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National Academies on U.S. Science
theodp writes to tell us that the National Academies, the nation's 'leading science advisory group', is warning of the continued loss of America's competitive edge with regards to science in the global community. In a press release they call for the immediate increase of teachers and advanced research and development, citing that 'in 2001 U.S. industry spent more on tort litigation than on research and development.' The Committee includes, among others, Intel's Craig 'Don't Call Us Benedict Arnold CEOs' Barrett.
In American society, being good at math or science is generally regarded as geeky or nerdy and is roundly disparraged. Small wonder American kids want nothing to do with it. Look at the popular TV shows - many are about lawyers, doctors, and law enforcement types. If there is a technically saavy person, they are made fun of and treated as quaint. Until this changes we can throw all the money we want at the problem, but it won't change much. Back in the 60's it was cool to be into science - largely thanks to the space race (and to a lesser degree the cold war). There was even a TV personality (Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons) who played an aeronautical engineer, and he was actually portrayed in a positive light! That's impossible to imagine in today's culture. Maybe if we had something akin to the space program, say a race to energy indepenence, we could once again make it cool to pursue a career in science, math, physics or engineering.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I remember hearing this business about our losing our scientific edge even as Apollo was landing astronauts on the moon. In itself, I really don't worry about it much. This has been a nation mostly of crackpots and bumpkins right from day one.
Our advantage never came from having the brightest of populations, it came from having an economic and legal system that placed few barriers in the paths of the talented, which also made this country an attractive place for talented foreigners to migrate to as well (think Andy Grove, Albert Einstein or Andrew Carnegie).
I'm a lot more worried about losing the advantages our legal and economic system afforded us than I am about some egalitarian vision of providing advanced education to the Great Unwashed.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Let me get this staight, they're asking the guy who 'believes' that intelligent design should be given time in schools to improve our science curriculum?
Obviously, this committee has a deathwish.
Dropouts are not reading the bible. They are playing X-box, vandalizing their neighborhood, and buying gangster rap CDs marketed to suburban kids.
I suggest you read Slashdot
It's time for the US to choose between a reliance on religious fanaticism or science.
How would I recognize one of these fanatics? Would they
- Obsessively post the same message over and over again?
- Try to make every topic of discussion, no matter how unconnected, a forum for their views?
- Consistently demonize other points of view?
- Counter well-meaning factual arguments with name-calling?
- Use guilt by association to try to discredit their unbelievers?
- Use fear as a motivator?
I sure am worried about all the fanaticism. I hope I can recognize it when I see it.
...if our corporations were ran by people with science and engineering backgrounds who cared about long-term research and development rather than ran by MBAs with BAs in Medieval History and Philosophy who can't differentiate a simple function or write a line of code, and who care more about short-term profits and $$$, then perhaps we'll see some more scientific and engineering progress in this country. Witness the downfall of Bell Labs, for example. Bell Labs was very innovative and many of its research projects led to things that we take for granted today (the very operating system that I'm typing this message on now, is FreeBSD, which is a direct descendant of Bell Labs' Unix [if you ignore the fact that the code was completely rewritten]). Then, some person who knows nothing about science and engineering took control and cut its funding to its knees. Now Bell Labs is very small, and that same dummy went on to destroy HP in a similar fashion....
The education system isn't looking that great, either. Our secondary schools are also failing to teach the basic science and mathematics needed to produce students capable of succeeding in an science or engineering field. College students looking at future career prospects might end up switching to law or business, because the future looks brighter for them. After all, we're outsourcing a great deal of the engineering jobs.
This country is fast on its way of becoming a country full of rich lawyers and managers, and poor McDonalds employees and janitors. But who will be exploring science and developing new technologies? The Indians and Chinese, of course. Their corporate culture seems to care much more about the future, and besides, many of our corporations are using them to do our non-law/managerial work.
If we want to turn back the tide, the corporate culture needs to change, and we need more CEOs who have science and engineering backgrounds who care about science and engineering. The school system in this country also needs to be radically improved.
It's interesting you've brought up "intelligent design" when the topic really isn't about that at all and it's not mentioned in any of the linked articles.
At the same time, during and after WWII, many great minds were coming to the relatively freedom of the US. It is often say the Allies won WWII because we had the smarter Germans. This continued to the end of the the 20th century, when changes in the US and foreign rules, the increasing cost of a US education, and the availability of other options, reduced the influx of foreign talent.
