Slashdot Mirror
MA Governor Wants More New Tech
turnitover writes "Cryptically stating that Asia wants the U.S. to become 'the France of the 21st century,' Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney made a public call for more innovation in technology, reports eWEEK.com. He urged more investment and development and, yes, a move to OpenDocument, as reported previously on Slashdot." From the article: "Underlining the challenge, Romney said leaders of one technology firm in Massachusetts anticipated that 90 percent of its skilled labor would be in Asia in 10 years. He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia."
Yes, the US graduates fewer PhDs in math and physics. I'm trying to be one of them. But the quality of the US PhD programs are what brought me here (I'm not USian). You can graduate a million PhDs from a degree farm somewhere but if they haven't had the same level of education they aren't going to be as influential. I'm not saying that asian universities are bad, just that there needs to be a deeper insight into this than just raw numbers.
I suspect that one of the main reasons that this data could possibly be true is the substantial cost of Education here in the US. While one would argue that students come here to earn their advanced degrees, several of these are done on stipend while students must bear the cost of the undergrad education here.
Lets face it, education is a business FIRST AND FOREMOST here in the USA..
Make education possible for everyone at costs comparable to Asia/Europe/etc and you will have more PhDs.
Perhaps you should compare the base population of "greater Asia" to the base population of the US... then the figure would seem incredibly skewed towards the US.
"Cryptically stating that Asia wants the U.S. to become 'the France of the 21st century,"
Wouldn't a better analogy be, "the England of the 21st century". After all we do have troops in the same cities around the world (Baghdad, Kabul) as Britain at the turn of the 20th century. We did take the position of world power from the British. Much of our common law is based from British law. But hey, the sun never sets on the British Empire....
He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia."
Correct me if I am wrong, but since greater Asia has a population of 4 billion , as opposed to the US's 297 million , that is a pretty favourable ratio in favour of the US ( about 2.5 times as many graduates per capita ).
Even if he only means "Asia" as in "China and India and Japan", the US still has more graduates per capita.
USA has generally kept ahead by inventing stuff and that's why it'll probably stay ahead of Asia, the economies future isn't going to be reliant on writing some basic HTML code at minimum wage, it's going to be dependant on continuing to come up with great new ideas. Asia is generally looking to be a solutions provider for everything under the sun rather than making their own stuff. And they're renowned for making inventions slightly smaller and adding a clock. Anyway, good luck to them.
"Cryptically stating that Asia wants the U.S. to become 'the France of the 21st century"
It's only cryptic if you don't understand that France is a former world power that has been permanently eclipsed economically, technologically, culturally, and militarily, and it has an almost obsessive desire to act as if it is America's nemesis, complaining almost reflexively of most of America's moves on the international stage.
That's not to say that the French aren't nice people, nor that I wouldn't love to hang out on one of their topless beaches, nor watch Paris's nightly display of lights, but in the realpolitik world, France doesn't matter! Thus their desire for a strong, core European Union, which along with Germany, they hope to dominate, to unite Europe as a strong and meaningful entity on the global stage.
You will know that the US is screwed when it seeks to create a transnational government with Canada and Mexico.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
Science, math, and engineering education and professions are disrespected by the educational system (we'd rather fund our sports teams), the government (your scientific results don't support our politics), businesses (your work is critical to us but we can't pay you more than your overseas competition), and media (entertainers are cool, geeks drool).
I doubt this will change until it's too late.
Moderation in everything, including moderation.
These sound an awful lot like the kind of things they said after Sputnik went up in October 1957. Back then, politicians fanned those flames too. Mind you it got us to the Moon and made Neil Armstrong wish he'd stayed on the farm, but still the motivation behind it turned out to be a little overdone. The Soviets burned themselves up just trying to keep up with us technologically.
From eWeek: Underlining the challenge, Romney said leaders of one technology firm in Massachusetts anticipated that 90 percent of its skilled labor would be in Asia in 10 years.
Read: rather than hiring US programmers at a decent wage, we'd rather send those jobs overseas to slightly less-skilled and cheaper workers. I wonder which firm that was?
From eWeek: He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia.
Ok, I'll bite. Imagine how you can turn statistics to your advantage! Let's do a little math based on figures from the The Census 2000 Report. We'll take it as read that "Greater Asia" encompasses mainly India and China; as of 2000, there combined population is 2.3 billion. The US in 2000 tops out at roughly 281 million. Let's assume 60% of each group is capable of going through the motions to get a Ph. D. (I know it's not accurate or based on anything concrete; in Asia, it's probably closer to 25%).
