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US No Longer Technology King
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that according to a recent report from the World Economic Forum the US has lost the leading spot for technology innovation. The new reigning champ is now apparently Denmark with other Nordic neighbors Sweden, Finland and Norway all claiming top spots as well. "Countries were judged on technological advancements in general business, the infrastructure available and the extent to which government policy creates a framework necessary for economic development and increased competitiveness."
It appears it's mostly based on that... but then we all know this country sucks there in regards to Europe and Asia. As soon as the FCC stops sucking up to the big telecom corps and opens up the spectrum, the game is on again.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I for one... aaaaahhhhh, nevermind.
I'm sure the RIAA and/or MPAA and/or Microsoft are to blame for this somehow.
Since the eighties, when Japan began to take over U.S. role on technology, and U.S. started to focus more on services, this was something predictable. Sometimes people forget that there is no way to be prosper doing each others laundry
When a society decides that corporations are priviledged citizens, corporations decide that profit and Tax Evasion matter more than Education, how can the country NOT fall behind in technology?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
At least we know how to make missiles and $1 million terrorism response vans in the USA. Thank God for our advanced technology.
In some respects that's not too far from the truth, but at the rate we're losing those freedoms I figure they'll eventually stop hating us.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
One small think they left off -- marginal tax rates. High rates like Sweden positively drive innovators away.
If anybody doubts that we have lost our edge in the technology arena let me ask you one question:
Name one complete sub-assembly inside of your computer which had the majority of the R&D and Fabrication done in the USA.
Of that sub-assembly (assuming you have named one), which components are utilizing NEW technology developed here in the USA.
I would like to know why the USA (given a dedicated effort) could not take back the crown of technology power house without doing so by stifling our competition over seas.
There has to be enough room in the future technology development for us to foster and train our citizens to come up with new concepts which will not rely on foreign brains, labor, or money to develop, market, and sell.
Until the US fixes its priorities we're going to continue to fall. Perhaps the US can keep buying talent from other nations, with H1-B visas, but unless the scientists are given fruitful environments they simply aren't going to come up with anything new or revolutionary. What encouragement do the nation's thinkers have to keep improving their ideas when the laurels and rewards are going only to the people who manage them like a column of assets? It's plain demoralizing to continually refine a product for a year only to see executive support lost and funding slashed. Graduate students and post-docs, while they provide a significant source of intellectual labor, cannot compete with happy and eager experienced scientists in other parts of the world.
Extreme levels of government regulation, oversight, interaction, and micromanaging are probably a significant contributor to the death of American technological innovation as well.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
The first thing I would critique about this (amongst many others) is that it is a ranked list. At least in the BBC summary, it doesn't describe the objective rankings of the countries.
For example, if it was on a 100 point scale, the US could have slipped from, say, 99.9 to 99.8, and that would have been enough to slip from first to seventh. Or maybe the objective score would have been a much larger slide. Maybe the US objectively climbed, but just not at the same rate as the other countries. Being that all ten of the top countries have the same mature technological apparatus, I am imagining that whatever shuffling took place in the ratings was rather minor. The actual differences between technology adaption between the US and Iceland might be almost indistinguishable.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
My wife has been mentioning this for years: it seems like the 'owners' have been cutting back on educational funding, industrial infrastructure, etc.
I am starting to agree with my wife, given evidence like: Bush family buying massive amounts of land in South America, Dick Cheney primarily investing his own money overseas, etc.
I believe that people with real power in the USA are "cutting loose" the middle class and lower class. I write about this in my blog a lot: the best thing to do is to invest heavily in yourself: education, personal learning, pay off debt, invest, and save.
Isn't it a global marketplace now? Who cares what 'your country' is doing. Just be the best you can be in your field and you'll be fine. Life will go on even if you can't wave a big flag saying your country is better than somebody else's. Be proud of what *you* can do.
Like software, Education and Immigration should be free and open. Providing innovation a fertile breeding ground.
I think that the cost of Education in the US has a big impact on this too. Sadly, a college degree has become a status symbol in the US for "upper class" citizens. A lot of people can't afford a student loan that is sometimes more than their mortgage!