Even with all this, I think there are three critical factors that makes the US less competitive, beyond the general presence of anti-intellectualism and the president that is proud that he cannot read complex prose. The first is that funding priorities are focused more on war and less on education, therefore most Universities have less money with which to educate. Second, though I think the WWII vets communicated the wonder of the world to their kids, the grandkids do not seem to understand. I know too many kids of successful people decline to the bum slacker status, never creating anything more complex than a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Third, we are not communicated the wonder of the world to average kids. They grow up believing that a worker and consumer is all they can be. That is what most will be, but some can be more, and it is these resources that we are wasting. And as the US returns to protectionism, there will be less chance for a kid to be exposed to the wonder of the world. Worse, i see television shows where contestants say the most wonderful thing they have done in their life is to hold their breaths for a couple minutes, or stay still while bugs crawl on. I often did the later when I was a kid, and I never thought is was so great. What is great is launching a satellite, or helping a factory stay in the US, or helping a company stay afloat so those jobs are saved, and more are created. or a new school of art, or a new way of communicating information. And everyone will say a normal person cannot do these things, but normal people do all things everyday. All anyone thinks can be done is new and more complex ways of stealing money or cheating on taxes so our boys do not have the equipment they need, the medical care, or the education facilities when they return.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It's strange that kids in high school must take 4 years of English, 3 years of math and only 2 years of science. I always though math and science where more important then reading Shakespeare; but the MAN doesn't seem to think so.
The human race is artificial intelligence created using object orientated programming.
We have zero inflation and a healthy economic growth rate
You're being sarcastic, right? Inflation was up 1.2% last month, the highest in 25 years. Prices are up 4.7% from where they were a year ago, if you use the new CPI stats. If you use the old CPI stats (pre-clinton era), which include house prices, then inflation is closer to 7%. That's why gold is near an 18-year high.
We have a housing bubble, record debt levels (national and individual), and a record low savings rate. Rising interest rates are going to start choking the economy...we're heading for stagflation. Since we're starting to see global inflation rising, things don't look very good for the rest of the world, either.
Of course, maybe everything will magically turn around, just as there's a possibility that a cancer patient's tumor might start shrinking back to nothing. But, until that happens, I don't think "healthy" is the right word.
Ah, but look at how many of those papers are written by scientists that have come here from places like India and China, and look at how many students in U.S. science & engineering graduate programs are from elsewhere. It's been a very good thing for us to have been such a magnet for so much of the world's scientific talent, but since 9/11 the Powers That Be have done everything in their power to cut off the flow. Now just who is going to be hurt by that in the long run?
You're kidding right? You think the US is run by religious fanatics? You're comparing the US to the Taliban? Where the government uses force to convert its subjects into practicing a certain religion? Apparently you're falling prey to buzz words in the media. The religious right, the right wing christian conservatives, revamping the country to puritanical colonialism all while doing mission statements and working on innovating their new and improved synergies. There is a jumble of all faiths running the US, many of the divisions of christianity, judaism, atheism, islam, etc. There is no state sponsored church, religion, or belief system that citizens are forced to join. It is ridiculous to think that the multitude in the US would follow a state designed religion in the first place. Look at the backlash over putting stickers on biology textbooks saying that evolution is only a theory, common sense is dominating ridiculous ideas. It isn't religious fanaticism running this country. It's apathy. Apathy towards hard work in school. We'd rather watch mind numbing reality tv than pick up a book or try to learn something new. Kids get passed to the next grade no matter if they work hard or not because we wouldn't want to hurt the little darling's self esteem, so the kids who would otherwise make an effort end up slacking off because they're guaranteed to pass anyway so why bother working hard? Why go out of your way to do well if you can just get by. There are plenty of would-be scientists out there in gradeschool that have no motivation because teachers don't reward diligence and effort, instead they spend more time trying to enforce discipline to a bunch of kids who don't care. What can a teacher do if the parents don't care in the first place? We constantly demonize teachers who discipline their students. How many times have you seen a parent go and complain that their kid was given detention or a bad grade when the kid deserved it? The biggest farce is the no child left behind act. Some kids need to be left behind. School isn't for everyone. Teach some kids a trade or useful everyday skills instead of forcing them to memorize shakespeare or other equally useless facts to them. Teach them how to work a cash register or fix a car. Don't waste their or the teacher's time by forcing the teacher to remediate the uninterested ones. Cater schools to kids who want to learn. All we owe people in this country is the chance to succeed, we don't have to make them do it if they don't want to. Let them fail if they don't want to put in effort, that way the teachers can focus on the students who want to learn, and ultimately schools will be better. Yeah I ranted, I'm just sick of seeing kids who have potential be held back because of other people.
