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Did the US Take the Back Seat In Science In 2009?
tcd004 writes "In the PBS NewsHour's roundup of the biggest science news of the year, Neil DeGrasse Tyson dropped this doozie: '[Scientific leadership] drives the economic strength and security of nations. The fall is not from a cliff. More like a slow, downward slide — almost imperceptible from day to day. But as the years pass America will have descended from leaders to players to merely followers as we fade to insignificance, at best hitching a ride on the innovations of others.'"
The USA has a population of around 300,000,000, or around 5% of the world population. It should expect to be following in some areas. In the twentieth century, a combination of factors (less damage from WWII than other developed nations, higher ratio of middle class to subsistence-level citizens, greater economies of scale that most of Europe) let the USA lead in technology. Even then, a number of key developments came from outside the USA, for example the first theoretical models in computing, the first stored program computer, the most successful commercial CPU architecture and the TFT display all came from the UK, the first (and, so far, only) supersonic passenger aircraft was a joint venture between the UK and France.
With 5% of the world population, you simply can't expect to be the world leader at everything. Through most of the twentieth century, the USA operated quite a successful brain drain, skimming off a lot of the best and brightest in the rest of the world by offering them bigger salaries and, more importantly, a lot more resources to continue their work. Now it's quite difficult for someone with a PhD to get a visa to work in the USA (unless they're just transferring within the same multinational company) and the desire to work in America is significantly lowered by the insane anti-terror legislation, not to mention the crippling IP laws which make the USA a much less attractive place to do research unless you have a massive company backing you.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
For decades, many of the world's best students came to the US to get their PhDs. In many American labs you could hardly meet a native American scientist. And American science thrived, really. Maybe now it's time for the US to send their best students abroad and get valuable PhDs from countries where you can still find a taste for hard work and good science?
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
It is worth noting that there is a Japanese Slashdot run by VA Japan. While we helped them a little in their early days, they essentially run their own content without any real involvement from us... none of us can read Kanji! There are currently no plans to do other language or nation specific Slashdot sites.
You can't just have PARC and places sitting in isolation, churning out whizz bang science.
Neither can you just build a PARC, and have that attract and create industry around it.
PARC and places like that need to co-exist with a hotbed industrial base, and then you get a positive feedback loop.
If you kill local industry and manufacture, then you also kill science.
If you kill science, then you also kill local industry and manufacture.
Back in the 1960's and before every school in the UK turned out kids who could read, write, and do math.
You cannot do ANY trade without these skills, not plumbing, not carpentry, not bricklaying, not to mention the slightly higher level trades like boilermakers etc.
Sadly, we threw it all away, in our pursuit of crap courses like equine aromatherapy and womyns studies, anything, just to get more people in university, just to get more people with degrees and diplomas and certificates.
Now we have a "service" economy that relies on someone else being able to do the basic math etc.
I am an engineer ( a proper one, eg mechanical and marine) and sadly I am the demographic that went through the trade at a time when an engineer was lower in status and pay than many blue collar jobs, which meant no-one wanted to do apprenticeships, which means I am one of the last of the "old school" of engineers.
The future isn't bright.
Sci-fi series Firefly had one thing right, learn a second language, and make it Chinese.
Even if we turned around and went balls out to fix the problem, money no expense, NOW, it would take a generation, or 20 years, to fix, which is too damn slow to work.
All that is left is importing the talent.
From what I know of the USA, there is a lot of importing engineering talent going on, lots of foreign nationals, green card holders and immigrants working in tech.
A friend of mine summed it up well years ago, when he said that in 2020 the USA will be the place to go to make cheap porn and exploit people who don't have any other options.
USA, the new Romania.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
are you americans arent able to realize that internet has become a global place still to the extent that you think staggering majority of people here are americans ?
get over yourselves. you are living in a global world and its name is internet.
In this great international global place of no shift keys, do you also not recognize the authority of the direct quote? The we in question is Dr. Tyson (an American) and his fellow countrymen (also Americans).
I am not a crackpot.
US may be taking a back seat in science, but what is described in the article has nothing to do with that.
