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."

Comments

But of course

[agent dero]

"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.

Re:But of course

[JWW]

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.

Amen to that. Now contrast what you just said and what the article said with this:

Earlier in the week /. had a story about NASA's new mission to the moon. A lot of conjecture in the comments was about if it would get enough funding. Now this story talks about funding contests and other shit like that. Bzzzt wrong answer. What the government should fund to get kids interested in science again (and as per your point exploration) is the Moon mission. We have to see exploration in scientific frontiers as the way to the future and I believe the kids will follow suit and learn this stuff.

Now contrast this with the worry (belief) in the Moon mission story that the project will be cut in order to spend the money on social programs. Well if the government does that why the hell should they complain about lack of kids going into the sciences? They themselves will be saying that science isn't a big interest for the country. So kids, why not go to school to be a social worker, we'll need lots of those in the future.

This isn't to say that industry won't need scientific types in the future, they will. But when your talking about influencing the next generation, something big like going back to the Moon, and to Mars is the best way to do that. Its the true building block for that spirit of exploration and adventure, that the parent post so rightly assumes we need to get back.

Re:But of course

[tbjw]

The cultural anti-intellectual bias is, admittedly, pretty common where I'm from in Ireland. From what I've seen, though, it's worse in the US than in Europe & elsewhere. There are a large number of very bright people in the world who would like to come to the US and work as Scientists (doing the jobs Americans are unwilling to do). The problem is that the US immigration & visa policy is pretty forbidding. For instance, a graduate student on an F1 or J1 visa in the US can work only 20 hours per week and is not eligible for various forms of NSF money for conferences etc. Postdocs employed at American universities are often on visas that do not allow them to become citizens. Once these people find tenured jobs in their countries or continents of origin, since the US has not given them much of a stake in American society, they will often return home.

This all makes sense if one views the US as a Beacon of Science, a place where people are lucky to study for a few years. According to conventional wisdom, though, this will stop being the case, even if it is still true, and the US ought to adopt a much more inviting position towards young scientists who wish to study there than it has heretofore.

Given how fast the government moves, and given the general xenophobia in the US today, where immigration is viewed more as a threat than a boon, I doubt they'll figure this out quite in time.

Ben

Re:But of course

[Ezubaric]

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. But the NSF is constantly slashing budgets, and there's far less money to go around, which means grad students have to whore themselves out to military contractors and pharma companies. Less basic research is being done, and corporations (which used to have big R&D wings) are getting their work done in universities.

Maybe it's good that universities are transforming themselves into more practical places, but it's at the expense of basic science.

Re:But of course

[testadicazzo]

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.

You aren't wrong. But I think more can be said on the subject. As a physicist currently working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (it's where Einstein went to school), I would like to offer my perspective.

What the united states government should do, in order to preserve it's dominance in research and development is to STOP ACTIVELY HARMING RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT. What are we actively doing to harm research and development? Well, I'm glad you asked. Here are some of the things that I see screwing the U.S. research community:

1. The Patriot Act(s): The horrible progression towards a totalitarian police state. No I'm not exagerating, flamebaiting or fudding here. The fact that America no longer has habeus corpus, that America has now adopted the military strategies/justifications of imperial japan and nazi germany (pre-emptive war), the numerous videos of excessive violency by U.S. cops, the onerous security conditions international travelers into the U.S. are subject to... All of this stuff gets a lot attention in the civilized world, and has a harmful effect on research in the U.S. Of my colleagues about 5% categorically refuse to travel to the U.S. for conferences or employment. About 50% would never take a position in the U.S. regardless of the pay on moral or safety grounds, and virtually everyone, when looking around for conferences to attend, will, all other things being equal, pick the conference that is NOT in the scary police state. Just to give you an example, most of my colleagues would feel safer going to a conference in Singapore than anywhere in the states.
2. Stop trying to introduce political and economic bias into research. If you think censoring NASA's JPL and the so-called 'intelligent design' movments don't screw up both our reputation (which is important in getting the best people to come and do research in the U.S.) and don't screw up the research climate in the states, well, you need to rethink the issue. What are some issues that can't be studied without undue pressure in the U.S.? It seems to me that biology, atmospheric physics, and medicine have all suffer here, but I'd like to hear from colleagues in those fields how strong that effect is. One area where one hasn't been able to do good research in the United States is drug use and abuse. See http://www.biopsychiatry.com/ for an excellent, if not entirely accessible discussion. Alternative energy and environmental research seems to be another victim. We need a government for whom science and facts are more important than faith.
3. The DMCA
4. Software and applied mathematics patents