" it came from having an economic and legal system that placed few barriers in the paths of the talented"
Judging from the fact that we're now spending more on legal -- in part due to intellectual property insanity and increased wrangling over who "owns" what ideas -- it's just possible the legal system is becoming part of the problem.
But hey, if potential personal profit means arguing over what's already been invented a la SCO instead of actually getting out and inventing things, why should we get in the way?
Tweet, tweet.
Judging from the fact that we're now spending more on legal -- in part due to intellectual property insanity and increased wrangling over who "owns" what ideas -- it's just possible the legal system is becoming part of the problem.
I understand that it's morphing into something that's becoming part of the problem. That's exactly why I said I was worried about it. This country is becoming a place that's no longer an attractive destination for the talented and entrepreneurial. If you've noticed, our laws and economic system have changed quite a bit over the last several decades.
As I said originally, it was never our brilliant population (*smirk*) that accounted for our success.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
- Obsessively post the same message over and over again?
- Try to make every topic of discussion, no matter how unconnected, a forum for their views?
- Consistently demonize other points of view?
- Counter well-meaning factual arguments with name-calling?
- Use guilt by association to try to discredit their unbelievers?
- Use fear as a motivator?
That sums up the bush administration and their supporters nicely. Good job.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
(Below is a copy of a comment I made the last time this story was posted. If slashdot editors can dupe, I should be able to as well :)
Last year Reason had an interview with Neal Stephenson (author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, and other fine novels), where he was asked about the state of science in America. What he said resonated with me quite a bit:
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.
Second step: Fire all the instructors in all the institutions of high learning that would rather do research than teach the next generation. Teaching first, research last!
You know nothing about higher ed. Lemme give you a quick overview. There are tiers. At the top, you got your research institutes. The ivy leagues, and what's left of California's state uni system, plus some up-and-coming schools. They do nothin' but research. They describe themselves as "research institutes". The teaching there sucks, and is done by grad students. Many of the grad students barely speak English.
These tier-1 research universities generally only take self-motivated students who can put up with the bad teaching. (Why? because self-motivated students make good researchers). Every now and then they let in a rich kid who needs good teachers in order to learn, and they complain to holy hell that the researchers are only researching, that the teachers suck, etc., etc. It makes the newspapers, and everyone clucks and tsks that, oh, this school has bad teachers. It's death by anecdote, let me tell ya.
Anyway, the researchers blow of their teaching duties, and focus on the research. Shake, stir, and bake for 30 years. You get things like the transistor, which spawned a one trillion dollar industry. You get the Internet. You get lasers. You get supersonic technologies. You get lotsa other things that (and here I shit you not) change the course of human history . The down side is that a few students who were not self-motivated complain that they were not pampered like they were in high school. Oh well. Fuck 'em, I say. And by the way, every Regent, sane politician, military general, and captain of industry agrees with this position: Research institutes are the engine of our civilization. So to hell with a few non-motivated kids who can't learn on their own from a book when the teaching assistant can't speak English.
Now, some of the graduates of these research institutes want to teach. If they are not the best in their class, they teach at the second tier institutes. These are the state colleges and unis. There, teaching is important. These are called "teaching colleges", and teaching counts towards tenure. You don't have time for research (and generally do very little if any), because you have 5 classes to teach. These colleges put out the bulk of the U.S. middle class. Most Americans who go to college attend a "teaching" college. Show up, drink for 4 years, and go into business with your frat brothers. Welcome to the middle class, dork. Just pay attention when the smart guys from the research institutes call and say they've got something.
Now, back to your idea of firing all the people who do research, and focusing only on teaching. Your suggestion for such massive reform of society was attempted before. For example, Pol Pot marched everyone out to the countryside, since farming was thought to be the right direction for Cambodians. You get the idea.
Now be a good tyke and do your homework.
