Slashdot Mirror
Saving U.S. Science
beebo famulus writes "Twenty years from now, experts doubt that America will remain a dominant force in science as it was during the last century. The hand wringing has generated a couple of new ideas to deal with the dilemma. Specifically, one expert says that the federal government should create contests and prize awards for successful science ideas, while another advises that the National Science Foundation fund more graduate students and increase the amount of the fellowships."
... of experts who have not learned from history.
I was told the same thing back in the 80s. About how my generation was falling behind compared to the 60s and their great space race. How kids in Ethiopia were doing better in quantum physics than the average US Sophomore.
Well let me tell you something. While those nerds from the 60s went to the moon and got nothing out of it, my generation of nerds built the Web and Wireless and Palm-based computing so that we can download any type of porn to satisfy any type of fetish at any time, any where. BEAT THAT.
So I say to these experts to stop thinking about prizes and stupid contests. What they need to worry about is how to throw porn into any problem we may have and I'll damn well assure you that us good old U.S. of Fucking-A nerds will be able to solve it.
Can I get a witness?
"one expert says that the federal government should create contests and prize awards for successful science ideas, while another advises that the National Science Foundation fund more graduate students and increase the amount of the fellowships."
How did we not think of that! Throw more money at the problem, that always works
It doesn't take a damned expert to figure out what's wrong, ask any geek that's in high school or recently graduated. Our problem is cultural, there's such an anti-intellectual problem in schools and the rest of society, actively encourage exploration (you know, the heart of science) throughout the development of today's youth, and within one generation we'll be sorted.
It's not as complicated as many make it out to be, encourage today's youth to think for themselves and experiment, not conform.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
How about instead of using fairy tales and pseudoscience to explain to folks how the universe operates, we actually teach them the science.
I know, I know, giving people science instead of religious precepts is a wild and crazy idea but someone has to suggest it.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Handwringing, maybe?
It's taken decades to devolve the American science curriculum into little more than basic biology. That means that today's graduates who would be eligible for participation in these science fairs are already past the point of redemption. In fact, any high school student is already past that point as well since they don't have a strong enough background from elementary and middle school.
So what does that mean? It means that it will take at least another 10 years of good science teaching to bring the next generation of kids up to speed with the rest of the world.
We're in a mess so big and so deep and so tall, we can't clean it up, there's no way at all.
Before we go and create all these new science/engineering trainees, should we not first determine whether we need more than we are currently producing? Given the trend to outsource anything possible, is there a shortage of these people? Or, like the IT field, is there merely a shortage of cheap, pliable labor?
The national chemistry society (ACS) has been showing a downward trend in the number of employed chemists. Given things like this, why the %@18&# make more of them?
Oh. My. Science.
Chums up, let's do this!
Contests and things like that are nice incentives, but everything rests on the fundamentals.
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
Well, US voters elected twice (not just once, but twice!) a man that does not care about science, and has been trying to undermine some of the most prestigious US research centers if they disagree with his policies or analysis.
And this man is backed by (a) a group of people who want an end to big governement and (b) another group of people who believe an obscure semitic carpenter - turned - Savior - turned - deity is going to come back Real Soon Now, which will bring the end of the world as we know it and the judgement of the unbelievers.
So is this so surprising?
I know this sounds very trollish/flame-baitish, and it's also a caricature, but the fact is, Big Government is that what gave an edge to the USA since around 1940, and most people who go to a hall of worship on Sunday morning turn out to be not so great scientists (I know, I know, there are exceptions, blah, blah, blah). Actually, only 17% of them even know their sacred scriptures, according to a recent survey.
So, let me ask you again: is that so surprising? I think not. Another brilliant civilization rejected science and went into a profound decline: it was the Middle-Ages Moslem civilization. Think about that for a minute.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
>The hang wringing has generated a couple of new ideas to deal with the dilemma.
Don't wring your hang in public.
They'll arrest you.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
So, the state-run education system is failing and we're falling behind in science.
Recommended solutions?
*Even more* state-run education - more funding, prizes, competitions.
I'm waiting for the day someone will come along and say: wait a minute, maybe this SHOULDN'T be provided by central government. Maybe we should give people back the money we'd tax to pay for it and let them do it for themselves.
Of course, the reason you don't see this much is because if you say to the State: you don't need to provide this service now, the service stops for sure, but the tax reduction? *that doesn't happen*. So people cling on to whatever they can get out of the State, because they know if it's taken away, they only lose.
That america will retain the lead, and even improve it.
... algebra ... computational theory ... everything is disappearing from exact science curricula. This cannot be a good thing.
I realize America's science is not progressing at the rate academics would like. However, this is happening everywhere, and it's a LOT worse over here. Trust me, a LOT.
Lots of material is being dropped from the curriculum. Phd positions are not getting filled. And everything is made easier in name of "everybody being equal", everybody "needs" equal access to university (and somehow access does not mean "a chance to try" but actual graduation), and the only way to do that is dropping the level of education by a lot.
Math is being dropped like a stone in every subject. Numerical analysis
"Twenty years from now, experts doubt that America will remain a dominant force in science as it was during the last century."
We're already behind if this "beebo" person (presumably not American) can see twenty years into the future to know what experts will be saying. That's just fucking amazing.
"Twenty years from now, experts doubt that America will remain a dominant force in science [CC] as it was during the last century.
Maybe a good place to start would be with better writing. The sentence above incorrectly suggests that experts will, in 20 years, make such a prediction.
In any case, the US has never been able to produce the number of highly skilled graduates necessary to maintain its dominance in science. America's dominance in science is largely due easy immigration, an open society, and a high living standard in the US relative to other nations. It seems pretty clear that all of those factors are changing for the worse.
I don't see anything that can be done about it. If Americans aren't willing to maintain a high standard of living, a rational and secular society, and a meritocracy for the direct benefits that those policies bring, they aren't going to do it in order to attract foreign scientists either.
When I see what british professors accomplishments are, I wouldn't fear too much about the future of U.S. science :)
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
If I want to make scientific progress, then I have to do things the Linux way; build on other people's work, publish my own freely for all to share.
If I want to make commercial progress, then I have to do things the Windows way; sell everyone a copy and make a pile of $$$.
But you've got this Digital Millennium Copyright Act thing, which kind-of devalues scientific progress, in order that the commercial crew can make more $$$.
Perhaps if you rebalance it; encourage Bill Gates to put his money into Malaria research; you'll get somewhere.
I think the reason for less students pursuing science and engineering fields is largely due to offshoring and the importation of labor through H1B visa. Many students have the perception, which is not inaccurate, that their jobs will be given to H1B visas or just shipped overseas. Look at students pursing computer science and information technology degress: they come out of school and they don't get hired. I knew it would be a sad day when I saw a job fair in New York City for technology jobs in Ireland. I never thought I would have to leave my country to find work. My brother studied mechanical engineering and he did well academically yet no one would hire him except for 6.50 per hour machinist job. His anger and frustration was justifiable. The offering of prizes is nothing but shortsighted and completely fails to address the roots of the problem. Unless the prizes are ubiquitous enough to give every science graduate whom does well employment, than it is a poorly spent effort. It will take a fundamental attitude shift beginning with our president whom supports offshoring and H1B programs. Our president, our government, and our corporations are contributing to our decline in science and manufacturing. Gee, with all of this in the forefront, why would I want to go into science? Perhaps I am wrong, but the article's solution seems more typical of a politician. I think they know the real reason but would ultimately get burned if they should make the suggestion that it is government. After all, it is our senators and congressman that voted for tax incentives for labor importation and H1B visas.
One problem is that a pernicious idea has gripped academia which is that somehow the way corporations operate is categorically better for everything - including how to run a university. So, research, publishing, and even teaching are oriented towards a bottom line, giving them at best third-quarter foresight. The strength of an idea on its own merits independent of its profitability is seen as archaic and dysfunctional. Universities all want to be 'corporate', thinking this will somehow improve education. Paying attention to what professors say will help things seems to be falling from favor.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
one's choice of major. I had a hell of a time paying for college and taking on an engineering cirriculum, and to a certain extent I'm glad I did it, but it's not for everyone and the $24k(now down to about $22k a year and half after graduation) in loans sucks and is having a significant impact on when I go to graduate school. Furthermore, money(and an asshole for a father, but that is a different debate) prevented me from attending my top choice school. It was so frustrating to know that you were good enough to attend a certain, rather famous, institution but because you were born into a poor family you cannot go. Meanwhile, some random business student who fails half his classes gets the same amount of aid that I, an engineering student, received. Who is more important to the future of the United States? Ultimately, because of the shitty way I was treated I plan on leaving the US after I get my PhD out of them. The education is a priveledge for the rich mentality really pisses me off.
Monstar L
The Rendezvous Center in San Diego, CA is flying me out to give several presentations on using virtual globes (NOT Google Earth though) in the classroom. They are an organization working towards improving the sciences in primary schools in San Diego and Southern California.
Seems like a better way to encourage innovation is to reduce the fear of being curious. The copyright and patent laws coupled with the sue happy legal system we have makes folks afraid to experiment, or at least to share the results of those experiments. If we can't completely remove the copyright and patent laws, at least reduce them down to something resonable in today's society, to maybe 5 years or so after initial release of a product. If they haven't made money in that time, then give someone else a try... my .02
--cfd
Uh, no they didn't. In both elections, more people voted against him than for him, or at least thought they did. And many of those that voted for him wouldn't have if the media had been more honest with them and not repeatedly worked to cover up his lies.
Blaming the voters for Bush's election is like blaming them for "lacking the will" to win in Iraq.
But the two are not unrelated. If the people were more science/math/tech savvy it would be harder to pull the wool over their eyes. Which means that, at least in some circles, as you suggest, the decline in science is seen as a good thing.
--MarkusQ
Two factors contributed to the US's good position in scientific research during the last century:
1 -- The economic decline of Britain, especially the vast amount of intellectual property that Britain had to give to the US in exchange for resources to resist Hitler.
2 -- The rapid maturing and solidifying of the US commercial world, which created intense competition as the number of companies collapsed -- the result was a period during which very large entities had a very strong need to gain a competitive advantage.
Neither of these factors is with us any more. Britain (as a center of technological research that could then be passed on to the US cheaply) is long gone. The US commercial landscape has settled down and now has a much better supply of cheap labor (cheap labor competes with technological innovation to fulfil the same need). So, yes, I'd say we can expect a flattening-off of the rate of technological progress in the US. It doesn't mean there's a big educational disaster or anything.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
It has less to do with the amount of prizes and awards available, and more to do with how we live. The curriculum in public schools is devolving into a watered-down, bland concoction designed to make people feel good about themselves, while as a nation, we are no longer wowed by anything in the hard-scientific realm. Rampant consumerism is the final frontier now....We are in danger of being slaves to our own success.
We need a breakthrough that will capture the imagination of the public at large. (Evidence of life on other planets would be great) Either that, or a new great war effort to spur on innovation and discovery. I would prefer the former.
With a Christian nut & oil man in the Whitehouse, we're screwed. All the scientists should move to one state and then that one should secede from the country. http://home.comcast.net/~plutarch/PoliceState.html
As usual, these sort of articles keep on suggesting increasing the number of graduate students.
How about another suggestion? How about increasing the number of permanent positions instead of low-paying temporary positions? How about job security? How about flexibility e.g. allowing women to have a couple of years off to have a kid and then reenter academia? How about improving work conditions so that working yourself to exhaustion is not considered the norm? Work conditions for scientists are basically crap. Job security is crap. Pay is crap. The only good thing about being a scientist is well the ability to do science, which is nice. But people have got to eat, kids have to be fed and clothed you know, and sometimes we might want to actually spend time with said kids and not constantly worry about begging for money or finding a new position. Basically, with the job conditions for science, you have to really really really really love science otherwise it's just an exercise in masochism. With this why would many kids choose science for a career? In the past, how many kids chose being a monk and devoting themselves to a life of sacrifice, piety, poverty, starvation and interrupted sleep as you get up in the middle of night for prayers for the sake of God? In science today there is almost a monastic attitude in which this sort of thing is *expected* as part of the norm.
Basically with the work conditions and lack of job security for young scientists today, science is not a career, it is a *calling*. Something which you have to love so much you're willing to put up with very bad work conditions and a good chance of never finding a good permanent position.
Adding more graduate students will just make things worse. More competition for jobs -> even worse work conditions and job security.
Prizes help spur research towards specific, known, targeted goals. That's not a bad thing (ethical research is almost never a bad thing) but it's only a small part of the problem, and probably not the most important part.
So called "pie in the sky" research with no application in sight seems to be increasingly difficult to justify to those with the purse strings. If someone isn't solving a problem, defending it as worthwhile is difficult. From the article:
"Dangling prizes in front of innovators has benefits not found in the typical funding process. By offering a prize, government pays for success instead of rewarding a research proposal, as occurs with grants."
Research is not just success - in fact, it's not even mostly success. You can't budget just to pay for the successes, or no one will be able to afford to go after the prizes. Plus, failures can often teach as much or more than successes.
Fortunately, Kalil acknowledges that prizes are not all that's needed. Personally I am wary of ANY prizes being introduced since there is a temptation to be "budget minded" in the future by paring down to just the prizes, which sound good while being less effective in reality. Also, institutions might pressure researchers to head for goals that have a prize rather than pursuing something more interesting to the researcher.
Perhaps a good summary of recent problems can be found at the end of this ( http://www.ncseonline.org/Updates/cms.cfm?id=985 ) article:
"Optimism about the current proposal to double the NSF budget in ten years is tempered by the failure of recent legislation to double the NSF budget in five years. The National Science Authorization Act of 2002, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush, called for a doubling of the NSF budget from FY 2002 to FY 2007. The annual appropriations bills have fallen far short of the doubling path specified in the NSF Authorization Act. The FY 2007 budget request for NSF is nearly $4 billion below the level authorized in the last doubling initiative."
