Slashdot Mirror
China Will Lead World Scientific Research By 2020
Hugh Pickens writes "An analysis of papers published in 10,500 academic journals across the world shows that, in terms of academic papers published, China is now second only to the US, and will take first place by 2020. Chinese scientists are increasing their output at a far faster rate than counterparts in rival 'emerging' nations such as India, Russia, and Brazil. The number of peer-reviewed papers published by Chinese researchers rose 64-fold over the past 30 years. 'China is out on its own, far ahead of the pack,' says James Wilsdon, of the Royal Society in London. 'If anything, China's recent research performance has exceeded even the high expectations of four or five years ago.' According to Wilsdon, three main factors are driving Chinese research. First is the government's enormous investment, with funding increases far above the rate of inflation, at all levels of the system from schools to postgraduate research. Second is the organized flow of knowledge from basic science to commercial applications. And third is the efficient and flexible way in which China is tapping the expertise of its extensive scientific diaspora in North America and Europe, tempting back mid-career scientists with deals that allow them to spend part of the year working in the West and part in China." Here's the Financial Times's original article.
But I wouldn't want to live in either.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"... China is tapping the expertise of its extensive scientific diaspora in North America and Europe, tempting back mid-career scientists with deals that allow them to spend part of the year working in the West and part in China."
Translation: Chinese academics and scientists working in the West are, for all intents and purposes, spys.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
...anyone can play the numbers game. But how do we gauge the quality of those papers, and the quality of the Chinese peer review process? If progress is simply a matter of slaughtering trees, then Americans can play with the best of 'em.
Since the PRC accounts for about 25% of the human race, while the US accounts for about 5%!
Let the Chinese steal from us and then start innovating on their own. We'll then just start stealing from each other.
As a researcher in the physical sciences, I have noticed that nearly all the Chinese groups working my area publish complete crap of no value to other researchers. There are quite a few good Chinese researchers at American universities, but I have not once found a reason to actually cite a group based in China. They have a long way to go still before they reach the same level of impact as any western country (or hell, even its neighbors Korea and Japan).
I have had several contacts with computer scientists **from** China, and they seem to have very bizarre publication habits. The quantity of papers seems to be their main objective. As concerns quality, it's not necessarily good. So, let them work on publishing, they'll do less research. :)
If all of that research is into how to make cheaper versions of the US/UK research that have the exact short term results?
Maybe things wouldn't be this way if people in the U.S. started fighting the stigma of becoming a "nerd," gave college research priority over athletics programs, and provided students incentive to be hard-working and inquisitive.
When it comes to the race to develop new technologies, I'm always reminded of the (easily missed) quote at the beginning of Deus Ex: "Their... 'ethical inflexibility' has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider." For example China does not have the ethical hangups about stem cell research that we do here in the west. Perhaps they will be developing new medicines and cures based on their research--and we will end up using it in the end as well.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Forget for a moment the nationalistic and economic competition between USA and China. What this means to me is that with China, Russia, Brazil and India increasing their research output, the rate of scientific progress will probably double from what we had 10 years ago.
That and the fact that I prefer (for moral reasons) a non starving Chinese population, means this is good to me. The current boom in biotechnology together with an aging population, means that scientific knowledge improves quality of life for all of us.
By the way, China is investing heavily and making fast progress in stem cell development, a research area where the religious lobby in the USA has delayed progress. The USA has it's own political problems.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Things are seriously backwards here when some of the most educated people in the world are paid so poorly.
Most post-docs doing basic research get paid between 30-40K. Perhaps if we paid scientists what they are worth there would be less brain drain.
... they can stop stealing everything in the West that isn't nailed down.
the chinese do all there research in the us then they publish there work in china
Is the gov't doing anything about this 'brain drain'? We loved it when the best minds from Asia came to the US to study, start families and have their careers here. Now that they are heading back while our top minds continue to become lawyers and doctors (those that practice medicine not research it). All the while US companies have their IP stolen.
Maybe in 2020 the US will have large botnets stealing IP from China...
and you could find this exact same article, just substitute China for Japan. And yet 25 years later very few Japanese have won nobel prizes, Japan is a leader in a few select fields, but is a far cry from what people were saying it would be by now. This despite spending massive amounts of money on R&D and whatnot. Time will tell if this holds true for China as well, but I think it's important not to extrapolate too much on a very limited data set.
Monstar L
The problem with presenting just raw numbers is that it does not reflect the quality of the research. Just last week, Nature has an article in its News section examining the rampant fraud and plagiarism in Chinese research publications.
this comment is idiotic. Running two groups (one in the West and one in China) is becoming commonplace. Although this seems to be happening mostly in Singapore (due to English), more than in Beijing or Shanghai.
... quality not quantity.
Every time I point out how China will replace the US as the dominant force in the world, I get modded troll. Well, America, I understand. My mother is British, and consequently I have a British passport. I understand the denial that's happening - the way you feel is just like the British felt from the mid 1800's up until the middle of last century. The decline of the British Empire took 100 years. But nowadays things happen a lot faster.
