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U.S. Science Gap Fictional?
James Cho writes "There are more science and engineering students than ever, says one Newsweek journalist. Inflated counts of Chinese and Indian students have created the myth of the U.S. science gap. While no gap exists yet, an exodus of retiring U.S. scientists could create one." From the article: "...a country's capacity for scientific and commercial innovation does not correlate directly with its number of scientists and engineers. Hard work, imagination and business practices also matter."
I don't think it's an issue of the number of scientists, but rather how many do something so useful as to significantly change our society for the better.
If the federal government wants to increase our scientific advancements, it would be in their best interest to offer prizes for such things as solar panel efficiency, new energy devices, spaceship design (easy way to get to Mars if we had to), cure for certain diseases, etc.
(I don't know if they currently do prizes or not. I haven't read up on it.)
By prizes, I mean maybe a tax-free cash payout, no personal income taxes for the person for life, etc. Prizes that would guarantee security for the person for life.
There is a comment in the article pointing out that Indian and Chinese engineering graduates do "only a 2- 3 year course similar to our associate degreess" in the UK for certain, when you go to school to study, say, electronic engineering, that's ALL you will study for your three years (well, it was 20 years ago) there was none of this majoring/minoring crap it was 9-5 EE (and maths, and labs) for three years. If the Chinese and Indians do the same, THATS why you really DO have a skills shortage. In our old style system, you had to have had a modicum of liberal arts before you went to school, not expecty to be taught it at the expense of your degree.
Far more interesting is the comment that prices are FINALLY going up in the market, as shortage of supply has its wonderful effect.
I suggest we FIGHT to restrict the supply of Engineers and scientists, and not whinge about there not being enough.
Steve
AI is far from "solved," given that nobody's built a robot that can beat the average five-year-old at walking across a room or a program that can equal one in conversation. (See the Loebner Prize Contest, which basically focuses on spawn of ELIZA.)
But some projects and resources seem promising. I'll refrain from plugging my own little project, but check out Hofstader's book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies," Stephen Pinker's book "How the Mind Works," and Sony's QRIO robot (unfortunately no longer in development). We're getting there. Looks like us Americans and the Japanese are leading the way. I'm on Kurzweil's side in his bet on AI's success.
By the way, why do all diagrams of AI systems look crazy? Maybe we should be focusing on narrower problems than a general-purpose AI -- and there have been successes in specialized tasks like face recognition.
" if an american engineer can do the work of 11 Indian engineers."
BLEEEEEPPP. Troll alert.
The universities love to talk about the "science gap" because they hope to tap into Washington's money faucet. Congress fell for the missile gap during the Cold War and the PhD-granting institutions figured out that they could use the same logic to get more cash. But the cash isn't spread out evenly. Tons of it goes to create new PhDs but little goes to employ them. That's why less than 5% of the PhDs get jobs in academia practicing their specialty. There just aren't that many jobs.
To get rid of the PhD gap, they should stop flushing newly minted PhDs out of the system. Create a sustainable system where 50-80% of the PhDs can use the knowledge they have. Too many have to go out and get a new career. It's just a rip off of the US taxpayer.
So whenever big science comes along talking about a shortage of funding, I laugh. They're terrible liars.
Exactly. Face it if you live in even a somewhat progressive Western industrial nation (like the U.S.) you can take a job in about whatever floats your boat and still eat 3 meals a day and have a roof over your head. If you want the best foods and the best four walls and roof around, bust your hump for money. If you adjust what you "need" (read "want") you are not likely to starve or die of exposure. You'll have a longer life and a better attitude doing something you love than going for the bucks. Currently, I hear that a bunch of students are being scared away from IT and being told that India, China, Fernando Poo, and a host of other sweatshop nations will be taking all the jobs from the US. I gotta call BS on that (and I ain't refering to a Bachelor of Science). People in the West (and especially in the US) have got to stop acting like sheep everytime a scare monger talking head pukes up statistics to grab viewers and readers. As James Brown says, "Do what you like, do what you wanna do..."
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, all deeply involved in technology but no degree for them. While not even close to their level i left college and joined the Navy. In 1972 I started working in tech. Did some systems programming. Did some hardware design and was deeply involved in a few very significant products. Put 2 kids through college, eventually got a BS an MS and an MBA at night cause I wanted to. Have anice house. Had a nice airplane. Lived in 3 countries. Retired froma major vendor after 33 years. Started a second career with a small "free software" company and love it. And I am no genius.
And I know some bright people do have degrees. rms for example
Point: While I would have been disappointed if my kids did not get degrees, I wouldn't confuse education with diplomas.
The only time you here about this 'lack' is when Business/Gov can't hire an Engineer/Scientist for near min. wage.