There has been some movement in the House: http://www.ncseonline.org/Updates/cms.cfm?id=1182 but now we will see what happens in reality. Apparently it is possible to sound good without actually putting the money into it, we'll hope that doesn't happen again. The recent shift in power in the House and Senate might be helpful - we will see.
I don't know if the US as a population is supportive of research though. I would be very interested in a survey which attempts to gauge the public's interest and support for general research funding - does anybody know of a good one?
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
USA was not dominant on the first half of the century.
.. actually the ONLY major american-born scientist I know from the last centyry are Robert Goddard and Richard Feynman.
Actually Adolf Hitler can be thanked for raising USA to "scientific domination"; Most jewish scientists fleed from central europe to USA because of nazis.
And some non-jewish german scientsts (like Werner von Braun) surrendered to USA when the war was ending.
Some european scientists why moved to USA between 1930 and 1945
Kurt gödel ( great mathematician )
Werner Von Braun ( main designed of V-2 ans Saturn V )
Albert Einstein( was visiting USA when hitler rose to power and because of that did not return to germany )
Paul Ärdös ( propably the most productive mathematician of all times, )
Stanislav Ulam, Polish, one of manhattan project scientists
Hans Bethe, nobel prize winner, manhattan project scientist
John Von Neumann, inventor the modern computer, manhattan project scientist
I am a computer scientist and faculty member at a Research 1 university.
As a few have said, IT IS THE CULTURE! I blame it on Anti-intellectual sentiment, pitiful teaching of math and science, and the fact that we don't have a big exploration goal.
I am not going to delve into anti-intellectual issue right now, but I would ask: What is the ratio of good scientists to evil scientists in movies?
In general, I have to say that we do a poor job in teaching math and science at all levels. There are many scapegoats here, but it's hard to imagine getting many good science teachers into schools without more pay and better environment. In the Universities, we have been importing scientists in many areas. As a culture, this is short sighted as it is unlikely to motivate US students into science. How are we to expect students in the University to be lured into science and math when they cannot relate to their professors and vice versa. Difficulties in communication and subtle racial/ethnic biases make it difficult for US students to see themselves as future professors. Students need role models.
The moon landings paid for themselves many times over in young scientists and engineers. We need some national goals that gives students a sense of purpose and appreciation. Why should I bust my hump for science when better paying, easier jobs exist? I could probably double my income in the private sector and work less, but I would lose my opportunity to work with fresh young students and help them see the beauties of learning new things.
More NSF grants will not solve the problem. Maybe if they are tied to developing domestic students into faculty--that could have a long term effect. The new Mars and moon efforts are good ideas, but the current administration doesn't have the credibility/vision of Kennedy to inspire America.
As you can tell, this is near and dear to my heart. I hope that we can do something with real effects. I do little things everyday, but I want to do more!
Japan, China, Britain?
Can you name MORE conformist societies than those? And yet, it's NOT holding them back, is it?
No, instead we need to develop the proper conformity, instead. Conforming to a non-ideal is going to be less than perfect. Instead of encouraging them to all be just like all the non-thinking losers, encourage a paradigm change. (I always wanted to say that. -sigh-)
You don't want them to be loose cannons, you want them to be free-thinkers that still conform to society's ideals. Being respectful to your elders does not prevent you from inventing the next sliced-bread. Quite the opposite, actually. The teamwork encouraged by that respect will provide the right atmosphere for thinking.
You cannot do your best thinking when you are worried that every co-worker will stab you in the back the first chance they get.
Teamwork is essential. No, we shouldn't be stamping out conformism. We should be redirecting it.
In the past, single-person breakthroughs were possible because the issues were relatively simple. Today, we have much more lofty goals in mind. Curing cancer, antigravity, etc etc... Not going to be the work of a single individual. We aren't studying the universe anymore, we're trying to control it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
How about this: teach the bloody scientific method in all schools?
I was never formally presented with it during my public school education, which I find shocking. The US system
is filled with mediocre teachers because of the low pay. I spent my school days bored out of my mind, until I went to
college, where even then I found the professors more interested in research than in teaching (and they certainly weren't
very good at it). All this was in an ivy league school, no less. We take children who love to learn (a child will almost drive you crazy
asking "why, why, why?" and bore the love of learning right the hell out of them. One college I toured had monitors halfway
back in the lecture halls so the students could see the teacher clearly at the blackboard. Totally pathetic. I think a system of
hypermedia and peer tutoring could reduce the number of teachers allowing for far fewer, much more talented, much better paid
teachers to oversee it all. I have a professor friend (much older) at a state school who earns a very good salary working about
10 hours a week. He's totally honest about being paid far too much for far too little; and he's got tenure.
We keep learning too abstract in the US. How about having young students work on real engineering projects where they
actually need trigonometry and statics & dynamics? Maybe have a dozen different projects they can participate on (a go-kart design
class, for example), where they can learn to work in groups and where the rubber will meet the road math-wise. I know
I would've taken to that approach like a fish to water. Of course, I'm an engineer, so I may be biased, but I believe everyone
should be trained as an engineer, since it really just boils down to solving problems with the available methods, which I
think is a useful skill for everyone to have, regardless of how good they are at it. I believe science will dominate humanity's future,
and that everyone who possibly can should go into it. Who knows which one of use will have that moment of revelation that
changes history forever? Even if it's in another country, innovation crosses borders soon enough.
The US had about a century's worth of head start, and we squandered it. Out-sourcing isn't about other country's stealing our
jobs, it's about why nations with much smaller degrees of wealth can produce graduates who can rival our best and brightest.
It's all on us: quit your whining, turn off the TV, and pick up a freakin' book. Given how our nation's been acting lately, our
losing our sole-superpower status is a good thing in my estimation.
Oh yeah, and get rid of the summer vacation thing. The agrarian society is over, so the number of kids working in the fields
is too small to penalize all the rest. We have too many farmers anyway, but that's the subject of another post...
Maxim
As others have said, the problem is with our elementary schools as well as high schools and colleges/universities. There is also the stupid idea that ANYTHING can be fixed by making some minor changes.
If you get into a big accident in your car, you KNOW the car will never be the same again, it just CAN'T be fixed properly. The American education system faces a similar situation.
Elementary schools are treated like a combination of one room schoolhouses where one teacher needs to instill a love of learning about every subject. It just doesn't work since no person loves Engish, History, Science, and Math to the point where they can really radiate an excitement for all of these subjects. The schools want/need to teach more subjects, but don't want to extend the school year and school day to the point where school is a full-time thing for students(with a bit more time off at different times of the year).
With dedicated math, science, english, and history teachers who love(or at least really enjoy) their subject, most students will tend to discover an interest in one or more of these subjects themselves. Without an interest in one or more subjects, schools are nothing more than a babysitting service while parents are out working.
It is unfortunate that most governments don't have leaders who understand that if something is seriously broken, doing a full replacement of the system as a whole is required. Here in the USA, what is needed is:
Shrink the summer vacation from 2-2.5 months down to 3 weeks, and to extend the school day to go from 8am to 4pm.
Get rid of elementary school and go to a system where different subjects have different teachers. To help younger students, the teachers can move from classroom to classroom instead of having the students go from room to room.
Focus on conceptual learning as well as memorization since understanding the why of things is generally more important in future problem solving than JUST being able to come up with the right answer.
Move school funding to being a part of income taxes, not just property taxes as well since those who rent instead of own tend not to pay into the school system.
If the above ideas are not enough, make it so you have 16 grades, not just 12. College should be where people go for EXTRA education, and should not be required to get most jobs. Now that the USA(and most of Europe for that matter) have shifted from blue collar/manufacturing jobs as the focus and have shifted to white collar educated jobs as the focus of the economy, that should be the focus for the minimum the standard public education system should have as a focus. If a public education system could be brought back to properly preparing students for most jobs, it would solve the problem.
I know quite a few graduates who didn't seek a career in academia because it isn't a sound and healthy career option. Personally, I can't think of a better career than being an academic, if they didn't have to pull long hours for poor wages (at least in Australia).
1.) say the word "science" in a newspost. ...
2.) get 100 people bashing old sciences (i.e. "religions") and foreign beliefs (i.e. "shamanic faiths")
3.) have someone like me post a classic "...profit" list like this.
4.)
5.) Profit!
Seriously though (and I believe myself a man of science), we don't have to put down everyone's personal beliefs every time someone says the word "science". We are starting to sound as thick-skulled as religious fundamentalists who put down scientists and foreign tribal/shamanic religions for "not believing in Jesus".
Can we ever accept that truth is really relative? The existence of the aether was as strongly believed by scientists 700 years ago as the existence of the atom is today. And all it takes is a few discoveries (followed by burnings and denials) to prove it entirely wrong.
A tribe in Africa might see a hawk fly overhead 2 hours before it rains every time it rains. Generations later, they still believe the "hawk brings rain", when scientists might argue that the hawk is indeed just fleeing from the rain coming in from the source of water (and source of the hawk's food) back to the hawk's nesting grounds on the other side of the village. But in the end, the village STILL can use the hawk to prepare themselves for rain in advanced. In the end its still two strong beliefs colliding. And in the end, does it really matter who is right and who is wrong?
For there is only one damned truth out there: your own. And there is only one person who needs to hear about it: you. Because in the end if you die and rot in a hole, or die and your consciousness carries on through the stars forever...it doesn't matter! Because the guy your arguing with will find himself in the same hole or astral-traveling through the same stars! Its like arguing over whether to use a magnum or colt to commit suicide with, and then dying of old age during the 15 year government funded study on which hurts less to get hit by.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
America is focal point of the world. Every young (and many not so young) expert in every part of the world dreams about coming to USA for virtually no other reason but to work with the cream of the crop, regardless that many of those best guys were not born in America (sorry guys, I know you are very proud of all the freedoms, power, wealth, novel culture, history, etc. but challenge is what draws the best minds, it is a kind of a process with positive feedback loop). So, research will continue to be funded and done there.
Elsewhere, kids may perhaps get better education en masse, but it doesn't make each and every one of them a genius. When a genius kid is born in USA, it will have perhaps more chance to make it to the top there then anywhere else.
What your government can do to enhance it: don't ever let research activities get outsourced! Make them state secret or something, so that smart people have to be imported, not given jobs somewhere abroad. If need be (companies refuse to suffer higher costs of research), start huge scientific "New Deal" projects to attract them. Make top notch brains scarce in other parts of the world (just please, don't murder those who won't relocate!), thus forcing companies back in. As these people mostly come from cultures (or at least, families) which hold education in high regard, they may also be a part of a push toward better education for their own children in the USA.
The hang wringing has generated a couple of new ideas to deal with the dilemma.
As apparently even basic spelling is difficult for editor and submitter alike!
I can just imagine the "ZOMG", kkthxbye?, IIRC, evelution, and neuclear phisics in the papers of the "scientits" of tomorrow....
This sounds weird I know, maybe even out of place, but I think more studies needs to be done with linking subjects together. I know it sounds funny, but when a student is given a hyper-text encoded text-book, they tend to like to click on links they want to find different articles and learn even more about different fields they would have otherwise ignored. Kind of a "wikipedia" format of learning.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
It is easier to get into business school than engineering. When they graduate many of the business students make way more than the engineers*. Engineering school is way harder than business school. Why would anyone in their right mind go into engineering?
The local industries complain bitterly that we don't graduate enough of the people they need and then they pay the grads, that they do get, crap wages. No bloody wonder we can't recruit students. The other problem is that the engineers are attracted to jobs in sales or management and don't end up doing engineering.
*The wages of business school grads are all over the map. Some of them do way better than the engineers and some of them do much worse. The engineers look at the best business school wages and wonder why they went into engineering.
Plus it would help if our culture placed more emphasis on the news and 'goings-on' of scientific research and less on celebrities and which nipple Paris Hilton exposed that week.
If you want more scientists, pay them more! Once an average scientist makes more than your typical lawyer, doctor or business executive, the social status of science will increase accordingly and a higher proportion of the most talented will pursuit a scientific career.
n ce
A good writeup on the situation (hooked on the topic of women in science) can be found here: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-scie
While culture has a lot to do with the current problems, there are other things that need to be looked at: There are hobbyists that practically have made themselves into scientists, dedicating much of their spare time at learning new things and trying new things. Imagine a guy with a hobby that can launch scientific payloads into the upper atmosphere? Yes, that is right, upper atmosphere. Imagine a group of kids that are building robots that can help deal with IED's?
Part of the problem is that such studies and people often only look at academia for the results and the answers. I can tell you that if you spend your money with people that WANT to solve problems and do things just because... well, you're going to get some good research. If there were tax cuts for commercial support of such things, it would create more research funding at all levels.
Okay, that sounds optimistic, but there are many hobbyists in North America that are not creating world class projects for the simple lack of funding. The iRobot robots that are being used by the military, police, etc. were basically designed by hobbyists. There is huge efforts by such people that go unnoticed, and uncounted in studies such as this one. Its sad.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Sure, our society de-values intellectual achievement vis-a-vis instant gratification and entertainment. However, as one who mentors secondary school students in engineering, I have seen first hand that those students who have even a slight inclination towards technology or science only take a little push to get them to pursue those interests.
My own daughter is a case in point. She has always been an artist and excelled in all her subjects, but until 8th grade had little interest in the physical world. That changed when she took a technology course with a very good instructor. He gives his classes challenges - mousetrap powered cars, egg drops, etc. and they go through what amounts to a full design cycle of problem definition, concept development, design, test and repeat, culmonating in a intra-class competition. He's pretty good at promoting these competitions and making it interesting for most students. Long story short, my daughter really got into her challenge: a CO2 powered crash sled with an egg cargo, and did pretty well in the competition. That, I think, was all it took to get her hooked.
When she got to high school, my daughter signed up for a robotics "club", kind of on a whim (but I'd bet her technology class experience helped her make the choice). Coincidentally (or maybe not), the club was led by the brother of the middle school teacher. The robotics club turned out to be a FIRST high school robotics team (Cybersonics, team 103, for those in the know), and consummed her life throughout her four years of high school.
