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The Real Science Gap
walterbyrd writes "This article attempts to explain why the US is struggling in its competition with other countries in the realm of scientific advancement. 'It's not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It's a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.' I can hardly believe that somebody actually understands the present situation. It continues, 'The current approach — trying to improve the students or schools — will not produce the desired result, the experts predict, because the forces driving bright young Americans away from technical careers arise elsewhere, in the very structure of the US research establishment. For generations, that establishment served as the world’s nimblest and most productive source of great science and outstanding young scientists. Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.'"
We must not allow a MINE SHAFT GAP...err...science gap...
Faith works much better.
One that hath name thou can not otter
The youngest and brightest are being sucked up by the field that pays: structured finance. As a country you've put financial innovation ahead of scientific and this is the natural outcome.
Should never have dismantled the Bell System.
when the government can't justify continuing it's own historically most prestigious scientific research program, there isn't much hope for the private sector.
When I was in college (not so long ago), getting a Ph.D. was basically considered an insane pursuit. The professors (whatever their motivation) would explicitly tell their students this. Aside from the grueling work and tough admission requirements for most programs, the end result was a mountain of student loan debt and a degree that was unlikely to even get you a tenure-track position anymore (since those were being phased out). You would end up $100,000 of student loan debt and a part-time instructor (or low-level researcher) job that barely paid your rent.
If the U.S. government wants more Ph.D.-level scientists so bad; start encouraging universities to open up more admissions slots, offering grants (instead of loans) for qualified candidates, and offering better paying post-doc positions. Otherwise STFU and stop complaining that no one is insane enough to go into serious research (more like serious *debt*).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I can spend 10 years getting a PhD, and make $60k/year (if that), or I can spend 4 years and get a BBA and make $60k/year to start. Sorry, I like science and all, but I *love* money.
My dad grew up with Nasa/AMES Lockheed sponsoring the model rocket club at James Lick High school.
His brother went to an autoshop sponsored by Ford.
Straight out of high school, uncle went to work at the Ford plant in Milpitas, bolting bumpers on Pintos. Dad went to work in the sciences.
My generation had nearly free apple II's in school. We grew up to be the dot.com generation.
Somewhere along the line, we decided corporate support of training and equipment wasn't good enough. Greedy school administrators insisted on "Cash only" gifts, citing that corporate support was some evil incapable of having goals that are in tune with the education system. Bullshit, they just wanted to pad their own 6 figure superintendent salaries.
Meanwhile the corporations are moving onto countries where the educational systems have no problems working with schools to produce good workers.
If wanted to fix this problem, we'd ask some of the biotech firms to donate used gene sequencing equipment to high schools, with some training on how to use it. How many students would love to know how to sequence their own genes?
I'm moving to Mexico, where I can fly the American flag and light off fireworks on the 4th of July without getting harassed by some dipshit politically correct cocksucker.
I think the answer is glaringly obvious for five solid reasons. (1) Since US firms mostly offshore research and developement there is little or no reason to train at the collegiate level for such a career. (2) Those firms doing research here in the US import labor on an H1-B visa program. (3) Wall Street has lured some bright minds to come up with fancy, fuzzy mathematics to allow major financial companies to bilk the American people out of billions of dollars. The sharp math minds going to Wall Street leave a void in the research, experimentation, and development arena. (4) George W. Bush repealled a number of executive orders and was generally unfriendly towards science making it unattractive for industry to engage in research in the US. Bush and his faith-based, theocratic bent set us back a decade. (5) George W. Bush's no child left behind which further worsened the educational system in the US.
Let's not kid ourselves - the real reason those gifted enough to excel shy away from science is that this path is not conducive to having a life. It requires working long hours, frequently 7 days per week, for little pay (NIH stipends for graduate students are around $20'000), and in a highly stressful environment (those who've done research know how emotionally crushing doing scientific research can often be), just to become a sub-$40k post-doc for another decade thereafter, and then desperately search for a faculty position, to spend the next 20 years stressing over grant deadlines that threaten to destroy whatever little autonomy you've managed to gain, in an environment where something like 5% of the projects get funded.
In an environment, where most work to the limit of their bodily ability, and get paid less than their intelligence and time commitment would yield them elsewhere, young men and women find it difficult to acquire and hold onto a mate, and those who want to have families find themselves unable to support them, as well as spend adequate time with them.
And people wonder why in many top-tier institutions 75% of the graduate students in science are foreign-born?
...that someone is raising the real issue. I'm in the UK and studied for a science degree and from people I still know who graduated, only one of them is actually working in science now (5 years later). Of other friends I've made in the field most have left their science jobs. The most recent has just retrained as an accountant. She got made redundant from her previous job with a big pharma as they moved her whole lab out to china where they said they could have 6 equally qualified people for what they were paying her. People aren't stupid, they aren't going to study for something where there's no jobs, or what jobs do exist are all low paid rubbish with no chance of advancement. They'll all go become accountants and lawyers. Say hello to globalisation...
I am a scientist and manned exploration is basically a useless waste of money for us (and yes my research is deeply rooted into space exploration). Robots bring more data for a fraction of the cost. I have yet to hear any of my colleague complain about the government new plans for space. On the contrary.
Wait... We can just print money instead. Forget what I just said.
Deleted
It is assumed (when asking for money from the government) that there is some terrible gap in education--that America is doomed because somebody's program isn't funded enough. But evidence of this is never given.
Are our universities bad? Obviously not, as foreigners do everything they can to get into them. Are our primary schools bad? Doesn't look like it; foreign students make cheating a science just to keep up at the university level.
If our science students can't find jobs, the problem is a GLUT of science education. Perhaps we should focus more on trade schools than churning out more unemployed bio and physics majors.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
If you ever get a chance, watch the series 'From the Earth to the Moon'. It was on HBO a while ago and is now on DVD. Specifically, watch episode 10. It addresses exactly what you're talking about. Granted, robot and camera technology today is significantly better than it was in 1970, but I think the point made in that episode (people > robots for scientific observation) is still true today.
It seems to me that this just proves that American math skills are good:
If student A spends over $100,000 on education, but finds there's no jobs that don't involve asking if they want whipped cream on their tall mocha late, how many years will they subsist on ramen while trying to pay off the debt with piss-poor tips?
If student B coasts out of high school and resigns themselves to the inevitability of their barista career, they'll be the manager in charge of deciding that Student A is way over qualified and might do better investigating the all the possibilities of frying something next door by the time Student A swallows their pride and applies.
The Digital Sorceress
Robots are fuckin' boring.
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
Two factors immediately come to my mind: military spending and the reduction of the progressive tax burden. The way I see it, there just is not as much money for the government to throw at science, with the exception of military science. Now, it is true that military science has produced a number of useful non-military results, but there are some fields that have not really been advanced by spending on military science -- the pentagon has little interest in funding research into coral reef development or studies on dung beetles (I write this wondering if someone is going to pull up a paper on one of those topics that happened to be funded by DARPA). It is also true that government spending is not the be-all and end-all of science funding, and that private sources can also fund science, but that is not a solution in and of itself -- corporate funded science suffers from a problem of biased results, and science-as-a-charity is not very sustainable (there really are not enough rich patrons willing to pay for research, especially for topics that are not "trendy").
Palm trees and 8
Even if the Apollo program was to a large extent a propaganda battle against the Soviets, it more than paid for itself in the technical innovations it delivered. The advancements in integrated circuits and miniaturization alone probably paid for the Apollo program many times over. It basically maintained the US's dominance in computers and embedded systems for a generation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
eventually we'll have to leave the planet if we are to continue as a species. that is a use of manned exploration.
I think the chronology was more the other way--- the death of serious research outside universities started in the private sector, with the slow deaths of Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc. NASA at least held out a bit longer than the private sector in that regard.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You mean to say a capitalistic corporate-run society can't support research that's not guaranteed to be practical or generate revenue? Gasp.
It's a lack of job opportunities.
If you want an education to set you up to take a job, train to clean toilets & mop floors. Those jobs aren't going away.
Otherwise, find something you love and plan on making, not taking, a job doing what you love. For most of us, we will be able to find an existing job doing that thing we want to do. (Or at least that thing we don't mind doing to pay the bills.) But a job is not an entitlement; it is not a right. Don't plan your life around someone else giving you a job.