There was a recent wide-spread report indicating prestige of various professions, and scientists were number one! Lack of respect is not what is driving kids away from science, it is lack of cash. As I have posted here numerous times, a smart person can make a lot more money in law, business, or medicine, all without having to stay in school until one is 30 (or older, depending on the number of post-docs you have to grind through).
Unless this changes, we aren't going to have lots of home-grown scientists. It is that simple.
I am a chemistry post-doc at a highly-regarded university, and have every reason to consider myself a highly intelligent person. I work my ass off (60h/week...a REAL 60h). I am nearing my 31st birthday.
I have never made more than $22,000 in a single year.
Do you see the problem?
And I won't even bother to elaborate on how slaving 60h+ each week in a virtually all-male environment inhibits one's social life.
That doesn't surprise me, but it should be a clue to all decent and sensible people that things have to change radically. Let's push for the kind of tort reform that will put 90% of the filthy blood-sucking pirates out of business.
The American legal system is a f**king disgrace. No, scratch that, it's a positive menace to the American way of life. We have turned into a nation of paranoid, selfish sissies, thanks to the pond scum of the trial bar. And the defense attorneys are no better; they don't want the gravy train to end either. I want to annihilate them. I want their children to starve and their wives to go barefoot. I want to cut their dirty greedy balls off with a rusty butter knife.
Most of all, I want to sweep away a thousand years of arcane gibberish and oppression of the common man, tear the legal system into itty bitty pieces, and rebuild it from the ground up according to principles of logic and common sense and brevity. The greedy vermin of the Bar have been a plague on humanity since the time of the Pharisees, and it has to stop NOW.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
One thing about most of these studies concerning the quality of US education is that it is often influenced by general perceptions from Hollywood movies.
The reason the US has managed to achieve all the things it has in the worlds of science is because we generally leave smart people alone and give them a relatively free hand to pursue the answers they seek. This is not a race for education. This is not a race for money. This is a race for freedom to explore.
This is not about hacking code. It's not about secret laboratories where diabolical experiments are performed. It's not about eggheads who decide to get even with the bullies who beat them up. It's about freedom to pursue what we nerds have always wanted to explore. Hollywood doesn't get it. It's also not about homegrown smart people.
In some ways we're still ahead. In others we're doomed. I'm particularly dismayed by the religious right's policy influence with medical research. However, this country still has silicon valley. In fact, it not only has silicon valley, it has Research Triangle Park, the suburbs of DC, Los Alamos National Labs, and similar collaborative institutions near most major cities.
Most other countries would give anything to have these informal and pragmatic social institutions where results are rewarded and where failures are detected early and aren't pursued. But no. Those countries have entrusted their governments or large industry groups to guide them. Sometimes it bears fruit. But the solutions aren't usually radical. The truly revolutionary discoveries are often kept on the shelf for further research. Big organizations don't usually know better.
Now we can squeal and holler about the rotten quality of US educational standards. And it's true. The average education received in public institutions frankly isn't good for much. What the US does differently is that it rewards talent. And by so doing, it often attracts talent from overseas. Yes, we have our own homegrown talent too. But we also count at least as many first generation immigrants among their number.
Yes, we had Thomas Edison. But we also count Nicholai Tesla along with him. We had Richard Feynnman, but we also count Paul Dirac with him too. We had Robert Goddard, but we also had Werner Von Braun. The Sciences here in the US got a huge head start from these first generation immigrants.
The only thing we need to ask is whether we're still encouraging and rewarding good work. If we are, then we aren't losing ground.
Hollywood can can portray these scientists as silly, just as they were portrayed in so many B Movies from the 1950s. No, I wish the reputations were different, but Hollywood is really nothing more than a place for Art students to get even with all of us smug and supercillious engineers and scientists. Most of Hollywood is filled with pretty people, most of couldn't learn enough to be good at much of anything. Thankfully, looking good is nearly all there is to a good career in Hollywood. It's nice that they can get rich doing what they like. I wish it didn't have to be at the expense of the reputation of another pillar of society. But that's no different than it's ever been.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
"to be in the middle class now, as a family, there MUST be at least 2 income earners. Studies show that it was not like that in the fifties"
Yes - in the fifties, most families had only one person in the workforce. Since most women wish to work now, the relative proportion of the population is much higher. According to the law of suppy and demand - if you double the supply of labor, expect the price (wages / salaries) to fall !
