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More Students Prefer Interdisciplinary to CS
prostoalex writes "With increased offshore outsourcing and continuing simplification of such tasks as writing a trivial application, Computer Science degrees are not as attractive for college students anymore, NYT finds. Students prefer interdisciplinary majors, where the programming skills are combined with solid scientific backgrounds in biotech, chemistry or business." From the article: "For students like Ms. Burge, expanding their expertise beyond computer programming is crucial to future job security as advances in the Internet and low-cost computers make it easier to shift some technology jobs to nations with well-educated engineers and lower wages, like India and China."
I think that foreign workers are better trained for computer programming jobs is incorrect. Corporations aren't pushing for more H1B workers because they are better qualified than domestic workers. Corporations want a guy who will take what they give them or else they get sent home. How much technical education is really applicable to a real world programming job? Probably less than ten percent of what is taught in higher education.
I have worked with some great H1B workers. I also have worked with some terribly unqualified H1B workers. Just like domestic workers some are good at programming and some just can't do it. I would say some of the H1B workers do more resume padding because they are desperate to stay and I would probably do it too. One H1B worker, when applying, listed the company he was applying for as one of the companies he previously worked. I guess he didn't check the name on the cut and past job he was doing because he never worked for the company.
I am not afraid to compete against foreign workers. I think it will be great for technology in general. I just want to compete on an even playing field. Let the programmers immigrate as Americans. You never hear Microsoft ask the government to allow immigration for foreign workers. They don't want to pay them more and worry about a worker leaving for another job.
The CS major taught at most colleges don't prepare you for jack nor shit.
I can attest to this. I took 2+ years in college towards my CS major before I gave it up. I had been working the entire time in various tech jobs, and I was picking up on just how little college would prepare someone for the real world.
I did "audit" several higher level courses, and while they provided good information, it's sort of half a degree. With no real training in hardware, software programmers really don't know what they are doing, or how to fix something if it goes BOOM.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
We are not alone in this. The problem is not so much that they are indian or chinese (although that does bring a whole host of issues of racism/reverse racism etc), but it is impossible to manage them remotely without spending so much effort on it that you might as well bring them over on an H1-B.
Combine that with the fact that it is impossible for a US corporation to enforce intellectual property rights in China and to a lesser degree India, and its hardly susprising that US corporations are favouring English speaking developers once again.
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Computer Science degrees are not as attractive for college students anymore
College students have surprisingly decided they prefer drunken parties and naked women more...especially if the two are combined.
CS isn't computer programming. CS is computer science.
It's Computer Science. If you want to fix equipment, take Electrical Engineering or maybe a technical school can help you.
Quite frankly, I don't care to dick arround with broken gear. That's why we have an administration group that handles all that ugly stuff.
I can concentrate on the interesting parts: designing systems and writing code.
Blar.
When will people understand that Computer Science is not related to programming as the article says. In fact, I know a couple of great CompSci graduates who couldn't write a complex program even if their lives depended on it.
"It's so not programming," Ms. Burge said. "If I had to sit down and code all day, I never would have continued. This is not traditional computer science."
She's talking about code-monkeys, or Software Engineering at most. Computer science is related to research, finding new and more efficient ways of doing different tasks (new algorithms, data structures), and understanding the underlying concepts behind a computer program (programming paradigms, logic) and tools that can be applied (verification, simulation).
People seem to think that higher educations is just about a career. It's not, it's about doing something you really like. Career qualifications can be picked up later (even at a night class).
Silly rabbit
There are mediocre tech people on both sides of the ocean. I've worked with great home grown American IT folks and mediocre home grown American IT folks. The same can be said for various Indian IT people I have had occasion to work with.
However I think Nicholas Carr's "Why IT doesn't matter" is more relevant in why someone should not choose to pursue a CS degree.
In a nutshell, IT has become a commodity input, much like eletricity. Yes, it is more expensive... but not as expensive as it once was. CS degrees are largely about programning and let me tell you, most of the places that have interesting programming problems can only employ a fraction of the CS students that graduate.
Companies whose business doesn't fall within technology employ about 90% of the IT people in the US. Frankly, a CS degree is overkill. In some ways, this type of job is more akin to positions of "skilled craftsman" of yesteryear. Yeah, I can use a set of tools to build you a piece of furniture, but don't bother we with figuring out what metals/alloys will go into making the tools themselves, that make the furniture.