Furthermore, if there is this connection between education and job opportunities, why do we have art history departments? Are there that many museums on the hunt for curators? Or is it just for all the Starbucks that don't yet have the minimum number of people hanging out behind the counter?
The people with the money and the power are more familiar with the works of Ayn Rand than than they are with the history of science.
And it doesn't help, either, that people are trying to push ID into education given how dangerously close it is to occasionalism which killed science in the Islamic world.
well, that's pretty much my point... the government SHOULD be able to last longer than the private sector. when they quit, hope is lost.
...by who in that society lives the best. Our society values middle men, lawyers and managers. Let's face it, we value the professions that manipulate others rather than directly producing anything.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
Your OMFG IT IS THE FOREIGNERS!!!1111! whining is crap.
1) The US doesn't offshore research more than it sends offshore anything else. It happens, but you stand a much better chance of winning a job from an Indian or Chinese competitor in R&D than basically anything else that isn't completely location specific. You are NOT going to beat India and China on cheap labor. You can win in brain power and the infrastructure that supports it. A few billion people means fuck-all if 90% of them grew up without power. The actual number of viable developing nation candidates you are dealing with is actually very small.
2) H1-B visas are not the devils work. If you lose to an H1-B, there is something wrong with you. H1-B's are expensive and unreliable. Even if a company breaks the law and uses H1-B's to save themselves 10% on how much they shell out in salary, that paltry gain doesn't make up for the fact that an H1-B might leave at any moment, probably has reduced English skills, is always under the threat of running home to get a decent job there, and you are on the hook for dealing with any immigration problems (which are hardly rare).
There is a problem in US science. Part of it might be cultural. I am sure part of it for PhD folks is pay, the slave like conditions you have to suffer, and the tenure system. You might even be able to point a finger at Wall Street... though I Imagine that bubble has gone boom. Blaming it on 'dem evil for-en-ers sounds a whole lot more like the whining of an enemy of science than a friend. Bush, Palin, and the other nut jobs that try and point outside of the nation for its internal problems are no friend of science.
I suspect every since the infamous "NSF scientist shortage" paper from the 1980s we have been comparing ourselves to an unsustainable utopia of the 1960s. That era was driven by a couple of factors. First was a pseudo-war the nuclear arms race and space race. Wars are usually great for S&E employment. Second was a ramp-up of science education in the universities. New PhDs just recycled back into the system to create more PhDs. Soem of my worst college profs came from this era, when there was little vetting of quality.
Before WII science support in the US was terrible. Grad students ran off to Europe for advanced education. And couldnt find much work when they return, except maybe for the War Dept.
The 60s-70s bubble burst in the 1980s. And its been a struggle since. A few bright spots have been the industrial labs. Bell and Xerox earlier, MSFT, Google, big Pharma now.
While there is always much waving of hands and gnashing of teeth about it, the reality is that the USA by far leads the world in science. And speaking as a science grad student, it's much easier to get into science here than anywhere else in the western world. I know plenty of foreign grad students in the US, but almost no US students that had any motivation to study overseas. Personally, even though I'm originally from Canada, I have no plans to go back, because it's so much easier to get funded as a scientist here.
It seems to me most of the of the people who complain about the "science gap" are those who aren't actually working in the field...
The U.S.A. collapsed with its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Your criminals-in-congress have simply decided NOT to announce it for fear the revolution
WILL be televised
Yours In Ashgabat,
Kilgore Trout, C.I.O.
I wonder if the United States was ever really a great place for research, has that been established? How many of the great advances of the 20th century that come form the United States were products of Europeans fleeing war and specifically Jews running from the Nazis that brought their talent and research with them. Could it not be that it is the end of the European influence that the end of that generation has brought that is having an influence. I have no real basis for this theory but it seems interesting to ponder.
You speak like the modern age has had a fundamentally different attitude towards science.
From what I'm told (I didn't live during that time, so I don't have firsthand knowledge), we used to have a government that strongly encouraged scientific research and development and considered it part of the greatness of our nation. Whether you consider it a problem with faith or with politics or with capitalism or education or whatever, I don't think you can say that about our relationship with science today.
It also doesn't help that we don't have a lot of hard science going on in business right now. Our current business environment emphasizes short-term growth over long-term growth, so scientific developments that don't lead to real gains within a few years are being somewhat ignored, so that the private sector is just as apathetic as the public sector, if not more.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
the less we know, the 'better' we 'feel'? of course that's not true, but we'll 'adjust'.
the corepirate nazi illuminati is always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their platform now. they do pull A LOT of major strings.
never a better time for all of us to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--
"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson
no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences for all.
consult with/trust in your creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land." )one does not need not to agree whois in charge to grasp the notion that there may be some assistance available to us(
boeing, boeing, gone.
"It's a lack of job opportunities.
If you want an education to set you up to take a job, train to clean toilets & mop floors. Those jobs aren't going away.
Otherwise, find something you love and plan on making, not taking, a job doing what you love. For most of us, we will be able to find an existing job doing that thing we want to do. (Or at least that thing we don't mind doing to pay the bills.) But a job is not an entitlement; it is not a right. Don't plan your life around someone else giving you a job."
So start an enterprise right after graduating? It's not enough that you have a huge student debt, but you will need more loan for your enterprise. How realistic is that?
Seriously, what you wrote is the most un-American thing I read. Few people go there, because there are few oppurtunities. (You know, return on investment.) That's just how the market works. If you want to more scientist for your projects, but you don't find enough, bid higher.
The best link I can find for the article is
http://www.marinetech.org/OSTO/documents/Job%20Prospects%20for%20Science%20Grads%20CHE%2021Sep07.pdf
The original article is behind a paywall unfortunately
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Real-Science-Crisis-Bleak/29178
Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.
You mean like arresting young chemists because their equipment serves a dual purpose and could be used to create something illegal like meth?
When I graduated high school, I expressed an interest in studying Physics. I would have loved to work with theoretical physics. However, all of my high school advisers suggested that I go the engineering route instead. They basically said that it would be much easier to get a job, specifically a good-paying job, with an engineering degree.
I took their advice, and it's worked out fairly well, but I still wonder if I could have made more meaningful contributions to society if I was working towards advancement in physics rather than the application of science to business (i.e. engineering.) For reference, this was about 10 years ago that I received the advice to avoid a straight science major.
And where does the lack of jobs come from? Lack of funding to hire new people, of course. Which is exactly what you should expect when the budgets for national science funding agencies don't expand to at least meet inflation and the rising costs of doing science.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The usual knee-jerk response to US science complaints is to request more money for science education. But that may worsen the problem with even more people in the "science pipeline" to fall into the abyss at the end of it.
Good small business policies help. A lot of "surplus scientists" have started companies and some have become wildly successful. The US small business environment is best in the world but not perfect. Especially with the fincnacing slowdown of the Great Recession.
Graduate school is a bad financial decision. At least for me it was.
My friend, fresh out of college with a CS degree, got a job paying more than $80,000/year + stock benefits and is generally leading, what I would call, an opulent life.
Meanwhile I am a graduate student in an extremely challenging program, live in a hovel of an apartment, and worry about spending more than $6.00 on a meal... And I am the recipient of a supplementary stipend! I have a classmate who is married and has a young child and he has to make due with $1500/month.
And what's the point of all the struggle? The field we are in (mathematics) is extremely competitive, and finding a tenured position is very difficult. Hell, even my professors have paltry salaries (think $70,000 on the top end).
Technology doesn't pay the bills when you work for a corp. Corp. America no longer respects the scientist or technologist. It's all about sales and marketing and executives. It's happening at the company where I work. My programming skills are ignored, I'm told my and my cor-workers' work is a commodity and it's being farmed out to India. Won't be long before I and the rest of the programmers get the boot. There will be nothing left but executive, sales, marketing, and a handful of subject matter experts who will find their jobs very difficult, due to not being able to actually do the work, and unrewarding since they will always be stuck in the middle between management and those who do the work in a different timezone.
I think that the problem is that the philosophy of business schools shifted from producing better products and services to profit optimization. For a while this worked as business did have some margin to coast on the level of developed of technology, but it increasingly is a direction that is stalling out as the proportion of rehashed crap product/services is rising vs new fundamental productivity gains.