If it deserves a mention, it is to ridicule it as non-science. The "blind watchmaker" is NOT anything close to intelligent design. The reason that scientists like myself slam this so hard is because it's patently ridiculous as science. So, someone believes something...does that make it science? A lot of people believe people are good natured, so should we teach it as science? Of course not. You may think you're being fair, but the only responsible way to teach it is as junk, and that would cause even more problems than just ignoring it. Discuss it a sociology or philosophy class, if you must, but not science class. If you do, expect to be teaching kids that the holocaust might not have happened in history class.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
If these students get job offers and pass a security screening test, they should automatically get work permits and expedited residence status. If they cannot get a job, their visas should expire.
This kind of thinking is why we are competing against desparate slave tech labor. I worked with one H1B who was only paid once every six months. Companies know they can pull this kind of shit with 3rd-world workers and that is why they liked them. Blame our education all you want, but I've seen the real story with my own eyes. Intel spinners can go to hell.
Table-ized A.I.
+ Eliminate Tenure???
Great idea! First, though, you will need to raise salaries across the board to compensate. Tenure currently compensates for the lower salaries in academe.
Otherwise what you'll do is drive those who are able to work outside of academe right out into the non-academic jobs, leaving few to teach at Universities. This will ultimately give them the same job security as they have in the tenure system, because no one will be educated in their fields to compete with them for jobs.
Jim
Of course, perhaps it is not ruled by mediocrity, because everyone is kind of expected to excel. But there is no reward for excelling more than others, and socially speaking, one receives punishment (through lack of recognition, ridicule by peers, pressure to not out-compete, etc...sound familiar?) for breaking the mould.
Mind you this is not only in schools, but in companies as well.
However, Japanese science and math education are ahead of the US. My 10th graders are learning math that I personally didn't learn until 11th grade in the States (Trig./Advanced math) and a lot of my peers didn't learn until 12th grade. These same 10th graders are doing biology that I was studying in 12th grade Bio.II in HS and Bio.I in University. They are also learning physics (and having calculus taught in those classes), which a.) wasn't integrated when I was in school (not to toot my own horn, but I was the only one in my class that figured that calculus and physics were completely related) and b.) wasn't even offered until 12th grade in my HS.
So, I'm not disagreeing with the parent post. Just giving another perspective on it. It seems the main problem in the US is the above mentioned "ruled by mediocrity". There is too much playing to the lowest common denominator rather than pushing everyone up to a (IMHO) reasonable level.
I hope that changes.
P.S. To give some perspective, I graduated from HS in Pennsylvania in 1996 and graduated university with a B.S. in Ecology/Marine Biology in Florida in 2000. I don't know well about the current US education system except that the FCATs (Florida's standardized test for 10th graders) seemed incredibly easy for students at that level. More insight would definitely be appreciated. :-)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
fireboy1919 insightfully said:
And to me, the problem is that there is not enough incentive for those who "can do it" to teach it. Teaching salaries (in the US) are not high. The hours are long, but not as long as some lines of work. However, there is a lot of shit in the education system that good teachers have to deal with and the low pay makes it not worth dealing with. Teachers not getting proper incentive and good teachers not getting the respect they deserve...these are the main part of the problem in my opinion.There needs to be more incentive for "those who can" to teach! There also needs to be some better standards to ensure that those who can't, and especially those who can't teach, don't teach.
Of course (disclaimer: saying this as a teacher), it takes a special type of person to teach what you know well. I had a lot of professors in University that could do their work very well, but couldn't teach worth a crap.
So, the main problem (to me) is finding someone who both knows his/her stuff, AND can teach that to others. These people when they are found need to be given incentives to teach (good pay, respect).
IMNSHO, it should be difficult to become a teacher, but the incentives should make that difficulty worth facing. Otherwise, the trend of mediocre teachers will continue.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Scientists are basically the same throughout the world. They are the original creaters of culture based on shared interest instead of nationalism.
Science will tend to follow production, product development, and engineering, and the shift away from the USA is already decades old.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, which is why it's no big deal to me, although it was nice to have the results available in English.
In the U.S a good engineer makes $100,000 a year. Somebody who works at Mcdonalds makes $15,000 a year.
In India a good engineer makes $40,000 a year. Somebody who works at the local noodle shop makes $1000 a year.
So if we had a similar wage differential in the U.S an engineer would make $600,000 a year. If engineers made that much I am positive that there would be a huge rush for people to be engineers. It all comes down to simple economics.