Let's see:
- US: (4400 / (281m *
.6)) * 100) = .0026%
- Asia: (24900 / (2.3b *
.6)) * 100) = .0018%
Hardly the same. But then this is wholly unscientific (I have had to do stats in years). Still, it seems a bit premature to claim they are overwhelming us.Does that mean we can be complacent? No. Our school system in this country is still not functioning effectively and is certainly not turning out top-notch students like it used to. Too much touchy-feely, not enough 3R's. And money will not solve this problem; getting back to fundamentals will.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
No? You mean that the Ruling Class isn't flocking to the sciences? How many of Governor Romney's children has he convinced to make a future in science and technology?
Let me guess: his kids are being groomed for careers in law, finance, and government as befits their station in life and more realistic estimates of long-term prospects.
I wonder why he's not advocating more of the Great Unwashed go after those jobs in competition with his own ...
Oh, wait a minute!
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Damn it, Jim! He's a politician, not a mathematician!
As Barbie teaches us, "Math is hard." The other key lesson is that hard work is for the underclasses, not the ruling class. From this we learn why he wants more math and science graduates: so he doesn't have to do hard math for his own speeches.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
We really don't need any at all. Seriously: what good is an advanced degree when your job is to ask "Would you like fries with that?" This is the future of the US.
Furthermore, my position is backed by the earning potential of PhDs and other technical workers. These people would make more money by becoming plumbers or roofers. Obviously, US industry does not think that technical careers are worth very much; if there were really a shortage, the pay would be much higher.
Currently, there's supposedly a shortage of pharmacists in the US. Recent articles say that many pharmacy school grads are getting starting salaries of $80k. That's more than double what I got as an electrical engineering graduate in my first job. In the technical fields, employers have been crying "shortage!" for years, but there's no way you'll get an $80k starting salary right now.
I live in MA, and Romney has been one colossal pain in the ass.
The man is a calculating, cold, arrogant, mean, power-brokering son of a bitch.
Please help metamoderate.
Asia has over 5 times the population that the US does so I believe this leaves us fairly even: 4,400 * 5 = 22,000 ~ 24,000.
I guess the poster point was not that fundamentalist don't exist, but that there is 0 relation between them and the growing of the tech labor force.
Closet monsters don't fly airplanes into skyscrapers.
Except along the way he was accosted by a bum who asked him if he was running for President or not (I'm dead serious) and was nearly attacked on one of the subway platforms by a woman who was in the news for keeping about a hundred cats in her house (a fair number of them dead, and a bunch of the dead ones in several freezers.) MBTA and State Police took care of both problems.
Adding insult to injury, a reporter asked him how much the fare was, and he said "a buck". Except the MBTA has been $1.25 for over a year. The MBTA comissioner became enraged when reporters made something of it. "The governor can't be aware of everything". Except it was a MAJOR issue in the eastern end of the state- the rate hike affected commuter rail, bus, and subway customers.
It pretty much proved that not only did he not give a shit about issues that affected citizens in his state, and that he could barely be bothered to take the subway for one stop- he didn't even pay for the fare himself.
Please help metamoderate.
Boston was recently rated the most expensive city in the US primarily due to housing costs (see bugmenot if you don't want to register for the article). Rewinn is right that the overhead of running a small business is driving employment opportunities away. Maybe it all balances out since the cost of housing is driving potential employees away.
The further development of Asian (more specifically global) manufacturing is unstoppable. This is not a bad thing. America's response will (hopefully) be increased automation and higher quality (as in German automobiles). The great thing about Asia is cheap labor. So reduce labor as a factor and you can come out ahead. This is an idiotic numbers game. Pursuing a PhD in mathematics or science requires a certain constitution. Urging more Americans to consider such degrees is unlikely to produce a wealth of qualified candidates. And besides, a Harvard PhD will tell you that he's worth at least 10 PhDs from God-Knows-Where in Asia (this is a joke). This is the only credible solution presented by Mr. Romney (the OpenDocument initiative is interesting but it has nothing to do with innovation). And it is a very unconvincing one. Wouldn't it make more sense to concentrate on students with the DEMONSTRATED potential to succeed? The education gap (which is a POVERTY issue, not a racial issue) is obviously a detriment to free society. But come on: it has nothing to do with high tech. A vague improvment in the general intelligence of the public will not change drastically the ability of American research and design.