I'm sure other points can be raised as well, but these are the ones I see most obviously damaging U.S. research. I would like to mention one more point which is less defensible. I believe the U.S. would benefit from more funding for basic research, outside of DARPA and war justifications. DARPA has been responsible for wonderful things, I just don't like how seemingly everything (in physics anyway) has to be linked somehow peripherally to war applications to get any funding in the states.

Besides the significant, immediate, direct, and observable impact these things have on U.S. science, they further reinforce the anti-intellectual climate you have complained about. Don't forget that one reason the U.S. enjoyed such a period of scientific dominance post WWII is we got all the great scientists the nazi's chased out of europe to come here. Now we're chasing away our best scientists.

Closing point, this line of thinking applies to many aspects of U.S. government. Before doing something to fix a problem, think a bit about what we are doing to create a problem, and see what we can do to address that.

Re:But of course

[lukesl]

But the NSF is constantly slashing budgets

To clarify, it's not the NSF that is slashing budgets, it's the President and congress that have been slashing the NSF budget, forcing them to make tough decisions. I'm sure the NSF would like nothing more than to fund more research.

Re:But of course

[radtea]

Of my colleagues about 5% categorically refuse to travel to the U.S. for conferences or employment.

This conforms to my experience as well. I've worked in the U.S. in the past, as recently as last summer, but with the passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspends habeas corpus for aliens, I will no longer enter the U.S. for any reason. YMMV, but I'd strongly recommend any non-American who can avoid it, to stay out of the U.S. until the current fight between the government and the consitution is over. There is no doubt that the constitution will win in the end, but who wants to be one of the tens of thousands being tortured in secret prisons while that happens?

America has not been a safe place for foreign high-tech workers for some time, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it a considerably less safe place. You may look at this and think, "Well, I'm not a Syrian-born Muslim, so I'm in no danger." But I'm sure Arar, if the thought crossed his mind at all, thought, "I am a Canadian citizen, going peacefully about my business, in no way connected to terrorism of any kind, so I'm in no danger."

Here's an idea

[smooth wombat]

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.

Re:Here's an idea

[DoofusOfDeath]

This is pure drivel. No one ever said, "Gee, I'd really like to understand better how the wave equation breaks down when our assumptions of a linear system aren't valid. But my belief that the universe shows signs of fine tuning just gets in the way."

Being a theist isn't a barrier to accepting most of the scientific community's conclusions, nor to participating in advanced research. Not being able to solve a system of linear equations, or having the good sense when to employ them, is. Not being curious about why the world works the way it does (perhaps because it was burned out of you by a bad education) is a barrier. Being more concerned about playing your PS3 and scoring weed, rather than helping to develop genetic treatments for certain forms of cancer, is a barrier. These are not barriers that can reasonably be attributed to specifically theists.

Too late, assholes

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Start at the bottom

[jsiren]

This really begins at the elementary school level: getting children into the habit of using their brain, promoting questioning and independent thought, would be a good start. It should continue throughout the education system.

Contests and things like that are nice incentives, but everything rests on the fundamentals.

Is that so surprising?

[Noryungi]

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.

Re:Is that so surprising?

[kahei]

Another brilliant civilization rejected science and went into a profound decline: it was the Middle-Ages Moslem civilization.