Let's look at China:
They have all the industry they need - so much, that they are rapidly becoming the worlds biggest exporter of everything.
They have a huge population.
They have a strong leadership.
They have a real military. Uh this isn't Iraq, right? Their submarines are good enough to sneak up on US carriers, and they have demonstrated that they can shoot down satellites. Now I ask myself where the US will be with carriers on the bottom of the oceans and no satellites to coordinate communications for combined arms or provide overhead intelligence. They've chosen a very smart, asymmetric warfare route. They don't need to have ultra high tech main battle tanks capable of taking direct hits from M1's. They don't need hundred million dollar stealth aircraft. They just need lots and lots of reasonably good anti aircraft and anti tank missiles.
They are becoming scientific leaders, which will even take away the US technology edge.
They have a space program. They also have nuclear weapons. Combine the two and that means they can put a nuclear bomb anywhere on the planet with an ICBM. What's not known is their accuracy, but who needs accuracy if you have a multi-megaton device?
Everything they can't innovate (yet), they can copy. Adherence to patents and intellectual property laws is only given by consent.
They are the single largest holder of US debt, outside the US government.
Ohhhh, it's going to be ugly. I certainly wouldn't want to live in Taiwan in the next 20 years, for a start. Forget the argument that the US is China's biggest customer, that's irrelevant. Wars often start between the best trading partners. The US and the UK circa 1800. The US and Japan WW2. France and Prussia/Germany, quite often in the 19th century. The only hope I have is that China has not shown any expansionist tendencies in recent history. They've been content with defending their borders. But if suddenly they decide to play the imperialism game - watch out!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe things wouldn't be this way if people in the U.S. started fighting the stigma of becoming a "nerd," gave college research priority over athletics programs, and provided students incentive to be hard-working and inquisitive.
The the real priority that is clearly disparate between Western countries and China is purely what percent of our GDP we dump into science versus defense on a federal level. Do a budget comparison between the United States and China for defense spending. I think you'll find that that leaves China with much more resources to dump into education, their growing economy, building infrastructure and science.
In the United States, military spending does foster more science and education but still not as much as dumping that new joint strike fighter contract into college educations for everyone. It ain't going to change but it's a very real difference that can be felt.
My work here is dung.
At least in my field (Mobile Robotics), Chinese papers are everywhere but none of the ones I found were some kind of breakthrough.
China is all about volume simply bc they are HUGE.
And also... I'm still waiting to see a major civil war there sometime..
rival 'emerging' nations such as India, Russia, and Brazil.
It was 18th century when Russia was "emerging" in scientific research.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
so i don't believe any chinese researchers will be making amazing breakthroughs as long as they live in a country which is fundamentally opposed to the idea of the free exchange of ideas. the free exchange of ideas is not some cute tweak on the product of scientific research, it is a preceding requirement for quality research to even be done in the first place
a society which does not allow a free exchange if ideas does not result in minds flexible enough to grasp important patterns quickly out of a morass of data. which is the essence of science. a society which carefully controls information results in minds weakened by an artificially placid media environment, where all information is carefully chosen for its adherence to an official point of view. but the truth is often ugly, and when "harmony" is artificially imposed, you breed flimsy minds which can only be spoonfed ideas which aren't too challenging to them
a truly keen scientific mind is bred in an environment where it is constantly challenged by ideas contrary to established belief. the mind is a muscle: challenge it, and it grows strong. put it in artificially serene environment free of opposing ideas, and it grows weak. the information environment that china supports therefore is contrary to the production of good scientific minds, and therefore contrary to the production of good science
in science, you question everything. and therefore, you get the best scientific theories. but in china, you never question, you only behave and adhere to the official party line. and so china is not building the social environment in which high quality minds can exist and high quality science can be done. china is breeding a generation of minds that are made of cotton candy and fluff with their desire for "harmony" over ugly truths. it takes an adherence to freedom of expression to get minds that are free in thought, and therefore make good science
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When I was taking stats, my stat professor told me that he saw the far east eventually becoming the technology center of the world because of the increased amount of technological manufacturing and R/D coming from that region of the world.
On the other hand, he said, the United States is pretty unmatched in agricultural exports because of the natural resources at its disposal. China seems to be the biggest importer of agricultural goods from the U.S. All of that is to say, we might eventually see an increase in the value of raw commodities some time in the near future because of their increased export value.
Since Slashdot is all about unsubstantiated rumors, is now an appropriate time to say I don't have any references for this?
----
My signature is ill and couldn't be with us today.
Ah, so have the Chinese come up with any therapies based on embryonic stem cells? If so, we'd know, since they would be the first and it would be banner headlines around the world.... (See my other comment on this for more detail.)
It really is quite interesting to see a new Super Power being born. This is made a bit more interesting as I'm an American and "I" have been the Super Power for my entire life. To be witnessing the handover/taking of that torch is, admittedly a little unsettling, but hey, lets be honest, the US is no barometer of "good". We're pretty shady in our own right.