Russian space agency needs money very much like NASA. The proposal to shoot down an asteroid (which, according to recent calculations is not an imminent threat) is made primarily to raise their profile, and perhaps get some cash. It certainly helps that the cause is "you will die unless you pay". If you read the original russian announcement you'd notice that they "will need 100s of millions of dollars" and they hope US and European partners will bring some dough to the table :)
I am somewhat familiar with a state of Russian science, and while it may be that over countries are going ahead of US - Russia is not one of them. Real science in Russia is, unfortunately, taking a backseat to populist crackpottery (such as controlling the clouds or making machines that cure all diseases with "magnetism" and other such things bordering on mysticism) that is in style with the new rich, who are ready to pay for it.
BTW. Alexa claims only about 47.1% of us here at /. are from US. I'm unsure how representative Alexa is for global stats (global rankings rarely are), but the rest of the world'd be sooner underrepresented than not.
Nobody ever said the Internet wasn't global. When interpreting pronouns like 'we' in a quote like that posted on slashdot, context matters. The person who constructed the sentence made it very clear that the 'we' pronoun was citizens and residents of the United States. 'We' isn't always a universal that is meant to encompass everyone who reads the text. For example, the U.S. Declaration of Independence was written by the Continental Congress, to be sent both to people within the American Colonies, *AND* to foreign nations (in particular, England). The second paragraph starts "We hold these truths to be self evident. . ."
It's obvious that the writers of the Declaration of Independence weren't including all possible readers in the "We", as the King of England and his privy council, as well as the parliament of England, probably didn't hold that view at that time.
'We' is a perfectly useful pronoun, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the way it was used in the quote posted to slashdot. If the article author hadn't made it clear from context who 'we' encompassed, then I might have agreed with your position, but I personally find your argument lacks merit.
Who cares where the research happens, so long as it happens and happens well? Science should be without borders. Reducing it to a penis-measuring contest is hardly edifying.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
However, that law is never mentioned when American companies demand that Washington open the floodgates to foreign engineers begging to come to the USA. The CEO of, say, Intel says that the American economy will collapse unless we Americans admit foreign engineers. Professor David Patterson (of UC-Berkeley) promotes the idea that we must admit foreign engineers so that we can be #1 in all fields. (Patterson is president of ACM and has promoted the H-1B program.)
These advocates of foreign engineers are wrong.
Even more interesting is the fact that Japanese companies rarely hire foreign engineers. Technology in Japan is homegrown. Yet, the Japanese beat the Americans in several areas of high technology. Most of the patents for your LCD monitor are owned by Japanese companies.
Here is the irony. Despite a massive influx of foreign engineers, the USA is actually declining in scientific achievement according to the lead news article in this discussion. Yet, Japan, which has severe restrictions on hiring foreigners, remains a technological powerhouse. Here is the conclusion: H-1B engineers were never necessary to the American economy.
http://creationmuseum.org/
...and it has not been laughed out of existence. 'Nuff said.
Disruption is the essence of progress. Some of what was is superseded by something new. Typically the incumbent technologies and powers either fight progress tooth and nail, try to co-opt it, or try to at least manage it's pace to something they can control. When too much incumbent power is too successful at slowing progress, that progress tends to move somewhere else.
In recent years, those incumbent powers have been quite successful in the US. One can hope that that trend doesn't continue.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
not anyone who counted
People mentioned the immigration policies and other factors, but I think the #1 reason long-term pursuits like science have faded from the forefront is the shift everywhere to short term thinking.
Personally, I think we should deemphasize the amount of attention paid to the stock market, and give it back to the billionaire's club. Invest your retirement money in something safe that gives reasonable returns....ror better yet, demand that they bring pensions back (the ultimate long term planning tool.)
He made a very good point.
Tyson made a very good point. In that lecture, he talked about the Islamic Empires of the 12th and 13th centuries that were building while we were in the Christian Dark Ages. Do you know what happened? A bunch of Imams got together and basically stated that Math and Science were of the devil. After that, it was only a matter of time. The result is the Middle East we see today.
He also stated a statistic that since Bush took office in 2001, during the 8 years of Bush, the amount of "hard science" Papers in Chemistry, Biology and Physics has dropped to 1/10th what it was in the 90s.
(He had exact numbers, and I saw this last November.)
The point is, Reactionary Christianity is causing the collapse of our civilization just the same way that Reactionary Islam caused the middle east to become what it is today.