She's now a sophomore in college, studying electrical and biomedical engineering. The biomedical part was another case of earlier inspiration - she took anatomy in high school and really liked it, too. She still paints for pleasure and gets A's in English, but knows her future is in biosensors, etc.
As I said, I mentor kids in engineering (through FIRST and team 103), and know that kids are not dumber now than when I was a kid - they just don't have things like the space race, displayed constantly and large in the media, to inspire them.
All it takes is a little push, and some of us are pushing instead of blaming foreigners and politicians.
Maybe we should ignore religious fundamentalists who are trying dictate their doctrine over science? You know, pay little heed to people who say the universe is 10,000 years old, or that evolution is false, or that stem cell research should be forbidden. It is a simplification to say in so few words, but it seems intuitive to me that assigning greater importance to bizarre ramblings of a few desert death cults from a thousand years ago over the tenants of science is a great way to quickly lose your “edge”.
Why bother.
...is the problem.
:)
Back In The Old Days (as they say in Cliché Magazine), you could make your own gunpowder and experiment with making your own model rocket engines and things like that. Doing these fun things as a kid leads to interest in later life for chemistry, electronics etc.
Now if you try and have some harmless fun you'd get into a whole bunch of trouble, because the powers that be can't distinguish between harmless experimenting and terrorism. Hell, in some parts of the states, you're not even allowed certain kinds of glassware, lest it be used for making drugs! How about nails? Should they be taken away lest I use them to nail people's heads?
And I suspect many people would be surprised by how many prominent figures in science have lead "interesting" childhoods.
The best scientists are the ones that did it as a child in their own time, and are inherently driven by their interest to find out more, make new discoveries, learn things. Not the people that did it as school because they couldn't think of anything else to do.
Westernised society has gone nanny/protectionist crazy, and you know what, it *will* suppress new talent.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
-
Many CS papers make motivational statements like, "The typical sensor network has...". That's complete BS. The authors have no accurate way of knowing what a "typical" sensor network is like. Because they've never seen a study that's sampled the world's sensor networks. They write papers that quietly confuse what's *really* typical with what the authors imagine would be typical. So there are two problems: (a) academic dishonesty in their writing, and (b) not facing up to the fact that they're guessing about the relevance of their paper, rather than actually having a well-grounded sense of relevance.
-
A nearly complete lack of statistical sensibility for simulations and performance characterizations. Hey computer science researchers: how do you know how many repetitions of a simulation to run before you draw your conclusions? Why don't you draw error bars around any numbers in your graphs that represent averaging over multiple repetitions? If you don't have good answers to these questions, then I think it's quite likely that your conclusions are neither reproducible nor sound.
-
Leaps of logic regarding models. I can't count (maybe because I'm rather dull
;- ) the number of ad hoc routing papers I've read that assume a circular-coverage radio model, and yet the papers make no mention of the fact that such a model is known to generally have have no connection to reality http://www.cs.virginia.edu/papers/p125-zhou.pdf. And yet the NSF keeps on funding this crap and not holding the researchers' feet to the fire. If there's peer review before these papers get into journals, it's an indication that even the reviewers don't care about or realize that the research described in such papers has no demonstrated connection to the real world. It's almost as though (gasp) computer science researchers have so much fun dreaming up protocols and programming simulations that they can't be bothered with the pesky work of checking their assumptions or validating their results.
Until we computer science systems researchers stop doing crap, wasted research, it doesn't matter how many papers we produce. Because what matters it the amount of good research we do.This is the real reason. (Safe for work, not goatse.cx or anything :))
No trees were harmed in the posting of this message. However, a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
Did you know subscribers can see articles in the future?
Boy, they sure aren't kidding about this. Evidence the blurb, "Twenty years from now, experts doubt that...
Why would any top student want to spend years of schooling only to graduate into a profession that only pays 65k to 85k avg for a senior position; when they could go into law, finance, medical and make 90k to start.
Sure there are talented and experienced engineers making over 100k, but they would have been better off crunching numbers for an investment firm and getting 7 figure bonuses.
This has nothing to do with slashing budgets. It has to do with the overall dumbing down of American school children.
The entire "No Child Left Behind" initiative would be more accurately called "Let's Weigh Down Our Brightest Kids With Some Fucking Morons".
It started when I was in school (80s) when people got their asses all in a twist about "tracking" students. If you're not familiar with that term, it basically means separating out the idiots and the trouble makers from the kids who actually have a chance. Of course, the slightly brighter parents of these sub-par offspring raised a huge stink about how it was damaging to their idiots to be segregated from the other children. The solution, of course, was to integrate them into all the classes. So, instead of a class full of bright kids doing something like dissecting frogs or building circuits you have 29 kids bored out of their fucking minds while the teacher tries relentlessly to impart Ohm's Law into some mouth-breathing fucktard.
My younger brother was in a "gifted and talented" class for all of 6 months (the entire length of the program) before somebody decided that he should be hobbled by other people's stupidity as well.
Also related to this entire fucking mess is the "why don't women do as well in science" question. The correct answer is "who gives a fuck", not "lets screw up the educational system to the point that NOBODY does well in science". Equality is not a fact of life, period. Some women are brilliant and excellent scientists, but they seem to be the exception in scientific fields. Respect them for their abilities, but don't turn all your resources towards teaching Sally _instead_ of Billy.
Things like that are why home schooled kids often seem so much brighter than public school ones these days. Not because of incapable public school teachers (although they exist), but more because of anti-educational policies that don't let them teach the ones who are willing and able to learn.
Harrison Bergeron was prophesy, and we're paying for it now.
America will still be a dominant force in the science of ID and Creationism in 20 years. The rest of those "sciences"... phew. Why should anyone need those?
" ... so that we can download any type of porn to satisfy any type of fetish at any time, any where. BEAT THAT. "
According to web usage statistics, they are.
Twenty years from now, experts doubt that America will remain a dominant force in science as it was during the last century.
/me cries. Do they actually enforce bad writing now?
That sentence tells me that in a score of years henceforth, beebo famulus's appointed "experts" will doubt if America will remain a dominant force within 100 years of the Earth's destruction.
Does anyone know who to write anymore?
Have you read my journal today?
The real problem is all the whackjobs who claim science doesn't exist, and we need to believe in magic and bad spirits which can be dispelled with a spraybottle filled with cooking oil and prayer.
When you have religious whackos trying to claim "intelligent design" is more valid than evolution, and that evolution is "just a theory"... and making sure they indoctrinate children into their stupidity... it's pretty hard to compete with countries who do not have religious whackjobs.
It's always saddened me that of all the freedoms granted to American citizens, most of us choose to practice the right to be stupid and ignorant.
"one expert says that the federal government should create contests and prize awards for successful science ideas" Apparently this "expert" has no idea what the research grant process is like.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Of course the USA is falling behind. Only a small fraction of the global population lives there. If the USA is dominant, this means a scary large portion of talent on this world is simply wasted. So, this just sounds like the post-WW2 period in which talent in other parts of the world was hampered, is coming to an end.
Trust me, I work for the government.
It is probably a fake. Note the letter is dated April 20, which could signify either the special day we all like smoke up or Hitler's birthday. Considering the latter, note the similarity between “Adam Hilliker” and “Adolf Hitler”. The most important indicator the Snopes write-up makes are the properly angled quotation marks that are probably not available on most typewriters.
Why bother.
the loss of dominance merely reflects the shift from the abnormal situation following the two world wars, and the long term abnormality of china not being a major world power
science dominance is a zero sum game - the "pie" of science (as measured say by the 1,000 most important papers per year) is so big; what we are fighting about is our share of that pie.
over the last few thousand years of history, most of the time china has been one of if not the dominant nation on the planet; the last hundred years or so have been abnormal. the return of china means that less of the pie is available to us
Traditinally, germany and other euro powers were as big as the us, again, the postware era , an abnormality, is fading, and again as the euros take more of the pie, there is less for us
Further, we have nations like singapore and korea that are climbing the development curve, which is asymptotic
there is NO lack of money for training scientitst in this country; there is a lack of long term job stability, there is the lure of parasites like hedge funds and comsmetic surgery draining people from science, there is an idiot president and congress earmarking money for stupid things, but these are all minor.
For instance, fusion "research" is nothing but welfare for physicsts; if the same money was put into basic material science research toward better solar power this country would be way better off
similarly, the emphasis on the space station is a national disaster; there is plenty of money, just not being spent well
of course, "plenty of money" is relative when your kid is dying of cancer; you might be forgiven for thinking we are not spending enough. but good researchers are not common (like good programmers/mythical man month) you just can't create good science with $$$ - you need long term comittements to careers so bright people will invest 20 or 30 years of their lifes
This is not obvious? The educational system has failed many an American, and it is going to get worse if you yankees can't fix it. I'm regularly amazed at the number of Americans that don't know that China has a coherent written history that goes back more than two hundred years (the actual number is approximately a thousand depending on how you define it.), or that prior to the "Age of Enlightenment" in Europe that the Arabs were the engineering and research power-house. Eye surgeons in Dubai during the Dark Ages? Most Americans don't believe it was possible. If I had a drachma for every American who believes that the Wright Brothers were the first ones to fly I could probably buy every one of their government officials. I will not even consider the number of your university students who sincerely believe that most of your space program was an elaborate fake.
If you want a decent educational system inside the boundaries of the United States of America, you need to do the following:
- Vote for education, not for morons who think that science can be 'edited to fit policy'.
- Teach your children a work ethic instead of a "give me" ethic.
- Get involved in the education of your children. Pay attention to it.
- Support the teaching of sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, electronics, etc) at all levels.
- Stop expecting your school system to raise your children for you. Be a parent.
- Encourage analysis and in-depth research instead of rote parroting of 'facts' in schools.
- Stop litigating to force teaching to the "lowest common denominator" in your education system. It is a fact of life that intelligence is variable. Look at your politicians.
Just an outside observer.
"experts", they say.
Both from the reports and experience, the anti-brain attitude of schools has to be dealt with first.
Can we create a fund whereby every time some kid gets beaten up for being a nerd, they can submit it to the federal government and receive $10,000?
"Go on. Punch me. Break my glasses. I'll get those reimbursed AND Ten Grand. We can do this 7 periods a day and 5 days a week if you like. I'll be a millionaire by the time I graduate. Awww. What'sa matter? I'm not a nerd anymore?"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I don't see how this is going to help. And even if we could, how would that help everyone who is not a PHD. All the articles of this type see to imply there is some kind of trickle down effect that we haven't see so far. Who benefits from all this exactly? Sorry, this is yet more propaganda from industry who wants to maintain an oversupply of highly skilled labor.
It happened to.... yes, that's right, Soviet Russia. And it may happen to us as well. We need to collect the world's geniuses and make it attractive to be an American scientist, not push them away by making it hard to get visas.
3. The United States and its citizens needs to place as much importance and admiration on the sciences, and those who persue knowledge in them, as they do on sports players, movie stars, and "socialites".
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Interesting that the only example that was raised by the article was funding by a private individual. Why should government take this on?
You mean that the US will keep on luring promising scientist away from Europe? The education in the US is lacking. When will those damn yankees realize that issues have to be dealt with at the source? And that doesn't mean invading countries for oil. There's so much poverty and segregation and still Baron Monkeyface insists on wars of terror and wars against drugs. But hey, follow the leader, right?
Venezuela has government handouts galore. No Nobel Prizes yet.
Sweden has a social safety net it's nearly impossible to fall through. And they have money. No huge science leadership there either.
The comment below about science-fiction being edged out by (and conflated with) fantasy, and the others about bright kids and non-conformists being beaten up, just about covers it. Culture, not money, is the answer.
I wonder how much science is hurt by the stricted immigration laws in America after 9/11?
And I am certain the new immegration laws does hurt US science, RIGHT NOW. I know of one bright scientific mind at my university here in Europe whom American Universities wanted badly, but still struggled to get through the immegration proces and getting a visa. The amount of burocracy was frankly staggering and only due to the Universities help (the American one) he succeded after 4 months to get a visa. And I know a lot mor ewho did not go the America just because they had to fact this monster more or less alone.
So YOU are to blame that today's America is busy jacking off instead of finding and inventing new and exciting means and ways to get your hands on pr0n.
Shame on you!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There, you asked for it.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Where? I need a post doc in about 3 months! Oh... they are in the USA... ummm.. never mind... bit of a scary place for outsiders to be living these days. (Seriously guys, you got to work on your PR, there's a few people I know who've crossed the USA off the places they'll consider moving to on the grounds that they feel they'll be treated poorly in immigration and when they are living there) .
... with persuing the one known road to success in Science. Education !
Let the nation laugh at Missouri (or whatever state it was) that wanted to define pi as 3 to make math easier for their students, at all those idiotic Bible-Belt states that insist upon trying to skew the curriculum with their religious dogma, at states that allow public funds to be spent on automobile racing tracks and professional sports stadiums while cutting funding for their school systems, at states that have year on year lowered the standard required to obtain a High School Diploma.
Go to Eastern Europe if you want to see who the US will competing with in Science in not 20 years but 5. Look at their curriculum, and the amazingly high level of general education they achieve with much less.
How about privatizing or moving to a Voucher system?
My Opinion:
All schools should be Semi-private with little or no goberment influence.
Vouchers are issued to Parents to choose the schools their kids go to.
Parents will choose schools based on academics, safety, discipline an success.
Grade schools should be rewarded on how well their students perform in middle school.
Middle schools should be rewarded on how well their students perform in High School.
High Schools should be rewarded on how well their students perform in college.
Colleges are rewarded by having the highest placement/employment rate of their graduates in the "real world".
Schools with teachers that CAN teach and have the highest achievement are rewarded with more students and more money. The better a schools students do "down the line" the bigger the $$ reward.