Oh, I don't think you can say they 'rejected science'. They were a group of cultures highly based on conquest -- first the Arab conquest of what is now 'the Arab world' and then the Muslim conquest of various other areas, such as Iberia, Indonesia, and Anatolia.

Result? Warrior class took control of some societies (Egypt), others became bogged down trying to keep control of their conquests (Almohads), others bit off more than they could chew and found themselves ruled by one violent Turkic dynasty after another (Persians etc).

Wait a minute. Warrior class takes control, energy is squandered trying to occupy strongly resisting regions, country is governed by feuding families that have nothing to do with the populace... ...hmm, it's not _exactly_ like America. But it ain't exactly different either, if'n you see what I mean :)

what can you do about it?

[idlake]

"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.

'Corporate' Universities

[MECC]

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.

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[DaMattster]

I am not so sure. Why not look at the white papers that were written. Many have Asian last names and were foriegn born.

Logical Empiricism

[maximthemagnificent]

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

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[Idbar]

Agree with Damattser. I think the amount of foreign students in the US is constantly growing, and if another country provides education and high level research, people will also tend to go there.

Mainly, Americans have to be convinced that they can go do research also. The average undergrad student (if they get there) gets a job and runs away from the academy. Many high school students ran because they started making money.

US should motivate students to go for their graduate studies. It amazing the amount of asian (chinese and indian) people currently on technology programs.

So don't be so sure, after all, US had to "import" science to make important advances (Let's name just one... Albert Einstein?).

A think US has been in the lead, but all this budget they have been using for war, might cause a reduction of graduate students and slow down the pace of US Science. US have to start motivating people to stay in graduate programs with good incentives. And US Universities should be involved in that process.

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[eric76]

As we export more and more jobs, especially manufacturing, it is only natural that we are going to lose our place in science.

If you have little or no manufacturing, you won't need much engineering to support the manufacturing. The less engineering we have, the less need for science to drive that engineering.

In other words, by exporting our manufacturing, we are exporting everything that depends on it as well.

The net result is that it will be nearly impossible for us to regain over the next few hundred years what we lose over the next twenty years.

We've made short term monetary gain our ultimate god. Many generations of future Americans will pay for that.

All it Takes is a Little Inspiration

[pkiesel]

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.

Blowing shit up

[tttonyyy]

...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.

Stop accepting crap systems research!!!

[DoofusOfDeath]

I've studied graduate-level computer science at several American universities, and the one theme that I find most depressing is the lack of reality in the research. I'm afraid that this decoupling from reality keeps many computer scientists from actually being responsible for accurate research. For example:

• 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.

It's NOT the money

[mungtor]

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.

Re:It's NOT the money

[Smidge204]

The problem with your analysis is that the people effected by the dumbing-down were/are too young to have been effected by the layoffs when they became popular.

The people who went to school in the 80's (myself included) have only been working at their career jobs for a few years by this point, assuming they have a college education. We won't feel the real effects of "No Child Left Behind" for at least another 20 years. In the meantime, the bulk of today's academic workforce was educated in the 1960's and 1970's.

Your inappropriate rant is off by a few decades. (But you'll probably blame public education, right?)
=Smidge=

The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The real problem

[Shaper_pmp]

A-fucking-MEN!

I would kill for mod-points. How is the parent still languishing at 0, a full half-hour after it was posted?

People want respect and money, but they'll compromise on the money for respect and self-worth.
Culture and the media dictates how much respect people get for their job.
Our culture and media is getting pretty vehemently "anti-expert"[1].
Scientists are basically paid experts.
Remove respect from a profession, and watch people desert it.
Remove people from a profession, and watch the country fall behind in that field.

Cheapen science in the media, encourage the perception that experts have no more to offer than anyone else and your country falls behind because nobody wants to waste time learning to become something so disrespected. QED.

Footnotes:

[1] Are there really always two sides to every story? Does everyone's opinion really have equal weight? Should everyone always have equal input on every decision?