As is the constant history of mankind, we build off each other. Nothing is constant.
-M
PS:
"If I have been able to see further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."
-Sir Isacc Newton
You don't get it do you? If I wanted to be in management, I would GO into management, get an MIS degree or something. It has been said that entering management is the death of a programmer.
I went into CS knowing very well that I would be spending my entire life "learning". Heck that is what I want. Yet, in 20 years time, I shall not only have studied the latest and greatest in technology trends, but also had the experience that I gained through creation and management of systems throughout those 20 years of time.
You can teach almost anyone to program, but an actual understanding of the computer is something different altogether.
There will be changes in management styles and trends over 20 years, business laws will change as well, so will accepted ethical practices. Do you honestly think that you will not have to go for any "retraining" in any of those 20 years?
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Getting a degree in something you are not passionate about is about the stupidest thing one could do. I mean, this degree, in theory at least, is going to be what you do until you retire in one form or another. Do you really want to be doing something you aren't passionate about for the rest of your life?
Going to school to learn something about something that interests you makes all the difference in the world.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Becoming a plumber or electrician has way more potential these days. Work for someone for a while, then go out on your own. You can easily make $60,000 and I know some electricians who pull in over $100,000.
Those jobs (especially an electrician) are great because they're interesting, challenging and offer lots of diversity. You are also free to go out on your own without nearly the risk a techy would take trying to establish a tech company (or any other company).
As a bonus, trades will never be outsourced because their location is of primary importance.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
My friend couldn't find any job with CIS (Computer Information Systems) degree, so became a plumber. Pulls above $50,000. Gets splashed with shit and fecies every once in a while, but if you ever resurrected a broken database or went to a corporate strategy meeting, feels about the same.
Basically, CNET's article boils down to CS majors wanting to branch out to other disciplines and also how CS research is no longer just about computing but about other problem domains.
I'm one of the few. I've done proof of correctness systems, image analysis algorithms, operating system design, game physics algorithms, robotic control algorithms, and network congestion algorithms. I've been lucky enough to be able to do this without having to work in academia. I do have an MSCS from Stanford, which is a great credential, although the education wasn't really that good.
But in most areas of computing, the basic algorithms already exist. (Some of them keep being reinvented; watching the XML fans reinvent LISP is amusing.) Not that many employers really need algorithm development people. I have no idea where you'd go as a computer scientist today. All the old labs (DEC, HP, IBM, PARC) are dead or shadows of their former selves. It's almost down to Microsoft, Google, or academia.
Actually, I'd recommend getting a strong background in numerical analysis and statistics. It's useful to know number-crunching cold. Engineering, financial, database, search, and game work all need number-crunching. It's more useful than, say, combinatorics.
If you're really into theory, you might want to take a new look at proof of correctness. I headed a team to build a proof of correctness system in 1980-82, and it worked, but it was just too slow on a 1 MIPS VAX. 45-minute proof runs for 500 lines of code. Today, that would take one second. It's time to work in that area again. There's some good proof of correctness work going on the hardware area, but not much for software.
(Incidentally, if you think proof of correctness is impossible for undecidability reasons, you're wrong.)
However, I think that this degree should ONLY be allowed if the student majors in something other than CS as well, ie business, chemistry, even a foriegn language. They could then take their CS knowledge and apply it in new and interesting ways in their chosen field.
To an extent, they do this at the college that I graduated from. When I chose CS as a major, I was required to pick an area of special interest (ASI) that correlated to another department at the school. In this ASI, we're required to take at least 4 specific junior and senior-level classes (and their prerequisites) in order to discover and explore another discipline in which to use our expertise.
In 20 years C++, Java, and .NET likely won't be cutting edge anymore (we hope now). So those skills don't work to well... you need to retrain anyway.
Yeah, and? A real programmer is not "A C++ Programmer" or "A Java Programmer". A real programmer can attain a level of proficiency equal to that of his/her perfered language in *any* language in a matter of months, if not far less. "Retraining" is just part of being a programer.
I started programming at my current job -- your standard LAMP operation -- six months ago. I'd never touch PHP, or any query language before in my life. My boss has been using both for at least 2 years, and our other developer claims 5 years of experience. In 6 months, I've become the go-to guy for both of them -- I can (and consistantly do) rewrite the inefficient parts of their code to execute exponentially faster, and make it much easier to read.