Each school has a vested interest in the success of it's students. As long as a student behaves, does the work, keeps the rules and stays out of trouble they have a right to stay in school.
Schools are required to provide classes, teachers and specialized teaching for students with learning difficulties or special needs.
Makes sense to me...
-sjamisoRC>
Wow. This is exactly the sort of emotionally charged irrational invective that (IMHO) is making it so hard to practice science in the US. Your heated response to two points (the claims that 1) more people voted against Bush than for him, and 2) even fewer would have voted for him had the media been more forthcoming/honest) contains...what? A rhetorical question about the color of the sky, a straw man about symmetry in election fraud, one explicit and two implicit ad hominim attacks, and absolutely nothing about the points you pretend to be responding to.
So let me show you how this whole logical argument thing is done:
The fact that, as you note, such incidents tend to be strongly correlated with Republican candidates winning is possibly a statistical fluke, unless you are wanting to suggest that there has been an organized effort on the part of the Republican party to subvert our democracy.
--MarkusQ
If your claims are correct, it sounds like one solution would be to dramatically reduce the debt that Americans accumulate in college. How do we do this? Well, we'd have to raise taxes on the nation as a whole, and redirect that wealth toward universities so that they could educate and perform research without charging (as much for) admission. We do some of it now, at both federal and state level. We could certainly do more.
End result: American degree holders graduate with much less debt, which seems like it would be good for everyone except MBNA.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
...give us free money, now! This is merely a budget-grab by an NGO. Happens all the time.
An environmental group says: "The earth is warming! We need a crash program to figure this out, right now! Trust us, we're a bunch of Ph.D., so we're way smart!".
Then an oil-industry consortium says: "We need more domestic oil and natural gas. We have to start drilling now, but we need to do it on land we don't own because we're all tapped out, and the economy is threatened. Trust us, all our expert geologists agree!"
A few lunches with a congressman, plus a campaign donation or two, and billions from the public treasury flow directly and indirectly into their hands.
This is called lobbying. Just because it's a group of "science educators" doing this doesn't mean they're not after personal gain (higher budgets, more grants, more status). They're just trying to get in on the gravy train that the U.S. Congress provides.
True, to an extent.
I certainly wouldn't call Kerry "Mr. Science" either.
On the other hand, I doubt that Kerry (with a Republican Congress fighting him every step of the way) could have done nearly as much damage to the Constitution, the budget, or to America in general as Bush managed with the help of the Rubber Stamp Congress. At the very least, when the two parties are split the keep each other from getting too wildly anti-science as part of a general question-everything-the-other-guy-does mentality.
--MarkusQ
Where? I need a post doc in about 3 months! Oh... they are in the USA... ummm.. never mind...
Grandparent is from the Netherlands. Guess your parent country must not have taught you reading comprehension...
But. .
>Hell, in some parts of the states, you're not even allowed certain kinds of glassware, lest it be used for making drugs!
Where I live, you can buy any kind of glassware you want, but it's all cash-only because that way they don't have to do any sort of record-keeping or reporting, since they "can't" verify identities on cash-only sales. I have no doubt that a law will be passed to close this loophole, but in the meantime, nobody involved is complaining.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I'm not going to argue over whether the total money spent on science is going up or down or whether it should go up or down.
Instead, I'd like to focus on productivity. If there's any field of endeavor that should have benefited from the last 20 years of information technology, it's science. All the new better tools for simulations, data analysis, experimental equipment, and knowledge sharing mean scientists of today are more productive. Just look at the strides made in genetic sequencing. What used to be a 10-year multibillion dollar "Manhattan Project" venture to sequence one animal's DNA is fast becoming something that an ordinary consumer (or cash-starved bio lab) could afford. I look at the research people can do these days with genetic knockouts, gene splicing, and magical laser-MRI-spectrometric instruments and realize how a scientist of today can do so much more science with a given unit of resource.
I wonder if the "OMG science budgets are dropping" is like saying "OMG the budget to buy desktop PCs is dropping." People don't need $7,000 to buy a PC ($10,000 if adjusted for inflation) -- we can now get a desktop machine that's state-of-art for 1/10 the price. I'm not saying that science follows Moore's Law (twice the bang from half the buck every couple of years), but I'd wager that we can now do a lot more science for the same dollars or the same amount of science for less dollars than in the past).
The point is that the inputs to research ($ in the fiscal plan) don't matter, it's the outputs that matter. Increases in productivity mean that we can do more science for less. Furthermore the same tools that let use do more science for less money also mean we can convert scientific knowledge into valuable engineered products.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
As long as americans will be culturally drawn to making money with the least amount of work, they will become lawyers or stock brokers or any of those parasitic occupations that merely moves money about without creating any wealth.
And as long as religion will have a chokehold on americans' brains, science does not stand a chance.
Better leave Science to atheist countries who have a healthy disdain for money, such as France, Russia or Germany...
So much so that I wanted to post a reply, but couldn't figure out how. Luckily there's this company in India I was able to call ....
Bark less. Wag more.
Does it really matter where great minds come from as long as we all are benefitting from portable porn. Better known as Po-Po.
Can I bum a sig?
Posting anon since I am a chemistry professor:
I've heard and read the same claims, with surprisingly slight variation: our basic sciences are declining, our mathemathics are declining, our relative number of college grads with science, engineering or applied science numbers trail the Europeans and the Asias. I've even seen all sorts of charts and stats which point to the collapse of the US higher education system due to funding, or lack of qualifed admissions, or underpayed professors leaving for industry (half of that statement at least being true, but this remains but my opinion), etc.
Unfortunatly for the Peanut Gallery, I saw all this 20 years ago when I first left industry to begin teaching at a respected private college. Today, I teach at a public university to classes consistantly at overflow. Certainly, there are some elements of self selection, but I cannot find meaningful differences in base knowledge between today's student and the student of 20 years ago, save perhaps a greater willingness to collaborate and share information than was ever the case in the competative pre-med/med school boom of the 80's. Rather than punish that inclination by calling it cheating, it's been on me and my fellow faculty to change the nature of traditional assessment to more team projects requiring research and application, and fewer formal exams - though those have a place, as well.
The issue of funding is a particular annoyance of mine, in that it is essentially a matter of perspective. 'Slashing the budget' is a familar outcry, when the truth would be a lot closer to, 'I asked for a 10% increase in funds for this fiscal year, but only got an 8% increase.' But saying you lost 20% of new funding due to budget slashing plays much better. This is not to say legitimate funding issues don't exist, especially in the historical arts, linguistics and native language perservation, but it's not in any sense dire - nor anywhere close.
I cannot close without touching on the semi-snide comments regarding government-funded research (specifically military research) and 'pharmalabs': those comments demonstrate nothing if not a willful ignorace of how research happens round the globe. Every scientist, engineering and researcher capable of furthering the field is also intelligent enough to be grasp the necessary pragmatic implications to his or her work.
ALL the recounts of the 2000 election showed Bush to be the winner in Florida. All of them. Every one.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Fair call. I stand corrected.
p habet) - that did my head in for sure. But no excuse for not reading the posting for sure.
Actually my parent country (the UK) taught me some mad stuff then I was growing up, go check up ITA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Al
Hey grandparent, what jobs are going? Living in the Netherlands, now that would be fine....
while another advises that the National Science Foundation fund more graduate students and increase the amount of the fellowships.
Here they go again.
They're fixated on the supply while ignoring demand. The demand for technical people has dropped because we don't make things here any more. The R&D is done where things are made. A country that doesn't make stuff, doesn't need a bunch of scientists and engineers. Heck, we aren't using the ones we've already got. Why do they think graduating a bunch more will help? For the scientists and engineers, that'll make things worse.
The problem isn't the supply of labor, it's the supply of jobs. But the only ideas we ever hear are to "fix the schools."
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
The biggest problems i believe to be in your country are not things that you can just toss some money at and expect everything to be fine, firstly you should probably ban creationist science and have it presented once a fortnight in a seperate class that has nothing to do with science, next you should probably watch the home schooling in your country and the perversion of the sciences within it (granted that a minority may be doing the right thing) but honestly with books in the system saying things like "Evolution is a concept that attempts to free man from God and his responsibility to his Creator." what do you expect other than that your leadership in the fields of science will be f**cked.
2 5776.100-homeschooling-special-preach-your-childre n-well.html
The following url is an article on the state of home schooling in your country.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg192
Natural wonder is what gives us good science, not legislated answers. The wonder can be theological -- or merely aesthetic -- but there is utterly no substitute for it. Wonder can involve naivete, but also offers us the best shot at correction.
I remember writing a fractal generator on an Atari 800 in the Australian outback when I was twelve (based on one of Scientific American's Mathematical Recreations articles: six hours to generate a 40x40 picture). Get kids appreciating this kind of beauty and you will get science for free; they'll line up to do it.
I think it's historically inarguable that religion is more fertile ground than skepticism for wonder: it has a deeper affinity for worth and value apart from which (as we see today) science is by and large reduced to business interests. Recognise the link between religions and wonder, and start to use it, instead of being spooked by fundies into adopting the same combatative ideas as they.
IIRC about 40% of the founding members of the Royal Academy were Puritans, despite being less than a few percent of the wider population; all through the 1700s and 1800s clerical pastimes very often included the natural sciences: their motivation was largely wonder (as an aspect of worship, no less: you can imagine the diligence of people like Mendel). The advances of the later 19th century would have been impossible without the vast body of observational data they generated. And the field, above all others, that they changed, was zoology.
Learn from history: Encourage wonder and you will get people asking questions, and finding answers for themselves. Legislate approved answers and you will be ignored (and very rightly so).
If cities would put half the effort into the schools as they do for building stadiums for wealthy team owners; we would be in a much better place.
Yesterday on the BBC world service I heard high school kids discussing science and why the UK sucked for science enrollments. Well, in Malaysia the kids were encouraged from early on to go into science ... so far so good ... probably easy enough. Then, in high school, quite a few kept on their science studies motivated by the opportunity to become doctors. There is the rub. In the lesser developed and more populated areas of the world, medicine is a potent motivator for science studies. Burgeoning populations have a huge unmet need for medical care and an almost infinite market for the science skills the students learn. Doctors are respected members of society so studying science is rewarded by social progress and money. Not everyone becomes doctors but the ones who do not carry their skills into the rest of society. The US benefits because we import the excess medical production from the rest of the world and avoid having to actually restructure society to produce our own.
So, what have we learned? If we want to produce scientists, produce an employment market in which science is rewarded. Actually PAY scientists for their value. Instead, what does the US do? We decry the absence of scientists being produced in the US and import scientists from other countries. That means that there is NEVER a shortage of scientific skills that might increase their price. Instead, science is paid at the same rate as anything else. What, exactly, is going to motivate people with that scehario?
Oh, maybe we should go to the moon. Good idea except somebody already did it (US!). The first trip to the moon produced integrated circuits and fueled the last 40 years of progress. This time, we will just buy our ICs from Asia and turn the conquest of the moon into the high tech equivalent of flipping burgers. Exactly what challenges are there in the moon? The first trip fueled advances in analog and then digital computing to calculate the trajectory. The capsule had to be light and reliable and smart so ICs were required. Rocketry and communications benefitted. This time the trip will simply be a matter of spending a fortune to buy existing technologies and apply them to an abstract goal of repeating our past success.
I can take an air conditioning vacuum pump, pieces of tungsten, a pinch of rare earth minerals, some glass, a bit of magnesium and some nickel wire and sheet metal and make a functional vacuum tube. No particular challenge there and I could build a radio. So what?
Our society has evolved to a point where we feel the need to turn our economic status into global advantage, mostly through military might. We did it with a lame-brained StarWars proposal and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We tried phenomenally smart munitions in the hope of a war without casualties. It worked once so let's try it again. Second time, not so much. Well, let's scale up our effort. Let's conquer the moon. Hurry up because the other economic powerhouse, China, is headed there too. Let's make sure we are there ready to weaponize our position and turn our economic power into military might.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of our planet is besieged with diseses resulting from poverty. The upper 2% of the world's population holds 50% of the world's wealth. We run around with tremendously expensive flyswatters trying to hold back the flies while the corpse of the planet feeds more maggots than we can imagine. It never occurs to us that if we helped the rest of the planet maybe we would have fewer flies to deal with. We focus on lawyers and MBAs who produce wealth primarily through agressive application of their knowlege. They work as hired guns for the 2% of the world who have the money to pay them. Somehow, nobody has the money to pay for eradicating malaria, cholera, and other diseases. We feed our population with frankenfoods and industrialized farms that spread disease to our own people because a few cents in the cost of food means a fortune at
it wasn't built in a day
;P
and it didn't crumble in one either
Bush says: let the wars and circuses continue
waspleg
Wow, this is a perspective on the american brain-drain I had never considered before. I have already quoted snippets of your post on other boards. Thank you for posting this!
I'm sure I'll get flamed for this, but ultimately it makes no difference to the nation whether we raise or import our scientists and engineers, as long as we get the benefit of their advances first. IMHO the idea that the U.S. was at some time a powerhouse of home-grown scientists and engineers is a myth. Across the board, in every discipline you will find immigrants as well as born-Americans at the heart of our success.
Does anyone really care where Einstein, Teller, or Fermi (for example) were born? No, what matters is that we figured out nuclear technology first. America is a nation of immigrants and we should try very hard to resist the impulse to close ourselves off to it. If the next bioengineering genius is French I want to make it very attractive and easy for him to immigrate to the U.S. rather than stay in France.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I don't remember exactly where I read this, but there was some study at the NIH or NSF or one of those agencies, and they found that the reason that US science is falling behind is simply because other countries are catching up. Basically, the US has dominated science in recent years not because it was so great, but because the amount of money spent in other countries was inadequate, and as a result, the best and brightest all flocked here. Now, other countries are starting to increase their science funding, and they're catching up. So according to the people who should know best, US science is fine, and the shift is really a result in what's been happening in other countries. As a US-born scientist, some small part of me wants to see us retain the lead, but for the most part I'm just glad that science is benefiting from this.