If you answered yes to all three, congratulations - you're a fully-paid-up brainwashed member of our generation.

You're also wrong, and likely dangerously stupid.

What about flying a plane - should we leave it to the couple of guys who've trained for years to do it, or should we consult everyone on the plane and have a vote about which way to turn to avoid the other oncoming 747?

Say it with me: Equality is an abstract goal, not an existing achievement.

Surely you are not surprised?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[Mr. Underbridge]

As we export more and more jobs, especially manufacturing, it is only natural that we are going to lose our place in science.

Quite the opposite. It is our high tech labor force that has priced itself out of low-level, non-innovative markets like manufacturing. A study of history would easily prove that - this nation has continuously become more high-tech while constantly shedding physical-labor intensive work elsewhere. An attempt to maintain a dying labor model in manufacturing spawned the original Luddites. Your suggestion is no different - smashing looms has never been the answer; creating the next better product is. That's where science comes in.

If you have little or no manufacturing, you won't need much engineering to support the manufacturing.

Science doesn't "surrport" manufacturing. High-level science and engineering invent things that are high-tech for a while, and are manufactured in the US as long as those things require a high-tech work force. Later they become commoditized and are moved offshore. By then we've moved on to something else.

The net result is that it will be nearly impossible for us to regain over the next few hundred years what we lose over the next twenty years.

What, low-paying manufacturing jobs that we send overseas? Good, I don't want them. Wouldn't you rather get rid of crappy jobs, while using research to generate new good ones?

We've made short term monetary gain our ultimate god. Many generations of future Americans will pay for that.

Actually, we're talking about re-investment into science and engineering here, which is long-term monetary gain. Short-term gain would be trying to squeeze a little more blood from the stone of manufacturing jobs, which isn't a growth industry. And I don't want future generations of Americans to pay be slipping and losing our wage advantage. The only way to maintain that is through an environment of innovation.

Put another way - we aren't smarter, nor do we work harder, than people in nations such as India and China. The only thing unique about us is our entrepeneurial environment which combines research at the highest levels with available capital to turn that research into products that generate thousands of jobs.

Flint, MI should tell you all you need to know about the wisdom of tying your economy to manufacturing.

They left out number 3

[davmoo]

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".

Re:CULTURE!

[o'reor]

and the fact that we don't have a big exploration goal.

Can't agree more. What about a national (or even better, international) research & industrialization program focused on renewable energy ? That is also a worthwhile exploration goal (think of hydrogen fusion, if we put the same effort on it as the US govt put on the lunar space program in the 60s...).

Not only would it help industrialized countries wean off of fossil fuels, but such an effort would also boost the economic activity in these countries, most of which have been severely affected by the massive outsourcing wave of the late 90s/early 2000s.

It would certainly be more beneficial to science and industry as a whole than trying to invade yet another oil-producing country.

Wow

[MarkusQ]

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.

Wow. Can you also convince yourself that the sky is green and that the Sun rises in the west (or at least it *would* if the media stopped lying about the east)?

BTW, with all the close elections in the mid-terms where is all the nuts claiming the Democrats *stole* the elections? Or does that only happen when it's Republicans winning?

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:

