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.
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.
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.
Seems like an incredibly dubious argument to me. Faith and Science are mutually exclusive and have nothing to do with atheists. It has to do with separation of scientific process and leaps of faith that can't be proven. Your arguments are typical of what the grandparent is trying to say. Faith assumes that observation is causality and science recognizes that observation can be related but not the cause. Tying observation to causality my be a natural defense in animals. We assume that the last thing we ate is the cause of our stomach ailments. This might be life saving, but it also makes us avoid things that don't make us sick. Science doesn't have this luxury. We need to root out causality to efficiently make scientific discovery. The beauty of science sometimes leads scientists to have faith is a high power, but it doesn't lead them to apply faith to the discovery process.
What is also hurting our institutions is the changes made during the Reagan era to reduce funding to higher education and place taxes on graduate student stipends. This was driven by your same argument, "Gosh we should stop funding universities because they are turning out to many liberal arts degrees." The government stopped funding universities and forced them into a quasi for profit position. Universities started drawing from the foreign pool of students whose governments had the foresight to fund the education of future leaders of arts and sciences. It is not surprising that our universities have a disproportionate number of foreign students, and they are returning to their homelands with the knowledge to succeed in science and engineering.
I think it is great that China and India have the wherewithal to see what is required to be a dominant economic and political power. They aren't sitting on slashdot arguing over faith versus science. They are just working hard at discovery knowing it will pay off.
Except that there is a bonus _per paper written_ in f.ex. Chinese institutes, so that it becomes very attractive to just swamp the community with papers. And when you write papers, you cite your colleagues.
There simply is no good metric. You have to judge the quality of the papers and authors by reading them. Tht is not the answer accounting departments want to hear, though.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
How about we add onto that -- everyone knows sports heroes and rock stars contribute far more to a society than advances in the hard sciences and engineering. We all know that 300 years from now, Justin Bieber's song lyrics will be immortalized and will become a must study for every student in future times, while the advances in graphene, memristors, and biofuels are absolutely meaningless and will be forgotten in ten years.
It is far more important for high schools to have the football stadiums, and as big, if not larger Jumbotrons than the rival. Far more important than funding science labs, or hiring and retaining competent staff. Woe to the school district that doesn't have available skyboxes for parties during the Friday night games.
Yes and no. Your sig says "correlation is not causation". Yes, religious fanaticism and in general anti-intellectuals make intellect almost look suspicious at times, and this is something we should worry about. However, I'd argue that religion is stronger in India and Brazil, were science is on the up according to this report. This suggests that religion is not the defining factor. I think it has an impact on some parts of science, for example if a religion is against biotech, biotech would clearly suffer, but while these areas will be highlighted, it doesn't affect the whole of science in pure numbers in terms of productivity, because the whole dwarfs those areas. Personally, I think the problem is there is more money and respect for smart brains elsewhere, such as in finance. Perhaps not religious fanaticism is he defining factor, but greed and the lack of necessity.