Real programming is a fundemental understanding of how to write algorithms efficiently, code clearly, picking the right tools for the job, and knowing how to use them correctly. You never have to "retrain" any of that.
Thanks alot for telling the whole world this...
1. Tell the world there will be no computer related jobs in the future.
2. Wait for the nobodys to choose other careers.
3. More jobs for real computer geeks.
Play along folks.
I remember having a conversation with my father years ago about CS grads. He was a software engineer/programmer at a tech company in Cambridge, MA, and had gotten to the point in his career where he was responsible for lots of hiring decisions. Being in Cambridge, they basically had their pick of the Ph.Ds coming out of the CS program at MIT. Once I asked him what they did with newly-minted Ph.D.s in CS. He said, "Retrain them."
I was surprised by this, and so I asked him if he thought all those years of CS education were essentially useless. "Oh, no," he said. "They're worth their weight in gold. They'd spent years working through extremely abstruse problems, and they'd learned how to absorb massive amounts of information quickly. Basically, they knew how to learn anything. Those guys would know nothing about building actual, production-level software for delivery to a customer. But they'd learn that quickly, because the foundation was strong."
Now that I am a professor (of English, not CS), I find myself taking a similar view of university education. It's not the content, per se (though certainly, the content is important), but the habit of mind one acquires by being confronted with difficult problems and issues over and over. If you want to learn VB or SQL, buy a book. If you want to think differently--more deeply and with fewer jerks of the knee--about the world, about engineering, about literature, about art, go to a university and let it change you.
Of course, I am one of those who did pursue an interdisciplinary degree of sorts (I use computers to study literature, and I teach software design in an English department). But that is another story . . .
This is a troll, but sigh, I'll bite.
Thinking that a CS degree is a "dead end" is the wrong takeaway. The answer is that it depends on what you want to do. Talented architects and computer scientists will always be in demand, as there are lots of interesting problems to solve, and true CS talent is scarce (and, amusingly, will only get scarcer over the next few years as enrollment in CS programs stays low.) The theory will still be much the same in 20 years, even if we're not programming using today's technology.
In addition, the assertion that "the days of a geek making it into upper management are over" is patently false. Google, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle are obvious counterexamples, and I'm sure everyone else can come up with more. If you want to have have a leadership in a company that produces new technology, you had better be a geek. On the other hand, if you're no more than a typical rank-and-file coder, things do not look good.
However, most pure CS students definitely lack communications skills, business sense, and an understanding of social graces and human behavior -- and these things aren't played up enough in most CS curricula. Your great ideas aren't worth much if your coworkers can't stand to be around you or are laughing to themselves when you're talking or presenting.
The good news is geeks can often pick up the business side (CEOs of aforementioned companies being good examples), but I've never met a pure business major who could truly pick up the important CS stuff like algorithms and systems analysis (your brain just stops being able to pick that stuff up after a while.) The pure management majors here at MIT learn to write great memos and know how to dress up for interviews, but that's about it (compared to the science majors) -- they can talk the business side, but are clueless about the underlying technology. (To be fair, most CS majors around here can't form complete English sentences or withstand direct sunlight.)
I'm glad I started out towards the geek side and stayed in CS, because picking up the business side isn't that intellectually hard --it's just different. And you'd be surprised how much your CS intuition applies to the business side as well -- a lot of my pure business buddies just don't understand logic, systems, or basic concepts of probability, for example, and consequently make stupid business decisions. Joel Spolsky has a good take on both sides of the issue.
Anyway. A CS degree is still very valuable, but only (or especially so) when paired with the ability to communicate and lead others.
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
So far, seems to be working. It's great to have one of your children call up too excited to speak clearly about some utterly awesome thing s/he's just learned.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I spent two weeks in Russia last month, where I met a number of university students. The number one major seemed to be some combination of Computer Science and engineering with extra training in English and German. I also met one lady who is working with a software startup doing localizations for English speaking countries. (She probably speaks better English than I do.)
At least now I've seen where the programming jobs are going.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
But there's really a lot of $50,000+ jobs for programmers and/or CS majors. It amazes me when people can't find a job when there are so many available. There are hundreds, thousands in some states, that go unfilled for extended time periods. I've yet to see this shortage of jobs, maybe I got lucky, but there are plenty out there, as even at current jobs I scan the market regularly for opportunities.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
I've worked with quite a few of H1-Bs. As a rule, Russians kick ass when you need to come up with a solution or solve a design problem but execution needs supervision sometimes, because once the problem is solved they tend to quickly lose interest. Russians rarely get very far beyond technical "individual contributor" positions, because they're clueless at politics and despise brown-nosing.