I find it most amusing that Mr. Romney praises Asians for being "hard working" and "ambitious" but does not encourage instilling those qualities in American youths. Increasing the salaries of educators (which should be done for ALL educators on general principles) based on their performance is a terribly uncomprehensive plan. Implement this and students will be demonstrably better at whatever metric is used to determine which teachers deserve raises. What a wonderfully superficial improvement! Until more children are motivated (by their parents and their community) to excel at school, nothing will change.
How can this be done? I dunno, I'm not a Governor =).
Just because they exist doesn't mean they aren't boogiemen. A boogieman is something you have an irrational, and unnecessary, fear of. I'd say terrorists fit that description for most Americans.
Sure terrorists do lots different of things, but the chance of them happening to you, or even anyone you know, is fairly remote. You are much more likely, in all probablity, to get into a car accident this year.
Should terrorists be stopped? Yes. Do they have to be mentioned in every political speach for the next 10 years? No. Did they have any real relevence in this speach? No. They were just being used for the knee-jerk fear the word evokes.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
You're right. Neither do closet monsters engage in continuous foreign military actions since WW2, topple regimes they don't like at the expense of millions of foreign lives, manipulate UN sanctions to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of foreign children, use obscure and long-dead definitions of enemy combatants to improson and torture for purely political ends, shell civilian populations from the safety of high altitude bombers and off-shore fleets, toss cruise missles into nations with no formal declaration of war the day before the leader's mistress testifies about a blue dress, or have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Pot, meet kettle.
They also don't park trucks full of explosives next to Oklahoma City buildings.
I probably wasn't taking enough time reading your post anyway, since I was in such a rush to rant.
You're right; western society (especially the USA) really *should* recognize the importance of scientists and engineers, but currently, it does not. I simply don't see this changing any time soon. Business is far too powerful here, and greed is all-consuming, so that businesses try to screw their employees as much as possible and keep all the profits for the owners or top execs. Other professions, such as doctors and lawyers, don't usually have this problem because in those fields, the practitioners also usually happen to own and run their own businesses. This is rarely the case with scientists and engineers: they usually work for a corporation.
I think this problem is more centered in the USA, too; I believe (but don't really have any proof to point to, maybe someone in other western countries can say something here) that in many other western countries, scientists and engineers are much more highly respected and treated better than they are here (such as in Germany).
You responded to my tongue-in-cheek trite response to your trite response, but completely ignored the substance of my post. I'm not surprised, because you did the same thing to the OP.
In any case, my odds of being "affected" by closet monsters is pretty high, too, since I have a two year old child. Oddly, I'm not afraid of either one.
Do you believe it is okay to use the fear of terrorism to coerce people into agreeing to or doing things that have dubious or no relation to terrorism?
The terrorists killing our soldiers in Iraq are affecting us as well. They're succeeding in swaying American popular support away from winning the war in Iraq -- not that I'm saying we should have gone there in the first place.
And if they were enemy soldiers this would be different how? That has absolutely nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with war. (We used to call those folks "partisans".) If the US was invaded, how do you think the occupying nation would refer to American citizen soldiers or foreign mercenaries?
BTW, regarding the sibling thread: You brought up the statistics, the onus is on you to cite the source.
Let me get this straight: an American fight pilot dropping a bomb is morally equivalent to a suicide bomber.
Is that really what you are saying?
Cause, stop me if I'm wrong here, if an suicide bomber had access to an F-16 I imagine he would do his best to kill as many people as possible, wherease the entire point of most of America's modern arsenal is to pinpoint the damage only where we want it to go. It doesn't turn dropping a 30,000 lb bomb into dropping a couple of lollipops, but it's not exactly the same as blowing yourself up at a wedding party on purpose either.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Mmmm Lets see. China Population: 1.1 Billion. India Population: 800 million. Together they don't make up all of Asia, but I digress. Together they are 1.9 billion people. The US has a population of 1/3 of a billion people (333 million, roughly). Thus, Asias population (roughly for the purposes of this exercise) is approximately 1.9 Billion / 0.333333333 billion or roughly 5.7 times as large as the population of the US. Now the US graduates 4400 PhD's per year. 4400 multiplied by 5.7 equals 25080. To be on par, Asia would have to graduate 25080 PhD's per year. So far they are graduating 24900, or 180 short of the proportional number to the US. There aren't enough jobs in the US for all the PhD's graduating now though. What you would have to do is: provide a climate where businesses invest in the US including research related jobs where PhD's would be most useful and 2. graduate more PhDs. Right now US banks/investors/industry is betting on China/India. It's been 35 years since they bet on the home team. Intel can't shut down US wafer/fab plants fast enough! The only part of his speech that made sense is for OpenOffice to have better screen reading capabilities for disabled people. (Microsoft is supported by 3rd party vendors which provide services to disabled people. OO.o needs it's own so sight-impaired people maintain their productivity. This is the next big push for OO.o).