But the USA will always lead the way in the field of Creation Science.
Doing a science PhD is a long poorly paid process that few Americans are willing to suffer through anymore. Go to any big grad school web page and look at the PhD students in engineering, physics, math and chemistry say. You will find very few native born American students. Most students these days are looking for (or were directed to by their parents) careers where they expect they can make a lot of money -- business and law. Enrolment by men in medical schools is even way down as that is no longer seen as a sure-fire ticket to the good life.
I am an applied math professor in Canada and have done consulting with several large US engineering firms with large R&D groups. It is extremely rare to meet an American scientist in these groups especially under the age of forty or so. They are all PhD level with most of them earning degrees in the US and many intend to eventually go back to China, India or Europe. Many will not but if enough do the US is in real long term trouble as there will be little talent for scientific leadership in the private sector within 10-20 years.
I don't purport to have any inside knowledge of the situation, but I've found this man's opinions interesting in the past. http://washingtontimes.com/technology/20061110-103 654-9230r.htm/
As many have noted, the problem here is not a lack of PhD students, or even a lack of smart PhDs: it's a lack of sufficient opportunities for said PhDs to direct their passion for science towards useful ends. So let me offer a novel proposal: establish a governmental venture capital fund to distribute start up funds - via a juried contest - to newly minted PhDs with an interest in starting new companies. The U.S. graduates about 25,000 science and engineering PhDs each year; if 10% of these were granted $150,000 each, the cost of the program would be $375 million - a "minimal cost" according to the article. Moreover, this would be an investment; the granting program would receive 25%-50% ownership of the startup, so even if only 1/25 to 1/50 of the new companies succeeded at growing to a capitalization of $15 million (and the rest all failed completely) the program would break even, costing taxpayers nothing. Moreover, it would create jobs (via the growth of successful companies) while spurring innovation and increasing competition.
(Full disclosure: I'm finishing up a PhD at Harvard this year, and I'd love to have this kind of funding for myself. But consider this: of 15 PhD graduates in my department last year, 7 took professorships immediately, and 8 took postdocs; zero went to industry. Harvard prides itself on this sort of thing - and in fact there's a real stigma attached to leaving acadmia and "selling out" by going to industry - but if we're a nation of free-market ideals, shouldn't we encourage more of our best & brightest (present company excluded for the sake of modesty) to compete & innovate in the private sector, rather than spending careers as de facto government employees, working off federal grant money?)
Well, if Americans quit watching Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, major-league sports and other pointless wastes of time maybe their idle (not idol) brains could be put to better use. IMHO, I believe that competitions like FIRST should be broadcast on ABC, NBC, CBS during primetime and during sweeps week. And the prizes should be major...like full scholarships to major universities.
What makes the U.S.A. so special? Answer that, and you answer if we will be ahead in 20 years.
This also implies that being superior is a good thing - how about plain old fashioned equal? We've pretty successfully dorked up the Middle East because we thought we had a better way of doing things.
Frankly, we should just aim to not be stupid. Waaaaay to many people believe in Angles, think that evolution is crap, and more kids have implicit trust in sports 'heros' that scientists.
The GP reads like an example of what is wrong with the U.S. these days--policy based on ideology and freestanding logic with an unknown (unexpressed, maybe non-existant) connection to objective reality.
Maybe the private sector could do a better job, I don't know. More to the point I'm happy to say that I don't know until I see some rigorous studies that indicate one way or the other.
My knowledge of history is that the U.S. has had publically funded education since before 1900, and since then we have grown tremendously in power and wealth. Based on that my initial thoughts are that public education has not held us back and is likely to have been a contributing factor.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
By George Uzizo
You've spent five or six years in graduate school. You are finally a doctor, or at least a Ph.D. If you've done really well, you have been offered a position in a big shot professor's group. Your parents worked hard their whole life to give you the opportunities that got you to this point in time. Even though you didn't know what you were doing, you worked hard yourself, and you made it, by yourself. It feels good. It feels good to be wanted. You ask and your new boss (it feels good to say that!) tells you your new salary: $35,000 a year. It's like a kick in the nuts. It's somewhere else of course, in an expensive city (moving will be your life now), and you don't have any friends there. You will need a roommate just to rent an apartment. In four or six years, moving two or three times, you might have a shot at a crappy professorship, in a crappy town you don't want to live in, making a crappy 60k a year. Of people your age you are in the top 10 to 20 physicists in the world. You have a shot at changing that world for the better.
Possibility 2. You haven't been that successful in graduate school. (Or, you are a good, average scientist and you haven't been that lucky.) You're smart. You are a doctor after all. (No, not a real doctor, a PhD.) You have always been an overachiever and a winner. You adapt. You get excited about a "real" job and making a difference. After all, that's why you went into science. You search. Does science still happen in this country? You adapt. You search. No one really knows what to do with you. You search. You get a job! Your PhD helped, but not much. Most websites tell you it's worth about six months seniority. You end up doing logistics programming. Microsoft becomes your friend: scripts, macros, the works. You forget quantum physics. You're thankful; you can focus on your life; you made it out in time. You are making 80k a year. Even though your boss is two years younger than you, you look forward to being able to buy a new car with your newfound wealth.
Another path. There were others who majored in physics in college with you. You forgot about them. Maybe they were smarter, maybe not. What's smart? They were probably girls. They looked ahead and said fuck it. They went to law school. They had a lot of fun. It's easier when you're not working in a room with no windows. They're married now. They started at 150k two years ago doing patent law. They have their own office. (Respect.) They use their brains everyday. They have a career and a life. They didn't need to move around every two years so they have a great community of friends.
Time passes. It works out ok! As a professional, you grew tremendously in graduate school, even if you regressed socially. Yes, ten years of your life were miserable. Your ability to think and be creative saved you though. You have great, smart kids. Yes, you're not as well off as your neighbors. But you survived your dream. You really didn't know any better but to follow it anyway.
You tell your son to go to medical school.
Testify, brother!
While I agree with the main thrust of your statement (that the US still has plenty of innovative minds, and the so-called "experts" are ignoring history) I have to point out that the Internet and palmOS and all that other stuff was built on technology specifically developed for the space program. Well, and perfected in order to blow up the Soviet Union.
See, there's this thing called an integrated circuit.... all the great gee-whiz tech of the 21st century is either rooted in war science or space science. I like funding space science better.
See chapter vi.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
One word: immigration. The US still has far and away the best universities in the world. There are a lot of reasons for this, but probably the biggest one is that professors can make several times the money in the US as they can in the UK or in mainland Europe. Additionally, there is a great deal more investment capital for startups in the US, encouraging many of the brightest to start companies in the US. As a result, many of the best European researchers come to the US for their research, and stay here to start high-tech companies. This is not a new phenomenon; simply look at some of the most famous US scientists over the years to see how many of them are immigrants (such as Alexander Graham Bell and Albert Einstein).
Last I checked, something like 60% of the graduate students at these US universities are from other countries. A significant number of those stay after achieving their degrees. Even though the primary education system in the US falls short of many (most?) developed countries, the US has succeeded in attracting these foreigners, with many of them immigrating after achieving their degrees.
The biggest threat to this cycle? US foreign policy and immigration policy. With this "global war on terror", the US has made immigration far more difficult. At the same time, the image of the US has suffered tremendously as a result of US foreign policy, trade policy, environmental policy, and human rights policy. If the US stops this cycle of immigration as a result of its self-centered governmental policies, then, yes, the US very well may lose its edge in the global economy.
--Be human.
Because some students actually *want* to do research in an academic environment, i.e. without a boss or product and with complete flexibility in what they do. Believe it or not, money isn't everything to some people.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
The US systemis filled with mediocre teachers because of the low pay. I spent my school days bored out of my mind...
:).
Teachers are very well paid for what they do, which is to prevent most their students from ever discovering personal power. Every single one of your classmates was "bored out of [their] mind" too - you just managed to find a way to make something of yourself, in spite of the government's attempt to dumb you down too. Most of our peers aren't quite so fortunate, for whatever reason.
Read Gatto's essay The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, or his book The Underground History of American Education (available for free online at his website).
Or one of Holt's books - How Children Fail or How Children Learn, for example (incidentally, is that your picture on the schoolbus?
The government school experiment is a good example of a cascading system failure. The first teachers came from classical american education, where learning was the learner's responsibility. The first school reform was to transfer responsibility for educational institutions from "the public" to "the government", and it's been all downhill from there.
The government school is corrupt because it places all responsibility for learning on the teacher. The first generation of government school students did well because their teachers had been "properly educated" in the traditional American manner. But every generation of teachers has been a little bit worse than the one before, because the system Doesn't teach children that it's their responsibility to teach themselves whatever they want to learn.
Now, 150 years later, many new teachers are frickin idiots. I had a date some years back with a girl who'd just gotten her teaching certificate, and felt sorry for whoever ended up in her class.
All part of a grand scheme to depower 'the masses' (that is, 'us').
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
This is actually the big problem of today. Not that people wouldn't want to learn. Ok, a lot of people are simply too lazy to get off their butt and have no drive to actually find out how this or that works.
Today our problem is that you're more often than not not allowed to learn. You're not allowed to break that encryption, you're not allowed to disassemble this program, you're not allowed to have certain chemicals, you're not allowed to experiment and tinker with your tools.
Yes, some of those things are supposed to keep me safe from my own insanity of wanting to try how Xenontrioxide behaves when I hold it calmly in my hand. Hey, who are you to keep me safe from myself? I'm a firm supporter of Darwinism, if people are too stupid to live, good riddance! Let them experiment and let them find out for themselves! Some will perish, but that's how it has been for the better part of human existance.
Between the 15th and 18th century, some alchemists on their hunt for the philosopher's stone, have blown themselves and a good deal of their peers apart, but what findings they made in that process! Do you think we'd have even the smallest chance of developing anything close to it by today's craze with security and safety?
Exploration is not safe, but we all want total safety. We're so terribly afraid to even get hurt (let's not mention dying here) that it's a wonder we don't get scared shitless when someone lights a zippo, since you could maybe get burned.
This is what's keeping us behind today. The safety craze. Sure, if we lift certain requirements for tests, some unscrupulous corporations would immediately jump onto it and force their (often enough unskilled and uneducated) workforce into unnecessary risks because it's a few cents cheaper. Fine tuning is going to be important. But in privacy, for pete's sake, let me do what I want to do! If I blow myself up or if I trash my PC, my fault, my problem, my life, my death. Not yours.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Perhaps you didn't study those things in 9th grade because you were supposed to have spent your 6th, 7th, and 8th grade science classes learning the scientific method. That way you could understand the gist of where those facts came from, and if you so desired to not take them at face value, look up on your own how they derived them.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
There's no need to force it on people if they don't want it. And there's a lot of room for top scientists in the rest of the world.
The purpose of school is to keep the smart kids down.
Always has been (you think the 80s were bad?), always will be.
The solution is to shut the damn places down. End public education, because most of the public is ineducable.
Why...that's almost as bad as letting kids develop their own ideas and not conform!
How are you going to have a properly subjugated populace if they can make good money WITHOUT family or political connections? What you advocate would bring chaos to our class structure and rob thousands of wealthy people of a tiny percentage of their horde. What are you, some kind of communist?
The feudal system was good enough for my ancestors, and by god it's good enough for me!
Perhaps they could vote an astronaut "out the airlock" every week.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Well let me tell you something. While those nerds from the 60s went to the moon and got nothing out of it, my generation of nerds built the Web and Wireless and Palm-based computing so that we can download any type of porn to satisfy any type of fetish at any time, any where. BEAT THAT.
.com bubble. ;-)
You are confusing when events occured with who was behind those events. It was the nerds of the 40s and 50s who put people on the moon in the 60s. It was the nerds of the 60s and 70s who brought us the web, etc. The nerds of the 80s, we brought the world the
If scientists are critical to our future, and if science is unappealing, government should provide incentives. Subsidize college for scientific and engineering degrees, fund more basic research, etc. The problem, as usual, will be the lawyers, the ACLU will file suit because liberal arts majors are not getting subsidized. I love history, history is important, but you only need a small number of historians. However, a critical mass of scientists and engineers will make history. As was witnessed in the post-World War 2 era thanks to the GI Bill and government's subsidizing of college for any veteran. That generation was more inclined towards science and engineering, they were not afraid of hard work.
Apologists for exporting our standard-of-living have been repeating this mantra for years. I'm sorry to burst your education-is-the-answer bubble, but not everybody is going to get a PhD (or even Bachelor) in engineering. We will always have a large section of our society who, for whatever reason (aptitude or personal perference, poor choice, etc) will NOT go to college and will NOT become engineers. We still have to provide meaningful jobs that pay a living wage to these people. And retraining these folks into programers or network support (or whatever) means nothing if we are going to also export that job to India or import an H-1b to take it away in a few years.
Manufacturing jobs are typically not rock-bottom low-paying. They are often moderately-paying union jobs with health insurance, pensions, and fringe benefits. They are the kind of jobs that allowed the development of a broad-based lower-middle class that formed the backbone of American society in the 1900s. They are the kind of jobs that allow a guy to own a small house with a yard on an affordable mortgage with enough left over to have a decent standard of living.
I agree with Cluckshot's post that we are waging a trade war against our own citizens. We are exporting manufacturing blue collar jobs while importing cheap immigant labor to take the remaining blue collar jobs. And please don't repeat the racist lie that these are "jobs American's won't do". That is a lie. They will do them for decent pay, but not for peanuts. I have relatives who work in landscaping (cutting grass) in rural Missouri, which has almost no immigant labor. They make a modest but decent living. They wouldn't be able to make a living in Virginia (where I live), because it is teeming with cheap illegal immigrant labor that has pushed out the native workforce in those types of jobs. I have no doubt that native born americans would do that work in Virginia, if they weren't undercut by an illegal workforce that does not get paid benefits, often gets paid "under the table", and is not subject to labor law. We have placed our blue-collar citizens in an unregulated and unfettered global labor market that really is a "race to the bottom".
