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US Can't Meet The "Grand Challenges" of Physics
BlueSky writes "A new report paints a troubling picture of the state of physics research in the US, which the authors believe has dire consequences for the competitiveness of the US. 'The report identifies six key questions that will represent the grand challenges that materials science will face over the coming decade, the ones most likely to produce the next revolution. But it also raises fears that those challenges will be met by researchers outside of the US. It highlights the fact that government funding has not kept up with the rising costs of research at the same time that the corporate-funded research lab system has collapsed. As a result, US scientific productivity has stagnated at a time when funding and output are booming overseas.'"
Evolution is just the soft target for anti-intellectuals, the argument really doesn't have a lot to do with creation at all just about layfolk trying to show they are better than authority figures in a field of knowlege. They had it before with the layfolk versus educated clergy and now they are pushing it furthur. Intelligent Design is apparently also bad theology - the devil is in those details since there are critters that behave in very scary ways.
"You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today!"
--Arthur Jensen, played by Ned Beatty, Network, 1976
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I don't think its that bleak for the US. With the amount the US spend on their defense budget, particularly aircraft/avionics and missile technology I have always though it likely that one day someone will come up with a cheap but effective defense such that a lot of striking power is instantly removed from the US and they have to adopt a less belligerent tone. Similar to what happened with Britain's navy. Once their expensive battleships ruled the seas until it became glaringly obvious how vulnerable they were to a few cheap aircraft. It wasn't the end of Britain but it did severely damage her ability to project global power. HMS IHaveBigGuns could no longer be confidently sent off to threaten some city unless it was accompanied by an even more expensive carrier group to protect it.
Maybe someone will come up with a foolproof radar and AA missile combo or a stealth missile platform that can be maneuvered close enough to a carrier group to sink most of it. Success in war is frequently about economics. Who ever can afford to fight longest will win. If I can sink your billion dollar battlegroup anchored off my coast using a few million dollars worth of missiles, negotiation becomes a much cheaper and more attractive proposition (I know the US still has a lot of nukes to fall back on but using them in anger for anything short of the US or a major ally actually being physically invaded is likely to cause so much backlash it will have been a self defeating exercise).
I don't see anyone developing new offensive technology in the short term such that the US is being threatened but I can see a day in the not so distant future when carrier groups can no longer be sent to a region for fear of being sunk or air campaigns are not a viable option because most the planes are likely to shot down. It's not going to be the end of the US, just means they can no longer wield the big stick with impunity.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
And the university system in the US isn't all that great either. Sure, there's the top tier of research universities, e.g., MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, UofI, CalTech &c. But there are a lot of 2nd and 3rd tier ones which are pretty mediocre institutions.
People come to the US because it is one of the few systems in the business of selling an education. Many other countries run their universities for their own people and only sponsor a few foreigners. It's easier for a german guy to get into a US university than a US person to go to Germany. Plus English is the common language so many will do a stint in the US to get better exposure. So it's not always that the US school is so great - it's that you can get accepted into it.
Yoghurt
It's not just that. It's that 'no child left behind' crap and 'more money for less performing schools'. It boils down to the Department of education and their political agenda.
DC and the city of Atlanta spend something like over $10,000 per child, have the lowest test scores and they still ask for more money. Poor performing schools aren't berated but praised with more money, good teachers have their hands tied behind their back and are punished by having to step down their lesson plans to accomodate non-english speaking students (at least where I live).
Basically we're stuck with a government agency that is hell bent on making sure that our highest aptitude students get the best quality education that the lowest attitude students can handle.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
I really don't think the religious nuts are the cause of the decline in technology in this country.
/profit/. Not many folks want to invest in "blue sky research" anymore, and even if they did, it's probably cheaper to invest in that kind of research overseas.
I think commercialism is far more easily the culprit.
We have rapidly entered an area where people want to invest heavily (401K, etc.). But everyone is after
Investment in research in this country is probably declining because we have become so heavily profit-motivated and no one sees any profit in research.
Further, I think most of the "low-hanging-fruit" of scientific learning was done between 1945 and 1980. But now perhaps we are reaching the time of diminishing returns, where it requires much heavier investment in the research to produce (profitable) results.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
BS. Or mostly BS. Congress gives Bush whatever he asks for the Iraq War, but for the rest, he has less control over the Congress than Clinton did. The President's budget requests are used as an outline, but Congress makes frequent changes, diverting funding from things they don't like to things which the executive departments didn't ask for. This is what's called "pork" or "earmarks", and both the Republicans and Democrats have been guilty of it. Congress is running wild, and Bush has little control over them.
But that's not the worst of it. In 2006, Republicans and Democrats managed enough intransigence and sheer orneriness between them they didn't pass a proper FY 2007 budget. Only 2 out of the 11 necessary appropriations bills could be passed. In lieu of passing these parts of an actual FY07 budget, Congress gave up and passed a Continuing Resolution that simply repeated the 2006 budget less a 1% rescission. This severely impacts many parts of the government, including the DOE, which through its Office of Science is responsible for funding most government research into the physical sciences.
A Continuing Resolution wouldn't be so bad -- funding cuts in the physical sciences have been pretty much continuous since the Congressional Democrats killed the SSC in 1993 -- except that Congress insists on micro-managing the budget. So the specific funding allocations were carried over from 2006. This means large new projects that were supposed to ramp up in FY07 can't, because their money has blindly been allocated to projects that have ended in 2006.
Read about the initial effects of the FY07 Continuing Resolution here on the APS website.
If Slashdot or mainstream journalism cared about the sciences, they would have reported on this. But most people are totally unaware of the federal budget. The FY07 continuing resolution has not been reported on even once by Slashdot. It is a travesty for the US and should be a major embarrassment, but people remain blissful unaware. In substitute of actual, important news we have been fed five pseudo-news stories per week about the iPhone or about Paris Hilton.
Anyway, to make a long story short, the Bush Administration is not the main entity to blame here. Congress is. But don't let actual facts get in the way of the daily Bush-bushing orgy...