The US doesn't support people becoming educated, and this is just one more aspect of the problem. When I was in school I thought of going all the way to PhD. But come on! Spend all that money and live in poverty for so many years. Combined with the fact that doing this stuff is difficult and time consuming, it seemed like an incredibly masocistic exercise. I love science and math and would love to bury myself in it, but I am a slave to economic realities.
Furthermore when we say we want more people in profession X, we are making an implict admission that we want a somewhat planned economy. So we want more research and researchers? Guess what? Most of the important expensive research in the past has been conducted by the government anyway. So the government should just start doing more research.
One more thing, if a company hires H1-Bs, for each one they hire should have to pay a very heavy fee that is used to give one student a full ride scholarship in that field.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Otherwise, find something you love and plan on making, not taking, a job doing what you love. For most of us, we will be able to find an existing job doing that thing we want to do. (Or at least that thing we don't mind doing to pay the bills.) But a job is not an entitlement; it is not a right. Don't plan your life around someone else giving you a job.
If I got a degree in science, I could not take out a loan to set up a research lab. If I did, the strong possibility that I could research something and come up empty as I disprove my own hypotheses is very strong, so I could have no way to pay off those loans. You're basically stating that no one should ever become a scientist, because it's not a job that you can do unless someone else pays you to do it.
Buddy, you're telling people that they shouldn't take any interest in a career that they couldn't do through self-employment, while some of the greatest strengths of this country came from our technological advancements from teams of people getting together to work on things. As someone who loves America, I hope that we give out plenty of grants to put scientists to work developing the tools that will return us to being the technological superpower. Stating that it's un-American to want more jobs for scientists is a pipe dream that our country remains the best in the world if we just clap our hands and should "I believe in fairies!" over and over rather than investing the time and manpower to make it real, and I'm not sure if I consider your comment one of the most un-American things that I've ever read, or if it's just a bunch of ignorant, hyper-libertarian claptrap.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Particularly the fact that the failure of american high schools is entirely racial. "White Americans on average substantially outscored Europeans in math and science and came in second to the Japanese, but American black and Hispanic students on average significantly trailed all other groups." It suggests that instead of merely throwing money at the entire system, we need to reform specific schools in poor neighborhoods.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Jocks get their pussy free, lawyers can buy professional pussy, and doctors are up to their elbows in pussy. Nerds? They get the leavings.
You can't fix the problem until you identify it exactly.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Many of the tech employers have lobbied congress to get exemptions to the laws regarding the hiring of foreign workers. They have cited the lack of qualified people as the reason for the need to hire H1b workers. I don't know what the truth is behind that claim, but I can tell you that the use of H1b workers has resulted in lower wages, fewer job opportunities, and less demand for those jobs that require specialized technical training. Job security is gone.
High tech employers have also gotten exemptions to the labor laws that limit the number of hours per week worked; people who work in the software industry do not have protection from employers who demand they work long hours. So, the quality of life for workers in the software industry sucks.
Someone ought to clue in the brainiacs about the reasons why nobody in the U.S. cares to take a tech/science job.
Best regards.
Some in the audience where he gave his talk pointed out that Intel, the company he remains chairman of, is a big part of the outsourcing trend, and Grove responds with something of a cop-out, saying that without public policy assistance they have no choice but to export jobs
Still trying to find more ... most of the intarweb is all what a great guy and genius he is and crap promoting his books.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I don't read the article as focusing on any individual's entitlement to a "science job", but on the more general societal issue. A lot of people, rightly or wrongly, feel that the U.S. is falling behind in scientific research, and that this should be fixed. Many people with such views point to education as the root of the problem: they argue that the U.S. is falling behind in scientific research because our schools are not keeping up, either in quality of science education, or in their ability to motivate kids to be excited about science, or both.
The article is arguing that the diagnosis is incorrect: people are not going into science because there aren't good jobs in science, not because of a failing on the part of schools. Of course, if you think the number of scientists and level of scientific research we currently have is fine, then it isn't a problem to begin with. But the article's arguing that if you're one of the people who thinks U.S. science is declining and should be fixed, then you should look at lack of appealing careers, not at problems with schools, as the root cause.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The next career to disappear in the U.S. is programming. There are no more entry level jobs, they've all been outsourced. Hence, there is no new generation of programmers in the U.S.
That means any new innovation in computer software will be coming from India or another of the up-coming outsourcing countries.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
This basic discussion has been had numerous times here on Slashdot. Usually, it is about IT careers and declining wages, declining local resources, outsourcing and H1-B visa programs.
They all have the same basic things in common. Corporations, looking to cut their costs, are looking elsewhere to get cheaper labor -- even when that labor is for R&D and other highly technical trades and activities.
I have claimed that the government needs to step in and restrict how these short-sighted companies are behaving simply because they are having a tremendous impact on the economy. Others commonly respond in opposition calling this type of thing "protectionism" and all this. But the end result of allowing companies to seek labor outside of the U.S. [to lower costs] is that jobs and money is being sent out of the country lowering the average income and increasing unemployment. Many of these companies are selling goods and services to the very same people they helped to make un[der]employed. And the extended result is that fewer people are going to enter career paths in the areas where there is less pay and/or less hiring.
What we have is a cascade that will lead to "idiocracy" right here in our own nation. Many people claim we are already living that famous movie and in many respects we are.
We can call it protectionism or we can just call it taking care of our own first. Whatever the label you apply to it, we absolutely need to retain our most important advantages if we are to return to the top of the food chain. The U.S. is presently not the world leader in anything except military influence. With everything else getting sent outside the U.S. and countries who would normally use U.S. resources going elsewhere, the U.S. has lost a great deal of its competitive advantage already. U.S. companies are simply becoming "international companies" whose headquarters just happen to be in the U.S.
The symptoms of this pattern beginning to fail are in what we are starting to see today -- increased attempts to influence other countries to adopt our laws in order to protect our intellectual property... failing diplomatic measures, military measures are sure to follow. (After all, the whole reason diplomacy works is because there is a shadow of a military threat looming in the background... otherwise, who would listen to you or care about your interests?) Basically we are attempting to get the world to "do things our way so that things favor us more than you" and who will listen to that without excessive bribery and threat of military or financial action? These types of measures weren't quite so necessary in the past and now they are becoming a lot more common.
I think it is past time to reign in the companies that are selling out the population of the nation they call home. The consequences are what we are experiencing today. The effect is obvious. The cause should be obvious. If the cause and the effect are obvious, why isn't the solution equally obvious? I think it is and our government is so comfortable being paid and backed by big money interests that they don't know how to stop it from continuing.
Where shall we have lunch?
Just an idea from the outfield: maybe an added reason is that it's so much harder to make a contribution these days? We've gone from "Ow! Fire hot!" to needing a PhD or more just to achieve parity with the state of the art in some fields of science.
Engineering isn't much better- from spark gaps to iPhones in about a century.
We might need to start kids down the science path as early as the first grade, or come up with some radical new method of teaching/learning.
Ah, I'm just babbling. Ignore me.
So start an enterprise right after graduating? It's not enough that you have a huge student debt, but you will need more loan for your enterprise. How realistic is that?
Seriously, what you wrote is the most un-American thing I read. Few people go there, because there are few oppurtunities. (You know, return on investment.) That's just how the market works. If you want to more scientist for your projects, but you don't find enough, bid higher.
Actually, I can't think of anything more American than start your own enterprise. It doesn't have to involve getting into masses of debt.
Though I'm not in the US, my own view is that I'm within a few thousand of the most I could reasonably expect to earn without going into management - which I'm not sure I want to do. I am very tempted to jack in the IT altogether and set up a business.
Doing what I don't know (it may not even be IT), but right now I'm doing the IT to put food on the table and I don't really want to spend the next thirty-five or forty years (the rate retirement ages are going in the UK it'll be 40 years....) just doing the same thing over and over. I'd sooner take a paycut - particularly right now when I don't have kids - and do something for myself just to see if I can.
The point is that there's no more use in day trips to the moon. There is nothing a human can tell us, in this instance, that a robot cannot.
On the other hand, sending robots into space will still allow us to experiment on better fuels and launch mechanisms.
The issue of permanent settlements on barren landscapes such as the moon here on Earth. We can create underwater habitats for a fraction of the cost of creating similar habitats on the moon with the benefit of exploring the oceans. Sure it's not perfectly the same, but when complemented with the robotic missions and advances in clean efficient energy production, it answers a large majority of the questions of achieving meaningful human space exploration.
