Slashdot Mirror
Tide of International Science Moving Against US, EU
explosivejared writes "The Economist has a story on the increasing scientific productivity of countries like China, India, and Brazil relative to the field's old guards in America, Europe, and Japan. Scientific productivity in this sense includes percent of GDP spent on R&D and the overall numbers of researchers, scholarly articles, and patents that a country produces. The article notes increasing levels of international collaboration on scholarly scientific articles in leading journals. From the article: '[M]ore than 35% of articles in leading journals are now the product of international collaboration. That is up from 25% 15 years ago — something the old regime and the new alike can celebrate.'" Note that the "old guard" are still firmly in the lead on these measures of scientific prowess, but the growth rate is higher in the newcomer states.
Fallow fields have a greater increased growth rate over developed ones!
We here in the States have much more pressing issues at the moment... Science is for pagans and heathens
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Judging scientific productivity in terms of patents filed is like measuring software value in lines of code. I realize that's not the only metric here but the fact that they're even looking at it this way is ridiculous.
I thought this was going to be a global warming study, rising sea levels ...
with the US singled out for special opprobrium because it's basically the only country unwilling to accept the consensus of (most) scientists that global warming is happening.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
some us schools think collaboration = cheating on some class projects and parts of other school work.
Some even think that collaboration on papers is cheating as well.
But citation of English-language articles in Chinese journals by other publications remains low.
Maybe it's because Chinese science isn't trustworthy enough?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Ever done this? How long would it take, do you think, it would take to rebuild a place like, say, oh, I don't know, New Orleans?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I've got a great idea.
Instead of making college free like other countries, let's raise the cost of going to college so high that nobody can afford it.
Instead, we'll let them take out loans that will put them in debt for the rest of their lives.
We'll make the interest rates so high that they'll never be able to pay it off.
And to stop them from going bankrupt like businessmen or anybody else who is overwhelmed by debt, we'll make it illegal for them to go bankrupt.
(Note to self: Don't forget to underpay science teachers and destroy teachers' unions.)
Here is another article by them about rampant fraud in China's research. More power to Brazil and other countries that are legitimately improving their scientific establishment rather than faking it till they make it.
And, from the summary: "Note that the "old guard" are still firmly in the lead on these measures of scientific prowess, but the growth rate is higher in the newcomer states."
So what? Increasing a baseline of 10 by 1 is 10% growth. Increasing a baseline of 1000 by 10 is 1% growth. Even if the metric is valid, which would you take?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The prestigious science journal Nature recently had an article on the best cities for science. They have some really cool interactive graphs showing scientific productivity of different parts of the world and how many citations each place gets. What struck me was how quickly China grew in terms of volume of publications, but how poorly their articles were cited. Whether that is due to papers being published in primarily Chinese language journals, the papers of being of poor quality, or the scientific community ignoring important papers coming from China for whatever reason is unclear, but I think it shows that other countries have a while to go before achieving scientific dominance.
Scientific fakery and plaggiarism are a problem, especially in the "wild west" of science, like China. Still and all, science is a bit stagnating in the US and EU alike, with monies tight and a lot of unwashed more comfortable with comfy fairy tales than hard science to the point of wanting to have their kids taught those fairy tales in science class in lieu of scientific method. Apparently they figure they already have so much tech, they don't need any more.
Whereas elsewhere science is still paving the road out of poverty.
On another note, I see no mention of Russia. What of that?
it is obvious why this is happening, it was obvious in this comment, it was also obvious much earlier, but it's hard to find much earlier references.
But I was just considered to be 'funny' because I stated the reasons and the solutions to economic problems that are experienced by the western world and 'economies' that have very high social obligations and expectations.
here is how it will end for USA
You can't handle the truth.
I've seen this kind of article before but most of the commenters usually point at the quality of stuff coming from these countries as opposed to the U.S. but honestly, it's saturday...fuck science...I'm going to the bar.
We have Sarah Palin and she can see Russia from her front porch. So you can keep all that lefty science and educational stuff. Ameristan don't need no intellekutals.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
While China and India stay busy copying our (old) research system, we should address and fix the distorted system of publish-or-perish junk paper mills that our university labs have become. Not that I have any concrete suggestions...
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Blow up the moon. Then we have no more tides!
