Slashdot Mirror
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.
The Americans have "faith based" science. What could go wrong?
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.
Last time I looked the US was the 1st on the list of scientific papers published by countries with more than 60% of the papers. The second position (United Kingdom IIRC) was really far from US in number of papers. It would be nice if not just one big expoend had the control of most scientific efforts, but many nations sharing this "privileged position".
I indeed believe US industry should invest more in research (as all other nations should do, always, no matter what). But it's worthy noting that other nations are growing and maturing too, US can't avoid that. Besides that, this is not a fight. The benefits achieved from researches aims all humanity (at least it should be that way), so it isn't important who is at the top of the list, but it is important to support studies and researches, both in academia and in industry.
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
Exactly! I picture our wealth of good lawyers as a gigantic tick (or other parasite, if you prefer) that suckles off the rest of society. We've let it grow, thinking that it was merely sucking out the bad stuff and keeping everything else in order (we were wrong, but whatever).
Now the tick is HUGE.. way bigger than the rest of us (still working with my metaphor here, so the rest of us includes everyone from Engineers to Artists.. basically the whole of the real economy; everyone that actually generates capital). As a result, we're practically dead. Supporting this beast for so long has taken too much out of us and workers overseas are now at an advantage.
Sounds like a pretty dire situation, right? WRONG! Once we're nearly dead the lawyers will see these juicy targets overseas and worm their way over to them leaving us to recover from our near fatal leaching. Once the lawyers are distracted we can make laws with which to control them and then wield them on the other countries until the end days! I'm telling you, this apparently crippling development is all but ensuring that America will be an economic powerhouse for centuries to come!
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.
I can't believe that the CEO of Intel is worried about the loss of US scientific positioning. He does everything possible to drive people OUT of the technical and engineering professions.
This is the guy who's company insists that you have college degrees and take a drug test before they will even consider you for a temp position working in any technicial position in his company.
Did I say temp? Goodness me, I meant perma-temp. Work for years as a 'contract' employee with no health insurance, job security, advancement, or benefits.
Intel sucks. Check out the FACEIntel website for more information. I spent a week at Intel ten years ago. I sure hope that I never have to go back there. Unless you are one of the top twenty people in the world at what you do, Intel is a total dead-end company. And if you are one of the top twenty people in the world in your speciality, why the hell would you want to work at Intel? It's a 'sixth sense' company; already dead but doesn't know it.
It's not even your general culture. It's your public education system, which sucks every imaginable mode of ass. It is a union-captured mediocrity-ruled Prussian-designed system absolutely intended to hammer the individual flat to the collective.
If you have a child in the USA, home-school them. Go hungry, rather than send them to government school.
- 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.
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!
> Last time I looked the US was the 1st on the list of scientific
> papers published by countries with more than 60% of the papers.
Then you must not have looked since about 1960. As of 2005, the US published only 33% of world science papers, significantly less than the EU (38%) and only half again more than Asia-Pacific (25%). source, more detail
What's interesting to note is that the EU's share of world publications has increased by almost 20% in the last 20 years (from 32%) and Asia's by almost 100%, but the USA's has fallen by almost 20% (from 40% to 33%).
In other words, the US has been losing its tech edge for at least the last 20 years.
+ 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
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.