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State of US Science Report Shows Disturbing Trends
coondoggie writes to mention that the National Science Board is concerned about certain indicators in the science and engineering fields for the United States. "For example, US schools continue to lag behind internationally in science and math education. On the other hand, the US is the largest, single, R&D-performing nation in the world pumping some $340 billion into future-related technologies. The US also leads the world in patent development."
...we spending the most money, on the dumbest researchers?
When did we all conspire to repeat the meme that the engineering job market sucks? It goes beyond the usual issue--outsourcing(linked almost every time to India). There's the annoyance with people who haven't been putting together and programming computers since age 5. There's the frightening realization in the programming world that anyone can learn it anywhere. You don't grow your industry by discouraging newcomers. People who work with computers will expand the market. As we get more people into atheism and computing, the demand for those same people grows. Check out monster.com's tech board. Pessimists abounds there.
Are we saying that Patent Trolling is the same thing as Developing?
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
This is a natural cycle of markets. (or greed, or laziness or whatever...) now the US is resting on their laurels, reaping the benefits of engineers past and eventually will pay dearly economically for this culture's unwillingness to churn out better engineers.... and 70 years from now you'll probably see another surge of ingenuity and wonder in western-hemisphere technology.
"Patenting the obvious, since 1994" :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...a creationist museum in Texas is closing
Mod US science +1!
It seems to me to be the height of hypocrisy that business leaders (Gates and company) complain about a lack of scientifically/technologically trained Americans, and thus we need to increase H1-B visas. These same leaders then turn around and support republican candidates who don't believe in evolution and want to water down the science curriculum by introducing Intelligent Design.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Wait, you mean in a nation where whole chunks of the population teach their kids that the world was created by an invisible sky daddy in six days isn't leading the pack in science education? We'd better pray harder!
This is going to sound really cynical, but I feel inclined to say: No wonder current tech is not forward-thinking and is only innovating at a "comfortable" pace. You know, the kind of pace that enables companies to really milk as much as they can out of products without having to do very much R&D to improve the tech.
This is why we are still using countless seperate devices for our various everyday communication/information needs that can't communicate with each other, and why the concept of "integration" of the technological extensions of ourselves is largely overlooked. Oh, it's also why we pay $50+mo for, frankly, the most basic of cell phone and internet connectivity, for example. Companies that have the funds to do amazing R&D and amazing advances in the "human" aspects of technology aren't bothering, because they're rich as hell one way or another - they can crawl along at a comfortable pace with no problem (especially because "everyone else is doing it too").
Yeah, a bit of a tangent there, but I've been thinking about this stuff a lot lately. You know, we 100% have the means for technology to be so much more, but it's as though no one cares.
today, the usa is where you go when you want to turn your ideas into personal financial rewards. however, the usa can't rely upon this fact for long, as china will become the top dog soon in the $$$ department. and so the usa must indeed focus on nurturing it's own brainpower ...and watch them move to shanghai
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Is this truly a good thing. Are US patents even valid outside the US (ie international treaties that govern patents)? There seems to be a big difference between using R&D to come up with commercially-viable products and generating patents of ideas that may or may not be viable.
Consider:
That's what I hear from my freshman-sophomore math majors nearly every day. Sorry to pass the buck, but I suspect that HS math is either dumbed down or grade inflation prevents the kids and their parents and their parents' lawyers from complaining too much. So, they get A's in a "hard" subject, get lots of kudos because this must indicate that they're smart, and so some decide (quite logically) to choose math as a major in college.
Then if you get a prof who expects excellent performance for an A, average for a C, and F if you never did work enough to catch on, and then their world turns absolutely upside-down.
Should students study harder? Absolutely. And _13 years_ of public education ought to provide adequate training in how to study. If not, we'll get more of these "disturbing" trends.