That being said, I have a feeling if there isn't a massive overhaul of the Chinese government, it may be a short lived stay at the top. As their populace inevitably feels the benefits of being at the top, they are going to want a better standard of living. As more and more of their populace starts wanting more, wanting "better", and becoming more educated, the corruption, censoring, etc, is going to get more and more obvious. I can easily see their population eventually standing up and demanding something better.
Hopefully they don't have the same growing pains we did (civil war, etc), although, we did come out better for it and it didn't kill us as a nation.
It will be an interesting show to watch, even if it is a bit unnerving.
Leading the world in the number of papers published is not equivalent to leading to world in scientific research.
An old professor of mine has said that he has been shocked by the number of times he's been reading a paper by a Chinese researcher and found large sections of the paper copied verbatim from one of his own. In a country that is so competitive in publishing papers, I'm sure many succumb to the pressure and temptation. That's not to say that there are good, original advances being made, but I'm not quite as optimistic as the news title leads one to believe.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/274/5286/337.pdf
maybe it's just me - but I am bored of people who are trying to tell me, how the world will look like in 10 or 20 or 50 years. I mean - it is always fun to play the "what will be" game - but I can't quite remember on of those prognosis that actually came out to be true true...
My own experience as a researcher is that Asian countries in general (with the possible exception of Japan) have a long way to go before they match the impact of Western researchers. There are exceptions, such as the MD5 collision found by Wang et al., but in general most of the major breakthroughs occur in the West.
It's also not clear whether research produced by overseas Chinese is included in the total. Some of the very best mathematicians in the world are Chinese, but almost all of them are based at Western institutions. In any case, as good as they are, the number of overseas Chinese is so small that they don't represent anything close to a majority.
>First is the government's enormous investment, with funding increases far above the rate of inflation
Well of course, when the person that comes up with something good or important, they will have to give it to china directly and it will be
china's property, second, their trials for medicine are totally different then ours, so if they come out with a supposed cure, the government has no problems testing right away on humans before doing real studies on animals...also, if you think about it, they have 4 times the population as the US, so of course they will be ahead, as well as all the cyber espionage they have been doing, what ever we have come up with, they now know, so we need to do the same to them....so as to keep relatively side by side.
This is all we can hope for.
Why is it always about quantity and growth? What about the quality of research? A scientist myself, I generally find that Chinese research, however "peer-reviewed", is not really stellar. In fact it is stated in the FT's article:
Although the statistics measure papers in peer-reviewed journals that pass a threshold of respectability, “the quality [in China] is still rather mixed,” says Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters. But it is improving, he adds: “They have some pretty good incentives to produce higher quality research in future.”
These "incentives" make me laugh tbh. The only incentive in a stupid quantitative system is to meet requirements for the next year's round of grants. To be fair, this focus on quantity is absolutely not specifically a problem with China: is it better to cut a long in-depth study in 10 monthly parts to achieve some arbitrary publication requirement, or to publish all of it in a comprehensive way, when finished? That would make it of course impossible to start a "huge" project only to milk three or four partial papers out of it and then just move on to the next buzz subject when you lose focus...
We might have a chance if we have free education (kindergarden through college), pay our teachers more, pay our scientists more; fix our pathetic and crumbling public schools and colleges (Yes, "free" means paid for through our taxes, because we consider education important).
No way! We don't need no Gummint largess on edumucation or that fancy research! Our free market is going to provide everything for us, especially as long as those socialists (who never succeed at anything) keep funding our debt like they have for the last decade. I'm just going to bury my head back into the sand and turn Fox news back on, so I don't have to think about this reality.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
A somewhat more in-depth account of the increased research output of China can be found here.
They have a one child policy. And lots of parents have sex selection abortion to avoid having their only child be a girl.
So you are going to have a population that will decline in number that has a bunch of young men with no hope of being married. Say what you will, the drive to take care of your family is important to society.
That's not a recipe for long-term success.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I think it's now time to begin to publish in Esperanto.
By now Americans and Brittish are advantaged because all the publications are in English. And all the scientists in the world have to learn this difficult language to stay behind and understand what happens.
But will the chineese always publish their results in English? If they learn English and publish in chineese, they will always be in the first place, but if the scientific community begin to publish in Esperanto now, maybe it's not too late...
But I don't think thiw will happens, and for us non-english speaking people, a new difficult language will replace the current.
lernu.net
It's called the Law of Large Numbers folks. They've got the numbers, we don't.
There is a war going on for your mind.
They hold down anyone who dissents and create a pressure cooker. Their hold on power is tenuous - now 'why should we do what the Party tells us what to do?' In America at least I can email my congressman that I disagree with him without getting thrown in jail. At least I can Run for Office even if I am not in the dominant party, at least I can Vote for Whom I want to that is in the running. They may have focused on lucre and pulled themselves economically out of the state where they used to be - where we had to donate or sell cheap wheat to them so they would not starve en masse - and that is a good thing - In terms of research - any individual in our great country can pick up a book and read, and do research, and team with like-minded people to do research. They may or may not be funded or supported by the Government, but we have plenty of private individuals and groups capable of supporting research.
