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.
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.
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.
We have Sarah Palin and she can see Russia from her front porch
What Palin actually said was
"They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."
http://www.slate.com/id/2200155/
Which is literally true since from Little Diomede part of US territory and Alaska you can see Big Diomede which is under Russian control.
A legitimate critique of Palin would be that she considered Russia being visible from an island of Alaska, as saying something useful about her international experience and foreign relations.
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
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
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.
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!
Here, troll, have a candy bar.
Give him a few more, throw in some sugar cubes and a few cans of Red Bull. Maybe he'll get diabetes, fall into a coma and die. Evolution in action.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No, they don't.... It's more like, "Fallow fields that aren't drenched in blood."
There's something a bit wrong with this metaphor. You'd think that blood would be a fairly good fertilizer. It's mostly water, of course, but it has a significant organic component that's already broken up into single-cell packets which will decay quickly. So it should be good plant food.
There's gotta be a better metaphor ...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.