At least it looks like there is some progress being made in revitalizing government support for basic research, although we will still have to wait to see if the damages done to scientific research in key fields can be repaired by the next Administration. Hopefully, people are starting to realize that the US doesn't exist in a magical opportunity bubble and unless we remain competitive at all levels of innovation, from basic research to patenting to bringing those developments to market, we are not going to hold on to our competitive edge. America is not immune to the global economy..it's that simple: the United States, like every other economically developed nation has to preserve its comparative advantage by ensuring that it retains a technological lead over its competitors. If we lose that lead, we slide in to economic stagnation and eventually outright decline. At the very least, maybe we'll get some leaders who actually listen to their experts.
U.S. students don't underperform their international peers because the school system sucks (although, it does suck). They underperform for two reasons. One is demographics. The U.S. has a much larger lower class than do most other nations to which it is compared. Kids who grow up in poverty with terrible home situations will, surprise surprise, not shine when it comes to academic performance. The second reasons is cultural. If you look at kids not from this underclass, a disproportionate number lack the desire to acquire math/science skills, or, really, the desire to excel academically in any field. One possible contributor to this is that students in the U.S. needn't pass an exit exam in order to graduate high school and enter college. The other is general cultural malaise, but it's harder to define that in any exact sense. There is a "culture of achievement" present in some countries (Japan and Germany come to mind) that is simply lacking in the United States.
I think it is time to stop comparisons like "the US is the largest, single, R&D-performing nation in the world pumping some $340 billion into future-related technologies", because they give a distorted view of reality. The main reason the USA comes out on top so often with this kind of statistic is simply because it is sound a large populous county.
For example, the USA wins the most gold medals at the Olympics. But does that mean the USA is the best at sports? No. If we look at gold medals per capita, then Australia easily beats the USA. If we add countries together so we have equivalent populations, then we get another picture - Europe would often beat the USA if it entered as a single country, for instance.
If you looked at R&D per capita, or R&D as a % of GDP, or any other more reasonable metric that just comparing countries of different sizes, I expect you would get a very different picture than the summary suggests.
Half the graduate students in hard sciences in the US are foreign. They're the ones who shine. I don't mean second generation I mean foreign students on academic visas. If they stay in the US, yaay for us. If not? Oh well, the US is indigenously now a nation of retards.
My position has always been cutting funding to education. The problem is we have continually increased spending and gotten less in return. I recall a couple of years back when a high school senior in a tiny West Virginia town blew the national curve. I imagine his school district placed higher priority on learning and less on social engineering curriculums. Teachers need to make more, administrative services at school need to be cut. And these social education programs need to be shit canned. Spending can be cut, moneys prioritized (read, teachers!) and we can finally focus on what matters!
I'll be devil's advocate here and suggest that the average scores don't mean much.
Does it matter that somebody with the median score in high school math isn't particularly good at it, if he's working as a salesman or a mechanic?
Now, I could argue in a liberal arts kind of way that it does matter, because with a better grasp of science these people will be better informed citizens. But from a vocational standpoint, you want to know that if there are N slots for graduates with science skills, the top N science students are very good indeed. And since every job that requires science skills requires strong math skills (but not necessarily vice versa), you want more students to be good at math, but not necessarily every student.
The trend is towards business giving up on American science, engineering, and know-how in general. So why spend four years after high school gaining skills that aren't wanted? Why spend the money to increase student performance when we can enjoy the use of that money today, and it won't make any difference to their lives except maybe in some kind of woolly headed liberal notion of citizenship? If we were really concerned about the future of our students, it'd be like beating the Soviets in the Cold War, no effort to improbable of success to try, no cost to outrageous to bear.
It doesn't pay to be better than the rest of the world but get paid more as well. You've got to be a better value. Therefore by in the name of business efficiency, Americans deserve to see their incomes drop until they're on a par with India and China. When the few Americans who, despite economizing on our schools, have attained some level of scientific or engineering skill look like an incredible bargain, the jobs will come back.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Is the R&D figure still bigger than other countries when it's expressed as a percentage?
How much of the "R&D budget" is spent developing new weapons?