Christianity. Its the Problem.
When you have 60% of your population denying Evolution, a scientific fact, your civilization is circling the drain.
This decline has been going on much longer than any war on terror. This is a problem on a wide social level that has no single cause and no single solution. The sooner people stop using this problem to push their own political agenda the sooner we can get down to solving it.
He said it.
The USA does not, contrary to some believing it, have a monopoly on science and technology.
During the 1970's to 1990's the USA may have made some innovative computer technology and got the Apollo mission to the Moon and the Space Shuttle, but the rest of the world has caught up and in some ways passed us by.
Due to offshoring the work to foreign nations and not hiring enough scientists, engineers, and computer science US citizens in the USA, most of us had to take a job to pay the bills that does not contribute to science and technology. The jobs went to the lower bidders in India, China, Russia, etc instead. Labor goes to where labor costs are cheaper as per classic capitalism and even China has become capitalist. Minimum wage is welfare capitalism and classic capitalism does not use it. The USA has welfare capitalism which means we have welfare ie social programs backed by capitalism via insurance and that means unemployment, COBRA, medicare, disability, welfare, etc. We also force companies to get health insurance for their employees but foreign nations do not. Plus we tax corporations to pay for our welfare capitalism social programs so it also forces companies to move to foreign nations to avoid all that.
When I went to UMR I hung out with the foreign students from China and other places. They were so smart I would play pinball with them in the student lounge and they would win all of these free games because of mechanical engineering and they taught me some of the tricks of playing pinball and gave me their free games, in which I would win more free games and give them to another student. The best of the best from foreign nations come to the USA for college degrees and used to work in the USA, but now thanks to the Internet they can work in a foreign nation and turn out work for pennies on the dollar of what a US citizen wants to earn.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
While out of all the countries, the US is definitely home to the most readers of this site, the majority of the readers are not US-based. Those are two different things. If you look at the stats on Alexa you can see that 47.1% of the readers are from the US, while he second place goes to India with a mere 8.8%. That still means that 52.9% of the readers live outside the US though, so the FAQ seems either false or outdated.
Personally, I blame the MBA. As in the "Masters of Business Administration" degree.
The MBA programmes at all North American universities promote this short of short-term, quarter-by-quarter, stock price driven corporate culture. As the MBA increasingly became the price of entry to more lucrative salaries and promotion within an enterprise, that culture became all-pervasive, to the point where it is now the water in which the fish swim.
And along the way, the MBA-trained manager class forgot the hard-learned lessons of their founding fathers - like long-term planning, maintainence of corporate morale, and taking care of employees.
My career arc went military (I was a product of a military college) -> civvi -> military. The military is hardly a perfect institution, but one thing it really gets right is teaching leadership. Actual *leadership*, not just management.
One of the key tenets of leadership is that quality personnel who are properly motivated can overcome shortfalls in pretty much everything else. Crappy materials, shitty situation, odds stacked against you - well led troops can overcome these things and manufacture success.
And so there are a number of principles that go along with providing this kind of leadership: Lead by example. Ask your subordinates to do nothing you wouldn't do (or haven't done). Loyalty up starts with loyalty down. Respect is earned, not demanded. Always tell the truth, no matter how unpalatable it might be. If you have to correct someone (or you yourself are corrected) fix the problem and move on with no grudges. Provide subordinates with clear direction, including the mission to be accomplished and your intent, and then trust them to carry it out. Etc.
Yes, even in the military it is rare for all of these to gel in the same unit, and I can name commanders who I worked for/with who were deficient in one or more of these areas. But even the worst of them (and some could be pretty bad) were still better leaders and ultimately more effective than any MBA-trained manager I ever worked with as a civilian.
Having worked in a variety of civvie companies, ranging from small startups to major corporations (and most of my civvie experience was with US corporations) I've never seen so many people so completely oblivious to the effects of their decisions upon morale and the overall health and well being of their workforce. Decisions were routinely made with no consideration of second or third order effects. Corporate loyalty simply did not exist, with the employees in the trenches convinced (quite rightly) that management was out to screw them as hard as they could - and so it was OK then to screw the company as hard as they could.