A lot of European countries offer good incentives for people to study, including paying a state allowance for university students.
I'm not up to date on European immigration policy, but I'm sure it would be much more relaxed than the US when it comes to skilled labor. I couldn't imagine it being any more tighter.
Well, that's my 2 cents worth anyways...
The word is "pantywaists". It referred originally to a child's undergarment.
~ Leilah
Dark fiber isn't useful for pushing out broadband. The dark fiber is just extra fiber that was run alongside lit fiber (because the incremental cost is very low) when they were installing the backbones. If the backbone owners find that they need more bandwidth, they'll use that dark fiber. There's no lack of bandwidth on the backbones; it's with the "last mile" connections to homes and businesses, which requires some type of new infrastructure to be installed.
'What country has landed on the moon?'
38 years ago.
'What country invented the transistor, and later the microchip?'
Over 50 years ago.
'What country harnessed electricity, and set up the first electric lights?'
You'd be surprised. But that was over 120 years ago.
'What country set up the first assembly line, and mass produced the automobile?'
Again, 100 years ago.
'What country split the atom?'
63 years ago.
Now.
Which of the wealthy industrialized countries has the highest percentage of poor?
Which has least progressive taxation, ie rich pay higher percentage, indeed, pay taxes at all.
Which has lowest average wages.
Which has declining participation in the wealth generated by labor.
Which has worst ratio superrich to general population.
Which has giant trade imbalance.
Which has largest debt.
Which has biggest tax breaks for wealthiest people.
Which has collapsing real estate market.
Which has no manufacturing capacity for its own markets.
Which has worst schools.
Which has largest percentage of permanent poor.
Which has poorest representation of science in government.
Which has most money wasted on military and spy networks.
Which has religious belief that markets cure anything.
Which lost a major city and told its people to go to hell for being poor and stupid.
Which has the highest per capita spending on health care with the worst per capita coverage. Add: Which has businesses taking 30 percent or more of the health care expenditures as admin costs and profit.
Which has worst sex education, teen pregnancy rate and STD infection rate.
Which has worst newborn death rate.
Which has collapsing science funding.
Which has had science infiltrated by the operatives of a political party.
Which has a population so uneducated and unimaginative that they only finished 1/4 of a space station and forgot to build a shuttle to get to it. And can't understand why that would matter.
Which economy is about to explode, sinking belly up?
Which nation is exceedingly wealthy and well educated because they nationalized their oil fields, keeping all the profits? That would be Norway.
Which countries tax high, have excellent labor representation in business decisions, has excellent health care at reasonable cost, low poverty rates, lowest teen birth rates and STD infection rates, and now lead the world in tech development? Why, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and all the other countries mentioned.
Apparently the people of a nation taking control of their futures through their representative governments do better than those who abdicate their control to be ruled by corporate business. Who would have thought it.
One thing i think that has been overlooked in this discussion is the number of amazing institutions. If you compare the number of elite research institutions in the United States to anywhere else the US does extremely well. While this is certainly only one factor in a nations "technology ranking" the amount of research these universities generate and the highly educated people they churn out is undeniable a huge positive force for the US.
Actually India is ranked 44th and you've got dyslexia. Also the study measures ICT readiness, not access to toilets. You can have access to the internet, but not to a toilet.. if you've ever been to India you'll see this is true
o rum-lead-lead-citizen-davos07_cx_ag_0123davos_land .html
http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gitr/rankings2007.pdf
The WEF is based in Geneva and run by the Swiss government
http://www.weforum.org/en/about/index.htm
They had a pretty big meeting in Davos in January this year at which several heads of state were present - including Tony Blair and Angela Merkel (also Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and several other industry leaders)
Read about it at that other "USA hating jack-off organization":
http://www.forbes.com/2007/01/23/world-economic-f
But don't let the facts get in the way of your opinion.
As has been pointed out many times previously on Slashdot, it is the Last Mile that counts. Putting down a few thousand kilometers of fibre in rural areas isn't that expensive. What costs is connecting each and every user of the network to the hubs.