I have yet to see someone proposing surveillance of all citizens and keeping the data for years (or similar drastic reduction of basic rights) to counter global warming.
Linux is not Windows
"the French sat around and waited to be attacked."
How was it that America entered the war again?
C.
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."
America was a part of the same treaties from WWI were we not?
We were part of the armistice that ended the war. But we weren't part an alliance with either the Allies or the Axis when WW2 broke out.
Were we not supposed to defend the same as Britan and France?
No, we were not. We were not part of any defensive agreement or alliance.
Just think we are making those same mistakes today. SDI? effective against small man deployed tactical nukes? how about bio agents poured into the water supply of a large city? I think not.
SDI is currently useless. It's beyond the scope of this discussion as to whether or not it should be researched more so that it wasn't useless. My two cents says that MAD worked quite well and we don't need to mess with that.
F-22? How many conventional aircraft can one defeat in a single sortie? I mean the cost is making us build MANY fewer than other nations will have in conventional, tried and trusted types. Will they stand up to the equivelent $ value of 80-90 era F-16s or MIGs? I think not. Not even if they are eventually perfected and combat ready, which is way behind schedule.
Umm??? I'm sorry but I'd disagree completely with you on this. The French stuck with "tried and true" designs and tactics -- look what it got them. As to whether or not the F-22 could stand up against an equal $ value of F-16s or MiGs? Most probably, yes it could. I recall a NATO simulation of the expected performance of various NATO types against the Su-37. The F-22 came out on top with an expected 12:1 kill ratio. It was followed by the Rafael (8:1), the Eurofighter (5:1), and the F-15 (0.8:1). Given that it is expected to perform that well against a modern fighter I would expect it to perform equally as well against 80s and 90s vintage technology.
That said, I'll leave it up to you to decide if investing billions of dollars into the F-22 when we are fighting terrorists on horseback is a good idea. Historically the United States has never fought a war without having air superiority -- which is the stated mission of the F-22. Despite that, at times it does feel like a nice big fat giveaway to the military-industrial complex.
The point is, the french were caught in a war they didnt plan for. And to be using that as a bludgeon to villify them is lame, and should have been played out a long damn time ago.
I wasn't vilifying them for anything. I was pointing out the reasons why many people (not just Americans) regard the French in this manner. And even if they didn't plan for the War (their own fault -- they had lots of warning) it doesn't excuse them for executing it so poorly when it finally arrived.
The time to have done something about the Nazis was when it was appearant that their "transport planes" and "airliners" were obviously made for the role of bomber and troop transports. We knew what they were up to then and did nothing, just like the french, british and almost any other nation you can name. It was well known that they were rearming and it was against the armistice treaty.
I don't think you can lay the blame for that on the United States though. We aren't the ones that ignored the warning signs across the border. We aren't the ones that backstabbed Czechoslovakia. We aren't the ones that let Poland down.
As for not invalidating your point, Um... Wasnt your point that France waited to enter the war until they were attacked?
No. France entered the war and then sat around and did nothing while Poland was crushed. If France didn't have any intention of fighting the Germans then they shouldn't have declared war on Germany. I would have had more respect for them as a neutral country that refused to get involved (like Belgium) then as somebody who makes an alliance and then does nothing while another member of that alliance is crushed. Picture the United States allowing the Soviet Union to roll over NATO and doing nothing about it but declaring war on a piece of paper and then not sending our troops to fight.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I think you also need to look at what happens to PhDs AFTER they graduate. Where do they work? Do they stay in the same country they studied in? I think THAT'S the real measure. The funny part is, a lot of PhDs from India and China are being used in those very countries. About the quality of education, you'd be surprised at how good some universities in Asia are - some of them are ranked higher than well known US ones. The real thing to think about is that the talent that is being produced is being re-cycled in the same country. Both India and China's economies are booming, all because of the simple fact that their currencies are weaker than the dollar and living expenses are less - that's what makes out-sourcing practical. I am from India and yes, there was a time when the big thing to do was to go to the US and work there. Not any more. In fact, now the trend is to go study in the US or Australia and then to COME BACK because you have a MUCH higher standard of living to look forward to.
You can quote percentages, numbers and figures about PhD graduates and PhD graduations as a ratio of the population, but you do need to take into account what happens after they graduate and where they go. I feel that is a statistic that would have more meaning to a particular country or continent.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.