I am normally a free-trade libertarian, but I've come to realize that something is wrong. There is a famous quote attributed to Yogi Bera - it goes something like "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is". In theory, and all other things being equal, trade will benefit both parties and increase the wealth of both. But in practice, all other things are not equal. This is where the ivory-tower economics of free-trade break down. There are just too many uncontrolled variables that their theories do not take into account. The largest uncontrolled varible is the dissimilar reglatory environoments between the US and the east asian economies. In China, free labor unions are outlawed, so workers can not bargin for higher wages or benefits as they could in a regulated true market economy (yes, true markets are also minimally regulated to preserve competition and bargining). Environmental and work safety regulations are unenforced, if they exist at all. This means that all the economic theories about efficiency and trade are blown out of the water. The classic theory is that if another country can make a good more efficiently, then it is good to close down the old inefficient factory and apply the resources to more efficient endevours. But China does not make goods more cheaply because they are more efficient. They make goods more cheaply because they have artificially low costs - no labor rights, can pollute to high-heaven without enforcement, and have a rigged exchange rate. That's not free trade, that's rigged trade.
I've digressed, so going back to the orig
It's really really high, and in favor of good scientists. In the Bond movies, we have Q, but not just Q, he often has a whole team working with him. And 007 isn't out hunting science, he's out hunting evil, often with crazy science gadgets provided by Q. This pattern is common, the good guy has science helpers that give him the tools he needs to get the bad guy, who often happens to be a scientist, but he is almost always evil for some other reason. Any movie where aliens are the bad guy tends to have good scientists, with no bad scientists. "The Core" had lots of bad scientists, but they weren't evil(except for the one guy, sort of), it was the gubment that was evil. And on and on.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
3. The United States and its citizens needs to place as much importance and admiration on the sciences, and those who persue knowledge in them, as they do on sports players, movie stars, and "socialites"
That was the case in the 1950s. Baseball players made $6,000 to $10,000 per year. And they had to unionize to get that. The movie industry had the studio system, where actors were hired as employees under a deal which allowed them to be fired but not to quit and go to another studio. That lasted until 1954, and except for a very few performers, being a movie star didn't mean being rich. Musicians were doing even worse; the big money in music was being a band leader or a record company. People who inherited money but weren't good enough to make it themselves were derided as useless wasters and taxed at very high levels.
But physicists and electronics engineers were almost worshipped. They were the people who ended WWII. Understand what a big deal this was. Without radar, the Battle of Britain probably would have been lost. British Spitfires only had enough fuel for about twenty minutes of combat, so Fighter Command had to have accurate information about where the enemy bombers were, or the fighters would be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Without the atomic bomb, defeating Japan would have been a long, bloody slog. Invading and conquering Japan was expected to be at least as big a job as invading and conquering Europe had been; harder because the distances were longer, bloodier because the landing area was totally hostile, unlike France. Then, one day, the US dropped the Bomb. And suddenly it was all over. (Read Thank God for the Atomic Bomb, by Paul Fussell. Fussell today is a famous essayist, but in 1945, he was an infantryman who'd been in combat and was part of the army getting ready for the invasion of Japan.)
That's how we got Big Science. Big Science was invented to win WWII, and it paid off. Big time. It continued to pay off during the 1950s and 1960s, with jet aircraft, computers, rockets, nuclear power, antibiotics, color TV - things that affected daily life.
We've been there. It's over in the US. Today, in China, being an engineer means a much better life than most of the people around you. That's why they're on the way up and we're on the way down.
It's true - compare the pay of the people who studied science and engineering to those who went to business school. US students who are truly smart will go where the money is. The only way to get more kids to study science is to show that there's good money to be made from it.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
NSF Budget
t ml
2002 - 4.774 billion
2003 - ?
2004 - 5.118 billion
2005 - 5.641 billion
2006 - 5.666 billion
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2006/nsf.h
and others
You hear about spending cuts all the time. But the spending in programs that were "slashed" is always higher from year to year.
The phrase "spending was cut" is simply a lie. It may be true once for every 1000 times you hear it.
Science is not to be "dominated" or "forced". Prominence and excellence; use these words.
All rites reversed 2010
Many people just don't understand what science is, and I think this can be partially blamed on lower education.
These days it's quite a gamble to go to college at all. To pick a field where it takes a lot of extra work to get good grades just increases the ante. The payoff comes if you get a good job when you graduate.
If most of those who graduate don't get good jobs, the payoff is seen as worse. Thirty years ago I saw a study that claimed that college was of only marginal economic utility to those who went to it. (Sorry, this was a global estimate that included Sculpture majors with Electrical Engineering majors with Business School majors.) I know that since that time college has gotten more expensive. OTOH, it's quite plausible that without college one's chances have gotten worse.
Were I starting today, would I think college was a good investment of time, effort, and money? If I did would I be right?
Prizes seems like an attempt to get a cheap labor pool by trickery and fraud. If you want to have good students commit time, effort, and money, then show them that they can expect a decent payoff for their investment.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes, and that means that if I have a debt of $1000 I'll need $2000 a year to live on. Oh, wait, no it doesn't! I don't know where he gets this "Simple Banker's rule of thumb" But he's totally wrong. Even with $40,000 in debt you can live well above the poverty line on $30,000 a year- it's not like you have to pay it all off your first year out of college. Also, I think pretty much everything else he says in his post is completely wrong, stupid, or written by a crackhead.
For instance: If you grow up in the USA and get a CS type degree whether you use debt or income you have to pay for your degree by using DOMESTICALLY TAXED income that equals about $250,000 of taxes by the time you graduate from time of birth. I think he's trying to say that raising a child for the first 25 years of life costs the U.S. Government $250,000 dollars- a ridculous number, averaging over $10,000 a year. Where he's getting that number from seems to be the cost that PARENTS pay to raise their own children in the United States, not the cost paid by the U.S. Government. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the discussion... Of course U.S. parents spend more on their kids, they have the money to do so. If I'm making less than $10000 a year, I can't spend it all on my kids.
And, of course, he advocates trade barriers on foreign goods to 'save' the US economy. But how can you argue with eloquence like: If you push the classic educate etc and R&D solution you only accelerate the decline of the USA as all new products displace the old the trade goes to the location over seas displacing the domestic work. It is a suicide pill. Drink the cool aid folks if you doubt this one!
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
It looks to me as if this discussion is polarizing mainly along the lines of pro-establishment types saying "we need more money" and pro-free enterprise types saying we need more choice & competition.
Here's a thought. What if we took the top 20% of children out of public schools, and put them into private schools focused on teaching them as much as they desire about math, science, music, art, literature, history, etc., etc., etc.?
While the bottom 50% of any population might be well served by "no child left behind" styles of education, the best scientists and artists certainly aren't. And being around a bunch of geeks and freaks probably isn't doing anything positive for the self-esteem of the less accomplished students. So, let's separate the two groups.
If the current educational establishment is correct, and money is the big stumbling block, then teachers with 20% smaller classes ought to have an easier time getting results out of the remaining kids. Oh, wait, I can see it now. First, we'll be accused of segregation, because a nation of lawyers can't stand to see an opportunity for a class action lawsuit pass them by, and the parents of kids stuck in public school will have nothing to lose by participating. In the meantime, a decline in test scores will be blamed on the fact that we took all the smart kids away. Then, we'll be hit up for more money because of the huge burden of teaching less gifted kids, even though there are fewer kids in public schools than there used to be.
Okay, enough sarcasm for a bit.
I think the elephant in the room is an element of free enterprise that is opposed to paying teachers for performance, or pruning out bad teachers, or making educational systems more cost effective -- unions. In California, for instance, all teachers are required by law to donate a significant portion of their salary to the union, even if they aren't members.
Now, many unions have done quite a lot to benefit their members over the years. Teachers unions that make it impossible to fire under-performing teachers, for instance, provide a level of job security that is pretty much unmatched by any other field. Remember, though, that the unions exist to benefit their members, not to benefit society as a whole.
If you want to clean up government, including the educational system, start by making it possible to fire people for misconduct or ineptitude. Let each teacher choose whether they prefer to pay union dues or keep the money for themselves. I imagine there are good potential teachers out there who would prefer to make money for themselves rather than union bosses.
Back to my original point, the way for any country to make progress in science, math, or the arts is to allow everyone to learn as much as possible. That goes hand-in-hand with America's entrepreneurial attitude toward most things, but runs directly counter to the prevailing socialist attitude found in most school systems. We need to fix the disconnect if we hope to make any significant progress.
We need more competition at the grade and high school level. Our upper level institutions are still the best in the world, because of how they are allowed to compete, but our lower level educational system is a typical government monopoly in a field where none is needed. Allow competition, increase the level of our high schools, allow colleges to focus on college level education instead of completing things that people should learn in high school, and it will go a long way towards improving our status in education.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
There's a subtle difference between having NSF fund more graduate students at a higher stipend and having more graduate students in the country. I don't think we need more students (see biology in the 90s), we just need to encourage the better ones to stay in science.
How do you convince someone to get into scientific research? It doesn't pay well, no one outside of science trusts you and worst of all, no one is interested in your work. Some people are so put off by their (grossly incorrect) assumptions that they don't want to talk to you (try going to lobby your local politicians as a physicist some time).
I've given a few talks on this to local non-profits who have funded graduate fellowships. The extra money is nice, but not the most important thing. My current fellowship actually pays me a bit less than I would make without it (teaching), and the best fellowship I've had didn't pay as much as my old job: digging ditches. The most important aspect of fellowships is that there is someone outside of your department who is interested enough in your work to pay you to do it.
Most graduate students feel like we're frauds and failures, and the validation that comes from having someone outside our immediate fields appreciate our research is enough to keep us in research. It's the only thing that stops us all from getting MBAs or JDs.
I had the luck of growing up in a pilot state-funded gifted program in the 70s, starting in 3rd grade and running through 8th grade, at which point the funding got cut.
I spent those wonderful years in extra classes and workshops, learning programming (hooray for the Apple II+), hardware tinkering, electronics, physics. In 6th grade we were actually programming in assembly. I still credit much of that experience and knowledge with me being the successful design engineer I am today.
When funding got cut in 9th grade, however, I was shoved back into the grinder with all of the other mainstream kids, paced with the lowest common denominator. Boredom and aimlessness led to my grades tumbling out of sheer frustration and lack of any challenge or stimulation. I barely graduated without dropping out, with grades that couldn't get me in to a good college, and poor study habits. It was a long arduous fight to scrape my way up through cheap community college, into university, and eventually catch up to where I should have been naturally.
Had that gifted program not been cut, I likely could have been a shining star MIT PhD, doing truly important work. Now, I'm just a humble BSEE, working fine in industry, but with a lot of missed opportunity that I regret not having available.
Take a look at the homogenized textbooks and curriculums of your kids' public schools. Take a look at No Child Left Behind policies stripping out the gifted science and art program budgets away. That is the reason science in the USA is suffering.
It starts and ends with the kids.
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
The squeakiest, most xenophobic, anti-multicultural, NIMBY wheel gets the grease (and also the vote) (and the media attention).
nuff said
When I went to college in 1980 to get my B. Sc., most bright Americans went to further their education by going into law, business, or medicine. That's were the money is. Something like 90% of the Ph. D. given in the physical sciences went to people born outside of the US, most likily because they knew that their chances were lower in fields requiring personal connections, as they did not have them. If I were to do it all over again, I'd get a degree in finance, something that would get me a job for life. Most American realize that the plumber, carpenter, and auto mechanic has a better lifestyle than a Ph. D. in engineering, chemistry, physics or math. Some say that truck drivers have a better stream of work all through their careers. At least they don't go around chasing 2 year appointments well into their mid careers.
Because America gave away the family jewels:
1) Even after all they hype about studying science, math, enigneering, etc. in the 70's, 80's, and 90's American corporations, with the help of the US Government, are not offering Americans the high paying jobs any more. Instead they are low balling them offshore or hiring cheap foreign nationals on work visas.
2) Western higher ed has trained so many foreign nationals that critical mass has been reached overseas so foreign companies can now compete head to head with American corporations and foreign education institutions can now compete with Western institutions.
I mean, why would a kid in the US study science or engineering? The corporations are less likely to hire them than 30 years ago. The very institutions that they'd train in are helping his/her foreign competition.
So here we are. American corporations are losing dominance in the world and University professors are scared that without more students there will staffing reductions and they will personally become insignificant in their field. Well guess what, you guys created this bold new world of globalization and "free" trade.
[sarcasm]
Science has a liberal agenda anyways. Here's the GOP/Republican* philosophy towards education and the economy in general.
1) Become politically active and fight for tax breaks, which then reduce funding and scholarships for public supported schools.
2) Lobby against all forms of US funded science:
Science contradicts the Priesthood on global warming and stem cells anyways.
Besides, given a sufficient ignorance, ALL science is a miracle. (yes, I am inverting the Heinlein quote).
3) Pull your US blue chop stocks and shuffle all that cash to China and India funds. OK, leave a few bucks in Coca-Cola and McDonalds... the school you just shortchanged has been forced to invite fast food vendors into the cafeteria to make up for the lost funds. Mmmm revenue!
4) PROFIT!
5) For extra credit, move yourself to New Hampshire or Alaska USA where you won't have to pay any state taxes. Or, better still, become a citizen of Bermuda or some banana republic with very favorable tax laws for foreign nationals (you can always visit the US...)
[/sarcasm]
* = Not intentionally swiping all conservatives with this brush. SOME conservatives believe the US economy would be best served if it were "managed like a business". This would imply investing in education to the point of maximum return for the dollar. Somehow it doesn't make business sense to cut university funding, which drives up tuition and saddles students with lifetime debt.