Indians suck at design real bad (their philosophy seems to be to do just enough to get by) but can be pretty good at execution and truly shine at brown-nosing, especially if their boss is also Indian. However, I know a couple of Indian developers who rock so hard, it's not funny (and coincidentally don't give a shit about what their boss thinks about them). But they're exceptions that only reinforce the rule.
The Chinese are a mixed bag. I only know one Chinese guy who I would say is good (and I have a very high bar for "good"), the others I've met over the course of my career had great difficulties picking up the language and thinking independently. It looks as though they need to be told what to do, down to the smallest details.
Americans are a mixed bag also, there are quite a few folks who are good, but if an American sucks, he/she sucks real hard, because Americans are ridiculously difficult to fire for non-performance.
I can (and consistantly do) rewrite the inefficient parts of their code to execute exponentially faster, and make it much easier to read.
:)
Ahh, so you're the smart-a$$ know-it-all that keeps deleting the fix I put in 5 years ago to solve problem X with client Y that only occurs in situation Z, and replacing it with that wonderfully elegant piece of code you just read about in Fowlers latest book...which will remain in place until Booch releases a book contradicting it at which time you'll probably rewrite it again, blowing away the fix that I put in again after taking a 4am call from client Y wondering why their lastest release crashed with a bug that was apparently fixed years ago
Good programmers rewrite bad code because they know they can write it better...great programmer realise that the person that originally wrote it was probably just as smart as they were and the reason for all those "ugly" pieces are the real world saying hello.
Have you ever done plumbing or electrical? If you do it well it can be quite a mental workout trying to get all the wires and pipes in their ideal locations.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
is one of the biggest reasons why jobs are coming back. The outsourcing numbers are not so compelling anymore, so sanity is beginning to win over beancounting again.
Oh well, what the hell...
Yes, there are zillions of listed jobs. However, The vast majority of those listed jobs do not really exist, since they are either stale and already filled, or prelistings for projects that will never happen. Either that, or HR has such a bad filtering system that they reject all the good candidates. I have worked on military systems for >10 years. Northrop Grumman alone has >2500 jobs open. You would think that ONE of those would fit my resume like a glove right?
Oh well, what the hell...
Pure computer science doesn't pay enough to justify a college education in it. People are getting out of it as fast as possible because they flat out, won't accept the standard of living it provides.
When you enter the industry you'll find all your managers are in their 20's and all the programmers are in their 50's. Recent graduates either get into management as fast as possible or quit.
Programmers in the business for 30 years still live in dumpy apartments and have virtually no goals in life because they're so damn poor. No government program is going to change the situation. People can't be made to work 30 years to live in a dumpy apartment when other jobs provide so much more.
The culture in US is based on selling. People in the front office, interacting with the customers, making the deals are always going to be valued more than the people in the back room.
You can elect as many democrats as you want and tax yourself as much as you want. Your country will still value front office workers more than programmers.
One of my teachers at City College, who runs a consulting firm, told us Monday night he is moving his development side to India. He's keeping the support operation here, but the programming jobs are going to India.
He says his building landlord wants another rent increase, and his programmers want more money or they'll go work for Google.
Fine - he can get a building in India for 30% of what he's paying here - a bigger building - and he can get equally qualified programmers for $1200-1500/month there vrs $4k, $5K, $6K, $7K per month here. It's a no-brainer for him.
Meanwhile, a number of the more advanced IT classes at City College have been cancelled this semester - not enough students showed up to fill the minimum fifteen seats to justify the class. Even tonight's class, on Active Directory, barely got enough seats to meet the minimum.
Meanwhile, as I pass Hastings College of the Law on my way to City College, they seem to be full of students.
Face it, technology leadership will pass to Asia and Europe over the next decade or more, if it hasn't already. Like the US in "Snow Crash", we're only good at movies, music and delivering pizza in thirty minutes or less.
And music-wise, we're not that good either, since the Corrs new album won't be released in the US until at least next spring. Atlantic Records has gone into the toilet, apparently, with Jason Flom ushered out, who discovered the Corrs among many others.
