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The Decline of Science and Technology in America
puke76 writes "There's a good article over on the BBC about the decline of science and technology in the U.S.. Vint Cerf and others are going on record to voice their concerns about the current administrations recipe for 'irrelevance and decline.' Scientists are increasingly concerned about the White House's pandering to the religious right at science's expense. From the article: 'radically we have moved away from regulation based on professional analysis of scientific data ...to regulation controlled by the White House and driven by political considerations.'"
There's a saying that I hear a lot of religious people say: "You reap what you sow". Ironic then that in this case America gets precisely what it sows. You teach kids that ID is science and you get crappy scientists. You cut the percentage of GDP spent on RND and you get less nobel prize winners. You ignore the science of economics and you end up with a huge current account deficit which will take a decade to repay. You ignore the *fact* that human produced carbon dioxide is warming the earth and you wreck your environment just in time for your grandchildren.
America is at a cross-roads of sorts. It can choose to be the The Christian Republic of America or the United States of America. It seems as time goes on these options are becoming more and more mutually exclusive. The religious fanatics are intent on replacing the textbook with the Bible. The atheist fanatics (yes they do exist) are intent on removing any shred of religion from public life.
The next fifty years are going to be interesting. Will the US continue to train world class scientists and be a home for the creative? Or will the US sink in to irrevelence through placing religious dogma before pragmatism.
The condom policy in Africa makes me think the latter rather than the former.
Simon.
The sad thing is many of these christian fanatics are uneducated, Rush Limbaugh/ Bill O'Reilly products (sculpted zombies) who's life doesn't stray further than Wal-Mart.
I think this is a key point. And not just public support for science and government funding, but the motivation of young people going into the field is critically important to whether or not scientific effort actually makes a difference in the real world. Are there real world problems (like the problems that led to development of
radar and computing in WWII, or the needs of cold war espionage and besting the Soviets post-Sputnik) that captivate people's attention? If the critical needs are there, that ensures both public support, government funding, and highly motivated researchers bringing real advances.
And we do have critical needs for R&D work right now - renewable energy probably most critical. Developing things further in space is a challenge that needs our best efforts now too. But our government and media, and even places reflective of geek opinion like slashdot, spend a lot of effort downplaying the seriousness of problems like oil depletion and
global warming. People can't be motivated to do anything about it if most of the country thinks it's not really a problem at all.
Energy: time to change the picture.
First off it's easy to decline when you're the world leader to begin with. Unfortunately in an age where the Internet is taking over, and unlimited possibilities for learning present themselves, the protectionists in the Bush administration are having their way with Americans. What kind of an insane world leader would suggest that we have to fight religious extremists, and then in the next breath insists that he supports Christian ideology being taught in the 21st Century science classroom?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Corporations are more to blame for the decline of science than the government. Most industrial development is ultimately driven by companies looking to make money on new technologies. Lately, most companies have been gutting research budgets in favor of more short term profits (ie. HP). Look at most job postings, how many both require an advanced degree and are willing to pay enough to hire someone? Most companies aren't interested. Until corporate America can look past next quarter's numbers, R&D will not really exist in the U.S. anymore.
As a red-blooded American, the only way I'll believe in evolution is if it's in line with the truth...
The cold, hard, undeniable truth about evolution is:
APES EVOLVED FROM HUMANS!
Isn't it obvious?
Laws are for people with no friends.
That just opened my email reader and created an empty file called creationism.
Yet Americans continue to think that they are automatically number one in everything. The man on the street still believes that we Americans are the smartest, strongest, and most capable people in the world. Mostly that's a delusion supported by ignorance, as the typical American knows very little about what's going on in the world outside of the US.
Certainly any American is capable of being the best, and is more likely to acheive that given good opportunities and education, and a culture that values whatever endeavor they choose. For science and technology, that's just not valued much by our culture. Americans like entertainment and instant gratification, and think the more of that they have the better they will be.
I fear for our future.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
is now accomplished by outsourcing engineering to India and manufacturing to China. IF the trend continues we'll end up a nation of international brokers and their support laborers (auto mechanics, maids, cooks, home repair, etc).