I agree. Though different PhD tracks differ a little bit in the details (the biosciences seem to pay their grad students and postdocs a little better), you can't help but feel you're just buying into a pyramid scheme of sorts as you work through the steps. This is made worse by the way the current economy seems to prioritize some other professions. Nothing can quite match the dissonance in a PhD's mind then thinking how idiotic some CEO/hedge-fund managers,etc. are, and then thinking how smart they were to avoid devoting years to specialization. The fact of the matter is, few survive the PhD route unless they really love the science, or are so stubborn that they persist until the system lets them advance.
I think the article is largely right, and that paying post-docs/graduate students/faculty better, and reducing their stress loads, will provide society more bang for the buck in the long run then spending the equivalent amount of money on specific k-12 science/math education. Making intellectually challenging pursuits more economically and socially viable will serve to encourage those that pursue more difficult paths. If it were up to me, k-12 would be best spent on generic problem solving activities, socialization, art/PE type stuff and encouraging specific interests. Some subjects (like history) become more interesting with age (for most) so they shouldn't be pushed before their time, while others, such as math, may be most easily picked up when young, but also seem the least useful then (the gap between when we learn mathematical concepts and use them to get paid is way too large!). Restructuring early education around problems/projects rather than subjects seems like it would be a lot more effective than the current system (knowledge, interest, and application would be better linked). Unfortunately, my current best advice to most people that want to pursue science beyond a B.S., is to discourage/warn them.
Actually, I can't think of anything more American than start your own enterprise. It doesn't have to involve getting into masses of debt.
It depends what you're into. If you're Pharmacy Phd, good luck about founding your own research lab.
When you have a educational system and culture that shields people from the effects of their bad decisions, even refutes the notion of causality, why would kids be encouraged to enter a field where causality is king? Isn't Obama going to pay their mortgage for them? Won't Al Gore save them from Global Warming? Won't giving $10 to a church save them from hell?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Me (hoping to do research like him): I'd like to get a PhD in physics.
Dad: Don't do that. There are almost no jobs (he was out of work after the company he worked for Chapt. 7'd). Get a technical Masters and do lab work. Some of the good techs we contract with get six figures (1990s).
Me: ...
I ended up in IT.
1/ Service industries become highest paid because they have to be local.
2/ All research, development and manufacturing of readily transportable items goes to the cheapest source - places with good infrastructure, less restrictive labour laws, clever, hard working and lower paid people. All westerners in offshorable professions are seeing their salaries drop relative to their service industry peers.
3/ So individuals (sensibly) work for their relative best interests by deserting manufacturing and tech and getting into service industries.
Problem is that service industries generally don't export and hence don't generate wealth, they just circulate it. That wealth is now being quickly dissipated by all the imports we suck in - and with offshoreing most of the west is now running huge trade deficits; effectively borrowing money from Asia and the Middle East. Without those exporting businesses the west is going down, and it's hard to see those businesses ever being onshored again given the political and educational choices the west is making. So like taking a collective shit in our pants, we have a relatively warm feeling now from what we've just done, but in 10 years time its going to be getting miserable and stinky.
The reason to do manned exploration isn't to gain scientific knowledge, it's to secure funding for the program, and to improve technology. Basically, it's make-work welfare for scientists and engineers, except that it has the happy byproduct of important technological advances (in many fields: Apollo created advances in medicine, electronics, aerospace, etc.), which are called "spin-offs" and massively boost the economy.
It's exactly like how big wars are good for the economy; look how many advances were achieved during the World Wars. Except that unlike war, pursuing a difficult mission like sending men to other moons and planets doesn't result in massive death and destruction, and results in more useful technologies like miniaturized electronics, rather than technologies only useful for more wars, such as machine guns and precision bombs.
Relying on consumers to create the economy needed for advanced research is a failing proposition. Consumers are happy when they have enough food and TV, and don't want to pay for something big like launching rockets to the moon; that's why you need government to pay for that. If you don't think the government should be taking money from citizens to spend on science projects, then fine, but don't complain when your nation has no scientists and does nothing useful in the scientific realm.
Mod Up. And in the corporate marketplace there is an overt bias against the Ph.D. in favor of M.S. level. (If you've not even considered by HR there is not even any room to negotiate salary etc.)
This is the problem for higher education in general. Universities are producing too many degrees. People waste a lot of time and school learning facts and information they will never use (or even talking classes where they don't learn anything) to vie for high-paying jobs that don't exist.
In the meantime, people don't learn the basic information that may be useful to them (like how to fix their car, how to do basic calculations and general problem solving). Nor do they learn useful job skills (universities leave this up to the their students' future employers). Pondering this, one may ask: "what exactly is school good for?" It is stupid to waste 4 (or more) years earning a degree just to fill a check-mark on some corporate recruiter's checklist? Yes. Yes it is.
The point is that there's no more use in day trips to the moon.
it sure would cure the boredom i'm feeling from reading your concessionary ramblings. the point isn't whether or not there is a current use, or a use for something similar but less complicated (no pesky humans with free will), THE POINT is that there is no hope, in your case, for a use in day trips to the moon.
no judgments about whether that matters.
This is a rediculously over-simplified misunderstanding of how society works. How do you propose "making" a job doing basic research? Research has to be funded, that's how it's done in our society. I'm afraid you're living in a fantasy world. This has nothing to do with anyone being "owed" a job. It has to do with setting priorities as a society. We've set up a system in which the priority is short term quarterly gains, and that's what we get. If you want a viable society in the long term, you have to invest in basic research.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
[quote]If you want an education to set you up to take a job, train to clean toilets & mop floors. Those jobs aren't going away.[/quote]
Of course those jobs are going away. Self-cleaning toilets is not all that rare even now, and I would bet that there already exists robotic mops in addition to robotic vaccum cleaners.
With the cost of college sky-rocketing, and wages for scientists going down the toilet, can Americans even afford to be scientists?
Why run up all that debt, and spend several years racking your brains on that difficult training, only to train your cheaper H1B replacement, or see your job offshored? Then what do you do? Manual labor? Welfare?
I agree people should not be all about money, but the wage difference is seriously astronomical, maybe your welfare, and the welfare of your family has to come into consideration at some point. If you have the brains to be scientist, and earn $40K a year, you probably also have the brains to be a surgeon and earn $400K a year. And it's not as surgeons do not do any good in the world.
The IEEE points out that, at present, only about 1/3 of electrical engineers have electrical engineering jobs. They also point out that in 1970, electrical engineers and doctors made about the same amount of money.
Lawyers, though, are starting to get hit. Outsourcing of legal work is now available.
The only thing being shut down is Constellation, which has been on the books for about 6 years, and I think many people would take issue with claiming that its the most prestigious scientific program in the US.
NASA is still alive, human spaceflight is still alive -- Ares 1, which was over-priced from the beginning, over-budget on top of that, and way behind schedule, is dead.
Well your sex-bots may be fucking in a boring manner, but that's no reason to lambaste the probes shooting up to Uranus.
I realize reading the article is hard, difficult and long but at least it isn't broken up into many different pages but it is worth reading. Trust me, I did.
However as someone actually dealing with the crap associated with the sciences, it is dead on in the things it address. Why bother spending many lonely nights working on home work when you could be out getting laid in college? Why go into grad school to spend 6-10 years learning more about your field when you could actually be earning more money by not doing so? And lets not forget the 4-6 years of marking time in a postdoc position where you're basically the lab grunt to pad out your resume so you may have a chance at a position down the line. This is then followed by 5-6 years of probation before you can get tenure if you're lucky but more then likely you will end up marking more time before you even get a tenure track position. Then you spend the rest of your career fighting for funding to pay for your research and more suckers...er grad students and postdocs and never actually doing science again.
People go into science because they love it but it gets quickly destroyed because they realize that all science requires a community, expensive journals, massive amounts of time, politics and lots of other bullshit. If you haven't been through it or are going through it, you have no fucking clue.
You want to know why colleges have art history departments? It is so that those sports stars have easy majors to pass so they can play. It is because many students realized that it doesn't matter what the degree is in only that they have a degree for a job and who wants to study something difficult when there is something easy.
The only way to get the best and brightest to go into the sciences is to make sure they know there are job opportunities available for them that are worth taking. I know I sure in the hell didn't spend 4 years in college and 6 years in grad school doing physics to be making NIH standard ($37k/year) which is only slightly higher then what my high school dropout of a brother pulls in doing construction work for a guy he meet at a 7-11.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
train to clean toilets & mop floors. Those jobs aren't going away.
When is the last time you saw a crew of charwomen on their knees scrubbing floors? They've been replaced by one guy with a mechanized carpet cleaner or floor buffer. In a few decades (maybe more depending on the supply of illegal workers) these devices will be fully robotic.
It could be the war on science too... Wake me up when I can buy some chemicals for my chemistry set , or even for that matter some glassware (http://www.crscientific.com/texas-glassware.html).
Science, Engineering, and Medical are fields where you better love the work because it is a lousy way to make a living. You have to follow the money to find out why. The problem as I see it is with the fiat money system. Government and the financial sector are where the money is these days because they actually create the money. Go ask a kid how a bank works. Usually you will get an answer like someone puts money in the bank to save it and they are paid a little interest. Someone then borrows the money and pays more interest and the bank makes the money on the difference. Only if it were so. Do a little research and you will find that Banks actually create money. When you take out a $30k loan it's not like the bank actually has that $30k. They create it out of thin air and put it in your account and then charge you interest on it. The first thing a smart person would say is "How do I get in on that?" . So while scientists, engineers, doctors, nurses, welders, plumbers, factory workers actually have to create things of value to their fellow man Finance types don't worry about creating real wealth they just create money and cut out all of that hard work. What is even more amazing is these stupid fuckers on Wall Street manage to lose money on money they created. Then they manage to get bailed out by their friends who just happen to work in government. I was cheering for the collapse of the financial system in 2008. You don't need credit. The world would work perfectly fine on a cash system. You would just have to wait to buy the things you wanted and then those finance fuckers would have to get a real job.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I'm one of those kids who wanted to be a scientist, and so far have failed in the strictest sense. After getting a world class master's degree, I've had a really unlucky streak with numerous attempts at graduate studies, and ended up as a teacher. I actually enjoy it very much, and I feel like it suits my personality better; I want to do something more "energetic" than working quietly in the lab or on the computer all day.
However, I have zero regrets about my career choices. The article makes it seem like every succesful scientist should become a professor one day. There are way too many scientifically minded people for that to work out. However, it is a great thing having those people in different fields of life. For example, having computer scientists and nuclear physicists in politics would be a good start. I also like having some real-world research experience, so I know what I'm teaching.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
You're making a big deal about the distinction between working for someone and making your own job, ie, starting a business. These are science jobs, for scientists. They are not MBAs, they are not going to start their own business.
How many people start up a fabrication lab? Who splices DNA in their garage? Who launches satellites into space on their own dime? (other then this guy)
I'm all for good 'ole 'mericun gumption, but scientists work for people. Most engineers do too. I have, in short, planed my life around developing valuable skills that people will pay me for. I'm dependent on them. Not any one in particular, but the group of people that need bit twiddled. I've also planned on the sun rising tomorrow. I'm not, you know, "entitled" to the sun rising tomorrow, but we're all fucked if it doesn't.
if there is this connection between education and job opportunities, why do we have art history departments?
Because people are stupid, wealthy, and/or willing to be poor.
"Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.'"
So..., you mean..., all that rhetoric against smart people (you know, those "intellectual elitists") has actually had some effect? Looks like the plans for creating a dullard electorate are proceeding apace.
One thing Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars novels brought home to me was that Antarctica is a natural paradise compared to any other place off Earth. Antarctica has breathable air, gravity that we can handle, and water. Food supplies, medical care, and other resources are a few hours away by plane. Yet I'm not hearing of any rush to colonize Antarctica, given that it's a frozen desert, even though it's more inhabitable than Mars or any other place in the solar system.
The only way I see people "living" on other planets is through some sort of remote-controlled robots. Human-like AI seems to me more probable than extensive human colonization of other planets -- and I have doubts about human-like AI. Humans are adapted to the narrow range of conditions on Earth -- narrow and fragile. People need to get over the idea that, as on Star Trek, the universe is full of LA-suburbs, that just need a little yard work.
I still think encouraging tinkering is the best route. Taking things apart, experimenting (even silly experiments), seeing how things work.
Unfortunately, we're already criminalizing some of those. Cue the hilarity of a kid at a science fair who mixed a brand-name seed with another getting taken down by Monsanto, or a new programmer trying to figure out how codecs work getting nailed by the movie or music industry.
Intelligent people often have a very hard time coping with the fact that people with better social skills make more money.
Robots are fuckin' boring.
I found the Mars Rovers a million times more fascinating than the ISS. It might have had something to do with the Rovers actually doing stuff, rather than hanging out in space, swapping out CO2 scrubbers.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In a system of capitalism there are no gaps or shortages, just disequilibrium between demand and supply that determines price. The current "science gap" is that U.S. produced "science" is price uncompetitive with global "science". Same problem as in automobiles or consumer electronics. Even U.S. Government knows this; e.g. NASA uses Russia whenever possible to "do science" to stretch its $. U.S. talent is naturally seeking highest value occupations: e.g. financial engineering, law, management, health care etc., As long as these occupations are valued more by market (than "science"), it is absurd to talk of "science gap", especially when global markets are producing enough "science". A day may come when the currently lucrative occupations may not be so anymore; then the talent may flow to "science" if "science" has more relative market value. Two years back, mortgage & real estate were highly lucrative; now, many previous 6 figure earners are on food stamps. May happen to financial engineering too some day.
what about looking at this in the simplest possible way
back before World War II, and for sometime after, an engineer/scientist had in made in the USA
there just weren't that many, the cost of education was way too high, and was not the education system of today
and foreign engineers/scientists were in very low supply, just a different world education wise
now we have many multiples of trained engineers/scientists from that time, both in the USA and outside
it's just simple economics, i don't like the trend, but it looks it has a ways to go
If you don't make anything what do you need technicians for?
If you don't make anything what do you need engineers for?
If you don't make anything what do you need scientists for?
No point in getting in debt getting a good engineering/technical degree if you can't find a job doing it. As others have said, better to go from high school to the service industry than "waste" $50,000+ on a degree.
Said to say that..and I work at a university.
Yeah, that's a real nice deal.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
But living on stipend or worse, student loans, sucks. And it is all comparative. Like the article says, just get the MBA, and you can have a 60-inch TV, a boat, and go to Europe every year.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I think most Americans miss the point. History has taught us that invention to a problem improves the life of the people impacted. The problem is that capitialism has made the problems less of an impact so the need to invent is no longer driving humanity. As population growed the need for the industrial rev was a natural form of human intelligent advancement, the same with the circuit and microchip as more people wanted to connect and share information. There is no major impact to humanity now except outside the US in 3rd world nations where clean water, food, shelter and crime are hurdles to advancement.
This is a bigger problem and I'm not going to write about it on here (maybe in my book), But the solution is always with the people who have Power, Money or Guns.
Technology is the unique rising tide that lifts all boats.
We need an Automation Trade Initiative treaty that supersedes the WTO treaties. Signatories would be :
(1) Permitted to tariff manually mass produced goods up to the prices for good produced using significantly more automation.
(2) May sue for declaring a particular degree of manual labor excessive, assuming there are at least three other non-coluding signatories and at least six non-coluding companies using significantly more automation for the same product.
(3) Obliged to tariff excessively manually produced goods up to the minimum price among all automated producers.
In other words, you're permitted to be protectionist for a particular industry only if they are using significantly more automation than competitors. Further more, other signatories agree they'll tariff good produced by excessive manual labor, provided enough people are producing them using automation.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"Making ... a job doing what you love" involves finding someone who's got money and convincing them that your work (what you love) is worth spending their money on. In other words, persuading someone to fund you because you're needed.
There's nothing, technically, stopping smart scientists or engineers from doing exactly that, and in fact some have done so - they've collected donations to start a research institute. It's a lot more rare than getting VC to start a company that makes something technical, for the reasons that you yourself (and others) already gave.
That said - the strategy of "strike out on your own, dazzle people into helping you create a job for yourself doing basic research" is difficult for most scientists to imagine, perhaps partly because of how we're trained: by collaboration and learning directly from others. "Lone wolf" self-teaching works well in some fields, but only occasionally in science.