If the Corrs can't be hits in the US with three hot babes and five hot guys because they're Irish and occasionally play an Irish trad instrumental between the pop rock (which they play on their own instruments and write the songs themselves) (especially given the number of Irish in this country), somebody explain this bimbo Shakira to me. She's from God knows where in South America, shakes a mean ass, and otherwise is indistinguishable from every other rock bimbo out there.
Meanwhile, as far as I can tell from the daily press, there are only three "musicians" in the entire United States: Britney, Christina, and Jessica. Maybe Mariah, makes it four. And I use the term "musician" or "singer" loosely.
Oh, and the octagenarian Stones - whose leader, Mick Jagger, once said the Corrs blew them off their own stage when they opened for the Stones.
Meanwhile, the only jobs left for techies is cleaning spyware off fucked up PCs for clueless Windows users.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Switch to nanotech.
Nanotech will absorb the biosciences within twenty or thirty years. Nanotech will absorb everything (well, of course, there will still be disciplines, but ALL the research will use nano technigues.)
That or learn AI and how to do bioinformatics using AI, which will be enabled by nanotech, but will still need people able to come up with the concepts.
Programming is a dead end profession - has been for twenty years. You have the authority - and pay - of a hotel desk clerk and the responsibility of a surgeon as a programmer. And your manager is guaranteed to be a moron making more money than you and who then screws up your project, then blames you for the failure - and he used to have your job.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
This makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I rarely meet a fellow student majoring in CS who actually understand and enjoys CS. More often then not I talk to undergrads who don't like CS and are just in it because of some dot-com fantasy.
Devise, Repair, Solve, Build
You seem very angry. I'm guessing you got outsourced, right? Well tough. But you can't blame it on India. That's called ignorace my friend, and you seem to have a lot of it to go araound.
I call bullshit on this post.
It's computer science, not a programming course. Software engineering is but a tiny part of computer science, so it's no surprise that the coverage is limited.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Whats with the comparisons of IT to CS? I've always made this distinction in my mind:
CS people study the creation process, and how to theorize/cook up new technology.
IT people study what has already been theorized. They fix what is broken.
CS people make it, users break it, IT people fix it.
I agree that he's extrapolating excessively.
On the other hand, I'd say that given many common social/economic/technological factors, that there probably *are* a number of general statements that can be made that apply to a majority of each population.
For example, I, as probably most other folk, doubt that there is anything inherently genetically flawed in black people. I don't think that a black guy can't become a really good engineer, nor do I think that there's anything in the genes that's going to really stand in the way.
Yet if you sit down and read through your US census, you'll discover that, sure enough, blacks are well behind whites and Asians in getting advanced technical jobs.
So why is this? We assume, for the sake of discussion, that it's not genes. So it must be something from society. Perhaps the generally lower economic status of blacks stemming from their commonly slave status in the US a hundred and fifty years ago has something to do with it. Perhaps it's simply social phenomena that affect people along racial lines (I can identify with character X in the mass media because he appears like me.) Who knows? All I can say is that there certainly is a difference.
There is a *far* larger difference in the society that a Chinese student will grow up in versus an American student than there is between a black American student and a white American student. In addition, an H1B or immigration status itself acts as a filter. If you view working in America (or learning English and doing business with people overseas) as being an arduous but career-building step, there is a natural filter to bring in people with drive and ambition -- maybe that means more brown-nosers, maybe that means more enthusiastic people. It's certainly not unreasonable to do breakdowns based on country of origin (and hence society). It may not be feasible to do it based on such a small population size, but I don't think that the very practice can be condemned. In addition, most people on here seem to have had similar observations.
I haven't worked with Chinese H1B folks, but I have with H1B and outsourced Indians, and I agree that my general perception has been similar to what the other posters have said -- exceptional drive and a lack of complaining, but often sub-par technical ability, and a willingness to misrepresent facts. Doesn't mean that this is true of all Indians, but may well be true of a very ambitious group that rapidly started conducting business in a new country to build careers. [shrug] I've found the same snappiness mentioned by others here in the Russian immigrants that I've worked with, but also the same strong technical ability. The Indians tend to work closely in teams, the Russians lone wolf (as in, they are on a team, but they rarely seek advice or ask questions of others). Could be coincidence, I don't know. But it does line up with the other things said here.