The reason the U.S. is falling so far behind is the fact that we glorify, even deify, athletes and musicians and throw unhealthy even obscene gobs of money at those two professions yet the return on the investment is nearly zero. Does the fact that some multi-millionare baseball player have a certain batting average do anything to improve the country? Does the fact that musicians get millions for writing one decent song and eleven crappy ones enable others to achieve anything? And then there's the current trend of anti-capitalism. China's government may be communist but its society is clearly capitalist.
despite the best efforts of autocrats and dictators and brutal ugly rulers imposing their will throughout history, a few free minds always fell through the cracks and advanced mankind in scientific progress, despite some of mankind's efforts to keep us backwards
so the terrible irony here is that china WILL produce great scientists, just like the soviet union. and just like those soviet scientists, strong minds in spite of the system they were raised in, those minds will yearn strongly for a free society
and so those great chinese scientists will either yearn to leave china and go to the west, just like their soviet predecessors, where they can be free of all the enforced mediocrity in the political and information environment around them, or, more hopefully, they will serve as the seed of china's transformation to a free society
what i'm saying is, china will produce galileos. and galileo made scientific discoveries which challenged the political environment he was brought up in: catholic dogma. and galileo paid a price for that: house arrest. it will be sad and cruel but inevitable, but the best chinese minds of the future will inevitably wind up opposing the chinese autocracy, and will pay a heavy price for that. we can only hope that enough in china can see the stupidity of punishing their greatest minds for the sake of adhering to a brutal regime, which is brutal only to sustain itself, to be brutal another day
and my comment about galileo is not theoretical, its reality, this is the future and current reality of china's greatest minds:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/25/china-jails-liu-xiaobo
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
While the magnitude of science publications is impressive, what about the quality? Nature magazine recently had an editorial on this subject. In summary, publishing culture in China is moved primarily by quantity. Scientists are rewarded for the number of articles and the prestige of the journal they publish in. This takes priority over all other considerations, including ethics.
From the Nature editorial:
"Chinese universities often award cash prizes, housing benefits or other perks on the basis of high-profile publications, and the pressure to publish seems to be growing. A new study from Wuhan University, for instance, estimates that the market for dubious science-publishing activities, such as ghostwriting papers on nonexistent research, was of the order of 1 billion renminbi (US$150 million) in 2009 — five times the amount in 2007. In other studies, one in three researchers surveyed at major universities and research institutions admitted to committing plagiarism, falsification or fabrication of data." (bold font added)
and later:
"Editors at the UK-based journal Acta Crystallographica Section E [publishing many biochemical crystal structures] last month retracted 70 published crystal structures that they allege are fabrications by researchers at Jinggangshan University in Jiangxi province. Further retractions, the editors say, are likely."
from:
Jane Qiu. "Publish or Perish in China" (2010). Nature 463, 142-143 [sorry, subscription only]
This is only one example but thanks to the Bush administration having its lips super glued to the ass of the religious "right", stem cell research is now being done largely by other countries. As the United States slid more into retreat and towards a theocratic nation, other countries just passed us by and lapped us: countries who aren't concerned about what Pat Robertson thinks and idiot hillbilly religious mentality. Mod it as a troll folks but the United States is largely to blame for its own self inflicted diminished role in research.
The only way this will happen is if they can steal more research than is being produced in the US. But if they have to do it on their own, forget it.
One of the largest is that America is funding their students to come to American universities. We are now spending more on Chinese science students and professors than we do for American science students. That needs to stop. I would rather focus on Western nations students, or at the least, those that are not in a cold war with us.
Given that China has 3x the population of the US, it would be reasonable to expect China to outproduce the US in anything it makes a priority. However, I have doubts that the Chinese government can sustain the current policies. China's one-child per couple policy has led to an ageing population. Plus a growing middle class are going to start demanding more resources to raise their standard of living. Consequently, to maintain social stability the government is going to have to shift priorities, and I suspect that Scientific Research funding may not sustain the increases it has enjoyed. Its only a question of when, and 10 years might be the right timeframe.
I guess having most chineese firms not caring about legal threats from the US helps a bit. In the US you can't do anything without having a lawyer telling you if somebody has already patented a part of what you've been doing.
Melanine will put a halt to this.
3. China is not wasting tons of money and research time trying to skew results to prove Global Warming is a man made event.
"You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor. "
NT
An astonishing fraction of research "results" from China are just plain made up. No wonder they're so prolific! I don't doubt that they will eventually make significant scientific contributions as a nation -- they're 20% of the world's population, after all -- but they're going to have to clean up their act before the global scientific community starts to take them seriously.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
This is not surprising news. Anyone active in a scientific or engineering field who conducts research would have noticed the disproportionate amount of foreign names in research papers. IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) is the major publication source for electrical engineering research. Just go on their website and search some random papers and read the lists of authors. Through my experience, about 50% of those papers will be written by Asian authors (if not dozens of Asian assistant graduate students). Anyone who has attended graduate school in a major engineering university will also divulge the skewed ratio of asian students. I don't know if engineering is a repulsive field of study for American high school students, but there is such a large amount of asian international students when I attended two major colleges for my degrees.