Of course such trends never continue indefinitely - it's just a leveling of inequalities left over from the WWII and cold war days. The US benefitted from an immigrant brain source once (Einstein, Von Braun, Tesla) - it could easily flow the other way if conditions here become too hostile or the grass looks greener elsewhere.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
"Young Americans are opting for better paid law and medicine over science and engineering and visa restrictions on bright foreign students further dilute the talent pool"
Well, the more we blame this situation on religious/anti-religous bugaboos and other flamefests, and not on THE WAY WE RAISE OUR KIDS nothing will ever change.
How many of you (or your wives for that matter) get on their childs teacher's case for being "too hard on my kid", "they just aren't good at math" etc. and not the other way around?
Why do you think Asians kick so much ass in the sciences and tech fields? Because they believe in hard work and challenge their kids (granted, maybe too much sometimes)
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
The Bush neoconservatives believe that their destiny is to mold the world as they see fit, and they don't care what they have to do or say to fulfill that goal. If that means lying about WMD, killing civilians, or sacrificing military personnel, then so be it. It is all for the greater good.
So don't expect them to give a crap about the cost to science by doing what the religous right demands, cause they need them to be in power in the first place.
Now if they could find a way to launder money out of R&D, like the defense, pharma, or oil industries, then you might get somewhere.
Maybe some R&D project managers need to take
Jack Abramoff or Tom DeLay out for a few rounds of golf...
Or did you mean to suggest that they did not mean it, simply by virtue of their being "Christian"? Their variety of Christianity was far more enlightened than what is often found in evangelical churches today. Here's another quote:
And while science is suffering from religious activists and the whim of politicians, innovations in engineering and technology as a whole are suffering from an outdated patent system, whose sole purpose seems to be rewarding large monopolies rather than promoting innovation.
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
Funny how liberal statists want the central government to control everything, except when the government is run by people they disagree with, elected by people they detest. You can't have your government schools and not expect the government to control the teaching as per majority desire, can you?
Here's the cycle of America:
1) Democrats gain power, expand government control over X, Y and Z.
2) Republicans gain power, use government control to fuck up X, Y and Z.
3) Goto (1)
If not that, they ended up running universities where their business depends on having more science students to
Then they get stressed out that my kids look around at their father and his cow-orkers stressing over whose job is the next to vanish. They look at the management, lawyers, and politicians getting wealthier and more powerful every year, and shock! they decide not to go into tech.
Here's the paradox: they want the best and brightest to make life decisions that they themselves saw as foolish.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
That's one of the themes of the BBC article, and it's so true on a variety of levels. I recall that, recently, the DC Metro (WMATA) had a big chunk of its budget cut because they allowed pro-marijuana ads on trains and buses.
The real stupid part? The metro serves a large number of people and is always in need of more money. So, in reality, they punished the people. Look for lots of punishment from an angry God, er, government because scientists feel differently about religion, environment, and politics in general.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
> That just opened my email reader and created an empty file called creationism.
Well, go ahead and close that file. It's already got all the facts and hard science in it that it's going to get.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
"The Bush administration does not take kindly to anyone who has drawn a federal dollar being critical."
I feel sorry for Joseph Wilson and his wife every day. They experienced this first hand - object and be retaliated against.
It's not my idea - I heard it originally from a journalist for the SF Chronicle - but one of the biggest tools the White House is using is distraction. Attention is being drawn to social issues (such as gay rights, and vegetable rights - Schiavo), while significant detrimental policies are being waged against science (like barring publication of papers about global warming) and civil rights.
The true crimes involve Writ of Habeus Corpus (Jose Padilla), and intentional endangerment (Valerie Plame), not stem-cells and Hubble.
I'm not sure that you understand what bias is. Just because Slashdot often paints Bush in a negative light when it comes to science-related issues, it doesn't mean that there's a bias. Face it, there's not much you can say that's positive about this administration's attitude towards science, and if the /. editors were to balance out all of the negative Bush-related science articles with positive ones, that would be extremely biased in Bush's favor. (In fact, that is the essence of what is wrong with Fox News.)
Your comment is not insightful because one doesn't have to "bash" Bush when it comes to science and religion. Bashing Bush would be saying he's a monkey, and falls off his bike, and is a poopyhead for opposing stem cell research, even the kind that doesn't involve embryos.
Anyone who is unbiased sees a world leader imposing religious dogma onto secular public schools, and scientists doing legitimate and lifesaving research with aborted fetus tissue, or even pre-life-viable embryos in a labratory.
Slashdot has a story involving Bush because like him or not he's a world leader and what he says counts as news. If he says something objectionable, then it's the medias' responsibility to report it and explain why it's objectionable. In an open society you're allowed to use the media to respond, or say the media is wrong for saying Bush is wrong, but if all you can say is that they are "biased" and that somehow passes as a solid argument, then we're letting people like you off way to easily.
Tell us WHY critics of Bush's science and religion policy are wrong? You can't, because they are right.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Un actually you are dead wrong.. The Indians, The Mexicans and even the Vikings were here before Christopher Colombus sailed that ocean blue. What we need is a completes separation of church and state. While people may have thier moral and religeous thoughts, i think our government needs to be able to look at whats good for americans without prejudice(and thats truly what most religeous politicians are) thought. Think about the supreme court...
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
It isn't a matter of falling standards and laziness. It isn't the fault of too much TV or rap music.
There are forces in society who want science neutered and brought to heel.
"Intelligent Design," and the manufactured controversy over "junk science" . . . it's all part of a plan to:
You can find it all here, in a document called "The Wedge Strategy."
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
As a Christian, and an amateur scientist (though not a Christian Scientist) I am increasingly disturbed by an administration that ignores whole chunks of the Bible (namely, nearly every word of Christ) in favor of pandering to a small and crazy fringe group who wants an untenable literal interpretation.
I am disturbed as a a scientist because it's holding us back, and educating our kids with BS, and I'm disturbed as a Christian because this is not Christianity, at least not of the mainstream portion. And most Christians are too afraid to stand up and say anything at the wholesale hijacking of their faith. (I wonder if this is how Muslims feel) Please, slashdotters, don't paint with a broad brush Christians as being like.....this.......
The "meat" of Christian teachings are _not_ incompatible with evolution, the big bang, modern society in general, etc, etc.
Voted for Bush the first time around, voted libertarian on try number 2.
Somebody please mod this back down. If the poster wants to make an insightful comment he/she can give some information to support it, as the child posters supported their claims to the contrary.
[javac] 100 errors
Many of the people who came to America were not religious conservatives, but religious liberals. The quakers, for example, were prosecuted for their views on organized religion. See this link for example. Your comments are exactly what the religious right would have us believe, that religion should be the core of our government, when in fact it was founded by people who got the harsh edge of that stick. The basis of our government is freedom of religion, not freedom to choose a state religion.
I stay out of peoples bedrooms and churchs, for the very reason that I don't want others in mine!
What you are saying, that America has always been a Christian nation the way it is today, is a nice little fairy tale, but it simply isn't true. Members of the Christian political movement that have hijacked America's politics in the last 45 years try to pretend that the spot they hold is their divine right and that they have always held it, that oceania has always been at war with eurasia, but the fact is a political member of the SBC stranded 200 years ago would be nothing but a ranting street preacher. Drop them 225 years ago among the deist-packed "founding fathers" that people are always trying to lay claim to, and they'd be even worse off...
Take any shred of religion out of the government, but don't tell me our forefathers or constitution says it should be that way.
Our "forefathers" and the constitutional law they wrote say it should be that way, in very specific terms:
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
ok...seriously for a second...blame the baby boomers. They represent that major demographic for UK, US and Australia and hence they weild the voting power.