Look at the anti-science rhetoric we see coming from Republican party.
The conservatives have fucked us.
Collaborating on papers which aren't handed out as collaborative papers is definitely cheating. What concerns me more is the implication that some US schools don't think that's cheating.
Likewise, school work is to be done on ones own, except where indicated as a group task or in cases where one needs it explained.
That's because it is when the work is supposed to be/is represented as your own work.
science falls behind in america because god wants it to.
I realize the linked article is in the Economist - but there's very little information regarding the methodology behind UNESCO's conclusions. What little that is there leads me to believe they're just doing bulk counting without regard to quality.
From what I've seen (FWLIW I work in a university engineering department), the top minds of countries such as India and China do their best to get out of there. They take faculty positions in the US; they go to Europe; or they go to Taiwan or Japan.
And while the article seems to imply that the lack of citation of China's journals from the western world might be some degree of latent racism, it provides zero evidence to support that conclusion. I am also left to wonder why Indian and Chinese scientists working in the west don't seem to have that problem.
#DeleteChrome
the whole nuclear non-proliferation thing means that the version of science taught in schools is flawed in a major way(s), while this deliberate inaccuracy helps prevent people from learning to build nukes and other things it also prevents them from performing cutting edge science. So the countries that don't give a rats bum about NP will always have an edge in:
nanotech
chemical/pharmaceutical design
chip design
precision engineering
rocket science
satellite tech
communications
"ufo" design
energy production
efficiency
recycling
next gen anything
etc
so what if there is a tiny chance some kid or crazy person might nuke your city, better tech is worth it.
"Likewise, school work is to be done on ones own"
Why? What if someone is actually helping you and explaining to you how to do the work so that you can later do it yourself? If they are cheating and merely copying answers without learning the material, it will show. It's their education and their own fault.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
That said, many teachers agree that student can work together on homework to figure out the approach to a problem, as long as they are not copying actual solutions (i.e. once the approach becomes clear, they stop and finish the problem independently, before moving on to the next problem). The vast majority of my teachers actively encouraged doing that, but were clear that merely copying solutions was very much unacceptable.
A few of them further specified that if while collaborating on the approach the the group as a whole finds the solution, a notation to that effect should be added to the paper, so the grader does not assume the basically identical answers are a result of copying.
One area none of the teachers ever touched was the collaborative process of checking answers against each other once everybody has completed the assignment. That is because that is a thorny area, and comes very close to the issue of simply coping answers. Done correctly, this process helps students find and understand mistakes they made, resulting in better understanding of the overall material, especially since by the time students get graded material back, and realize they made a mistake, the class has advanced far beyond that point, making students feel less comfortable asking questions, and also often just no longer care.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
My father has a PhD from a fancy school in the US. (Genetics)
When I was looking at a career path, he warned me off pure science. He was right.
Fighting for tenure and the climate towards R&D in general is nuts.
The days of Bell labs, PARC et. al were great - people forget many of the advances today came out of those investments made by public and private industry.
Now, increasingly, advances in semiconductor manufacturing, wireless tech - all comes from overseas.
Sigh.
..don't panic
If said cheating is done in secondary school and helps one to get a tertiary placement in preference to someone who did not cheat, it doesn't matter to the displaced scholar that the person who displaced them got found out or failed the course later on.
Similarly, if a person obtains employment on the strength of academic results which aren't valid, not only does the person they displace get impacted potentially hampering them at the start of their career, the reputation of the cheats educational qualification will be damaged, affecting every student who completes their qualification honestly.
It's this last which should motivate educational institutions to ensure that their students complete their qualifications honestly.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
You'd think that since nearly everybody in the real world collaborates on projects, that academic institutions should want to encourage collaboration.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Some even think that collaboration on papers is cheating as well.
I dunno 'bout cheatin', but gotdangit, that sure sounds like communism to me! I mean, ain't 'collaboratin' what the Jews and the French did with the Nazis after the krauts bombed Pearl Harbor?
I'm old enough to remember when Japan was the mindless plagiarizer, and now they are considered one of the "old guards", how times have changed.
how about dropping filler classes like art history and other off your major stuff just to fill a needed # of college courses. Some colleges have up to 1 year of filler that can be cut to save costs and let you take less time and or more class on your major.