As for the comment about Indians interacting differently among each other, I hardly think that this is a stretch. If you know your native tongue better than a foreign one, you may well interact more and act differently when talking with people with whom you can converse in the same tongue.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
AFAIK, when you kick out an H1-B he/she has to leave the country in 10 days. It's a bit hard to sue the company within just 10 days. Americans have lots of time on their hands, and they can bring all sorts of trouble. So big companies usually choose to carefully document poor performance of US employees for a couple of years before firing them.
I agree with the reply: I am sure that is true at some schools, but all of the people I have worked with who earned a degree from an ABET accredited CS program seem to get the more hardcore education. This includes a large variety of schools (University of Colorado at CS, Bucknell, MIT, etc).
On the other hand, alot of non-ABET CS programs are rubbish. I have worked with those people in the real world and they are utterly clueless.
As to the point of this article/discussion? Silly and misguided. CS is just as all of my peers seem to point out: science or more to the point mathematics. Maybe not the exact same kind of science as physics (minor #2), but close.
What is odd is the attitude of people to the hardcore CS cirriculum. As a grad student and a full time software engineer I see both sides of the fence. I work with the "Give me practical or give me death people" and hardcore CS people. In what I have seen (in 2 years of J2EE work and 2 years of C++, etc work) the practical people are not very clever.
After finishing a small project that used a clever bit of recursive parsing (like building a lexical analyzer), one of these people asked me if I took a class on "Java" and learned that. A few months later he lamented that he wanted a several semester class on J2EE. This guy is senior level and gets paid way more than I do, yet he is such a dolt that I wouldn't let him touch any of my code with a stick.
As everyone has already said (insert dead equine and pummel), CS is about theory and pushing the boundries of your mind. You can learn a language from a book... that is just a matter of translating ideas. But learning compiler design, architecture, algorithms, calculus, EM, neural nets, etc... even if you don't learn it, it trains you think non-linearly. At my Uni, people dropped CS left and right for IS degrees after a couple of semesters because they "just wanted to program".
Now I am not claiming that ABET accredidation means anything. I am just saying that those that I have worked with who were clever went to those kinds of schools. I have also worked with people who went to my school (I think they have the same degree, but it is a decent sized school, so I didn't run into them) who I can hardly believe graduated.
All I was trying to say:
Computer Science, the real thing, is very much based on math, but it's a *theoretical*, academic discipline, with little practical value (which is not to say that the results of CompSci R&D don't benefit practical software development). A real computer scientist isn't a good software developer any more than a physicist is a good EE.
However, lack of precise naming (not suprising, really, considerin the youth of the discipline) means that there's a vast variation in whats considered computer science. In many places it's essentially an algorithms class. In some it's essentially a tech course in Java. More commonly, it's a fairly technical but very practically oriented programming class. Thats why you get people who want to be software developers taking compsci but complaining about the math in one school, and compsci graduates from another who can't do anything except code bubble sort in a Java applet.
Where did I say one observation points establishes the fact?
I used my account as an explanation of WHY it's happening. THAT it's happening is a known fact. Read the trade press.
I also said nothing about the US not still producing more code (and in fact, most technology) than anywhere else.
Today is not tommorrow.
I said the FUTURE is not the US's, if present trends continue - and there is no evidence I see that it won't.
As for Europe, I have read that more scientific literature is now produced there than in the US. This indicates that more scientific research is being done there than in the US. That is a fundamental shift which is likely to have consequences.
You, on the other hand, are assuming that what was true a hundred years ago for the US will remain true forever.
A true provincial.
As for music, my point was that the US was supposed to be a hotbed of music - yet, as Norman Spinrad once observed in one of his stories, if the British and psychedelics hadn't come in back in the Sixties, rock would still be just "ass-kicking music for greasers."
Today, many of the influences of pop rock are coming from abroad. Yet the insular US music business and tight control of the radio market limit the success of groups such as the Corrs who are megastars everywhere else. The Internet will eventually sort this out, as people find music via the Net and acts start cutting out the label middleman and directly marketing live broadcasts and cheap downloads over the Net, but for now the music industry as an industry appears to be moribund. The recent payola issue rearing its head again makes that clear - they have to bribe the radio people to play anything that wasn't released ten years ago.
If you can't market three hot babes and five hot guys, all of whom are excellent musicians playing lush pop rock and toe-tapping instrumentals as well, to the US market, get the fuck out of the business.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!