Does anyone else here believe that MASSIVE Bush cuts in federal support for schools and students, is all just to make people choose between a lifetime of debt, and joining the military (when they were not otherwise leaning towards that decision)? Cutting education money is NOT about the budget -- after all we're borrowing PLENTY of billions from China to fund the war and education would be just a sliver of it.
The real problem is it's easier to adjust to the momentum in job migration, than it is to fight inertia and try to make the US competitive.
1. Stop suing schools for "endangering" students. Sign the little form that tells them you will not sue is little Suzie decides to drink the liquid nitrogen.
2. Stop suing people making chemistry sets with real chemicals. If parents don't explain that NaOH is not sugar, or tell them "While this is fun, its also dangerous, so do not eat or drink anything from, or around, the chemistry set.", then have the state punish the parents. Its their fault, not the fault of the company that made said set.
3. Stop lowering the bar in schools to fit with the lowest common denominator. Push kids to learn, not make friends. Trust me, they will still make friends without all the "Happy Happy Fun Times". Hell, if schools actually taught in schools anymore, asside from a little reading assignments, homework should be nigh unexistant. Send them out to play...
4. Have schools have longer classes, that actually have time to do experiments. Two hours in a science, or an english, or a history. Rotate classes during the week so that the students get all classes each week, not in each day.
5. Push your kids to learn ar home. Make it fun. Turn off the T.V. They make these things called 'books'. Encourage intrests. Take them out on hikes. Enroll them in the scouts.
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
Flint michigan is an example of tying your economy to high level globalist traders who set out to destroy the middle class and union labor, so they could all become billionaires instead of being content with being millionaires. You can't blame the unions for management decisions, they build what they are told to build. You can't blame the unions for "investors" only out for short term profits. Big corporations are "unionized", they just don't call it that, they run themselves as cartels. You can't blame a decline in the economy when they give tax breaks to offshore entire industries.
It's being done on purpose, dig it? And it's working. They don't want a middle class, they want only two classes of people, globally, masters and serfs, that is why they are so much in love with china, it's the same sort of society they want globally. One class of masters and controllers, then the vast bulk of the people who are forced into perpetual economic slavery and kept there at gunpoint. sure, through them a few bones now and then, but make sure your mercenaies stay well fed and mean to keep the population in check..
Now think about it, take a posit, if you as a high level globalist wanted to destroy that pesky middle class in some nation so you could become more powerful, how would you do it? Export as many jobs as you can then import as many illegal or barely legal lower paid workers as possible, to dilute the local labor pool? That is by far the easiest way to do that,stealthily, and it is exactly what the globalists have done.
Coincidence? I think not. Every single stinking high level governmental economic action is designed to stiff the middle class, so they can rip them off. Look at all the easy credit they just pushed on people, get them in hock past their eyeballs, then dump the dollar, kick in the ARM increases, smash the jobs. Real property then flows upstream into fewer and fewer hands-"legally". Try to save money-you can't, the federal reserve inflates it, forcing people to "invest" in the same GLOBAL corporations that are trashing their jobs, paying for their own demise. Try to get some reform in congress so that global corporations can't bribe in what they want? Where is it, not seeing it. Try to get in anything besides some D or R bribed off gangster in office-you can't, the same global corporations control the mass media, they decide what gets coverage and what doesn't, keeping that political gangster vendor lock in running. Try to even maintain the illusion of honest voting-you can't, they force blackbox voting on people and their own agencies say a paper trail is "too expensive". That is a BIG FAT CLUE.
None of this is accidental, it is being done on purpose as a way to basically enslave the population without them noticing it, to condition them to "accept their station in life".
Feudalism never went away, they just don't call it that any more. The US has been an occupied military-industrial dictatorship run by the globalists since they offed jack kennedy and got away with it. He got offed because he was going to smash the criminal federal reserve, which is at the height of the globalist power structure. As soon as he started taking steps to rein in those crooks, bang, he is no more.
They just have to go slow, step by step, kill off the middle class in one area, then switch to another, then another, because they know if they tried it the traditional way they would have a mass revolt, so they chose the plan b method, just do it slowly and call everything they do "legal".
The day Eisenhower stepped down he gave a speech, clearly delinating what he saw coming. Black and white, no wiggle room, he was done, an old man by then, been around, knew everything there needs to be known about politics, military, where money comes from and who pulls what puppet strings, etc. There was nothing else they could do to him so he dumped it out on the US people, as clear a warning and prediction as is possible to make. Everything he warned about has come to pass. Again, this is not a coincidence, and no amount of cheerleading or astroturfing will make it change. The billionaire globalists, the fedualists, are the problem, they are not the solution.
I do agree, though, we need to restore balance to the system, and that means either tarrifs, or subsidies. Both of these approaches have some pretty severe shortfalls. It's like tasering someone who's slashed their wrists to prevent them from committing suicide.
You're quite right that most of his post was nonsensical, but I think that he does have an important, if not exactly salient, point about U.S. and foreign competition.
The U.S. just can't compete based on price with a lot of countries in Asia. They have a huge labor pool (granted much of it is living in poverty and squalor) and are going to be able to underbid U.S. workers every single time. There's no way to compete with that, because it's not a level playing field.
In the U.S., if you run a factory, you have to follow OSHA regulations, you have strict maximums on work-day length, you may have to deal with unions, pay hefty taxes (OASDI, etc.), and you'll have to pay a competitive salary to your workers. Contrast this with some place in Asia. Not only is the "competitive salary" far lower, but there's virtually no safety regulation or worker's-protection laws to speak of, at least nothing like they are in the U.S., and if your employees start fussing about unions, you can just fire them all and hire a new batch from those practically beating down your front gate looking for work. That we have any industry at all left in the United States is pretty amazing. But it's a losing game. No matter now efficiently you run your factory here in the U.S., no matter how much you automate and how far you slash your workforce, eventually those advances in production are going to trickle over to the Asian factories, and they're going to apply them to their production lines, combine them with the cheap labor and lack of taxes and regulatory frameworks, and undercut you.
There are a few ways this can play out. Either all the countries in Asia can adopt U.S./Western-style regulations on industry -- highly unlikely, because the people running the show there are getting quite rich as it is, so why would they want to? Or the U.S. can regress to the situation that dominates in Asia in order to compete on price. That would entail a huge drop in our quality of life here; probably back to conditions that most people haven't seen since the early part of last century.
The third option is that we forcibly level the playing field. We apply import tariffs to goods made in countries with more lax laws and labor surpluses, in order to put it on a more equal footing with efficiently-run domestic operations. If we want to maintain our quality of life, we're going to have to take drastic steps to stop the hemorrhaging. Right now, we're financing our society's lifestyle on debt, and that's not sustainable.
We have one of the largest goods markets in the world, and we're letting firms sell to that market and destroy domestic industry, who don't have to play by the same rules, and in some cases, whose parent countries don't even allow U.S. firms the same access. There's no logic there, and I've seen no evidence that it's going to bring us to anything but ruin in the long run.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yes I have at one time or another contributed to NASA Research.
Wow. Thats very interesting. See, I just made up that part, I didn't think you actually had claimed it.
You're completely off your rocker, you do know that?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
No, money isn't everything, but it's nice to have some vacation time, reasonable working hours, and enough pay to actually raise a family instead of living in a ghetto.
One of the main complaints that I've heard is regarding DARPA's restructuring of research funding. This is from speeches from professors who I've known and worked with to the agencies that have funded their activities.
To be brief, DARPA has started on a research track that seeks periodic milestones, which is fine if you're in a production model, developing artifacts such as specific programs and specific products, but is terrible for fundamental research. Part of fundamental research is finding a new avenue and testing it out, and, sometimes, that avenue doesn't bear fruit in the short term. This is part of what fundamental research is about. You can research computational complexity in the long-term, but we probably won't have an answer to P ?= NP next year.
Also, the milestones introduce a certain level of uncertainty. You can't take a 6-month grant and a 2-year postdoc. You have to be able to guarantee that that postdoc can work for the full 2-years on the research that they are there to pursue. In short, this is not the way to run a laboratory, but it is the way that the current funding structure mandates that you run one. Extend this to consider tenure for professors!
As a PhD student, I can certainly say that more NSF fellowships would be great. If I get mine in the Spring, I'll be very happy. That is a significant pay raise that would make my life easier, and it also will take some financial burden off of my school and my department. Still, PhDs need jobs when we leave school. I see a number of my peers leaving academia for the world of high-finance, which is great for their pocketbooks, but not for science. I'm sure that, if there were more funding for fundamental science, that more PhDs would stay in science, rather than leaving for more certain futures in other fields.
I don't see the disconnect.
Science attempts to explain how things happen. Religion attempts to explain why. I am not a particularly religious person myself, but looking at it from the perspective of logic, I don't see anything inconsistent with someone being a scientist, believing that all processes in the world can be explained by testable, measurable, understandable forces and laws, and yet believing that there is a God who wrote all those laws according to some Grand Plan.
Or is this not what you're saying?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I think the ideas of contests and space exploration to ignite innovation is a good thing and pray they continue.
The problem now adays is that as government budgets are slashed, what is one of the first things they cut...technology and research and development. There justifcation, the private sector is doing well on this and can take up the slack. However, then you have to compete with how the business would works. Do they take risks and maybe innovate something new? Or do they just make minor changes, causing you to buy the next version of the same thing and start a cycle.
Eric B
ebresie@gmail.com
Why try to argue with someone who only sets up straw men that are totally unrepresentative of the actual truth?
Here's a hint: the only people who actually seriously believe that science might change because of an act of God, God will cure a disease simply because of prayer with no medicine involved, and everything in the Bible is absolute truth are religious zealots--not your average person who believes in God and goes to church on Sunday.
But go ahead and keep believing that theist == fundamentalist, because I'm sure it's more comforting to hold onto your own delusions...
Oh, and by the way: I'm more or less agnostic myself.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
and we should rely on hobbyists?
Imagine a group of kids that are building robots that can help deal with IED's?
Why, we can have them read your CAT scan too when you get brain cancer.
iRobot robots weren't designed by hobbyists---iRobot was founded by
a PhD robotics engineer and got millions of dollars in venture funding and
DARPA type of contracts, and had to pay lots of smart people money to do serious
things as part of their full time job.
Okay, that sounds optimistic, but there are many hobbyists in North America that are not creating world class projects for the simple lack of funding.
Maybe, but I know for a fact there are many professional researchers and engineers that are not creating world class projects for the simple lack of funding, and the chance that giving funding to one of those will probably work better than giving it to a hobbyist is lower bounded by 97%. Hobbyists often have delusions about what is 'world-class projects'.
Billionaire hobbyists (Elon Musk) may be useful in spending money on people to make their dreams work but the billionaire part of it is the critical element.
How many hobbyists are doing molecular biology cancer research that makes a serious difference?
I'm a sophomore in an American high school. I've been raised in an intellectual family from Eastern Europe, and found a talent in math at a young age, and programming a bit later. In middle school, I did well in math competitions (placing nationally) and got some recognition for it. However, my nerdy nature led to me being an outcast. This was exacerbated by entering high school, where the only thing that matters is sports. Also, there was no math team in the high school and hadn't been for years, although the middle school team had, when I was in 8th grade, taken first place in our half-state (eastern MA). I tried to organize one, but it did not work out, due to lack of interest. I may also point out that competitions had been the only source of my interest in math, with no regular competition, my interest waned. School did not provide any help; I am placed in math classes that I could teach, and to top it off, the method of teaching I've seen in every math and science class is simply memorizing unconnected facts and theorems. In science this is accompanied by arts-and-crafts labs that are supposed to teach us the background behind a concept but in fact, do not help understanding, as far as I can see. I actually make an effort to understand, but most people I know, even the brightest, just memorize.
My other interest, programming, has been quashed due to many of the same reasons. The only time I tried to take a computer class, it was absolutely horrific, in fact, despite the material being new to me, I learned just about nothing from the teacher, instead, I used the Internet in class to figure out what to do. Also, being into computers leads to an even worse social stigma. Finally, from what I have seen, an average programmer just gets uninteresting work, screwed over, or both. Now, like many others, due to many factors, have lost the interest to science and engineering I had from a young age. From what I can see, this is generally true across the school system. The smart high-schoolers are mostly planning to become business/economics majors, or the staples of law/medecine.
If I had not gotten started on math and programming before school got to me, the mundane problems worked on in class, the snail pace, and the overall disinterest among students would have turned me off fast.
Summarising: the main problems are social repression of intellectualism, lousy career opporitunities, and horrible education systems.
I encounter people everyday that begrudge my skills which I have developed through years of diligent effort. They think it is some terrible thing that I might be better than they are at several things, and they strenuously deny the truth to their own misfortune. This is the U.S.A. that I know and have experienced since entering the job market 8 years ago. In martial arts, I have been training for years and I consistently meet people that behave this way, until I knock them on their ass gently, but repeatedly. It is so ingrained in our culture, that equality is right and one person being better than another is wrong, that people repeatedly knocked on their ass (for which they have no way to excuse the outcome) will walk away to train with someone else and claim, "That guy doesn't play by the rules," or "That guy has an attitude," and so on. In other words, they go into completely irrational denial.
If equality were a desirable goal and if it existed, evolution would be completely unnecessary and we would all have the same genetic code. Equality is stagnation and death. Nature knows that equality is retarded and specialization exists to achieve survival advantages ("That's 'better' to you and me."), but our culture denies it and is founded on the phrase, "All men are created equal." Which people apparently interpret as, "All men are create equal, and equal they stay no matter what they do with their lives." The original intent was equality under the law (human rights). Fine, then look at the army as an example. Of necessity, high-ranking officers have more rights and are protected moreso than low-ranking soldiers. Why? Because they are not equal. There is a huge disparity between two such enlisted men in potential to achieve a positive outcome.