"Similarly, if a person obtains employment on the strength of academic results which aren't valid"
If an employer is hiring people based on the imaginary grading scales present in the school systems, that is their first error.
"It's this last which should motivate educational institutions to ensure that their students complete their qualifications honestly."
Banning all collaboration whether good or 'bad' isn't the answer.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
It seems like half the scientific publications in the west feature participants Chinese or of said heritage, so even disregarding China proper, they were well in the game.
Judging from an admittedly non-rigorous sampling of U.S. technical journals, much of the domestic U.S. corporate and university R&D is being done by Chinese and Indian nationals. Would someone please explain the wisdom of American universities allocating scarce graduate positions and funding to foreigners with no intention of staying in the U.S. It's a puzzle to this taxpayer.
"Banning all collaboration whether good or 'bad' isn't the answer." Hedwards, to whom you originally replied, carefully distinguished between good and bad collaboration, so I assumed that you would be able to comprehend the fact that I was not referring to permitted and/or required collaborative efforts. My apologies for this erroneous assumption.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
Their methodology is worthless, and even their name is a marketing gimmick. Why it is regarded as "intellectual" or even scientific is beyond me -- whenever they publish anything within the areas of my expertise, it is either some kind of fashionable bullshit or hearsay.
I am a CS professor, and I've been on review and program committees for conferences taking place in China. There are some good submissions, but most of the work submitted is incremental, or of inferior quality, and much of it gets through review, gets published, and brings the authors the "citation metrics" they are rewarded for by the Chinese government. Think of it as mutual grading on the curve for scientists, by scientists who want a promotion. Similar things exist in the US and EU in certain communities (especially when they are primarily funded by government organizations) but on a much smaller scale. I do not blame those researchers, though: they were handed the rules of the game, and they make the best of it. We still warn our grad students to beware of "International" conferences and journals - there is a strong chance that such a publication could be worthless for their careers.
Now, for those of us who went to school in Eastern Europe and in Asia, the situation with science teaching in the US public schools is incomprehensible -- how, on such comparatively huge budgets, can it be so bad? According to an American Mathematical Society study, Chinese high school graduates tend to know math better than US high school teachers! Teachers unions and BS pedagogical theories promoted by various "Ph.D.s in Education" who teach those teachers have a lot to do with it, but it still does not make sense. Many school districts are now considering "Singapore textbooks", as if Singapore is some kind of a math and physics powerhouse - but in fact these are just old style textbooks, before the Dept. of Education and dozens of BS pedagogical theories that made their inventors' careers.
Still, even though public education in the US has major problems, the supposed great upswelling of published research out of China is just a game of numbers, people organizing to work around arbitrary metrics with which an authoritarian government tries to steer economy. Anyone who knows could tell that to the Economist's jornos, if they would only listen instead of rushing to write fashionable crap.
"so I assumed that you would be able to comprehend the fact that I was not referring to permitted and/or required collaborative efforts."
No, I was talking about projects that were originally meant to be done alone but you asked for the help of another to show you how to do it, not projects specifically intended to be group projects.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I'm sure it was many years before Terminus overtook Trantor in the sciences as well.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
You know people can get through college without having to study, assuming they are an active member of a good frat? Most profs tend to have the same test questions, and most decent frats will have those questions on file to study. Combine that with a dossier of what profs do for exams and their political leanings, and all it takes it going to the test dates and the final with a list of answers memorized, and that is an easy "A" without interfering with the drinking binges.
I don't know how it is in America, but here in the Netherlands a lot of Chinese and Indian people come here to get their Ph.D. They write their thesis and a few articles, get their Ph.D., and go back to where they came from, taking all the experience that you need for performing their specific 'trick' with them. One Ph.D. costs on average around 400.000 euros. I think when these people leave for their home country we should at least make them pay part of that money back. If they can't they have to stay here and we can pluck the fruits of our investment.
-- Cheers!
The TEA PARTY is in power now, so all our problems will be solved shortly.