...but living in a beehive would be sweet!
Have you ever heard about basic research? You know, that kind that is very hard to do and takes a long time to become applied?
I have a wild guess that if you forbid basic research in one area you won't get practical results in it.
entropy happens
Who cares about bloody therapies! Stem cell research is fundamental science, wich will, down the road, lead to therapies. Perhaps.
But this is entirely uninportant. The trickle-down effect of additional knowledge in the field will enable more research in all connected fields.And yes, down the road, therapies. No perhaps.
And humanity advances.
And what is it with ESCs? These are not yet well understood at all, and because of the various bans the number of cell lines available for public research could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And were maintained since the seventies. And probably have nothing to do anymore with the real thing.
Please stop obstructing progress. It is because of people like you that researchers overstate the potential of their research. Because nitwits will give them money only for "applied" stuff. Despite the thousands of years of experience we have that fundamental science is amazingly profitable!
Good, maybe they'll stop stealing from others and start actually creating really innovative things...
or at least, ahead of you by 17 minutes ;-P
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1524310&cid=30903536
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
except when you talk about "a racist myth". there's nothing mythical or racist about anything i am saying. you're injecting bullshit into the discussion
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Let me bust some myths here...
1. By publication numbers, YES! China or even any Asian institution can easily knock down a Western institution. But once you bring in "Impact Factor", Asian institutions sink in to the bottom of the pacific!!
Maybe Westerners don't know much about what I'm about to tell. In general, researchers in Asia (especially of Chinese descent) loves to publish barrage of papers every year. Most institutions in this part of the world gives you incentives/bonuses based on the "number" of publications.
How do I know this? Because I'm a PhD student in an university in south-east Asia. When I entered this department, head of research was a mainland Chinese. His first rule was "publish at least 1 journal + 1 conference paper every year. Without 2 journal papers, I won't even read your thesis".
As a consequence of this rat-race, people here are just publishing every crap they can and they don't respect the quality or adherence to ethics of sciences. Even one time, a chinese-descent researcher asked me to fake/make-up data and publish (in fact, that's how she get really amazing data for publications). Here people may call it "scientific discovery", but for a proper trained eyes (like myself), its nothing but "scientific fraud".
Personally, I'm very disappointed with how research departments operate here. Hence I applied to US grad schools last month.
2. Can China improve ? I'm not sure. But certainly I have met several extremely talented mainland Chinese researchers, but all of them reside in some other country (e.g. Australia, Singapore).
Then again, I was asked to review a conference paper, written by *post-doc* students from a non-popular rural university in China. Literally, it was unreadable. It seems they have heavily used the thesaurus or used a translator altogether. Lets forget about the language (even I am happy to help them re-write the paper). That particular paper I read, it didn't prove anything significant nor important, knowledge contribution wise.. NULL. Undergrads in my university report much better research outcomes.
So it is hard to predict... but surely, western institutions still have the mojo.
3. Despite what we see and read, I strongly believe they (Chinese) have a proper R&D knowledge sphere hidden out somewhere. Otherwise, they won't be able to progress in nuclear, military and other technology fronts. Also not to forget, they have journals and other publications in *chinese*.... which I believe are out of reach to us, as we can't read Chinese and those material hardly get translated to English and reach to science databases in west.
As of 2010, it is safe to say... US/UK/EU institutions have the monopoly in Research.. and Asia is nothing but spammers to periodicals. Just my $0.02...
Calling the objections to stem cell research "political" entirely misses the point of whats being argued.
Raising incentives helps to solve straight forward problems, and while china will certainly solve a lot of those way quicker, that's not Nobel Prize-type research. When it comes down to it the only thing that matters is the wisdom to recognize when a failure is a revolution, and the passion to be eternally curious. Europe was the major powerhouse of revolutionary science before "we" killed a lot of them and drove the rest of them away to the US. As far as I can tell I don't see a big jewish diaspora into china :P
I think this is partly because greed, religion and big corps has taken over pretty much everything in the west. We dont listen to our scholars, we dont let them into the debate, we counter their arguments with pseudo science like "intelligent design" and we generally treat them like the scum of the earth. Doing research in the west is not that hot anymore, especially if youre into basic research and not on the productification side of things. Facts and science are in the west just a tool people above the scientists twist and distort to make their personal view come forward.
China hasnt yet had its government taken over by big corps like the US and EU has. Their biggest advantage is a govt that runs the agenda instead of lobbyists just looking out for their very small part of the big picture running the show. We live in a fantasy world where people will pay for our IP but what people fail to understand is that the groundwork laid out now with regards to WIPO is something that will bite us royally in the ass in the future when all the new fancy IP is really coming out from China.
HTTP/1.1 400
...and so I despise those "free traders" who gave away our technology - particularly our computer and manufacturing technology - because they could make a fast buck in the now by ditching American workers.