And most frustratingly, any attempt to draw attention to problems in an attempt to get them rectified was usually perceived as an attack on the person who came up with the policy, not the policy itself. It was nearly impossible to pass ground truth up the chain because the bearer of bad news was treated as "difficult" and quite often punished or even terminated.
I wonder sometimes if the success of the "greatest generation" who fought in WW2 isn't because so many key people were exposed to military-style leadership and that sense of everybody in an enterprise pulling towards a common goal, and then that carrying on through the rest of their lives. Now, we get the short-sighted, numbers-focussed "leadership" of the MBA and the resulting destruction and misery.
I went back to the Army in large part because I couldn't take it any more. Even a bad day in the Army usually trumped a good day as a corporate wage slave.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
^ +1, uncomfortably true.
There is certainly a big "culture of entitlement" in the U.S. that has largely replaced individualism and a good work ethic. When you have a lot of people wanting something for nothing and only a small number of hard-working people to leech off of to get that something for nothing, are you surprised that the country is collapsing?
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
The introduction of the welfare state in the Nordic countries greatly boosted their economies. Blaming America's problems on a desire for some government solutions is an oversimplification that obscures more than it clarifies.
this nightmare started in 1980 with reagan and has continued ever since. Poppa Bush tried to give it more funding, but Clinton did little and W out and out destroyed it. It remains to be seen what Obama really will do, but it does not look all that good.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
While I think there is rampant abuse of the H1-B program I do think it is vital a U.S. dominance in all technological fields. Through-out the 30's and 40's we were not pulling just highly educated people from other countries, we were pulling in rockstars of science, people that could contribute the science we were trying to develop. Today H1-Bs are just a form of cheaper labor for companies and you don't have to be especially well qualified to land a job using an H1-B. Because of this our job pool is diluted and all the effort bringing people here yields very little.
The best and brightest minds are naturally going to be in other countries as we hold merely 5% of the population. H1-B needs to be about bringing in the best and the brightest, not about filling non-existent programmer position voids. Foreigners helped us construct the atomic bomb among many other technological leaps forward. They are necessary. The fact that Japan is so successful right now is due to us being lazy and let's face it, science was manipulated for political gains through the new millennium. When we recover our strengths you'll see us surpass Japan unless they too start bringing in foreign talent.
Of course you might remember that Japan was in a similar position to the U.S. now about a decade ago. They shifted their priorities and surprise surprise, they are back to being productive members of the international community. Right now people in the U.S. take their success for granted and have forgotten that it was only achieved through lots of hard work and lots of sacrifice! My own feelings lean towards suggesting that the religious awakening since 9/11 has been the root cause due to people living in fear searching for a quick fix rather than fixing the root of the problems at hand. It's easy to say god will save us, hard to actually do it yourself and stop the international sale of arms to unstable regions and stop the acquisition of oil from countries that behave unconscionably. All solutions come with sacrifice and there would be serious humanitarian issues to deal with although I suspect China would fill any economic gaps for those countries we stopped buying from. At some point we have to accept higher gas prices as a cost of our ideals which are just and sound if only we had the balls to live up to them.
There are a number of factors as to why science is sliding, and it's not unique to the USA, most of the Western countries have this problem.
- In the UK, anyone on a science / engineering degree is sneered at; science, engineering and IT are SERIOUSLY uncool.
- In the UK, it is cool to be a moron.
- In the UK, there are no incentives for smart children to take up sciences (the government socially engineering moron population - easier to control).
- In the UK, a degree in a useless subject like English, art, politics, history, Latin, drama, can get you on the career paths which can earn LOTS of money (ie. acting, banking, politics). How many rich people do you see that are engineers? The list rapidly runs out after Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ellison and a few others.
- Education in sciences is not that great, many lecturers prefer the textbook approach and not enough practical skills.
But that's the education side. The other problem is people in the sciences of engineering come up with a new gadget or process, but then find out that they can't proceed because part of their idea has already been patented by Mega rich corp..
Take Nobody's Word For It.
H-1B engineers are necessary to suppress wages, which is necessary to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. That's commonly known as "right-wing" politics, which have been practiced at least since Reagan's time, for the detriment of almost all.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Okay, we're all a little bit Intel, IBM, Arab and English. Where's the American part?