They are the fastest growing scientific sector in the third world, ranking first in terms of growth rate (ahead of China). Unlike China, 1/4 of their published papers are co-authored with Western countries showing that it's valid science. They regularly rank high in world rankings for fields like nanotechnology, neurology .etc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Iran#International_Rankings
"A 2010 report by Canadian research firm Science-Metrix has put Iran in the top rank globally in terms of growth in scientific productivity with a 14.4 growth index followed by South Korea with a 9.8 growth index.[107] Iran's growth rate in science and technology is 11 times more than the average growth of the world's output in 2009 and in terms of total output per year, Iran has already surpassed the total scientific output of countries like Sweden, Switzerland, Israel, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Austria or that of Norway. ...
Other findings of the report point out that the fastest growing sectors in Iran are Physics, Public health sciences, Engineering, Chemistry and Mathematics. Overall the growth has mostly occurred after 1980 and specially has been becoming faster since 1991 with a significant acceleration in 2002 and an explosive surge since 2005."
That the article in the OP fails to mention Iran strikes me that it's poorly written and non-credible. Most of the Chinese science is not valuable worldwide and is marred by widespread fraudulent unscientific claims.
Some other people in this thread have linked to some specifics, but they are far from the only examples. Basically what it comes down to is that China right how has a prevailing ethic that anything is ok if it gets you ahead in the world. You do what it takes including lie, cut corners, etc. Output matters, quality doesn't, etc.
Well when this gets applied to science, and it does, it leads to shitty research and outright fraud. Of course not only is that not useful, but it is easy to detect. When results are unrepeatable, to the point that it is clear the experiment was never performed in the first place, and so on. The quality is extremely lousy. The system is set up to reward quantity, and the ethics say it is perfectly ok to do whatever so long as you get ahead.
What is going to have to happen there before their science will improve is an ethical shift. This will probably have to happen anyhow as their society changes, but for science it is critical. There has to be a general mentality shift in the country that it isn't ok to just ignore any and all ethical standards. There has to be an understanding that quality matters, particularly in things like research because no matter how good a made up result sounds, it is useless if it isn't real.
As Feynman said "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." A wise statement. Science is ultimately just the process of finding out what really is, discovering the rules and quirks of the universe. That is why it is useful we discover that something is possible, or that something works a certain way and we can then make use of that. However that also means that results must be true and accurate for them to be useful. If you make shit up doesn't matter how cool it is, doesn't matter how compelling it sounds, doesn't matter what amount of stuff you have to try and "prove" it, it is useless if it is false.
China has to come to terms with that before their research is going to be something widely accepted. Doesn't mean they won't have problems, scientific fraud happens everywhere. However there it is institutionalized because society says it is ok. The sheer volume of crap means taht there is almost nothing useful and even if there is, it isn't so likely it gets noticed.
From what I recall of my own education, I am a Norwegian, we often had collaborative projects, with group members randomly selected. This might be merely anecdotal, but someone told me that part of the reason was to teach students to co-operate on various tasks and to increase socialization.
The Long Now Foundation
Characteristics of the engineering and technology companies started in the U.S. from 1995 to 2005. 25.3% of these companies, at least one key founder was foreign-born. Duke/Berkley report.
Immigration and visa nightmares are a large and growing problem for high-skill employers in the U.S.. Wall Street and Silicon Valley tend to complain the loudest about such things, but they happen everywhere — right now celebrated Colombian journalist Hollman Morris looks as though he won’t be able to take up his Nieman fellowship at Harvard, since the State Department has denied him a visa for reasons that no one can understand. Between dealing with capricious decisions and navigating the insanity that is the USCIS bureaucracy, it’s little surprise that many employers choose to simply set up shop abroad.
www.newviewmedia.com
To what degree are countries like china making advancements because the initial IP is stolen though... I work for a software company and we refuse to do business in china because of the incredibly high piracy rates.. One can assume that stealing ideas does not stop at software but physical designs as well.. It's probably alot easier to make advancements if you can steal the inital idea and then improve it.
It didn't have much to do with tax rates, it had to do with back then we had a wealth production/creation economy. Today, we have a wealth skimming/transference/re-arranging economy.
Classifying "financial products" as the same thing as industrial products is simply insane. Letting your "financial products" sector of the economy skim off the bulk of the wealth is nuts. Using word plays to try and equate the two as being of equal worth is again, nuts. Ripping off the middle class and offshoring still useful jobs to other nations for short term profits held within under 1% of the population is the surest way possible to collapse your economy and go bankrupt as a nation.