I worked in a research lab programming while getting a degree in the 80's and saw a large number of young scientist trying to get established. In the lab I worked in we had 5 postdocs, none of which got funding and all ended up leaving the field, most after a series of 2-5 year postdoc's. Not enough funding in the field. The only one of my general age group I know of who made some progress is my wife.
When I worked in a small engineering business there were always huge number of qualified applicant for new positions - we had our pick, so it was the best per $, sometimes getting experienced people for $35K. Sad.
Hard work, imagination and business practices also matter.
In my experience, many organisations are organized in such way that it is barely possible for scientists to run a project successfully to completion. The more complacent they are, the more dysfunctional they tend to be.
The reason is simple. To get a scientifict project (in fact any project) near its goalpost, you typically need to coordinate a number of elements in an intelligent manner: People, for you do need a certain critical mass of scientific knowledge to get a good team; space, in terms of laboratories and offices; equipment; engineering support; money; computer hardware and software; and so on. One missing element can be enough to ruin your day.
Now look at the typical "professionally" managed organisation and you will see that rather than coordinated, these elements tend to be fragmented, sometimes very highly fragemented, each with its own manager. Who often enough will fiercely defend his turf against any interference and takes care great to ensure that any inter-departemental coordination is only done at the highest possible level.
The theory of it usually is that the scientists need to be "supported" by taking the responsibility for budgets and computer and other circumstantial elements out of their hands, to leave them doing what they are best at, science. Scientists are supposed to be no good at administration. But in practice it only takes two breaths for these "supporting" departments to effectively take over control of the organisation, forcing the scientists to spend more of their time on fighting the system than on research.
It would actually be far more efficient to hire more scientists and to let them improvise things in their own sloppy way, than to hire managers and administrators who are supposed to be more efficient.
As several other posters mentioned, American students are becoming very worried about spending a lot of time in school and a lot of money pursuing a degree for which there will be a high supply and low demand. Doctors go into huge amounts of debt, but they know that the debt they incur now will more than pay for itself later. Same with lawyers...these two professions are immune to economic downturns, and we sure don't complain about a shortage of either!
Now consider a student who wants to do pure engineering or scientific research. PhD's just aren't drawing the same salaries or lifetime employment that they used to. Tenured professors are an exception, but corporate research labs (AT&T, IBM, Lockheed, etc.) would invest im employees for the long term and make sure they were able to continue producing research. Today, every employee, scientific or not, is interchangeable. If you don't want to work for $60K, someone else will. Add to this fact that there are some areas of the country whose housing prices and cost of living are way out of control (New York, California, Boston area, etc.) and they just happen to have the scientific jobs right in that area (pharmaceuticals, Silicon Valley, MIT, etc.) Another point to consider is that you're out of the workforce for an additional 4+ years. Traditional pensions which kept workers comfortable for life are gone, and you have to do it yourself with a 401K and such. If you don't start right when you're 21 and get your first job, you can miss out on huge amounts of money later on in life. This is part of the reason why PhD's demand higher salaries...some of them are starting their retirement savings at 30!
Ask yourself this: Would you be willing to watch your less-educated peers flip real estate or crawl their way up the MBA ladder, while you made comparatively less doing much more important work? For some, the answer is yes, and those are the people who should be in their chosen fields. I'm not a scientist, but I graduated with a scientific degree. I work in IT, and there's a definite difference between someone who took an MCSE course, and someone who takes the time to learn the systems they're working on inside and out. The second type of person would probably answer "yes" to this question, simply because they enjoy challenging work. Managers make more money, sure, but it is a totally different skill set. (If you think your boss isn't doing anything, look again. Good ones are constantly keeping their techies shielded from political battles so they can do their jobs.)
I also think the gap is made up by foriegn students, just an empirical observations by educators I know. Universities can't find enough good talent at home, but they still need to fill positions. Science in this country just isn't as important anymore, I guess.
One change that I'd like to see happen in general is a return to a stable workplace. Back in the day, it was unrealistic to switch jobs every few years and have to constantly worry about layoffs. A lot of technical people I know aren't buying houses or other things simply because they don't know whether their job will be yanked out from under them. If employers were forced to really think about their hiring as an investment, things would change for the better. The prosperity of the 50s and 60s was a result of a strong middle class with stable paychecks who could afford to buy things. Companies who hire someone with the intention of keeping them, giving them training, and putting them in places where they'll be productive will eventually see ROI. The other thing I'd like to change is the promotion structure in companies. Pure people management should not be the way to reward great technical people; it leads to ineffective management. Instead, identify your best leadership talent and technical talent, and compensate them on two parallel tracks. The more you produce, the better your compensation, in either track. That would be a fair way to go.