Our society is founded on a lie. We're not equal: not genetically, not economically, and not socially. The second lie is that there is something wrong with this idea. There isn't. It is the way of Nature. Is it any wonder that we have a strong current of people trying to overturn evolution in this nation? Sure, many of us educated folk look at this and laugh. "Of course, evolution exists. Look at all the evidence." But it around and tell those same educated folk that some people are better than others. OMG! THE SHITSTORM!
This attitude is what endangers our ability to remain great among all nations. Many of us can readily look at any other nation and claim, "We're the best!" but cannot look at each other and say without pause, "I am better" or "you are better." This makes being great quite difficult because you cannot jump from nothing to greatness in one go. You have to climb all the way up, one "better" at a time.
No Child Left Behind == Hold Back All Other Children Unless we can get every other society to institute an "Office of Handicapper General" we will have to loose the NCLB.
There are several, and they aren't what you think.
One is that more and more peoplel don't give a damn about anything but themselves, *and* they don't expect to have to work for anything. It should all be handed to them. I work with teenagers, and this attitude pervades the high schools. Not all of them have this attitude, but a huge, scary percentage do.
Then, there's the "us vs them" mentality of the poster I'm responding to. Evolution requires at least as big a leap of faith as intelligent design. You can rag on people all day long, or you can find ways to have meaningful dialogue. Far too many people today follow the "rag on" hlosophy. (Yes, I know. But I have an "us *and* them" philosophy, as much as possible. It's OK to disagree, now let's move on and solve this other problem, OK?)
Throw in the fact that an insane portion of today's youth are diagnosed with disorders purely for the convenience of the schools and parents, and given drugs when they need some mix of love and discipline, and you have a hugely demotivated, downright dysfunctional bomb waiting to explode.
The U.S. is a country, not a football team. Why is the goal "winning the superbowl (or world cup)", instead of doing the best the U.S. can do?
Remove the screening process of using GPA's to determin whether someone is elegable to work in the scientific field, we all know the most intelligent people are some of the most lazy people on the planet that choose to not do homework or make it to class. thus the 1.2 GPA and 4.0 test average
Except that Spiderman himself is a scientist. Last I heard, he did that freelance photography thing as a side gig to fund school.
Sci/Tech cannot be our comparative advantage anymore. Before it required solid infrastructure such as phones, freeways, and copy machines. However, with the web those don't matter as much anymore. It is cheaper to do research in lower-wage countries. The economics are just plain against sci/tech in the US.
Table-ized A.I.
Like most everything else America's technological lead really is more a question of economics than education. Only idiots think that our success has something to do with race. Of course our leading technologist, scientists, and thinkers used used to be foreigners. Now, however, they are Americans. When some other country learns that particular trick then the U.S. will have real problems.
The US already has a problem but now the problem is that it's hard for foreigners to either study or work in the US after 911 depending on what part of the world they come from. If they have an Arab sounding name they may not get in the US for instance, or if their name sound Latin or they look like they came from south of the border they may be accused of being an "illegal alien". Then there's the clampdown on what can be taught in science. Growing up as a kid I had those chemistry lab sets that could be bought in stores, try to find one and buy it now without ending up on some terrorist watch list. You may find when you try to board a plane that you're on the Do Not Fly list.
FalconShould there be a Law?
One of the first times I encountered this was long ago in a PolSci type lecture when the lecturer stated that since no one was capable of true obejctivity she didn't feel the need to try and be objective in representing her beliefs [in class]. I found that idea getting more and more acceptable in academic circles and then in general culture.
I think this really depends on the professor/teacher. One of my fav professors in college I had for philosophy and relgious classes and she was a terrific devil's advocate. Whatever philosophical or religious tradition she talked about she would sound like she was a follower of it. Even after someone took a few of her classes it was neigh impossible to know exactly what she believed or what her philosophy or religion was.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The days of Walter Cronkite are gone but the days of Edward R Murrow were gone a long tyme ago.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm currently studying a computer related major at a small East Coast liberal arts school. And I think that to fix our current situation, the United States must end the bias towards smart people in K-12 public education.
On that note, there's another problem. Everyone in this country needs to be "unique". I would never tell anyone this, I would never hold it over their head or make them feel bad, but I am more intelligent than a majority of the population.
I was so intelligent I did horribly in school. I was bored. You know that feeling you get when your parents put you in time out for say, 20 minutes as a small child? That's the feeling I had every minute of every day of every class until college.
Couple that with a case of "high functioning Asperger's syndrome" which really just means my peers envy you and therefor shunned me, limiting my social development.
With these two factors working against me, it's obvious why I did poorly in school.
Unfortunately, I was placed in a school for students with "behavior problems", which I now view as simply an attempt to stunt my educational growth. The friends I have from elementary school are at CMU, John Hopkins, Davidson, and other prestigious universities. I am not. We all are intelligent, but my poor math education lead me to abandon my dream of majoring in Computer Science. Instead I major in Information Science, a much less fulfilling major.
All this can be traced back to who I am. When other kids read Goosebumps, I read Steven King. When others played tetris online during free periods, I was probably looking up some obscure technical term on wikipedia and then working on formulating a project to learn about it now.
Quite frankly, the hard workers in our society are NOT at our top universities. The truly intelligent, the ones who can discuss Marx and Descartes as easily as Kernighan and Ritchie are like me, sitting at piddly liberal arts schools and state schools, slowly networking and waiting for they day they prove how wrong everyone was about them. As they climb the dean's list, joining
professional organizations, sitting on student government and CMU undergrads are sitting in their rooms trying to study for finals. Yeah I might not have a fancy degree when I graduate.
Instead I'll have experience in my field from working internships since freshman year, an array of contacts at various companies from the conferences I attended, my name in magizines like 2600 and my personal projects on sites like this one.
Who would YOU hire?
P.S. I suggest anyone reading this post to read the following books, which will truly enlighten you:
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
your choice and your consequences will rule.
That's exactly what it's about, choice and consepuences. If you can't save and invest a little money for retirement then you should live by your consequences. If an 18 year old were to save and invest just $2000 a year for 7 seven years, until the age of 25 at the age of 65 with 10% growth that nest egg will contain almost 1,000,000 dollars. You should also own free and clear your house. There's something really wrong if you couldn't live on that. Where I have a problem is though I believe Social Security should be at least partially privatized, ie allow people to invest some of the money paid into SS, is where it will leave those who have already paid into SS and are about to retire. There is one thing that can help keep SS solvent longer, the so called "illegal aliens". About 8 million of them pay and contribute $50 billion into Social Security even though they won't collect it. See what must people in the US don't know is that the IRS issued millions of "fake" SSNs, 8 million "illegals" were able to get these numbers and now pay income and social security taxes.
FalconShould there be a Law?
What's going to happen is that a lot of seniors will outsource themselves. Already plenty of places in Mexico catering to US retirees; you can have a decent standard of living for less than a thousand a month.
One good place to start learning is "Transitions Abroad" .
FalconShould there be a Law?
Tariffs are a compensation for the domestic tax burden. They equalize the taxes on the imported goods and services with those levied domestically. All that happens when you get rid of tariffs is that your tax system becomes a trade war against your own citizens.
No, if tariffs the US were reduced, by all countries, the US could export more thus creating more jobs. This was one of the reasons the WTO meeting in Geneva failed this summer, the First World or developed countries demanded the third world get rid of their tariffs and other trade barriers but they wouldn't get rid of thier own.
The USA collapse might seem fun for the rest of the world but it will be followed by anarchy and economic troubles such that nobody would want them. This catastrophe was courtesy of the "Free Traders." They built this disaster brick by brick. Never in their entire history have they made one prediction on the economy or promise that has been fulfilled. In fact the opposite happens every time they come up to bat. More trade and more prosperity is their promise. The rows of closed factories and import trucks tell how big a liars they are.
What "Free Traders"? There are very few real Freetraders, most so called freetraders want open access to other markets but they refuse to give up the government subsidies they collect. That is not free trade. Take NAFTA, US agribusinesses receive billions of dollars from the federal government. Then they are able to sale food is Mexico cheaper than Mexican farmers can grow food. So the US ends up with a bunch of "illegal aliens". Get rid of the billions of dollars in subsidies then taxes can be lowered and more Mexican farmers can stay on their farms.
The very existence of this discussion thread owes to the fact that the "Free Traders" are wrong.
Again what "Free Traders"? Real ones or fake ones?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Just to clarify, I do NOT think this would be easy, solve all the world's problems, or is something that should be attempted now. Financial infrastructure for transfers, bill collecting, etc would need to be strengthened. Groups of investors looking to do the same thing would be needed to spread the risk around. There would be costs of translators to broker the deals, investigators to make sure purchased inventory actually exists, etc. Of course, all of these things would mean jobs for those with advanced degrees.
Yes and no, it's both easy and hard to solve the world's problems. It'd be easy if the hard part is gotten rid of, that being big business and the government it controls. For instance you heard about all those "illegal aliens", most of them Mexicans, in the US? Blame it on NAFTA and the billions of dollars in subsidies the US government gives to big agribusinesses. Because of those subsidies US agribusiness can sale corn and other foods cheaper than Mexican farmers can grow it, so many of them are being driven off of their farms. Some come north while others head to the cities thus driving those already in Mexican cities north. By ending farm subsidies Mexican farmers would be able to stay on their farms. The same thing in India. Currently the suicide rate for Indian farmers is rather high as they just can't compete with US farmers who receive subsidies. That was a sticking point and the reason the Indian rep walked out of the WTO meeting in Geneva this past summer, the EU would not even talk about reducing the subsidies it pays farmers there and though the US offered to reduce them some it wasn't enough. Many blame all this on freetrade but it's not really freetrade, if it were truely freetrade then there would be no subsidies.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Japan is basically a prototype of America - it is very good at taking other people's culture and technology and modifying it to fit into their society. The only difference is the desire for racial purity
Ah but Japan isn't really racially pure. Those who are considered Japanese today aren't really anymore native Japanese than the descendents of Europeans who settled in the New World, the Americas. The predominate Japanese of today did much the same to the original inhabitants of the Japanese islands, the Ainu amoung them as the European settlers did to the American Indians.
FalconShould there be a Law?
While some of them may or may not be part of the al-Qieda Navy, pirates still exist. Many can be found in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea between Africa and Australia. News googling "Indian Ocean" pirates returns 19 news items such as this one about shipping in the Malacca Straits. While piracy there doesn't hurt the US much, it can hurt India, China, and Japan a lot, it still exists. A strategic attack can cause a lot of harm to the US, say for instance if an oil tanker were attacked and sunk in the straits it could impact the whole world.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Ah but some Chechnyans are Muslims and I wouldn't be supprised if some were also al Qaida. Remember what happened in the school in Beslan, Russia? Or how about Russia's (Soviet Union's) "Vietnam", Afghanistan? Where do you think al Qaida started, in Afghanistan, with the mujahadeen fighting the Soviets. By the way, back then the US supported them just as it supported Saddam then too.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Um, I apologize for not putting a "" tag at the end of my post. Really, it should have been pretty obvious that I was bashing Bush and the fact that he's totally out of touch with regular Americans.
I don't like and bash Bush myself. It's not just "regular Americans" that Bush is out of touch with, he's out of touch with reality. You know, I'm still waiting to see those stockpiles of WMDs Saddam had. Not that I was against removing him from office, I was all for removing him after the first Gulf War. Bush Sr should of went right into Baghdad instead of stopping on the Kuwaiti border. Bush Jr should of just told the truth for invading Iraq instead of lying about WMDs or that Saddam posed an imminent threat invoking mushroom clouds.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Per capita Sweden has about the most Nobel laureates!
o untry
1 United States 160
2 United Kingdom 110
3 Germany 94
4 France 54
5 Sweden 27
6 Switzerland 25
7 USSR and Russia 21
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_by_c
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
The problem was that we never had a good reason to remove Saddam at all, even in the first Gulf War. Yeah, he was a tinpot dictator and mistreated his people, but it's not our job to "liberate" everyone from their crappy governments,
Actually I agree. We shouldn't even of been involved in the first Gulf War. But then again we shouldn't been supporting Saddam through the 1980s, it was only after the Kuwaiti invasion that US support for Saddam was ended. Before then he could use all the chemical weapons he wanted without the US doing anything about it. After it was scientifically confirmed chemical weapons had been used on Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and others Saddam didn't like Bush Sr still wouldn't end the support. In 1988-89 congress was debating on whether to use a trade embargoe against Iraq, but it was nothing like the embargoe through the '90s, instead it was a ban on military equipment and such. When Bush Sr appeared before congress during the debate, he told congress it would hurt US trade.
or else most of our military would be in Africa full-time.
The conflicts, fighting, in Africa are in part caused by the west, industrialized nations. For instance in the Congo the different rebel groups, militias, and such amoung other reason are fighting to control the areas where coltan which is used in electronics equipment especially cellphones is mined. Then there are the blood diamonds, oil, and the list can keep going. Simply there are spots rich with some natural resource the west will pay for and these areas have different ethnic groups living in the same area and not all want any resource extraction or do not receive any compensation. Nigeria is one country but has several different ethnic and tribal groups for instance.
A sorta similar situation happened in former Yugoslavia as the Serbians oppressed all their neighbors, especially the Kosovars.
Here's a mistake many make, thinking Serbians did all the oppressing of Albanians in Kosovo. The Albanian KLA or Kosovo Liberation Army did a lot of terrorizing and ethnic cleansing. And working with the Albanian mafia they sold poppy and opium to finance their operations. After forensic investigations many of those "mass graves" of Albanians were found to have been staged.
FalconShould there be a Law?
After it was scientifically confirmed chemical weapons had been used on Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and others Saddam didn't like Bush Sr still wouldn't end the support.
Oops, the above should read "After it was scientifically confirmed chemical weapons had been used on Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and others Saddam didn't like, Bush Sr's still didn't stop supporting Saddam."
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yes you're right...it would be AWESOME. but some think it's a fair trade...at least for a couple of years.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.