Virtually all science and math PhD students are given tuition remission and paid $16k to $30k per year. If you paid for your own science PhD, most likely you're just the crackpot they all knew was crazy, but didn't kick out.
Imho, the easiest solution for fixing the sciences would are :
(1) Raise graduate student pay at top institutions from $30k to $40k, while pointedly advertising how this indicates that (a) people doing this job should make more, (b) people not studying for those institutions will never get tenure track jobs, etc. I'd imagine this would forced better pay at other institutions, thus forcing all institutions into being more selective.
(2) Ban NSF grants for institutions that employ non-retired non-student adjuncts with PhDs for less than $50k per year more for more than 6 months. Ideally, even hiring humanities adjuncts would exclude the institution from NSF funding.
(3) All graduate students should face institutional encouragement for leaving academia for industry, like requiring math PhDs take an applied math course, offering summer support for work on more applied problems, etc.
(4) Create "academically ambitious" tech startup grants that are restricted to very small companies whose projects and personnel are reviewed favorably by pure academics, under the restriction that all IP is licensed under RAND terms, even if the company fails.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
You don't need to specify that. That doesn't make your post truer.
There are scientists by profession I wouldn't call scientists.
In fact all the NASA scientists I'm aware of who are doing robotic exploration are also strongly supporting manned exploration, hence my frowning at your need to precise that.
That's the claim that keeps getting made - but in fact, it's almost completely false. Apollo delivered few technical innovations, while capitalizing heavily on work already done. Or to put it in more modern terms - Apollo could spend a lot of money on specific developments because someone body else had already paid for the general research and development.
Hardly. MIT based the Apollo guidance computers on the existing Polaris A-2 computer (Because Apollo didn't have time to develop one from scratch), which the Navy already considered obsolescent and was planning it's replacement. For every dollar that NASA spent on the relative handful of systems it built, the DoD spent ten dollars on the Polaris, Poseidon, and Minuteman -II and -III systems it was developing and building at the same time.
when blue sky research funding got canceled, in favor of easy to patent and monetize, short hop "innovations".
Change the color of the outer casing? patent. Change the button layout? patent. then kill the old model and introduce the new and market the hell out of it. Repeat as needed next year, or there about.
What used to be perhaps a decade long cycle have been cut down to years, all in the interest to inflate sale, share prices and bonuses. And this have come about thanks to the split between day to day leadership, and "ownership". The former is given a bonus by the latter whenever the "value" (what someone else is willing to pay) of their shares go up up up. And they do that when the "profits" of a company is seen to increase, as then the shareholders may be able to extract a larger dividend before selling and move on to pump a different company...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
People with technical skills these days are NOT looking to the sciences, but to business. Ph.D.'s in areas like Finance and Economics, with some ability to work with practical applications in a real world environment can earn several times the median salary of a Ph.D. in most of the "hard" sciences. With my degrees in math and compsci, I had no trouble at all following my cousin's doctoral dissertation in Finance, done in the relatively early days of the Black-Scholes investigations, even though I'd only had one course in Finance.
1) Wealth Concentration.
The gap between the richest and the poorest continues to accelerate world wide. The effect is less money for everyone except the very few. That means less money to spend on education, less money to spend on research by the large. The only countries that are not seeing this trend is those countries that have not permitted the IMF/Banking community to infiltrate their governments like in Europe and the USA.
2) No capital to do research because the very few value large estates, political power and private jets and jaguars to drive around in. Why risk it on a new technology that will destabilize their investments monopoly holds in Oil and Gas?
Even if it means trashing the entire Gulf of America.
3)More and more public institutions now rely on a very few corporate giants for funding research more than ever before. This research is for products, _not_ solutions. A good example is the research into Cancer, which is concentrating on prescriptions and improving the "Gold Standard" such as chemo.
Why kill your market and create cures? When you can create really expensive drugs which prolong agony, have so many side effects you need _more drugs_ and do TV adds with half the ads explaining the side effects.
4) Huge sums of money that go into "ways of political thought" for students, instead of thinking for themselves. The result, which is planned, half do not graduate. This is planned because the real goal is not so much science ignorance, but control of the mind. With record amounts of money pouring into Chicago and Milwaukee for education with the goal of graduating just 1/2 to 1/4 of the students in the next 5 years.
By creating a underclass, the very few can select which science can be used in society world wide using schools of thought so that dangerous ideas like "Open Source" can be thought of as Anti-American or bad political schools of thinking or just bad for business.
Once the graduation rates are less than 20%, the very few can insure a new "Dark Age" which will benefit them greatly by insuring any new science can be reviewed by corporate boards and insured not to produce any bad effects such as producing any sort of revolutionary energy source, propulsion system or system of thought not approved by the state.
We already see this in the planned bills before the house and senate which would require the Department of Homeland Security to approve any ISP connection with more than 100 customers, which would be run with equipment specifications from the department itself.
Good By Linux.
5) The debasing of corporate media. It is only a matter of time before the ISP's get shut down, or are totally controlled by the IMF or Banking/Government fascists. We already see that happening everywhere with excuses for this tyranny from Child porn, to Hate Speech to whatever.
I can assure for example the Australian government could care less about Child Porn. They want to control what you think, and what you say.
With new bills before the house and senate in the USA that want everyone who connects to the internet or writes BLOGS to have a certain set of requirements to get a license to do anything on the connection to theinternet.
In short to wrap up, if you think the science gap is bad now, wait till they shut the internet down, take more personal liberties away as they plan these new wars that are coming up in the future and tell everyone here that "It is for your own good that we don't allow you to speak."
This isn't a science gap problem, it is a fascist problem and it is going to get worse.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Even if the Apollo program was to a large extent a propaganda battle against the Soviets, it more than paid for itself in the technical innovations it delivered. The advancements in integrated circuits and miniaturization alone probably paid for the Apollo program many times over. It basically maintained the US's dominance in computers and embedded systems for a generation.
The question is, how much more (or less) would it have paid in technical innovations if it was robotic rather than manned?
But then also, one shouldn't forget that science, like many other things, need PR and marketing on the "ooh, shiny!" level, and manned spaceflight and especially landings are (were) awesome marketing.
"Robots are fuckin' boring."
Robots are useful on earth and necessary in the utterly hostile environment of space, where humans "explore" nothing robots can't explore (at leisure, for longer, and vastly less money).
Robots aren't boring to the right kind of person, and science doesn't need the other sort. Let them go watch football or wrasslin'.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Butthurt much?
Just thank him he lives in a free country that gives him a choice to enter a non-free country that might not let him leave as easily as he left prior.
This is why I don't live anywhere near incorporated US Cities. As long as you are in the non-associated townships then you don't have any of the corruption of judicial and executive officers swarming the people from the hosting city yet living in an alternative city. Police Officers are a fine example of this: insult, curse, and bastardize the people in which you patrol, and then live a fancier lifestyle in another town far away where none would recognize you.
Let me give an idea of how useful it would be to talk to the kids to figure out why there aren't that many kids going into engineering and science streams.
I am a techie, low level C programmer, has been that way for eons. My two High school kids are A grade students, can quote rather obscure things from H2G2, tech savvy, know more HTML than I, and don't use the mouse as much as I do.
They have multiple facebook/myspace/youtube/gmail accounts. They can almost hack their IPod/ITouch etc.
That is where their love of science and engineering stops. "I don't want to work in the Tech industry, I just want to use it" is what they say.
They are interested in "Business", "Fashion", and such more glamorous and generally higher paying avenues.
I come from a not so wealthy family, I had to struggle, I had to prove myself. My kids are rather well off, they don't want to struggle, they don't want to prove anything.
Do these observations offer some explanation?
That is the reason I say we should talk to our kids first before going with expert opinions or the H1's are coming H1's are coming crowd.
The problem is that Americans are highly susceptible to groupthink. Groupthink says that science is not "cool". Groupthink also says that there are no jobs available, and that even if there were jobs, they would only pay an average amount. Diversity is what America makes America great, and groupthink destroys diversity. So, to put it simply, we are basically facing the problem of overpopulation. We need a new land to expand into, but there are no more new lands, in the traditional sense. Thus, there are two possibilities: war or space colonization. We are already engaged in the former, and I suspect it will only get worse, since the second option requires real leadership, and there is no real leadership right now. It's the blind leading the blind.
As he observes: "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." And he's right. And then people wonder why more Americans don't go into science.
