is it that there's a super-abundance of resources, plus, at the time, the correct economic environment to support enough industry to support such a huge social undertaking as a space race?
I respect your optimism, but enough countries will have caught up to the U.S. economically in the next couple decades that these firmly held beliefs you have about your absolute superiority in all things is soon to be shattered. The fact that your school system keeps teaching you that you're all perfect and that you're better than everyone else, without actually comparing the U.S. to any other front-running country in any meaningful way is going to bite you in the ass. You can't win a race if you keep you eye on last place.
I've heard several Americans say, "there's nowhere else I'd rather live", but the fact is, even though that may be true, it's meaningless if you haven't actually looked at the real alternatives. When you say that, you're thinking entirely of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Mexico (parts of which are actually nicer than you think). How many Americans have been to Scandinavia, Iceland, England, Canada, or Australia? The reason Americans think that Canada is "just the U.S. and doesn't count" is because they can't fathom the idea that another sovereign nation is just as great a place to live as the U.S.. Even better in many ways. Then they say that Canada wouldn't be as great a place without the U.S. The fact is that the U.S. wouldn't be as great a place without the rest of the world, now would it? You are a trading nation, just like the rest of the nations in the world, and you would have a much lower standard of living if you did not trade.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain