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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.
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.
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.)
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
I read that article and I think maybe they're trying to solve the wrong problem. Rather than training more priests to perform exorcisms maybe they need to stop looking for demons in everything.
I, for one, welcome our new Mandarin speaking Chinese research Overlords. Or not.
Given the fact that China, India, Brazil and a host of other countries are trying to shed their 'third world' moniker, I would both expect and accept the fact that these countries are starting to do more research.
I'm not sure how anyone expects them to improve their technology base otherwise unless it's to simply to buy everything from the US / UK / EU. Where's the fun in that? Furthermore, it's not like the entrenched powers are keen on sharing much of what we know with other countries. So what the hell do you expect them to do? You can't download everything from the Internet.
And besides, the US really needs this to occur. We need some scary boogeyman (preferably foreign) to create some sort of gap that we have to fill lest the American Way of Life become endangered. I am really hoping that the Chinese get a viable manned space program going in a few years so we can 'catch up'.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And, of course, this will be modded insightful instead of offtopic, just so Slashdotters can rejoice in their atheism once again despite it having nothing to do with the actual article.
It is well known in the academic field that if you keep sending your crappy paper to journals, it will eventually get published. And I can tell you that I review a LOT a crap those days. Measuring papers is stupid,, it won't discriminate good papers from bad papers. The editors are supposed not to publish bad papers, but eventually they will. There is no good (IMHO) to discriminate those. So let's not use the number of paper as a metric of how good countries are at science.
In which country do people go for their study if they ARE going to another country looks like a much better metric to me. And let's face it, no one goes to india, china or brazil. It might come and I wish that eventually they will. I wish those country will produce good science. But let's face it. Right now, they have 20 years to catch up.
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.
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
"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
Those 'scare' graduate positions are filled with highly qualified students willing to work for less than minimum wage. I know - I did it, and there was no great line of equally qualified Americans waiting for my job. And if you think that we have no intention of staying, I suggest you look at the makeup of the faculty at these universities.
They the best people for the job, and significantly lower the bar for US students. I've been on recruitment committees - some places are allocated domestic ahead of time, others have 'score 40(US)/60(foreign)' type set ups. Oh, and Mr Taxpayer? Your taxes do not pay my salary/tuition. My work teaching your kids is what pays my salary - whilst my classmates went on to make six figure salaries. Go round up a bunch of US students with masters degrees in physical sciences and ask them to work 60+ hour weeks for 18k per year. See what response you get.
Scientists in the US "accept the consensus" on global warming as much as any scientists around the world. It's the general public that has been misled by a well financed disinformation campaign.
Why is it a puzzle? It is an excellent deal for the US taxpayer. Many graduate students and many postdocs = cheap research labor. If you tried to limit foreign researchers, you would never be able to fill the spots without hiring more faculty = expensive. There are currently roughly twenty postdocs (one to three year positions) for every open tenure-track faculty position.
As a side effect, though, you get fewer American researchers. Americans aren't going to train for 10 years of graduate school and postdocs to accept a 95% rejection rate. But if you are willing to leave the US after the postdoc then it is a good deal.
If you think that religious fanaticism doesn't have anything to do with the (relative) decline in US scientific productivity, you haven't been paying attention.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Simple ... grad students in the sciences provide a source of cheap labour that pays off any taxpayer funding several times over in ultimate research benefits. Universities cannot afford to run out of talented, hardworking grad students. It does not matter which countries the grad students come from.
Because the positions pay peanuts, the work gets no respect and you taxpayers throw fits at the idea of funding anything, much less making the position and prospects attractive to an American.
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.
What does this mean exactly? Did you open a handful of journal issues you had lying around, look at the table of contents and decide "this name sounds like it belongs to a Chinese, this name sounds like it belongs to an Indian, this name sounds like it belongs to a good, upstanding American patriot"? Maybe I'm overly cynical, but that's the first thing that came to my mind...
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".
Religion /per se/ may not be the problem, but I can tell you as an American, that religion in this country is most *definitely* against science. You need look no farther than the creationists (aka, intelligent design proponents) and those against stem cell research to see just how strongly religion opposes science in America. It doesn't help that anti-intellectualism has been ascendant in America for (at least) the last three decades. Even ignoring the flat out obvious real world examples, all religions posit to have the answers. Why perform research or experiments when you already "know" the answers by faith?
Nathan's blog
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.