If artificially created pseudo products had any real value, Las Vegas would be the top of the heap all the time economically, and wouldn't need any influx of outside money to stay afloat, but gambling games just rearrange past produced wealth, they don't create any new additional wealth. The same with 99% of Wall Street "products", the ones that get the most attention and government support today. It dwarfs even the military budget, which is the ultimate broken windows fallacy "wealth creation" economic metric.
You don't need a convoluted tax rate scheme, you need to ban the bulk of those wall street "products" (that will take care of those top 1% today getting too much for too little effort) and re emphasize actual manufacturing again, with actual horizontal and vertical production inside the nation (this reinvigorates the middle class). There's a reason the BRICs are doing so well, and that is because they make stuff and do things besides "financial products".
RIght, like Kelly Johnson needed foreign researchers to get the SR-71
off the ground... I call BULLSHIT!!!!
All we need is American scientists that love this nation to do the
things that have always made us great..
Done and done.. At least this way we won't have to worry as much
about foreigners leaving the country with a free education
and free research on IP or government secrets..
The other day, there were several articles about the discovery that cats have a greater grasp of fluid dynamics than dogs. (Dogs ladle water; cats cause water to rise up through inertia, than snap their mouths shut to capture it without getting their whiskers wet.)
I, for one, hail our new water-lapping, expert-in-fluid-dynamics, miaowing overlords.
Of the large emerging countries mentioned, only China is making real progress.
India and Brazil will be third world shitholes for the foreseeable future (as is much of the west heading down to the same destination).
Kudos to The Economist for acting all surprised that India is a third world shithole (the 'they are a democracy, and therefore they must be advanced' bullshit).
And India, second only to China in the size of its population, has only a tenth as many researchers. This is a surprising anomaly for a country that has become the world’s leading exporter of information-technology services and ranks third after America and Japan in terms of the volume of pharmaceuticals it produces.
From "Bart the Fink" in season 7...
Krusty (to Bart): Bah. What good is respect without the moolah to back it up. Everywhere I go I see teachers driving Ferraris, research scientists drinking champagne.
From USA Today: "Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83% of home-schooling parents want to give their children 'religious or moral instruction.'"
So the bulk of th 1.5 million homeschooling market teaches something that has been known to be wrong for 150 years (200 years if it includes Noah's flood and young-earth crap). I found this with 30 seconds of Google. If you look through amazon.com for creationism you'll find hundreds of books on the subject so creationist books conservatively cost the US millions a year in direct costs, but this is then multiplied greatly by the cost of correcting the falsehoods in those books. Multiple creationist ministries (Answers in Genesis, Discovery Institute, Institute for Creation Research, etc) have multi-million dollar annual budgets that are devoted entirely to obfuscation of well established scientific fact through the creation of those ignorance-promoting textbooks, science and educationally-hostile political advocacy, and legal battles, again amplifying those budgets to create a much larger drain on the US. These groups wield enormous political power: in 2008 multiple Republican presidential candidates (Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo) and the Republican VP nominee (Sarah Palin) declared their support for creationism. If you look through Republican state party platforms you'll commonly see support for damaging education by incorporation of creationism. Widespread and politically powerful opposition to evolution is something that our foreign competitors have much less of a problem with: in one survey of selected countries we only beat Turkey in terms of acceptance of scientific fact. Considering evolution is of critical importance in biotechnology, pharmacology, medicine, etc. this is a grave threat to the USA.
I'm really annoyed with articles that sensationalise scientific advancement in developing nations. They're all screaming of the downfall of western science as if its a 0 sum game and they're stealing all our discoveries.
Other countries gaining prominence in scientific fields is only a good thing. It will force the west to cooperate more fully with the rest of the world.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
Most professors will provide tests and answers from previous years. I don't think I've had a professor outright refuse to do this.
And from my experience, frat guys usually don't score the highest on exams. My college roommate was in a frat, and he used to take advantage of the test archive and abuse Adderall in order to fit in his drinking binges. For him and his "brothers" it was usually an easy C or D. At my university at least, As were hard to come by even with well focused, responsible studying habits.
Haha, great idea! How about the Flying Backpack index?
"How many flying backpacks models can you buy in your country?"
(Oh, looky! An article about "mass production" of a flying backpack made in New Zealand in a Russian newspaper! Wait, WOT?!)