I don't much like being left with either crossing my fingers or the threat of nuclear Armageddon as my only defenses against the possibility that China - still a state-directed society controlled by a powerful few whose decision process is anything but open - should seek something other than peace forevermore.
Oh, and I also hope that China doesn't decide that, as resources get scarcer, by golly they'll just go take more of whatever from wherever. That might lead them to do something unimaginable - something without precedent - like inventing a reason to invade a nation that has a resource that they perceive value in.
But such an action would never be attempted by a civilized nation, eh? Oh, wait...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Russia's nuke research was greatly helped/jump started by industrial espionage during the WW2 lend-lease program, partly facilitated and financed by short term profits centered traders and compromised governmental functionaries inside the US and Canada. Nuke secrets and actual hardware, including uranium salts and more refined metals, were loaded on planes in the US and shipped there through Alaska into Siberia. They were able to bypass decades of research that way. After that, ya, good at it, but it was that jump start that kicked them into high gear.
Fast forward to today, and it is exactly what China has been doing now in a way for the last twenty years. Just the level of scientific and engineering help is much larger. They have been acquiring just mega loads of already developed tech to start with and work from, at firesale prices or free, heck, they get paid to just take it, that they can turn around and clone and refine and further develop, without doing much of the preliminary steps.
It has been a huge global market advantage for them, simply an enormous advantage, as is obvious looking at global finance today. The west has been giving them every possible industrial advantage, all so that the market traders and labor arbitragers can rake in huge short term profits. Of course China would take that deal, and has, free stuff, then work from there. They got bootstrapped a hundred years in technological development in 20.
China isn't the real problem with the decline of western economies, and it was predictable, and was. It has been the west's own business people in collaboration with some politicians basically selling them out and taking a fat skim in the middle. It's like those corporate raiders who do a hostile take over of some company, sell off all the juicy bits fast for huge short term profits, gut the companies, vote themselves a golden parachute then move on to their next victim/target. Except this has been on entire national scales. We let the looters..loot.
That's why so many of these western nations now have to bailout banks, watch their hard industries collapse, watch their trade deficits soar, watch their internal debt load soar, watch their unemployment levels soar, and resort to desperation governmental accounting tricks with their currencies, etc, to make it appear that things are better than they really are.
That's why US should adopt 5-year plans, at least in academia. Then we might be able to catch up. Seriously, every US university should just increase the volume of their scientific publications, say, 10 percent every year, starting this year.
Would have helped if you'd read the other thread I linked to....
Anyway, you have 22 fingers on your hand? I'm impressed.
But the basic point (see other thread here) is that embryonic stem cell research is being prompted as applied not basic research. This is a bad idea, if for no other reason than that the promoters are getting caught in their lies (e.g. the California government org set up to administer their program). This along with other currently more well known lies like AGW will make it harder for all scientists to get funding in the future. Very short term thinking, yes?
(I support basic research, just not lying about it.)
There's another $150 billion in military spending outside of the Department of Defense. And paying off debt accrued through previous military spending is also lumped in outside of that $600B. When you consider social security separately (and arguably you should, since it's a self-contained program), total military spending easily approaches half.
Then it's a good thing we didn't? Only ban was on Federal funding on creating (or using) new embryonic stem cell lines. Federally funded research could use the 22 existing at the time of the "ban", and other funding (including the 1-2? billion in the California program) wasn't restricted.
And all the research shows that we aren't anywhere near the applied level ... but it's being promoted as applied (see other thread I previously referenced), and see the other reply in this thread for why that's a bad idea.
China consists of a strange mix: two First World territories (Hong Kong and Taiwan), an emergent country (mainly the seaboard) and a large Third World country. In order to become the dominant power, the emergent bit has to become First World and the Third World bit has to become emergent. This is unlike Europe (where the emergent bit is the poorest part) or the US, where the emergent and Third World parts are relatively small and mixed in with the First World part.
On this analysis, China needs to look inwards before it looks outwards. An aggressive war would result in the destruction of the most advanced parts of China, leaving the rest back near the iron age. Europe and the US would be badly damaged but would survive and retain First World capabilities. It is simply not in the Chinese interest to damage its most valuable assets. Just like Mao, they would let the peasants starve first.
* The War of 1812 does not figure in glorious US victories. A coalition of French Canadians, native Americans and the British successfully defended Canada and burned the White House, then the British went on to defeat Napoleon and weaken US power in the Caribbean for many years. The US turned Westwards. So much for Imperialist wars.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
After all, the powers that be want us to be a "Service Economy", translation - an entire nation of retail selling Chinese garbage to each other. Why do we need scientists and engineers to work at WalMart?
-- Correction, half our economy will be the "service economy", the rest will be defense contractors parasitizing off the "service economy" though taxation.
Most of us here know what it was like grow up as a "brain" in school: those kids were considered social outsiders. I think that discouraged people from staying in S&T. Plus the financial incentives were in business and law.
Chinese (and other Asian) families think science and engineering is a very desirable career for their sons and push them in that direction. Their last three presidents have been engineers. I have live there and found it refreshing to be in that kind of culture.