No sig today...
what i see as most disturbing not only in the article, but in the responses, is that no one seems to worry about what is referred to as "basic" research anymore. basic research is the research you do to figure out what is happening in a system normally, figuring out how it's supposed to work. this is the first step in ANY major breakthrough, no matter the field.
but it's the least funded.
i work in basic research in the medical field. the NIH is currently funding between 9 and 10 PERCENT of the proposals handed to them. hopefully they are picking the cream of the crop. we don't lack the manpower. there are LOTS of capable people to do the work. it's funding. there is VERY little funding for research unless someone stands to make a great deal of money from it. the problem is, most of the important things we need to figure out are not going to make anyone a pile of money. they may, down the line. but it isn't that likely.
call me a socialist, but the government needs to get the act together and push their funding toward basic research, and let industry pay for R&D.
Study the competition (or, in more base terms, know your enemy...).
Hell, the US is GOOD at out-sourcing, even outsourcing education. Sure, foreign students from abroad attend some of the ivy league (lower-casing intentional) schools here, but many attend in Europe, too. Some even attend here, then SPEND their time in Europe after having had enough of the US, but are still in school and have too many friends here.
Plus, there are cultural reasons (corruption, leadership by cronies and elders who might not see the logic in empowering their local populations), or other reasons in regions where there's just not enough money and will to outright build new, world-class, competitive, lasting and door-knocking throngs of students. So, they ship them out or allow them to be recruited by US colleges needing cash infusion.
Do you KNOW how many Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian students HERE in the US come from families that put them up in $1,000/month apartments, send them to renowned as well as dubious schools or "academies" that cost $80,000 to $200,000 for maybe 3 or 4 years? LOTS. It's a churning industry, and they keep getting fuller and fuller. Recruiting or otherwise attracting well-off kids whose parents want the brightest futures for their kids. Not saying ALL Asian families are that way, though.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The problem also lies with legal immigration. As someone with experience in and published a thesis on control systems, I find it impossible to get a dream job without having at least a Greencard. The problem is applying for a Greencard will rob me of at least, at least 5K$ if not about 10K$ (all about the right lawyer, you see). After that, comes the waiting game. How long? About 4 years at least! Longer, normally. So you see, after a couple of years, I am thinking! Heck! Screw this. I am going home. After all research opportunities are much better than what they used to be a decade ago. This reverse brain drain (Trust me, the home country has been lamenting about brain drain for decades) is going to further affect the R&D scope here.
I have a patent on 1+1= 2, please use the other method of 1+1 = 10, thank you.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I'm sorry... Is this a troll? American freedoms "vastly outclass the rest of the world"? Centralized education is a mighty fist of the state? Have you been reading a bunch of captain america comics or something? Exactly how ass backwards do you think the rest of the world is? "Freedom" doesn't generate research, money does and America is a large portion of the world economy. That's about all there is to it. China is a rapidly growing competitor in research, are new "freedoms" there responsible for this? The USSR had a massive research infrastructure, was that due to freedom of any kind beyond the government having the idea that technological advancement is a good thing?
As for your second statement, centralization isn't the issue with education, the fact that a huge number of highschool students are coming out of american schools largely uneducated is. I should think the last thing we would want is to continue churning out increasingly economically uncompetitive students, whether that's done through centralized means or other (what do you even mean by "centralized"?) seems secondary.
Science is not anti-religion. We don't waste our time trying to prove religion is false.
Religion is anti-science. The religous do pick fights with existing scientific explanations, but in a non-testable "god did it" kind of way.
I don't hate the religious, I pity the ignorant. I see ignorance and lack of education as a more serious threat to this country than any foreign terrorist organization.
It's not a paradox. Look, do we imagine that everybody is capable of being a first class brilliant scientist or engineer? Clearly not. Therefore, if you have a system where the difference between the best and the worst (in any field) is small, then you have a system which fails to promote the best. You have a system where everyone is at the "average" level, and the people who ought to stand out, don't, for whatever reason.
On the other hand, if you have a system where the difference between the best and the average is high, what does that tell you? It tells you the system works well to promote the best and give them the tools they need to produce. Fact is, there is a natural heirarchy of ability among human beings in any field. Most are at some ordinary level, and only a few are very good. If you don't see the natural ability heirarchy reflected in the accomplishment heirarchy, then something is wrong. Since it's impossible to bring ordinary folk up to the extraordinary level, what must be happening is that the extraordinary folks are being held down (which is fairly easy to do).