This, together with the Big Mac and IPod indexes, is everything an economist needs!
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I'd agree with all of those who've already pointed out that paper quantities are useless as a measure of academic productivity. There is indeed a lot of very low-quality research coming out of the developing world (there's plenty of low-quality research done in the developed world, too, mind you), but not everything done in China or India is rubbish.
There's also a very silly assumption underlying this - that research is some kind of nerd Olympics and all that matters is the US wins. More research ultimately means faster scientific and technological progress, and we all benefit.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Academic cheating is breaking the rules, usually in ways that favor you in some way. Collaborative writing of graded papers that are given to be solved on one's own are then cheating. That's just by definition, so there isn't much space for arguing against that. What it seems you want to say is that some kinds of cheating are OK, except you don't want to come out and say it that way. Your post would have made a stronger argument by stating your position clearly and then given a proper rationale for that. E.g. you could say that the rules of some academic institutions ought to be different, and therefore cheating by breaking those rules is OK, even if that puts non-cheating students at a disadvantage.
I disagree that collaboration on school projects should always be allowed. The point of a test is to test you, not to test your friends. Not that I think group work is bad - on the contrary it's important. It's just that I won't think very highly of a place where every or even most tests are collaborative (unless for some reason that is unavoidable). If you don't understand something that the course requires you to understand at the test on your own, then you don't understand it. It does nothing to improve that situation that your friend understands it, because he won't be there throughout your career to do your work for you. Now collaborating on understanding the books and materials of the course, that's better than OK, that's downright the best way to do it, but the thing to take away from that is independent understanding, not understanding defined as "I can ask my friend to solve this for me if it comes up."
Where this really comes up for some students is when ALL the studying and homework they do is for the graded content of a course. Then there IS nothing else they can collaborate on, because it really is ALL they do. If that's your situation, and the source of your problems with non-collaborative work, then you are doing it wrong. You are supposed to spend more time on your courses.
They do when it comes to studying, they don't when it comes to testing individual performance. Is that strange?
Yes, an AI that can grade, perhaps write papers?
Nah, the profs and grad students would burn it...
What if they make a boostrapping AI and it assembles a better AI, and so on ad infinitum...that reaches an IQ of 27,000,000
When the USA causes it's cost of education to be a lifetime debt, then the student who can, will look to getting an advanced degree in a lower cost (downhill!!) country. And often, this student marries and remains in that alternate society. Why? Because owning ipods, Ipads, cars, flatscreen TVs, etc does not make for a quality life. They are just adult toys. So, the USA is exporting their brainiest people. My employees are from other countries, and boy, can they deliver. Not even my Canadian student graduates can compare. The USA has to lower the cost of university education. It has to include apprenticeships with industry, even at the undergraduate level.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
In addition to the article under discussion, it might prove worthwhile
to read the following:
Watching Greed Murder the Economy
by Paul Craig Roberts
Maybe your faith and science are. Maybe your dog is painted blue, too, but that doesn't mean everyone else's dog is also painted blue.
Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism are religions that explicitly acknowledge science, and in both cases they encourage practitioners place faith in the scientific method. If you can scientifically prove that some article of either faith is fundamentally wrong, then it can be changed to reflect observed reality.
I have heard that Quakers have a similar trust that a God who gave us an inclination to use our powers of reason and observation will not punish us for doing so. I'm not a Quaker, though, so I can't confirm or deny that.
Scientifically, existence of one counter-example (I am an ordained minister, and a practicing scientist, I do not oppose science, my church does not oppose science, my religion does not oppose science) proves that a categorical statement (religion and science are mutually exclusive) is false.
It is in the interests of both the dogmatic religions and militant atheism to paint science as inimical to religion. It is in the interests of science to refuse to accept this fundamentally wrong, easily disprovable thesis.
Now, if you said most of the Christian faiths in the USA can't be reconciled with science, I'd have to agree with you there. That's a special case, and not general, even though we are talking about the mainstream of religion in America. Precise distinctions may not be meaningful to religious fanatics (Kill them all. For the Lord knoweth them that are His) but should be meaningful to scientists.
I always thought Sarah Palin invented the Internet and said that 640K should be enough for anyone.
I was taught that in skool.
Aww, did the faggot teabaggers with mod points get their feelings hurt?