No, it is not. Look at China. They operate PURELY as a nation looking out for their own interest. Copenhagen should have told you that. Likewise, we see similar actions in South America. India worked with China, but even they point their finger at China for not working to do what most nations perceive as being in global interest. Brazil and nations like Veneuela point their finger at America and say that we did not do enough. Yet, we offered up large conncessions and said that we would go further if CHina would go with us. China refused. Problem is, that unless CHina changes course, then even if the entire west drops to ZERO OUTPUT TODAY (zero chance), China will drive the total emissions over the 2050 line by 2030.
What this shows is that we have a coming superpower that only recognizes national lines, not global.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
>>They are, but perhaps they wouldn't have been if there was sufficient (in price as well as quantity) homegrown talent.
Fixed that for you. H-1B's are there to lower expected wage for engineers by increasing the pool, not to replace any shortage.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
This is what happens when you start to politicize science.
We spending money proving Global Warming but change it to Climate Change. Still not a lot of scientifically sound evidence that we are in a man-made cycle with irreversible conditions. Ironically, we are only releasing carbon from fossil fuels that was once in plants, which was once in the air, which is where we are putting it. Not sure that, given the planet earth is a closed system in terms of matter conservation, we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.
But we spend more money on social engineering than we do on real engineering or research. I think if the government gave up on all research it would be beneficial. Virgin is doing more with space technology than NASA is. And making money at it.
All government funded research does is take money away from people who want to spend it in some other manner and apply it towards projects that may not have any realizable benefit that's being run by people who are better at pitching funding proposals than delivering results.
Here's food for thought. Polywell fusion has amazing potential as a viable energy source. Government funding consists of $500,000 from the US Navy and run by a private company. The researchers are not Government employees. With some Venture Capital they could be running this project with billions of capital investments.
UAV technology is at a complete standstill in this country -- unless you work for the USAF. FAA regulations are so retarded you can't consider ever deploying UAV on US territories. But Australia and Korea are kicking butt on this research outside of military applications because they have commercially viable potential.
We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.
I didn't see it coming. They didn't mention it once on American Idol.
To have a good domestic workforce, you have to train good domestic engineers. It is actually that simple.
Ever seen a Japanese school from the inside? Try to discuss the idea of "no child left behind" with a person from Japan and watch closely how he tries to retain his proverbial composure. Japanese schools don't level the field, they demand.
You say that the Japanese system of a reliance on domestic engineers is good and should be applied to the US. I say, to do that you first of all have to create engineers that are on par with Japan. Then we can talk.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, the problem is, as pointed out in the subtext of your post, a failing educational system.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
American universities should focus on Americans first.
And this is exactly the attitude that is causing America to be slipping. Don't educate the best and brightest, educate the best from the 5% who happen to be born in the USA. Don't encourage the best and brightest to come to America and make it a better place, pick from the 5% who happen to be born in the USA. If you want America to regain the place it had in the middle of the twentieth century, you need to make it an attractive place for the top foreigners to relocate to. Stop importing people to fill up jobs at the bottom and middle, and start importing world leaders again.
Or would you rather that people like Einstein and Von Braun had gone somewhere else and their jobs been taking by Real Americans(tm)? The world stage would probably look very different if that had happened...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yet you're communicatying over the internet in a way created by a British man.
My understanding is that to receive a student Visa in the US, you have to promise NOT to attempt to get a job here after graduation. Why are we trying to send the best(?) educated people in the world to other countries to innovate? If I was president, anyone with a master or doctorate degree from an accredited US university could live and work here as long as they like with a only a background check.
I have no clue what you're trying to prove by that.
That the US still does science isn't being disputed. Science in the US can be on the decline, while still exploring the solar system, doing research in genetics and funding studies.
No. Only Norway has any real amount of oil. Finland is almost bereft of natural resources (its paper companies these days looking more to Brazil for wood).
The problem with anecdotal evidence, is that people arguing the exact opposite point can pull out a dozen examples too. In this article John Derbyshire pulls out a dozen examples of why Obama is trying to kill science in the United States. It's not convincing to anyone who knows about National Lab Day, Educate to Innovate STEM initiative, Computer Science Week, data.gov, and the Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research... but this is all anecdotal too, a better resource would be an overview of all the projects being funded by the stimulus package or trends in government funding of scientific research.