Unfortunately, I'm posting this a bit late in the game--there are 400 comments already--so it's not likely to get modded very far up, but those who actually care about science in the United States should read this.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html
Irrespective of military spending and the reduction of the progressive tax burden, the federal government now spends more than 40% of the US GDP every year. Back in the supposed heyday of science funding, the fed spent less than 30% of GDP. The REAL reason that science funding isn't higher is the entitlement state. Medicare alone costs more annually that the entire budget of NSF, NEA, DARPA, and DOE inception to date. NIH is funded in the Medicare budget.
"With an annual budget of about US $6.87 billion (fiscal year 2010), the NSF funds approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation NSF budget is currently the highest it has ever been even adjusted for inflation.
Medicare cost under existing law are $489.3 billion; the figure for Medicaid is $264.5 billion. Both will raise $58 billion in 2011.
Sadly, each and every single one has given me a stupified look and inquired as to what a hydrologist is? (Many have thought it was akin to an astrologer!)
America is one scarey stupid country.....
I'm posting as AC because I work as a science educator and researcher at a fairly major university, and I think it would be unfair to the university and my students to make that connection known.
I don't think the problem is so simple as attracting the best and the brightest into the sciences. Although nobody could call the life of a scientist easy or profitable, my life for the most part has been comfortable since getting a permanent position. That's not to say marrying well wouldn't hurt.
The University always has more applicants than spaces and fills up with students with grade points in the mid-4s (damnable high school honors system). The science departments don't overflow with majors, which is good because the required courses are packed anyway.
The problem is that many of the students, including graduate students, are poorly prepared for even being a science major. They over react to any grade less than an A on any assignment. (This trait used to be limited to pre-med students). They will do fine in their math courses and the problems presented to them in lab courses. But that has nothing to do with a career in the sciences. One major thing many of them lack is the ability to formulate a method for solving a problem of a type they haven't seen before. Writing down a set of steps to accomplish a task is something they can't imagine. Even if I hand them a flow chart or a decision tree for a long project, they'll forget it exists in a week and will be asking for help. Another related problem is the ability to work unassisted.
For many, useful computer skills (i.e. programming) are lacking. I think that's related to the inability to plan a set of steps to take. We've even had entering graduate students who not only couldn't program in any language, but refused to learn how to do so. Finally, many graduate students, while not necessarily unwilling to put themselves through the gauntlet that is graduate school, are unable to get through that gauntlet. I'm not saying that grad school should be a gauntlet. It nearly killed me, and it does kill some. I do what I can to change that for my students. But it seems that some of the recent crop give up well before it becomes difficult.
Why is this happening? Beats me. I'd say around 2003 marked the start of this decline. Of course I can speculate... Is this the 'only child' generation and suddenly there aren't any parents to help with homework? Was the homework they got in high-school designed to occupy time rather than be a learning experience? Do high schools no longer have Computer Programming classes? Is it the mark of the 'self esteem' generation to give up when anything challenges their opinion of themselves?
Anyway, my two cents.
So the vast majority of mediocre PhD students are not becoming tenured professors. Why would this discourage the best students?
I'm not seeing an awful lot of support for the arguments being made by the naysayers. I look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the job outlook for the sciences is average to good depending on the specialty. Contrast that with my current field, law, where competition is described as intense. Complaints about science I've read here include long hours and low pay. I hear many of the same complaints in law and consulting, which is where some commenters are suggesting people go instead. Work in general is not fun. There are few easy and well-paid jobs anymore. Smart people should try to align their interests, personality and values to their career and hope for the best. At least you will get some satisfaction with that strategy.
This is a major issue and one of the reasons why Henry Ford did not put much stock in formalized education. He had his faults, but it is difficult to discredit his monumental contributions to society. Most B.S. and M.S. recipients that I know, work in fields not at all related to their degree. It is ultimately the fault of higher education. There is a 20,000% markup on undergraduate coursework. This makes the health insurance industry look like the "good guys". Much of what is wrong with our system can be traced back to the greed of these institutions and the people who are employed by them. The exorbitant cost and the devaluation of this system that we all hold near and dear to our hearts must be fixed. I hope this changes-- and soon, starting with you Mary Sue Coleman. Shame on you and your $553,500.00 salary (2009-2010).
Geez, if you haven't figured it by this time, what the frigging perdition are you doing at this site? It's gotta be quite difficult for you and technically advanced for your kind, after all....
But there is still a way to solve America's present economic doldrums: retailers around the country must practice outreach to all those H-1A, H-1B, H-2B, H-2C, L-1, O-1, P-1, P-2, P-3 and all the other visa worker codes out there, and all the undocumented workers out there too -- to come and eat at American restaurants and to purchase American books.
I mean....somebody has to, and the rest of us don't have any work since they've offshored ALL the jobs (OK, there are still some restaurant and book store jobs, but if those guys don't start shopping there, they'll be gone too).
They've offshored the R & D, like the rest of the jobs. There is simply nothing going on in this completely and utterly corrupt criminal enterprise called America. Whenever I find some moron wearing one of those (lifer puke) shirts "Freedom isn't free" I inquire if he believes that "freedom" must be purchased from Wall Street in time payments?
When they answer affirmatively, I disappear their useless butts.....
I've been reading slashdot for ten years and every two weeks there is a story posted that amounts to nothing more than "woe is me, underpaid IT guy." These posts never fail to get less than 300 replies of sorry sacks bitching and moaning about their personal situation. If you took slashdot at face value, you would assume that being an IT professional is full of disrespect and horror. If I was a bright 16 year old with opportunities to do well in other fields, this site would not persuade me to enter the field. Most intelligent life forms would run away screaming after reading what you old codgers complain about on a daily basis. They are getting off your lawn, by not studying what you hold dear. They don't care about linked lists, they don't care about immutable variables and they sure as fuck don't care about parallelism. Kids learn what they want. The old guard has passed, now we need to make sure our best and brightest learn from those who know things worth learning.
Please relinquish your geek card on your way out.
I have yet to hear any of my colleague complain about the government new plans for space. On the contrary.
You obviously don't work in or around Houston or Cape Canaveral.
We should be pushing man into the stars, not sending out ropes into the fog and seeing if they get tugged.
I hope Americans adjusts themselves to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
The Miller-McCune article outlines an American system for funding science.
Looking at it as a system, how should that system be changed?
The main purpose of the existing system was inspired by the World War II understanding of the political and military importance of science.
Lets say that there are two huge failures of the American science system.
1.An absurd waste of highly educated people waiting for autonomy and work appropriate for their preparation. The research universities benefit and the people get by on pittances.
2.A phenomenal drain of scientific research into the wasteland of proprietary intellectual property, patents based on public funded research, and exorbitantly high prices for biochemical items substantially based on research initially funded by the US government. Note the mention of Monsanto interfering with a student science project above.
A side effect of the American science system is that the government has allowed all the innovations to be released to others. The knowledge is locked in expensive journals, out of print books and expensive reverse lookup citation indexes within University libraries.
So the question I hand back to you is: How do we change the system to alter these two bad side effects?
No, and you dont have to search very far either: Three isn't :)
Lowest prime: Two.
Lowest possible sum of two primes: Four.
FRA: STFU GTFO
There is a simple solution: Make Ph.D as a required qualification for High School Teachers and pay them well; MS for Junior High and "A" point average for BA/BS etc.to teach at elementary school.
Test the candidates for teaching using their psychological profile to make sure that they have teaching aptitude and love for teaching. The who bogus Teacher training thing that makes money to
Universities without any accreditation board should be abolished. USA will become again the best in 10 years.
I find it interesting to compare the economics of Sci/Eng careers in the US to those in Medicine. Both have an early, slave-like (ahem, high value per hourly cost) phase, whether it's a post-doc or Medical Internship/residency. The interesting divergence is that, after that long-but-finite slave phase, all of the medical workers (who survive it), are full-fledged M.D.s.
As such, they have excellent job prospects, that are almost guaranteed. Given the guild-like powers of the AMA and/or State medical boards, it is almost impossible for a doctor to be fired for medical incompetence. Failure rate data is hidden from the prospective customers (concealed until/unless the state medical board strips a Doc of his/her license -- happens *very rarely.)