In the 60s/70s...they were entering the colleges and workforce...what did we get...a massive overhaul to the educational systems. In the 70/80s they were moving through their "working lives"...what did we get...a massive overhaul to industrial relations in favor of the workers...in 2000, they're all heading into retirement, mostly funded by shares, wanting to live on less money and also worried about death...what do we see? More power being given to corporations and taken from workers (in all three countries), more focus on immediate share holder returns rather than r&d, outsourcing to cut the cost of consumables, cutting of government research, services and educational assistence to lower taxes, and an increase in relious uptake as they all worry about death.
This is sheer speculation on my part, but in Australia we're watching all the great social practices put in place during the 60s/70s and 80s be repealed...from free education and medical, to workers rights...and from what I hear here it seems to be happening in the US and UK. These trends, to my untrained eye, seem to follow rather closely the needs of the major voting demographic (baby boomers)...so lets face it...if you're under 40 you're screwed...unless of course you move to south america where I believe the major demographics in most countries is 15-25 (they're having somewhat of a baby boom at the moment).
I'm incredibly disappointed with the lack of respect for science and intellectual achievement that seems to pervade the United States today. Everywhere I look I see this -- in energy, economics, medicine, education -- everywhere.
But, I had one glorious day last year. The Jet Propulsion Labs at CalTech had an open house in May, and I attended this year with my little boy. It was a unique experience. You don't just stumble upon JPL, it's way off in the corner of the LA basin, but people came from everywhere around to the open house.
At each of a fifty or so different stations, there were JPL scientists describing their current work to an incredibly diverse but intensely interested audience. The scientists and engineers are, of course, very enthusiastic about their projects -- but the tremendous enthusiasm of my fellow attendees was surprising and heartening. Young and old, of every imaginable race and combination thereof, in families and individually -- everyone was just enthralled. It was kind of interesting to watch the engineers trying to describe the interferometer that JPL hopes to send up to measure the positions and velocities of stars more accurately to this group -- but they struggled to explain it, and people struggled to understand it.
As I said above, it was glorious. I recommend it to anybody in the LA area. There is hope.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
god is, by defenition, outside of the scope of science. the question of the existance of god is theology [think sub-division of philosophy].
the only people that i see bringing god into scientific debates are fanatics trying to prove god's existance through non-scientific methods and logical fallacies while claiming it as science [eg intelligent design].
this does not make it science.
evolutionists have no opinion on god from a scientific point of view.
sum.zero
uhhhh.....no.
This reminds me of an interview in Reason (a libertarian mag) of slashdot favorite Neal Stephenson. Here's the relevant part:
http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml
Reason: The Baroque Cycle suggests that there are sometimes great explosions of creativity, followed by that creative energy's recombining and eventual crystallization into new forms--social, technological, political. Are we seeing a similar degree of explosive progress in the modern U.S.?
Stephenson: The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.
For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.
Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we're coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it's going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be "worse." If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we'll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.
Bush and stem cells is probably a good example of religion and science interacting properly
Are you kidding? He crippled the entire line of ESC research for years. And every argument given for doing so was entirely baseless. The Christian Right simply wouldn't ever shut up about how it encourages abortion, even though the one has utterly nothing to do with another. As a result, the US has already begun falling behind in biosciences. He puts _faith healers_ on medical boards. Money spent on actual scientific studies of environmental problems gets thrown away because the guys at the top don't like the results. The latest crop of republicans are about the worst thing to happen to science and they are making religion look like a caricature of itself. To the rest of the world, the most powerful nation on earth looks like it's becoming a Christian version of Saudi Arabia.
The lunar missions ended because American leaders decided the money was better spent getting GIs killed in Vietman. The space program ultimately stagnated because US leaders made it a government monopoly run by a political committee. I see a solid week of news dedicated to ongoing technical problems with a single solitary shuttle (i.e., a third of our entire manned fleet) and I think, "We don't have a space program, we have a space hobby". And the reason people get pissed off with the expense is because it doesn't _do_ anything useful or even new anymore.
Anyway, it's not so much that there's a declining number of competent researchers and scientists. It's just that they are increasingly being told that neither they nor their work is wanted here. Fact is old and busted, faith-based-government is the new hotness. Average Joe is not just getting dumber, he's becoming more and more convinced that this is a virtue. Nothing could demonstrate this better than the studies showing that half the voting population would refuse to vote for a candidate for no other reason than because he was an atheist. I.e., competency and intelligence are secondary to whimsy and insanity.