• First, to substantiate my points which you seem to be trying to question:
  • No one disputes that Gore got more votes than Bush in 2000
  • No one disputes that Bush would have gotten fewer votes in 2004 if the media hadn't:
    • Sat on the unwarranted wiretapping story till after the election
    • Downplayed the level of violence in Iraq
    • Allowed the Whitehouse lies about contact with Abramoff to go unchallenged until after the election
    • Failed to aggressively pursue the phone logs showing repeated calls between the New Jersey election tampering operation and the Whitehouse during the 2002 midterms.
    • And so on and so forth...
  • Which leaves the claim that more people voted against Bush than for him in 2004 (or at least thought they did) as the only vaguely controversial claim in my post. While you might argue the validity of exit polls (which showed Bush loosing until they were "adjusted" to match the official results) or discount the impact of election fraud, you have not done so.
• Now for your remarks:
  • I do not believe the sky to be green.
  • I do not believe the sun rises at all; rather on most parts of the globe for most of the year it appears to rise (generally in the wast) because the Earth rotates on its axis. Note that, near the poles, it may appear to rise or set in the north or south but, to AFAIK, never in the west.
  • To my knowledge the media is not "lying about the east", though I admit that I can't even imagine how you could lie about a direction.
  • While I do not know of any "nuts that are claiming the Democrats stole elections", I'm sure they are out there. You might want to try the Free Republic, as that particular type of nut can often be found there.
  • Your question as posed (Do people only claim that the Democrats stole an election when the Republicans win?) is nonsensical. What I believe you were trying to ask is, "Does the frequency of claims of electoral fraud depend on the party of the winning candidate?" to which I would respond no. It seems to be much more strongly correlated to evidence of actual shenanigans (machines not registering votes, precincts reporting negative votes for one candidate, people who voted for themselves not receiving any votes, precints repoerting more votes than registered voters, etc.

    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

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[SnowZero]

No kidding. What happened to good old American scientists like we used to have... You know, the ones with names like Einstein, Von Braun, and Tesla.

Oh wait...

Foreign vs. Domestic does not matter

[snowwrestler]

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.

We Still Need Blue Collar Jobs

[HighOrbit]

What, low-paying manufacturing jobs that we send overseas? Good, I don't want them. Wouldn't you rather get rid of crappy jobs, while using research to generate new good ones?

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

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[Jason Earl]

The secret to America's success in maintaining the science gap with the rest of the world is that we have historically poached the best and the brightest from everywhere on the planet. That's the truly scary thing about the current outsourcing trends. It isn't surprising that there are piles of intelligent and motivated Chinese and Indians that are making real breakthroughs in all sorts of fields. It *is* surprising, however, that for the first time in a generation many of these folks are not moving to the West to take advantage of their skills. The U.S. economy holds all sorts of bonuses for educated folks with drive and ambition. People in the U.S. have access to funding that is unmatched in the rest of the world. As long as it is relatively easy for smart people to emmigrate to the U.S., and as long as the U.S. is seen as *the* place to go to turn your ideas into fat piles of money, then the U.S. will maintain its technology lead.

Despite what educators believe (especially primary educators) the state of the American primary education system really has very little to do with America's technological lead. Who cares how much smarter Ethiopian high school students are than American high school students if the Ethiopian students have to come to the U.S. to do advanced research? America is more than happy to let other countries pay to have their young educated and then poach the best and brightest when they start to be income earners.

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.

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[Grishnakh]

People in the U.S. have access to funding that is unmatched in the rest of the world. As long as it is relatively easy for smart people to emmigrate to the U.S., and as long as the U.S. is seen as *the* place to go to turn your ideas into fat piles of money, then the U.S. will maintain its technology lead.

It *is* surprising, however, that for the first time in a generation many of these folks are not moving to the West to take advantage of their skills.

This is the problem right here. Back in the "old days", smart people from other countries moved to the US because they could more easily do their work here, and also because it was simply a better place to live; their own countries were war-torn, economically depressed, etc. But this is no longer true. Highly educated Indians no longer want to move to the USA because they like India just fine, and don't want to deal with culture shock and having to fly across the Pacific twice a year when they can enjoy a better standard of living in their own country with a smaller salary. Money doesn't go nearly as far in the US as it used to back in the 20th century.

We still have tons of people trying to immigrate here, but they're all dirt-poor uneducated Mexicans who want to work as landscapers, and they're certainly not going to be the next generation of scientists. So if we want to continue to lead, we have to grow our own here. Unfortunately, that's not happening; our education system sucks, we have an anti-intellectual culture that favors football and NASCAR, and jobs in science don't pay squat.

Personally, I think we should just throw the towel in. It'd be better to just let another culture concentrate on science, one which actually values science and people who work in it.