"There are more science and engineering students than ever, says one Newsweek journalist."
True Journalists don't make claims, they report facts. In this case, the journalist is real; he reports facts (he is one of the real journalists, at least in this case.) The NSF provides facts that prove that more scientists and engineers graduated in 2004 than ever before.
The real gap in the US is a different educational one. There are plenty of bright people, graduating and contributing, as the facts show. Empiral evidence, however, points us in the direction of concluding that there is a large contingent of US citizens who have no idea what to believe, cannot tell the difference between a fact and a claim, and ultimately get confused and just choose to believe what they want to, or have to to, to deal with the insecure feeling one gets when the people in control of their lives cannot be trusted.
I recently revised my theory on Bush. I do not believe he was behind the tainted election results. Those who fixed the election chose him because he falls into the latter category. He is willing to say "I have the authority to do it, or - it is true - or -it is a good idea - for the Bible/my advisors tell me so." Bush is not a puppeteer; he is the favorite puppet of the military industrial complex, American corporations, and those who would twist and manipulate the words of Christ and the Bible to facilitate their own (not very well) hidden agendas.
Sadly ironic
Chum the waters with enough bogus journalists and you can say whatever you want. The proverbial fourth part of the checks and balances system doesn't exist anymore, because people will think "that guy is just offering up his opinion
There is a lack of qualified journalists in the US, not scientists, and that is where the real problem lies.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
They always say that there are two things you don't talk about at work, religion and politics, because it always degenerates into an argument where both sides are utterly convinced that they're correct and usually end up doing little more than slinging mud. Productive conversation comes to nil very quickly.
I'd like to say that, outside of work, there is one thing you shouldn't bother talking about and that's work. Why? Let's profile it the same way we would profile religion or politics. There are two sides. There is one side that has it good (whether because they were born into it or they got lucky) and one side that does not have it good (whether because they were born into it or because they didn't get lucky). Let's get one thing straight. How hard you work has nothing to do with it. Zero, zilch. Let's get another thing straight. How smart you work has nothing to do with it. Zero, zilch. Plenty of people will claim that they made it to success through hard work and perserverence but that is simply not true. It is a correlation and causation disconnect. Those very same people could claim, with the same statistical accuracy, that they made it to success because the weather had been just right on the day they hit their promotion, or their hair was exactly 2.5 inches long, or because they had eaten turkey the night before. Let me reiterate: the only two factors that affect the separation of the two groups are birth and luck.
So now that the two groups are defined, let's look at how the conversation will inevitably go. This is the same way that employment conversations have gone on this board, and many others, and in many pubs, and around many lunch tables, for years.
Person A is the person who has it good. Person B is the person who does not.
Conversation 1:
Person B: "My job sucks."
Person A: "You're an incompetent fucktard who can't do anything right and doesn't concentrate on your job."
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 2:
Person A: "My job is great."
Person B: "Mine isn't."
Person A: "You're an incompetent fucktard who can't do anything right and doesn't concentrate on your job."
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 3:
Person B: "I'm not getting paid enough."
Person A: "You should be happy just to have a job! There are people starving in China!"
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 4:
Person A: "I just bought a new car!"
Person B: "I wish I could afford one."
Person A: "You should be happy just to have a job! There are people starving in China!"
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
And that's how it always goes. Why do we even bother anymore? Nothing ever gets resolved. Person A is always self-satisfied and, usually, doing nothing but trolling B. B is always frustrated and looking for that lucky break and wishes A would quit needling them, for just once, and offer some real advice.
Who wrote this script? It's getting old.
The government itself is not stealing your liberties. Their new programs are enabling criminals who will.
Not to mention a patent system that allows people to innovate without getting their @$$ sued off for the innovations they come up with. These patent holding companies are killing our innovativeness. All they do is come up with an idea, patent it, then wait for someone else to come up with the idea, do all the hard work of design and implementation, then they sue because "it was my idea first!".
It has been said that "Americans invent as the French paint, or the Italians sculpt." If we are to stay ahead in our technical prowess, we need to remove the chains of thought that hold our top engineers back.
There's a quote that I particularly like from Jane Jacobs in Death and Life of Great American Cities which reads: "Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must come from old buildings."
This holds true for nearly all innovations. We take steps advancing ourselves from the progressions made from our forefathers. We had to invent the airplane before we could invent the jet engine. The automobile begat airbags. If some SciFi writer of the 1930's had invented a fanciful (yet at that time impossible) design for some type of internally jet propelled engine, then sued the first person(s) to come actually come up with a working plan of that idea; we may be living in a different era today.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.