Dyolf Knip
Ah yes. The ever so predictable jab at Bill Clinton from a republican. How convient that we use the past to gloss over the huge republican fuck up that is today present time.
Country is bleeding cash to foreign nations, country is insanely in debt, oil costs a fortune, christian religious dogma dictates public policy, record high unemployment, health care is unaffordable, we've off shored most of our manufacturing, stem cells are no considered babies, ass backwards tort reform, bullshit patriot acts by a republican government no less (the irony is fucking histerical)...
Oh the list goes on, and its retarded. There isnt a single GOOD thing that has come from this administration, other than perhaps "we invaded Afghanistan" but yet, havent gotten Bin Laden.
Our current goverment is a joke. They're incapable of doing anything AND that includes the democrats that are in office as well. They're lame and weak.
The republicans know how to fight, but they have no clue how to run a country. They certainly are good at giving government hand outs ot their rich friends though.
And that is a big issue.
So lets not talk about Clinton. Lets talk about the assholes in power RIGHT NOW.
The article got one thing right - unless you have a limitless passion for science, there is no reason for an American student to become a scientist.
If you become a PhD scientist, you will not get through your now essentially-mandatory post-docs until after you are thirty years old. Depending on your field, you can then expect to start at a salary of $60-80k.
On the other hand, a typical lawyer is out of school at age 25 and already makes a higher salary than the PhD will. Yes, they have a larger debt but it is only about a year's salary. Also, the lawyer does not have to worry much about someone from China or India replacing him at a third the price.
Economically, it does not make sense for a bright young American to choose science. We should not be surprised when few do.
Yes, those nasty Christians. The ones who kept learning alive inside monasteries during the Middle Ages. The ones who started the universities. Christians like Newton, Darwin and Galileo.
What learning? Most monks were illiterate scribes who learned to copy letters without ever learning how to read.
The real intended role of monestaries was to keep anyone remotely intelligent away from the general public where he might go starting trouble by speaking out against the Church. If you keep all the remotely bright people lured away, and force them to dedicate their life to the Church in order to learn anything, you can control them: and control of the masses was and is the purpose of Christianity since it's inception.
It's hard NOT to blame the Christian for the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings: they perpetuated that statement for thousands of years. The founding fathers were literally traitors of their day; not only to their King, but to their God as well. God had appointed King George to rule over them, and god-fearing men obeyed. Only evil heretics like Franklin and Jefferson dared rebelagainst the divine goodness incarnate in royalty. Or so said the Christians.
They claimed it was God who appointed the Kings, and it was a heresy against God to argue against the Church.
Newton, Darwin, and Galileo didn't have the choice to reject Christianity: when you face death for being an atheist, it's not a good idea to argue against a God. In England, the early copyright laws were formed to keep unpopular writings supressed: pornographic, heretical, and atheistic statements were illegal, and you could be killed for it.
Even today, there are still laws against blasphemy on the books in the USA, Canada, and Great Britan. Even today, there is little freedom against this religion.
As a boy,I was forced to worship the Christian's God, in my public school, funded by the public's tax dollars. If anything should be free of the taint of religious brainwashing, it should be a house of education, but no, the Christians got there first.
Catholics in my province get special treatment under the law; Catholic schools get public funding, unlike any other religious school in the country.
It's unfair, but that's Christianity. Claim what they will, they're only out for the power. When your starting premise is a lie, it's not surprising that many of them learned to lie to themselves as well.
--
AC
First... The Us was far more 'Christian' during the 40s 50's and 60's, the time of it's greatest advances. Second... Lawers, Singers, Sports and Business management are the big things today. Science is not a player in the career stakes today. Third... Corporations run America more than anytime in it's history. They exist to make money not fund science. Science can feed from the crumbs off the corporate table. Forth... In the mad house thats patents have built, whatever I may discover is bound to be already patented ten times over with an army of lawers to back them up. Whatever isn't patented is copyrighted or otherwise protected under the DMCA. Lastly... Ignorance is king! Look at mass entertainment and news. Life beyond third grade education simply isn't required and such today is considered a fringe demographic. Religion the cause my ass!