I think that while other countries are striving to reward outstanding performance by the student, our country is racing to define and categorize more medicatable learning disabilities than anyone else. I don't assume that all the currently labelled learning challenges in the US cropped up in the past 25 years out of nowhere. I was once told I have ADHD. Of course the doctors couldn't figure out why I could focus when and where I wanted to for hours at a time. I tend to think it's because they're making a lot up as they go. When I was a kid, there were older kids who got academic awards for this and that. They phased a lot of that stuff out because someone's kid was feeling left out. Welcome in No Child Left Behind. A system that makes sure your smart kid doesn't intimidate tomorrow's ditchdigger. No offense to ditchdiggers, you guys make a home for our fiber internet ocnnections, luv yas, but I've been told that in most European countries they still reward success. If we went to a system where we could put more academic-jockdom statistics into play and somehow redirect the social dynamic of what is "cool" as it stands in those European countries we might be able to reverse what I call the "slow-cheetahs prevail" system in place now. Don't slow the gazelles down, make the cheetahs faster!
Education system should preferably create employers instead of employees.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
I think in general it benefits society to have people with PhDs around. We can't make jobs for these people but one thing we can do is convince companies that they should be hiring more of them and not necessarily in a research capacity. Not all people who end up with a PhD in engineering/science even want to continue on in research but at the same time, companies tend to think that research is all they can do.
People with PhDs have many more skills than those who don't go to graduate school and I'm not just talking research wise. The analytical/critical thinking/writing/presentation/communivcation skills of somebody with a PhD usually blows somebody with a BSc out of the water (simply because of the time spent writing papers/giving lectures etc), not to mention their general philosophy on life (a proven interest in continuously improving their work and themselves). The tradeoff is that a company would usually have to shell out a bit more in salary to those with PhDs, but really not that much and perhaps this is where some government spending should come in. Why not redirect some of those post-doc fellowships to make up the difference in the salary for somebody working in a company but not in a research capacity?
Eventually, as more and more PhDs infiltrate commercial enterprises, they will begin to hire their own kind and this will create a positive feedback system creating a steady stream of empolyment for those with PhDs.
To which manned exploration missions are you comparing the robotic exploration missions? December 14th, 1972 was the last time a person left the orbit of earth. Since then the only scientific discovery that can occur in space, by humans, is microgravity experiments. These have plenty of merit, but they don't do what the robots do on Mars and around Saturn.
When the Apollo program put humans on the moon, little was known about what we should be looking for. Even less of that information was known by the astronauts involved. After Apollo 11 there was a concerted effort to expand the geological science done on the lunar surface, but the history of the moon and the knowledge gained about it couldn't be completely learned in 3 years, whether robots or humans were there.
I'd love an apples to apples citation on where a robot perceives more and brings back more data and insight than a human. More objective data, possibly. But until you can build a curious robot, they're way behind.
"...And who wants to make buttprints in the sands of time?" ~Bob Moawad
Where I live, the local chamber of commerce puts out commercials every few years... if only we have the training, we will become the worlds greatest R&D hub...there are no limits blah blah blah. Yep, they put it out. They waste money on it. So what happens? Kids go to the colleges and universities. Take courses. Study Hard. Pass with honors. Join the unemployed. Shock, awe, take on the job training for some other kind of work because no one is hiring. Its great to yap about "oh think of the jobs", but when money for science is going overseas, when high technology is being funded overseas, your best chance of getting a job is ....overseas. I'm actually quite pissed about the stunts they pull (and have pulled) over the years.
For now, quarterly results are great, because we're still coasting on all the innovation of previous years. There has been no disruptive technology to dislodge this mindset.
However, if one or two companies have a mindset of finding a competitive advantage by doing research for a couple of years, they could leapfrog existing companies with their newer processes. But, no guarantee of finding an advantage. It takes visionaries to look farther than the quarterly cash flow sheets.
Most companies will not do long-term research until necessary. The advantage of waiting for a new innovation to appear (from someone else's research) is that it's not near as expensive to clone the advantage for yourself.
So, our current model is that small companies spend lots of money looking for competitive advantages against larger companies, find one, and promptly get bought out or cloned.
I watched Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs tribute to Discovery's 25 year anniversary, and I thought he was brilliant. He basically called bullshit on all the platitudes you hear encouraging people to be good workers. Things like "Work smarter, not harder" and other bullshit (you should work smarter and harder).
The one that struck me the most was the platitude "follow your passion". Bullshit. 99% of us aren't going to be able to do what we love, it's just not going to happen. So he said instead "bring your passion with you". Whatever you end up doing, put everything you've got into it, and chances are you'll be successful and happy.
Like the guy who wanted to be a jet pilot, but couldn't afford school, and so got into the business of steam cleaning gum off sidewalks. He turns over a pretty penny doing that, and is probably a hell of a lot happier than most jet pilots. Pilots only make about $90k a year on average, and top out at around $105k. That's not hard for a successful business owner to surpass, and one can do so without the years of school debt piled on top.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
We've done this in the name of competition and lower consumer costs. Example: Our government broke up the AT&T Bell System twice (by court order in 1984 and effectively by legislation -- Telecom Act -- in 1996). Now, Bell Laboratories, once a prime R&D facility in the US, belongs to France (what's left of it). Competition is fine, but when it gets out of hand it can destabilize the job market and create a lot of wasted time, energy and materials.
... I make my living writing software because there are no jobs in physics. It is that simple. And when people ask me about getting an "advanced" degree - I tell them that it isn't worth it unless the company you are with is actively funding your education, as well as paying you for going to school. Otherwise you will *never* recoup your time-cost, or out-of-pocket costs.
Most of the people that got their degrees in science in the past were guaranteed of finding some type of well-paying job - that is simply no longer the case, and more and more people are aware of that fact. I have been asked to talk to students and I give them the facts, which is what isn't given to them otherwise. The simple fact is - don't waste your time. More and more of the US job base is being exported to other countries, and we will slide into third-world country status. Sad - but seemingly true, as we are already seeing Europe follow that path, and we are following their lead...
If there is no incentive to exceed - no one will.. The present tax structure penalizes you for working hard, and trying to put any money away - you are better off spending every dime you make, and keep your hand out to the government to pay you. Is it any wonder that people are finally getting the message?
That's because the ISS was fuckin' boring, as it never went anywhere beyond LEO.
I think what the parent was comparing robots to is manned exploration. Sticking people in LEO does not qualify as "exploration", any more than sticking people in a boat in the middle of the Atlantic counts as "deep-sea exploration".
Sending men to the moon was true exploration. Sending men to Mars, or an asteroid, or anywhere beyond Earth orbit is exploration, and is more interesting and glamorous when it's done by people instead of robots. The glamor part is important, too, since it's taxpayer dollars that are used for it; the more you can please them with pictures of people walking around on an alien world (rather than pictures from a very slow robot), the more likely they will be to continue supporting your funding.
(And it's a big assumption.)
What exactly is the value of any given answer to your example question? How do you evaluate whether a given answer is "true" in any meaningful sense of the word? How do you even define "truth" in the religious case?
That's the problem with these NOMA (Non-overlapping majesteria) proponents: It's not even clear that answers to "religious questions" have any real meaning if you take the NOMA stance, nor if they (even in principle) can/ have any objective meaning. If you're just talking subjective meaning then you're on the road to solopsism and that way lies madness.
HAND.
Also, no-true-scotsman fallacy. Welcome to America.
Freedom isn't free --- as if corporate Amerika hasn't been financing both sides of every war, at least since WWI. What bloody freedom do you have, zombie consumertard?
And when and whom did you fight for said "freedom"?
I sincerely hope you aren't one of those "volunteer army" mental category six types? There's a sound reason why Jefferson promulgated the citizen-soldier concept -- so America wouldn't have all this super-sized debt, super-sized deficit spending, too many debt-financed billionaires, and crackers coming out the ying yang -- and all those life pukes who've retired from the SEALS or Delta to play bodyguards to the world's bloddiest totalitarian dictators!
It's people like you who believe history started yesterday.
Here's an interview you probably missed with everything else -- pay very close attention -- assuming you can focus on anything -- to Brzezinski's responses.
Robots aren't boring to the right kind of person, and science doesn't need the other sort.
Oh really? Where does the funding come from?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Are you saying that if NASA offered you a crew spot on an upcoming ISS mission, you would turn it down because you believe manned programs are a waste of money?