However, I do completely agree that Tyson is being unfair to the American government. In fact, this is the same guy who previously argued Republicans were doing a great job of funding American science. The real issue here, and the one we are dealing with most in computer science, is American Culture's antipathy and outright contempt for science and academia. Kids aren't going into Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry, etc, because they are afraid of being associated with "geeks." The kids all want to be gangsters, models, and sports stars... not realizing how unrealistic those dreams are and that only a miniscule percentage of people succeed in those arenas.
We need a culture change, we need to be proud geeks and make others envy us. It'll help us out in the long run.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
That is a very false conclusion.
The Japanese are a few years behind... but they are suffering the same fate as the Americans.
Young Japanese (on mass) do not find science and engineering all that interesting anymore and they aren't willing to sacrifice to just do it as a job.
There's also the salary curve. As your society gets more services and regulations, there are 'easier' ways to make money, you can be a financial person, a doctor, lawyer, public sector worker, transit worker ... Your best and brightest go into those areas.
Contrast this with say H1Bs. Now you get the best of the best from other countries where the pay/work vastly exceeds anything they could earn in other industries.
That said, the need for H1Bs is simply not that useful these days. If a company wants to make use of foreign labor, they could just setup a foreign branch :P
If it's free market you are worried about, did you notice that if you hire a foreign engineer even with just a bachelors, you just got approximately 16 years of training for absolutely free. The other country paid for the schooling, and you get the fruits.
The reason most countries have free education is that the investment into education is well worth it. Now you are saying no, when someone is giving it to you for free. The way to make sure that US engineers have jobs is to stimulate the job market, not by starving the job market of foreign talent. Investing in basic research is one way to do that, and the US has done that in the 50s and 60s, and we are still reaping the benefits. Now that huge government investment in basic research has gone the way of the dodo ... so will the jobs. Insulating ourselves and pretending nothing's wrong ain't going to work.
In an odd coincidence, when those plants were growing with all that carbon dioxide in the air, it was a lot hotter than it is now! Obviously that warming wasn't man made so this must not be either, right?
You state we spend money "proving" global warming. Let's assume you're right - how much is that exactly?
According to the GAO, it's probably around 6 billion a year. Which is about two weeks in Iraq.
Not sure that... we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.
Yes, we are burning hundreds of millions of years worth of old biomass in less than 150. We're also destroying every old growth forest on the planet. I'm fairly sure these are new events. And even a closed system will have periods of self-regulation that could be very inhospitable to our way of life.
Virgin is doing more with space technology than NASA is. And making money at it.
Virgin is not making money. Virgin has not been to the moon. Virgin hasn't ever placed a satellite. Virgin has never even orbited the earth as the space shuttle has. Virgin has never docked with a space station, or built one. It's performing sub-orbital flights - whoopdedoo!
All government funded research does is take money away from people who want to spend it in some other manner and apply it towards projects that may not have any realizable benefit that's being run by people who are better at pitching funding proposals than delivering results.
If this is true, why are all technologically advanced civilizations run by a strong state government? And I guess rocket technology, information technology, satellites, and every other major advance of the 20th century funded directly by government research have netted us very little.
Here's food for thought. Polywell fusion has amazing potential as a viable energy source. Government funding consists of $500,000 from the US Navy and run by a private company. The researchers are not Government employees. With some Venture Capital they could be running this project with billions of capital investments
I thought you just said government funding was the problem? Would polywell reactors had a chance at private capital investment in the 1980s, so it could develop to the point where it may be viable? Or are you just unable to form a coherent argument if you're allowed to write more than a few sentences?
I agree that there need to be more reasonable restrictions for research and development, but that's more of a function of bad governance than private initiative. All of the programs in Australia and South Korea are sponsored by their federal governments.
We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.
Commercial R&D is just like commerce itself. Incredibly short sighted and hamstrung by the requirement of quick return on investment. That's why pure R&D does not exist in the commercial realm, especially since the closure of Bell Labs. Modern corporations are so greedy, they are only allowed by their shareholders to perform product development. Anything that has a good chance of losing money - like pure research and development - is never even put on the table.