Did someone on the playground tell you all that about India? Discrimination based on the caste system has been on the decline for over 100 years. Lower caste citizens are in the majority, and so have more representation in government. People can rise from poverty no matter what their caste, and there are certainly higher caste living below the poverty line. India has a first rate university system with some of the largest universities in the world, and plenty of Indians are educated there, not abroad. India does suffer from poverty, about 25% in 2002, putting it 96th on the list of countries with the most people living under the poverty level. Then again, the US was at about 12% at the time, putting it at 116 on the list. India currently is the third fastest growing economy in the world.
Please, try to find out actual facts to support you arguments. I don't so much like the way the anecdotes pulled out of your ass smell.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...It's the attitude that says this:
The single biggest negative perception about the US that I experience here in Europe is the collective ego represented by the way the US government conducts itself, and the comments made by so many Americans in many an Internet forum. Here are a few claims I've seen in the past week alone:
Now here's an alternative version, as seen by the devil's advocate:
Seriously, this isn't meant to be a troll. That first list really is the impression a lot of Americans I've encountered give, and the second list is certainly how the US is increasingly perceived here in the UK.
The problem for this discussion, of course, is that being a world leader in scientific research depends fundamentally on three things: attracting good people, getting them in touch with everyone else's good people, and funding them well enough to do their thing. Pissing off the rest of the world and destroying your economy from within probably aren't the best ways to achieve any of those three critical things. Yeah, I'd say the US is pretty much toast for a while as far as leading the world in scientific research.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
In the early half of the 20th century the U.S. was relatively isolated from the rest of the world. While the infrastructures of most of the countries in the world were destroyed by World War 2 none of the destruction reached the US. As a result America became the leader in technology development.
The rest of the world has been a relatively peaceful place for the last 50 years. So now the rest of the world is catching up. It doesn't mean the US is doing worse, the rest of the world is doing better.
I am a scientist working at a university and my salary comes entirely from research grants. Thanks to the Bush administration's bad attitude towards science, my funding will run out in a few months. I have written new grant proposals, applied for government research jobs and teaching jobs, but so far have had no luck at all. There are so many people out there right now who are in a similar situation, and many of them have even more experience than I do, so I really don't have a chance at competing with them.
The article commented about visa restrictions preventing talented people from coming to the U.S. to study or do research. I just don't see that at all. In my field, there are tons of foreign post-docs working in the U.S., and many them decide to stay here after their post-doctoral appointments are done. Ironically, I have been told by many people in my field that I should look for a job overseas, since I can't find one here. Instead of trying to cultivate the talent that is already here in the U.S., our government's policies and the hiring practices of many institutions are bringing in foreign scientists while American scientists are being told to look to other countries for employment. In principle, I'm not against bringing foreign talent to the U.S. to help with scientific research. I just don't think it makes sense to do this on a large scale when U.S. scientists are struggling to survive.
I've also heard the complaint from many industry leaders that they can't find Americans with the right technical and scientific skills to fill job openings, so they need to bring in foreign talent. I've started looking into industry jobs, and I'm beginning to realize that computerized resume searches may be partially to blame for the apparent lack of qualified applicants. Most of the job descriptions are so specialized that I don't think there would be anyone in the entire world who fit the job exactly and would have all the right keywords in their resume. It doesn't matter if corporations look for employees in the U.S. or in other countries if they aren't willing to invest in training their staff. The executives and upper level managers of most corporations probably don't have a lot of technical experience themselves, and yet they expect a prospective employee to show up at their first day of work and know everything there is to know about the corporation's products. This is unreasonable and impossible, given that this type of information is often proprietary and available only to people who already work at the company.
I think that there are plenty of talented scientists, engineers, and programmers in the U.S. but the policies of our government and the practices of large corporations make it nearly impossible for us to actually find work in our chosen fields. Until we fix these problems, the U.S. is going to get further and further behind the rest of the world.
Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
/., like maybe actually citing something.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814
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And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
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You are completely wrong. If anything, most of the founding fathers were Deists, believing in at most whatever form of "Natures God" they personally had. Paine was definitely in sync with the founding fathers and their opinion on christianity in relation to government, i.e. there should be nothing but separation. Look it up. You need to do better on a large public forum such as
Thirty years and countless books on the subject and not til today do I learn the US entered Vietnam for France. It's been a while though and apparently I'm not up on the latest 'Freedom Fries' school of historical thought.
It wasn't just to support the French that the US went into Viet Nam. Then president Eisenhower was afraid that if the Viet Namese, North and South Vietnam, were allowed to vote to reunite not only would they reunite but they would also become communist. Because of this dispite the signing of the Paris Accord of 1954 being signed by North and South Vietnam and the Geneva conference Eisenhower didn't want the election to happen. To prevent reunitification Colonel Edward Lansdale "carried out a campaign of military and psychological warfare against the Vietminh.(35)"
As for the crack about "Freedom Fries" I never did call them that. I was against invading Iraq without broad UN, Security Council support. I'm still waiting to see all those stockpiles of WMDs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Look it up. Honestly, *none* of the founding fathers were Christians. At best they were "deists", which is really a polite way to say "atheists", because deists believe that while a god exists, it does nothing and everything works by natural law just as if no god existed.
Even if the things the Republicans said *were* true (something I dispute), did it justify breaking the law? Did it justify the risking of the lives of other operatives and associates that worked for and with the Brewster-Jennings cover organization? Or is it OK to break the law in the name of political expediancy if you are a Republican administration official? What a fscking moron.
That is all.
I agree with most of your rant. However, Newton was never even remotely atheistic. 1/3 of all his writings were spent on the subject of theology. Well, as I understand it, mostly biblical numerology.
Yes, you are an anomaly.
Much of the present climate is very much anti-science. In recent times I've been almost ridiculed for "believing" in DNA. One woman sneered and called me an "academic".
I think the problem is that science is being made into a "belief system". I've heard so many times, "Science is just like religion" or "Science is just another paradigm". Clearly it's not. If I were to say that the Bible instructs the faithful to wear purple polka-dotted pantaloons on Wednesdays I'd be dismissed as a crackpot. Yet so many in the religious community can claim that science is a "belief system" and misrepresent aspects of scientific theory (evolution, the Big Bang) and get away with it. They have conned people into believing that science is something more than a process and by doing so, forced people to choose between God and science.
Sure it's noble to seek knowledge, but ultimately it's just a process. One might as well call arithmetic a belief system. "You're adding! You godless heathen!!!"
So, I took a look at the website you've been touting on several posts. There's a book by Stuart Kauffman "The Origins Of Order", which clearly satisfies the requirements of the prize. Since other titles of Prof. Kauffman are listed, I can't see how they could have missed that one...
TOOO shows how auto-catalytism of peptides (tiny tiny molecules, 2 amino-acids or more, occur in non-living natural form etc.) could have formed the primeval building blocks. He provides a testable model for it. The test works. He uses the results to validate his model and then demonstrates the implications of those results.
One of the fundamental theses within TOOO is that of interconnection and interaction. A massive neural network without any connectivity is completely useless, make it highly connected and you end up with a brain. The same principles can apply to the evolution of life itself - interaction is the key, not any static properties.
TOOO then also addresses the limits that evolution must work within, and how even the simplest of these sets of peptides can become complex and integrated. He shows that order and chaos can be harnessed by evolution in a similar fashion to mutation and sex. He shows these are complementary approaches.
So why hasn't he won your prize ?
As for Logically, God exists and life has meaning, or He doesn't and it does not. There is no in-between for a binary condition., well that's not a binary condition (it's total bollocks as well, but leaving that to one side...)