Merely counting papers published is like counting slashdot posts. It's only a measure of publication through a particular channel and accounts for neither novelty nor quality of content.
might just trip them up. Either the people will get used to it, which will undermine and eventually topple the central government, or the politicians will crack down to save their own hides, and the output will diminish. I'm hoping for a completely free and democratic China, personally.
Lots of luck.
Yesterday I bought a hammer from the "99 Cent Store". The head broke the first time I used it. Progress? My dad's Craftsman hammer has a lifetime guarantee: he bought it in the 1950's and it still works fine. Everything made in China seems to have a programmed lifetime of less than 2 years. Is this "progress" or just another attempt to put us on the money treadmill?
Where's my flying car? (yeah, I know, it's coming real soon now. NASA has a plan! Jeez!) Or clean generation of oil from coal tar sands? Is this really progress, is it change parading as progress, or is it even less, the promise of change , parading as progress?
We've been searching for the cure for cancer for 60 years to little effect. Where's the cure for herpes, hepatitis, AIDS, glaucoma, and, most of all, diabetes? Everything that is important to us as a species has no apparent cure, just unending, empty promises! The reality is that medicine can give these people only a few painful years. It would be better to encourage suicide for them once they have a clear diagnosis. That would be cheaper and less painful for them, their families and for society. Instead they spend their last few miserable years (or months) in the care of medical parasites(doctors, oncologists, hospitals, cancer centers, AIDS researchers, etc.) who nurse them along an unerring path to death as they suck their wallets dry. Astonishingly we reward this behavior (that is, the behavior of the death system: doctors, etc.)!
Humans are natural fools. They'll pay for empty promises for decades and die without getting anything in return.
You fail at causality. The reason to do research in a particular area is to advance our knowledge/technology in that area. So the fact that the Chinese are investing in ESC research and we're not means that if a breakthrough happens, its much more likely to happen there than here.
Side note: only public lines count, those owned by companies, well, are lost for mankind.
Oh, I read your other comment, I ust don't agree at all.
Basically, I would agree if we lived in an ideal world where people were moved by reason. Unfortunately the debate goes something like that:
Intelligent person: we should do research on that, it is very interesting, and there is potential to unerstand many fundamental mechanisms of embryogenesis, cell differentiation, epigenetics, etc.
nutter: You're killing BABIES !
at this point the intelligent person becomes either depressed and goes away, or goes for the cynical approach:
Cynical response: We will cure CHILDREN an GRANNIES. You are CHILD MOLESTERS !
Of course, at this point, any pretense of intelligent debate is gone, but you have good (50%, because you were as outrageous and loud as the other side) to get funding and do the research.
Because although in theory it should be so that people will notice you are not working on medical issues at, they don't. No long term memory.
In the even longer term, of course, cures do appear -- or not. but it doesn't matter because the principal objective, increasing knowledge is attained.
Yes, it is all very sad, but I prefer sad with science than sad without.
Incientally, this is why the democrats are playing it all wrong. You cannot discuss with nutters. You must do the right thing and use a barrage of outrageous arguments as a smoke screen. Such is the sorry state of public debate.
I remember a letter from my friend who went to do a PhD in UCLA. It was 20 years ago.
She told us that the most brilliant students were from China. Of course, most of them
returned back to their country.
Recall also that when we were hunters-gatherers, Chinese (and Hindu and Persians)
had greate civilazations 4-5000 years ago.
I thnk one of China's strong points is that they identify talent at an early age, and put those students on a fast track, educational-robot program. You need to develop intelligence; it doesn't just come out of nowhere. If we separated the education systems here to cater to the smart at one level and the oxygen thieves at the other, we might start getting the same calibre of university graduates. This would probably be wildly unpopular here, and for good reason - everyone needs access to basic education. But not providing the really smart people appropriate challenges will reduce their standing against similar smart people from education-heavy countries.
It also doesn't help that students who could go either way aren't encouraged. Science is a really tough career choice for someone to make in the US today. All the smart people become doctors, lawyers, bankers or MBAs. I don't blame them - there's no job security and very low material rewards in most science careers.
Wars often start between the best trading partners
The examples you cite are wrong. Those so-called trading partners were nowhere near "partners"; their wars started over exclusive access to markets and resources. The true trading you see now between China and the rest of the world makes their economies far too intertwined for war to have any economic sense. If China were to invade Taiwan for example, they would lose all that expertise and capacity and not only damage their and all other economies, but the rest of the world would shun them enough to drag the world into a second 1930s style depression. Note that this shunning would not be for moral principles, but because the Chinese would no longer be reliable business partners.
Infuriate left and right
I work in a government research lab, and we often have more visiting Chinese scientists in our group than American scientists. Many times, they lack some basic skills that are taught in the US (e.g., statistical analysis), but it seems that a big part of their reason for coming here is to learn how to do research. The other part is to learn about our technologies. I find it very frustrating and wonder how our government can justify its actions. I think that the MOU that allows them to work here comes from very high up the chain of command, perhaps the cabinet-level.