Well, about the Climate Change or Global Warming, I find it funny that people come and say the we have no proof of that. The other day I was hearing a known analyst on tv saying just that. I remember the same guy saying there were WMDs in Iraq well after US troops overrun the country, that Saddam hid them in a boat of truck in the desert... I'm not saying the same applies to you... My point is that while some disagreement seems to exist, that's more on how it's going to affect us, because the large majority - it no longer takes a scientist to see that - can't deny something is happening. But even if people don't want to believe the warming there's a whole array of other nice problems: garbage, garbage on the sea, extinction, deforestation, and our old but somewhat forgotten friend - the ozone hole! Now, are the scientists still trying to find proof for these too, I ask?
I sure think it's changing. In fact I'm sure. I hear my parents and grandparents saying how it used to rain more or how it used to be colder in Winter. Hell, seasons are blurring since a few years back. More extreme weather phenomena is happening... And it's going to get worse I fear.
As for research, we don't have much of that here, we slightly have some in the Universities but that's it. But in the US? Come on, cut a few percent off the defense budget and there's plenty dough for everyone. Why should people have to choose between having private or public R&D? They can have both.
The decline in science and technology in America is enough to scare the hell out of me. The worst of it is that we can do nothing to fix it that the public would tolerate. Requirements for success by our school children would have to be drastic. American parents are in no way willing to put their kids through the kind of hell it takes to make competitive scholars. Some nations have genius scholars simply because extraordinary accomplishments are the only hope a young person has to avoid a living hell.
A lot of people here are talking about H1bs and the cost of education and one person even said the size of our population somehow correlates to a lack of amazing scientific progress. If that's true, India and China should have warp drives already.
Let's stop with the nonsense, especially with regard to immigrant workers.
While some companies do abuse H1bs it's not the cause of the decline of US scientific leadership, not even close! Einstein, Fermi, Godel et al were all foreigners! Please take the immigration debate elsewhere!
The realize the real root of the problem: culture. We have created a culture that loves to watch celebrities and make money. We have not instilled in our students the value of science education. And this should be seen as the biggest tragedy going into the second decade of the 21st century. People lack basic scientific literacy and they seems to be ok with not understanding a great many things. Just the other day I read about a high school that wanted to cut science labs because too many white students were overachieving while the minority students were not. This should be obvious to anyone with common sense that this is absurd. Taking away resources from achieving students and directed them to non-achieving students won't help anyone. There are a lot of factors why students don't perform well in school, particularly in the math and science fields. But I think the main reason is culture. The under-achieving students haven't had it beaten into them that their education, particularly in science, is invaluable. And while these are often minority students, they are not exclusively so. My grandfather came to this country with a PhD in physics but less than $6.00 in his pocket and no family, but managed to work his way up to solidly middle class with a comfortable life and his kids are in engineering. The idea that education is paramount has been drilled into me from birth and now I'm a graduate physics student and I enjoy doing physics.
So my point is, you must hammer into the psyche of the populace that science and math are not inaccesible and can be quite enjoyable if some hard work is put into study. Not everything is about money and getting the MBA (but yes, increased funding would go a long way to help advance STEM). And even though some companies do probably abuse H1bs, it's not the reason we're lacking and neither is the size of our population (a silly idea in my humble opinion, it's obvious to see why).
So, even thought Tyson makes a weak link between the shooting of Apophis and American science, the point he raises is still a valid one and is a valid concern and requires an honest attempt at a cultural shift as I pointed just mentioned that requires us, especially scientists, to show the population that evolution is fact, the reasons for it, why it's important, and how spectacular learning about it is.
Get an MBA. Half the work, twice the standard of living. If you're smart, do a salary survey and really look at the work conditions of the various career paths. I didn't.
Engineers, and many scientists from what I see, work long hours, get very little respect/recognition, and make a decent salary. Don't expect a door or window to your "office", and expect to be jealous of Dilbert (I'm no kidding).
With an MBA you get lots of recognition (i.e. take credit for what your engineers do), get little blame (i.e. blame all your engineers), and get ~50% more salary despite the omnipresent line of drool on the left side of your mouth. No one bats an eye when you leave for a 3:30 PM tee time either. Best of all your skills are "universal", no need to understand microwave design now that you manage it, you worked for a disk drive manufacturer. Same thing, right?
Seriously, the incentives are pretty fouled up at the moment, and you will kick yourself later if you get into engineering or science for anything but the cerebral self rewards your are occasionally allowed to enjoy (in between schedule related beatings from your MBA wielding overlord).
surely you realize that, while all UCAVs are UAVs, not all UAVs are UCAVs.
Ironically, we are only releasing carbon from fossil fuels that was once in plants, which was once in the air, which is where we are putting it. Not sure that, given the planet earth is a closed system in terms of matter conservation, we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.
Ironically, you would not be living well in a Earth habitat that existed 1,000,000s of years ago. Just because the Earth once was does not mean that Humankind once was. Humankind has not been around as long as the Earth and there were many, many environments that the Earth has had.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
Investment theory models treat corporations as if they were mathematical or perhaps physical entities - a mechanism, if you will.
That is not the case.
A corporation is a SOCIAL entity, because most of the moving parts are PEOPLE.
That means that there are second and third and umpty-ordinal effects of the model-driven first order effects because the model cannot predict how the employees will feel and react to decisions made in the company.
Any military commander will tell you that the most precious attribute of a unit is *morale*. You can give a man the best weapons, the best equipment, outnumber the enemy by a significant margin - but if the troops won't fight, you're going to lose.
Morale is built from human relationships and human contact. It is constructed from trust and experience. It is a very touchy-feely, nebulous concept that does not model well. It can be simulated, somewhat, and many wargames attempt to build in some approximation of it because it is so important. Do your investment models take it into account?
I have been in companies with both low and high morale. The difference is night and day. And a company with low morale is both a horrid place to work and and underperformer.
Leadership, not management, build winners.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
While I agree with your assessment that US schools and society should foster interest and acceptance of more hard science and engineering, and seek to reduce the attractiveness of careers like being the next basketball or hip hop star, using the Japanese method of schooling does have its own set of drawbacks.
http://www.japantoday.com/category/kuchikomi/view/childrens-depression-and-suicide-a-worsening-problem
I think something in the middle between the US methods and the Japanese methods of childhood education might hit the sweet spot a little better.
If that means some short attention span theater stockholder doesn't make enough this quarter..who cares...
I think it is far more important, for the longer range view of humanity in general, that the emphasis is more placed on just being happy and having enough, rather than the great race to see who can accumulate the most electronic digits in some server some place, to be at the top of an unhappy and dysfunctional dystopian society, by being the most strict and ruthless and to use your word, "demanding".
I, for one, to follow the meme and to use an example that everyone here would understand, have absolutely no desire to be part of a society of either extreme (which unfortunately both extremes exist today and ARE being pushed heavily towards); either some zombied/brainwashed out Borg "you as an individual have no worth, and must conform and do exactly as you are programmed to do for the collective" type society, nor a "profits above everything else" type individual greed is king no rules and get out of the way or you are dead Ferengi type society.
Got no use for either, but sadly, those are roughly the two main political tracks on the planet now. Kinda sucks.
We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.
Hey, stupid, corporate taxes have gone down since the 1980's. But yet, the number of research labs run by corporations has gone down precipitously in that time. Why? I'll give you a hint - it has nothing to do with the amount of government expenditures. It has a lot to do with the fact that corporations don't see immediate profit in research and have closed down their labs. And, in fact, the government has actually subsidized corporate R&D since that time by giving R&D tax credits. So are you just ignoring facts, or what?
That is all.
First off I am a frequent lurker of the Polywell community and if you are being intellectually
honest you know darn well that the potential device has only a slim chance of being
better than ITER. The lack of funds is one thing true, the other is the performance of science
(in this case fusion) without a proper amount of community (yes boring democratic government)
peer review so that in 30 years on the most basic assumptions have yet to be verified.
Secondly were "climate change" false or a scam there would be zero reason to develop Polywell
since this country has ample coal reserves -- enough to last 100's of years.
Thirdly I have been long been an academic researcher, now am in industry and I will tell you
that nothing innovative in science comes except from government funding. The halcyon
days of Bell Labs funding astronomy are long gone. There is a difference between science
and technology.
Capitalism, as practiced worldwide has advantages in terms of efficiency, but few in terms of
"the vision thing".