There are four states for any two binary orthogonal values A and B, they are {A,B}, {A,!B}, {!A,B}, {!A,!B}. The only case your assertion holds is in the degenerate case where A=B (at which point A and B are not orthogonal)
For example, I do not believe in god (so god does not exist, at least for me), but my life has meaning to me.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
What an incredibly misleading article.
a l%20R&D%20Spending%20Chart.pdf
a l%20Non-Defense%20R&D%20Spending%20Chart.pdf
The US is not sixth in percentage of wealth spent on R&D, as the article says, when defense and corporations are factored in.
Ironically, many of the things the author listed as examples of US inventions/improvements on inventions, came from defense spending: the jet engine, computer, radar, jumbo jet, internet, lasers, and GPS. None of those things would either exist or be what they are today without US defense spending. You would think giving those examples, he would factor in defense spending into some of his funding stats.
He is also being disingenuous by including complaints about Bush, and then only including statistics from the '06 budget. If you look at the budget from since he took office, both defense and regular R&D have increased absolutely incredible amounts.
Here is Federal R&D Spending with defense included:
http://www.ostp.gov/html/budget/2006/Charts/Feder
Non-Defense Federal R&D Spending:
http://www.ostp.gov/html/budget/2006/Charts/Feder
Obviously, the second one is what the author was looking at. That tiny little decrease after 5 years, under the Bush administration, of very high increases.
How the hell can someone write an article, much of which blames the president, without even mentioning an approximate 40% increase in federal R&D during his administration?
... Dubya's crowd, I'm afraid this has been going on for much longer...
Back in the 50's and 60's there were research organizations throughout corporate America -- even a number of basic research departments (yes, that's right -- BASIC research, not just APPLIED research).
And corporate America had at least one eye focused on the big picture, making plans beyond the next quarter and being more concerned about the welfare of the company than their bonuses and severance packages.
Over the intervening years, we have seen not only basic, but applied research departments closed down in all but the largest companies. Emphasis has shifted to the current quarter (never mind the next quarter, we'll deal with it next quarter).
All that Dubya can take credit for is using the Religious Right to pummel the weakened science establishment. And the most likely reason he has chosen to attack the scientific establishment is that they ARE weakened and do not represent any sort of political (or other) power in contemporary society. Dubya picks his victims well.
The fault is in our society, and its view of science. Why we belittle the importance of science, and ignore the methodology of the scientific method, I know not, but it is manifested in the declining fraction of college and university science graduates for a much longer time than Dubya has been a factor.
Dubya is more the symptom of the problem than the cause.
regarding illitirate scribes, I don't know if that was true as a rule.
7 .html
Certainly I know that manuscripts produced and used in celtic-monasteries have margin notes and other additions that are not the work of illiterates:
c.f. pangur bán: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/16
There was also the preservation of written works for their own sake. Many non-religious classical texts were preserved and duplicated in monastic settings, and this went some way to preserving these works during the interregnum following the decline of the Roman empire.
Though surely coming from your personal experience, I think some of your other comments come across as a little prejudiced and over-general. I'd be interested to see the evidence for your origin of copyright laws thesis. And as another poster commented, there's no indication that Newton was by any means an atheist.
at least, not when it concerned foreign citizens.
in Chile and here in Brasil the CIA helped stage military coups (74 and 64 respectively) transforming what where democratic republics in bloody, raping/murdering dictatorships.
As Deep Throat once said, "follow the money".
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The US military is currently on the edge of being over extended and cannot in practice be used to enforce national policy without some major changes. Right now, it's just not able to take on extra activities without leaving the country "undefended".
The US has been losing it's edge in technology research for a few years. The IT industry has come to a standstill pretty much since 1998 and won't move until MS and others stop being a bottle neck. Recently, Rice was the first foreign minister to blow off the ASEAN meeting, indicating that the US may be preparing to cede the entire Asian economic region over to China. For manufacturing, everybody including the US has already moved over to China.
Dollar hegemony and inertia look to be what keep things going this long. The dollar, however, would become irrelevant if the cost of oil were tied to the Euro. I recall Saddam Hussein including among his threats shortly before he got raided.
If current policies are allowed to continue much longer without intensive corrective action, it may be time to say that it's over for the US.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.