China at once has a leg up and a leg down on the rest of the world. On the one hand, because religion is suppressed, science is the remaining world view available to Chinese citizens. On the other hand, science thrives with open exchange of ideas, and while China might (more or less) have that for scientific topics, it certainly doesn't have it for all topics.
I, for one, do not welcome our new Chinese overlords. If I had to choose between science and freedom, it would be difficult, but I'd go for freedom.
Huge number of Chinese nationals or persons of Asian descent with advanced degrees, a burgeoning economy
built by becoming the world's go-to labour market and propped up with currency shenanigans and systemic
industrial espionage.
Looks like they covered all the bases - China for the win!
Unless the former leaders get their shit together.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
You mean like the Caltech basketball team that lost 207 games in a row?
...they're going to need to have a lot of smart people who don't mind and aren't hampered by their flow of information (both ways) being censored. I don't see that happening. I also don't buy the story that scientific information is perfectly free and it's only narrow political things that are censored.
China funding more education as US creates more research.
News at 11.
The sad thing is, that the US still lives in the “education is uncool, the elite should be hated, and don’t dare to call me an idiot because I can’t even program a DVR” reality. Including a funding that fits this view, preferring to fund pointless wars based on pointless short-term greed.
The good thing is, that educated people won’t be controllable anymore, and China’s government therefore funds its own death-sentence. (The same thing is happening with the students in Iran.) It’s only a matter of time.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
who only know how to fake data and create papers through SCIgen.
It's is NOT the possessive form of it. You hereby lose all credibility in your argument.
They get paid per publication.
This is also the same country that labels a worker the US would call a 'technician' as an Engineer. But no doubt they will lead the world in science very soon, given the sophistication and volume of Industrial Espionage they are conducting with literal military precision.
Haha whatever.
I worked at a Chinese University for about a year. Whenever someone needs a paper written, they go plagiarize from some western source.
In some fields, there are more and more conferences, and more and more papers. In mine, the quality varies a great deal. One friend loves to argue that paper selection is random. Success does follow from the patience and energy to keep submitting the same thing to different conferences. Some people have publications lists so long, you'd need a couple years to read all of them carefully and a couple lifetimes to duplicate the results. (I know grad students do the work.) Every moderately clever idea begets five or six nearly identical papers. It's a bigger problem that whose list is longest.
A long list of papers help people get academic appointments and grants, but then there are so many more grad students floating around ... maybe it's a good thing.
In any numbers game, China's got a pretty good advantage, with India close behind, at three- or four-fold over the U.S., where by the way a lot of students stay away from the sciences because there is easier money to be made elsewhere.
Why are you saying Great Library is useless? Is it because there are too few players for you to automatically steal technology if two or more of them have some technology you don't have?
I generally play as one of about 5 players. Great Library is my number 1 goal. I concentrate on science at the expense of everything else. You start with Alphabet, then research Writing. That lets you build (generic) libraries, which increases your research speed; it also lets you build the cheap Diplomat, which has: increased movement (2 instead of 1), no upkeep costs, and you can even steal the other players' units. After you have discovered Writing, you work on Code of Laws. That's all the requirements you need to start researching Literacy. It's remarkably cheap for a Level 2 technology (where Level 0 are the discoveries that have no prerequisites), since both of the Level 1 technologies on which Literacy is based (ie. Writing and Code of Laws) are based on the same Level 0 tech (Alphabet).
Once you have literacy, you can pretty much stop the science and switch all your cities to maximum production to build the Great Library. And remember all those diplomats you were churning out? You can disband them to contribute to building the Great Library. Once you get the Great Library, you just sit back and wait for all the technology to roll in. So you can increase your taxes at the expense of science (so you have enough $$ for all your diplomats to bribe the other players).
After that, you can work on getting the Lighthouse and having your triremes pound the s**t out of the other triremes.
Admittedly, this does require some time for you to develop in peace before encountering other civilizations. I usually use the map generator where each player gets an island of his/her own and has to cross the water on triremes before finding other civilizations.
This is for FreeCiv. Adjust accordingly for Civ2, Civ3, etc.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Well OK; religious, then.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
ignoring for the moment the faulty assumption that most people noticed regarding quality and quantity of publications, another issue is that the fraction of epsilon publications from Chinese universities seems to be no more or no less than from any other university.
I am a researcher in a quantitative and rigorous field (EE/applied math) and have worked across multiple countries (yes incl the US). There seems to be a fall in quality of research itself which is made worse by grants influencing the direction of research. The number of almost obvious research papers at famous peer reviewed conferences/ journals is appalling. This is due to a move by university admins to co-relate promotions to number of publications which leads to a very low signal to noise ratio in research, making it harder to find good research output. Fundamental research is no longer the primary output from most universities and is a result of tying money to research (aka grants).
Bottom line: number of publications has no relation to quality...and even more upsetting is that research has become a rat race rather than an ideal pursuit for knowledge. Way to go NSF, DARPA!...