Compare to sports. The difference between your average high-school athlete and Olympic or world-class athletes has never been greater, and the very few at the very top are amazing. Do we look at this pyramid of accomplishment and say, gee, there must be something wrong with how we promote and train people in sports, because there are so few at the top? Because the average 35-year-old pick-up basketball player, measured on the same scale that includes the championship Los Angeles Lakers, sucks? Not if we have any brains, we don't. We realize that the better a system is at sifting and placing people according to their abilities and motivation, the more pronounced the heirarchy, the greater the difference between the best and all the rest. Only in some doofus Lake Wobegon mode of (non)thinking do we imagine that a successful system would look non-heirarchical, with everyone above average.
The fact that heirarchies of accomplishment are more evident in the United States than elsewhere is no proof that the mass of people are being held down. It may well be evidence that in the United States the best are better able to rise to the top, to find their natural level of achievement, whereas in other places considerations of social class, restrictive groupthink education, or cultural barriers to personal ambition and radical innovation tend to keep the best from ever showing their stuff and emerging above the sea of average folk.
There's a demand for atheists? I knew there had to be jobs for philosophy majors somewhere.
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That's a nice view and all and it may even give you that fuzzy feeling in your tummy but unfortunately it doesn't have anything to do with reality. At all. The US's R&D success was accomplished and is maintained through a single factor: money. Lots of money. It has absolutely nothing to do with freedom nor other patriotic drivel. The US is a very rich nation that dumps loads of cash into research. If you happen to be a talented researcher who happens to like receiving recognition in the form of cold hard cash then you will find that combination attractive, specially if your current job doesn't offer you the research funding you need and your current salary is less than 2000 dollars a month.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
...not just science and math.
First of all, to the people who blame this trend on I.D., give it a rest. Our education system has far greater problems to confront, such as:
1. Parents - more an dmore parents don't take an active role in their kids' education, and blame the schools for their kids' failure.
2. Basic literacy - more and more kids cannot even read at grade-level. And we expect them to understand concepts like evolution??
3. Critical thinking - thanks ot NCLB, kids are taught to take a test, not think for themselves.
4. Qualified/dedicated teachers - thanks to unions, teachers have little motivation to actually give a shit about whether or not their students are actually learning anything.
5. No Child Left Behind - the great unfunded mandate that promotes the fantasy that there is no such thing as a dumb, unmotivated kid. One-size-fits-all education only harms good students, and it sure as hell doesn't make the bad ones any better.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Want domestic job security? Get security clearance. I bet a lot of the "real engineers" are working on things that cannot be outsourced for national security reasons...
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The answer is simple, its not the government, its the parents. How can we hold the government and teachers 100% liable for the education of our children if we as parents do not get involved on a daily basis with our children's lives and education? I personally believe this lack of involvement is the catalyst for a series of other disturbing issues.
My wife is a teacher at a middle school, while lack of funding is an issue, the lack of interest displayed by a lot of parents is just down right scary. Seriously, if mommy and daddy don't care why should the child?
With a lack of involvement, and doing things such as using the TV and video games as a baby sitter, its no wonder why the test scores of kids here in the US are so poor when compared internationally.
From my observations, there are way too many kids who are extremely disrespectful to their parent, and will do anything to get there way. The parents of such kids, will do just about anything for the kids, and really just want to be their "friend". I call BS! Be a parent! If a kid mouths off to you don't hesitate to tan his hide! Now, I am not an advocate of "beating" kids, but I do support controlled and metered punishment. Spanking can and should be given when appropriate.
I better get off my soapbox now.
That's all nice speculation, and no doubt (like much of what Friedman writes) backed by an anecdote or two, but there's little empirical evidence that the US deficiencies in one area of education are offset by US advantages elsewhere.
Looking at other studies, in the 2003 PISA study, for instance, the US scored right about the OECD average in reading, below OECD average in problem solving, below OECD average in math, and below OECD average in science.