This is where European cities have a big advantage. Most people live in apartments with sometimes hundreds of families living in the same block of flats. The cable companies can just connect the whole building to a hub and draw the cables inside the house. In the US, where most people live in their own houses they have to draw the last mile outdoors. That means digging up roads and doing a separate installation for each household they want to connect. Of course that is going to be much more expensive.
That and subsidies. The Nordic countries try very hard to bring high speed access to everyone.
Football Odds
I don't buy this playing with numbers
. htm, and broadband penetration was nearly 70% (and that was in 2004!! So I'm sure the numbers are higher now).
The first thing here is not to confuse broadband 'availability' with broadband 'subscribers'. Canada and Nordic countries have both high availability, and high subscription rates.
In the case of a region like NYC, I'm sure it has very high broadband *availability*. (Meaning that if you live in NYC you could get broadband if you decided to, and you probably even have a choice who you get it from.) But I concede that even in places like New York, the subscription rate falls short of other countries.
That said, to address your comment:
New York alone contains more people than all of Sweden and Norway combined. I am sure New York City takes up far less space than Norway and Sweden combined. So why don't cities like LA, New York and Chicago have at least as good broadband penetration as nordic countries? From what I read they don't.
You make a valid point.
New York, is actually the 4th most wired city in the United States, according to this article:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/articles/art030
That said, I don't know. If I were to speculate I would expect that the answer lies with social issues like poverty and illiteracy, and/or a lack of education. This strikes me as likely for two reasons:
Firstly, it seems logical to suggest that the poor/illiterate would be less likely to subscribe to high speed internet access
Secondly, this is an area where Canada and the Nordic countries differ from the US. Their inner city problems, poverty, and illiteracy rates are markedly lower than in the US, so its reasonable to suggest that it might be responsible for the difference.
regards
There's an even better answer. To wit, "How do you know there was a Jesus? Were you there?"
There is no historical evidence supporting the actual existence of Jesus. The earliest mention of Jesus is in the context of remarks made by Josephus, a man born about 7 years after Christ's supposed death. Then there is Tacitus, who was born about 55 AD. There are a couple more that come at about 80 AD and 100...110AD and then as the Christians gained followers, more and more mentions. The key thing, though, is that there is no mention anywhere in the records we have from 0 to 30 AD of Mr. Christus, and no mention by anyone whose personal timeline crossed that of Mr. Christus.
"What about the bible?" I hear the apologists winding up to ask. Well, what about it? There are no books of the bible that are any older than 300AD. The earliest documents we have - the Vatican, Sinaitic, and Alexandrin manuscripts - come from 300AD or later; they are supposed to be copies of earlier works, but as no such works have come to light, and of the 5,000 or so documents that went into the mix to be used as a basis for the bible (compared against one another and so on), these three are by far the best ones and the most used... we can pretty much limit the scope of trust to literally hundreds of years after Christus was supposed to have lived - in other words, the bible is actually less authoritative than either Tacitus or Josephus, and as I pointed out, those fellows never even knew the man.
A lot of people take the actual existence of Christ as a given, and then proceed to argue about his divinity. However, examining the history, it turns out there is no reason to even presume the man existed. We know there was a group of people - Christians - who were being a pain in the government's rear by the end of the first century AD. That's all we know.
One more step down the ladder - the argument that "because there were Christians, there must have been a Chirst." I point you to Scientology. Must there have been a Xenu? I point you to Mormonism. Must there have been golden tablets, an angel named Moroni? I can even point you to the wall of your veterinarian. Must there have been a "rainbow bridge"? I could go on (for pages!) but I think I've already made the point. These types of organizations are known to arise for reasons entirely aside from the claims that underlie the mythology. There is no need to assume truth because an organization arises based around certain ideas; quite the contrary. The ideas themselves are what need to be looked at, not the organization. And in the case of Christus, it turns out that there are no more convincing records of him than there are of Xenu.
As the claimant, the burden of proof falls upon the Christian. Presently, there is no historical evidence that backs up their claims; that pretty much cuts the feet right out from under any argument they might make. Much more to the point than the flood. Floods are known to happen. Divine children aren't.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yea, all the whiney stuff about losing our tech edge... really man, get over it. How about something that really counts, like high scores on Grand Theft Auto? We rule dude. When it comes to whacking cops and hos and stealin stuff, we are like so totally NUMBER ONE! We are the numero uno video game nation! The USA is also top of the heap in pizza, and drinks with cool names like "cocaine", and shopping malls. And stuff like SUVs and MP3 players. You Euro-smack talkers ever look and see where your iPod comes from? Silicone valley usa, dude. And where do you think Star Wars came from? France? Sheesh. They're not even allowed to use cameras anymore. Where else can you see American Idle or a Billy Ray Cirrhosis show? Huh? Not London hon. No way. Cause we are just too bitchin.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
They're rejection Christianity and Science!
The country is *literally* going to hell in a hand basket!
I always knew we were going to hell, but I was hoping for a ferrari, or maybe a hover craft. But a hand basket, I never say that coming.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
We now have a President who is "Born Again", and recognizes Christ as his personal saviour. His old Attorney General, John Ashcroft, a devout Assemblies of God member, used to anoint himself with oil. We have many members of Congress, both in the Senate and the House, who are ordained ministers in their churches. Some are LDS Bishops. I would venture to say that the percentage of devout Christians holding office in various levels of government in the US exceeds that of the general population. Which oath do they hold to? Their duty to country, or to a church?
You've got people who firmly believe that the US Constitution states that the USA is a Christian nation. I've got in-laws who used to believe that I was damned to Hell because I was raised Catholic and not a member of the Church of Christ.
We have a member of the Texas House who firmly believes that the Earth is the center of the Universe, and that we never landed a man on the moon, and that satellites are held in orbit by magnetism, not gravity - because Newton's Laws are wrong and he can prove it. http://www.fixedearth.com/geosynchronous_sa.htm (I had to post that link because it's a hoot. His proof is that a LaGrange point is where gravity stops because it's where it balances out. Give the man a Nobel!)
We had an Army General (2 star?) who fervently believed we would win in Iraq because his God is greater than their God, Allah. Someone forgot to tell him they're one and the same. Jehovah, too.
These are the people who've been running this nation for the last dozen years or so. Their's are the people who backed a "Crusade" in the Middle East, thinking we'd set them "free".
Oh. And that CUNY study? Does it take into account that many black Southern Baptists are becoming Muslims? And the biggest immigrant groups in the US today are Hispanic Catholics (and Protestants) and Muslims from the Middle East and SE Asia?
Just because the percentage of people identifying themselves as Christians has gone down (how accurate is that study) does not mean that the number of people who identify themselves as religious has gone down. Or that the percentage who identify themselves as Born Again has gone down.
I don't need to cite references. All you need to do is get out of your ivory tower (sorry, that actually sounds religious!) and look around. Wake up. You're missing an entire country out there!
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
And someone always argues along these lines. Yet Canada has a larger percentage of rural population, similar geography, and has a higher percentage of broadband use.
Whoa, whoa. You were doing ok until here, where you slip up. It is perfectly reasonable to assume, given the existence of early Buddhists, that there was a Buddha. Was he in fact in possession of all of the traits they attributed to him? Probably not, from a skeptical outlook - most likely, he was just a very smart, insightful and charismatic individual. Likewise Jesus. The scant evidence does not prove he exists, but the simplest explanation is that such a person - not necessarily a divine one - did, in fact, exist. Don't mix up the existence of the supernatural Christ with a human Jesus. Don't compare the existence of the human Jesus to the existence of Xenu, these are completely different issues.
Scientology - there was a Ron L. Hubbard. Mormonism - there was a Joseph Smith. Religious movements nearly always start with a powerful leader figure. As skeptics, we would view those people as ('merely') exceptional human beings, not divine or supernatural as the adherents of those faiths would. But let's not deny the likely existence of the individual itself.