If one wants to assert that the educational weaknesses in the US in math and science are the consequence of policies that produce strengths in other areas, empirical evidence of that strength would be welcome.
A more likely explanation for the weaknesses in science and math is a general weakness in education that manifest primarily through inequity. In the science-focussed 2006 PISA study, the US performed below average overall, but had an average proportion of top performers and an above average proportion of poor performers. The study also found that the US had an stronger than average correlation between socioeconomic background and performance, and unusually large gap between performance both of immediate immigrants and the general population and what it refers to as "second-generation immigrants" (what usually in the US are referred to as "first-generation" -- children whose parents are immigrants) and the general population.
It also notes that US students express a high personal value of science, a high personal motivation to learn science and, despite below average performance, one of the highest levels of confidence in their scientific proficiency of students in any of the studied countries. (Briefing paper here.)
I don't need to bash the US, because the US is still it's own biggest critic. This is the sign of a free country. The critics haven't been totally marginalized yet.
Having said that, as an European I can't help wonder why American culture is so obsessed with "freedom" and "liberty". I've yet to see what you've got we don't. Where is this obsession coming from? Perhaps you can help me here.
But since you asked, I do have more freedoms, more rights and more privacy. Let me name certain areas. My employer cannot read my email or monitor my Internet usage. I'm free to join my family after 8 hours of work, and cannot be penalized if I refuse to do overtime. Meanwhile Americans have corporations employing spies and using underhanded tactics to monitor their employees. Sure many Americans are "free" to walk out after 8 hours but they'd get fired for it.
Please write me off now for being a jealous penniless pinko weeny with an inferiority complex.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
It single family parents where the parent sits on the couch watching TV and slurping Brawndo all day, vs Finland, where the parent (and maybe even the gov't) is much more involved in the community.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
However, I assure you I am not.
I honestly believe that the US would not be lagging so far behind in sciences if we finished converting fully to the metric system.
An acquaintance of mine is taking his first college-level physics class, and the professor stated on the first day that since this was an exact science, there would be no use of US customary measure, only SI units. More than half of the class was simply unaware of what these non-customary units were, and as a result, they spent a week's worth of courses going over grams, litres, metres/kilometres, etc., all the while the students bemoaned having to learn a "foreign" unit of measure. I can even recall something similar happening in my high school physics classes. What a waste!
If we're going to teach our kids to be proficient in math & science, the least we can do is give them a Base-10 system of measure with no fractions and simple conversions.
It seems that you inadvertently touched the point where the European and American perspectives clash. It's not how easy or hard it is to become wealthy but the very perception of what being wealthy means.
What struck out from the beginning is your implicit obsession with money, as if it is the dominant objective in mind. Being successful means not only stockpiling the most money but also showing it off the most extravagant exterior signs of wealth. Another incomprehensible detail is how Americans perceive class as being showing off as many exterior signs of wealth as possible. That means that in america a character like Paris Hilton is seen as classy and successful, when the truth is that a character like that is nothing more than cheap white trash. Just because you can afford real diamonds instead of plastic trinkets or you live in a suite instead of a trailer it doesn't mean you are any more posh. Yet, somehow Americans perceive her, and others who emulate her, as successful, posh people. Even as role models. Europeans aren't obsessed with material wealth as Americans are. Europeans do enjoy consumerism and do buy a lot of stuff but Americans just act like that was their sole purpose in life. Well, that isn't healty at all.
Indeed and yet again Europeans do have more economic freedom. Europeans do pay a lot of taxes but those taxes are used to fund basic, fundamental services that benefit the entire fabric of society. The public health service is an European institution that pretty much defines if a society is civilized or not. The public education system is also an European institution. As soon as no citizen is barred from progressing academically (which does more to climb the class hierarchy than money) due to economic constraints or receives a de-facto death sentence due to being poor, the entire society benefits. It constantly amazes me how a society can accept the idea of success and even the concept of life and death can and should depend on the money you make.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Nice try but no cigar. ;) I happen to come from a country with one of the world's highest gun ownership ratios. We get hand guns. We get silencers. A 15 year old can get a gun with parental permission. You can try guess which country.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone