Saving U.S. Science

beebo famulus writes "Twenty years from now, experts doubt that America will remain a dominant force in science as it was during the last century. The hand wringing has generated a couple of new ideas to deal with the dilemma. Specifically, one expert says that the federal government should create contests and prize awards for successful science ideas, while another advises that the National Science Foundation fund more graduate students and increase the amount of the fellowships."

But of course

[agent dero]

"one expert says that the federal government should create contests and prize awards for successful science ideas, while another advises that the National Science Foundation fund more graduate students and increase the amount of the fellowships."

How did we not think of that! Throw more money at the problem, that always works

It doesn't take a damned expert to figure out what's wrong, ask any geek that's in high school or recently graduated. Our problem is cultural, there's such an anti-intellectual problem in schools and the rest of society, actively encourage exploration (you know, the heart of science) throughout the development of today's youth, and within one generation we'll be sorted.

It's not as complicated as many make it out to be, encourage today's youth to think for themselves and experiment, not conform.

Here's an idea

[smooth wombat]

How about instead of using fairy tales and pseudoscience to explain to folks how the universe operates, we actually teach them the science.

I know, I know, giving people science instead of religious precepts is a wild and crazy idea but someone has to suggest it.

Too late, assholes

[BadAnalogyGuy]

It's taken decades to devolve the American science curriculum into little more than basic biology. That means that today's graduates who would be eligible for participation in these science fairs are already past the point of redemption. In fact, any high school student is already past that point as well since they don't have a strong enough background from elementary and middle school.

So what does that mean? It means that it will take at least another 10 years of good science teaching to bring the next generation of kids up to speed with the rest of the world.

We're in a mess so big and so deep and so tall, we can't clean it up, there's no way at all.

A Comment...

[Anonymous Coward]

Before we go and create all these new science/engineering trainees, should we not first determine whether we need more than we are currently producing? Given the trend to outsource anything possible, is there a shortage of these people? Or, like the IT field, is there merely a shortage of cheap, pliable labor?

The national chemistry society (ACS) has been showing a downward trend in the number of employed chemists. Given things like this, why the %@18&# make more of them?

Start at the bottom

[jsiren]

This really begins at the elementary school level: getting children into the habit of using their brain, promoting questioning and independent thought, would be a good start. It should continue throughout the education system.

Contests and things like that are nice incentives, but everything rests on the fundamentals.

Is that so surprising?

[Noryungi]

Well, US voters elected twice (not just once, but twice!) a man that does not care about science, and has been trying to undermine some of the most prestigious US research centers if they disagree with his policies or analysis.

And this man is backed by (a) a group of people who want an end to big governement and (b) another group of people who believe an obscure semitic carpenter - turned - Savior - turned - deity is going to come back Real Soon Now, which will bring the end of the world as we know it and the judgement of the unbelievers.

So is this so surprising?

I know this sounds very trollish/flame-baitish, and it's also a caricature, but the fact is, Big Government is that what gave an edge to the USA since around 1940, and most people who go to a hall of worship on Sunday morning turn out to be not so great scientists (I know, I know, there are exceptions, blah, blah, blah). Actually, only 17% of them even know their sacred scriptures, according to a recent survey.

So, let me ask you again: is that so surprising? I think not. Another brilliant civilization rejected science and went into a profound decline: it was the Middle-Ages Moslem civilization. Think about that for a minute.

what can you do about it?

[idlake]

"Twenty years from now, experts doubt that America will remain a dominant force in science [CC] as it was during the last century.

Maybe a good place to start would be with better writing. The sentence above incorrectly suggests that experts will, in 20 years, make such a prediction.

In any case, the US has never been able to produce the number of highly skilled graduates necessary to maintain its dominance in science. America's dominance in science is largely due easy immigration, an open society, and a high living standard in the US relative to other nations. It seems pretty clear that all of those factors are changing for the worse.

I don't see anything that can be done about it. If Americans aren't willing to maintain a high standard of living, a rational and secular society, and a meritocracy for the direct benefits that those policies bring, they aren't going to do it in order to attract foreign scientists either.

Offshoring and H1B

[DaMattster]

I think the reason for less students pursuing science and engineering fields is largely due to offshoring and the importation of labor through H1B visa. Many students have the perception, which is not inaccurate, that their jobs will be given to H1B visas or just shipped overseas. Look at students pursing computer science and information technology degress: they come out of school and they don't get hired. I knew it would be a sad day when I saw a job fair in New York City for technology jobs in Ireland. I never thought I would have to leave my country to find work. My brother studied mechanical engineering and he did well academically yet no one would hire him except for 6.50 per hour machinist job. His anger and frustration was justifiable. The offering of prizes is nothing but shortsighted and completely fails to address the roots of the problem. Unless the prizes are ubiquitous enough to give every science graduate whom does well employment, than it is a poorly spent effort. It will take a fundamental attitude shift beginning with our president whom supports offshoring and H1B programs. Our president, our government, and our corporations are contributing to our decline in science and manufacturing. Gee, with all of this in the forefront, why would I want to go into science? Perhaps I am wrong, but the article's solution seems more typical of a politician. I think they know the real reason but would ultimately get burned if they should make the suggestion that it is government. After all, it is our senators and congressman that voted for tax incentives for labor importation and H1B visas.

'Corporate' Universities

[MECC]

One problem is that a pernicious idea has gripped academia which is that somehow the way corporations operate is categorically better for everything - including how to run a university. So, research, publishing, and even teaching are oriented towards a bottom line, giving them at best third-quarter foresight. The strength of an idea on its own merits independent of its profitability is seen as archaic and dysfunctional. Universities all want to be 'corporate', thinking this will somehow improve education. Paying attention to what professors say will help things seems to be falling from favor.

Re:But of course

[JWW]

Our problem is cultural, there's such an anti-intellectual problem in schools and the rest of society, actively encourage exploration (you know, the heart of science) throughout the development of today's youth, and within one generation we'll be sorted.

Amen to that. Now contrast what you just said and what the article said with this:

Earlier in the week /. had a story about NASA's new mission to the moon. A lot of conjecture in the comments was about if it would get enough funding. Now this story talks about funding contests and other shit like that. Bzzzt wrong answer. What the government should fund to get kids interested in science again (and as per your point exploration) is the Moon mission. We have to see exploration in scientific frontiers as the way to the future and I believe the kids will follow suit and learn this stuff.

Now contrast this with the worry (belief) in the Moon mission story that the project will be cut in order to spend the money on social programs. Well if the government does that why the hell should they complain about lack of kids going into the sciences? They themselves will be saying that science isn't a big interest for the country. So kids, why not go to school to be a social worker, we'll need lots of those in the future.

This isn't to say that industry won't need scientific types in the future, they will. But when your talking about influencing the next generation, something big like going back to the Moon, and to Mars is the best way to do that. Its the true building block for that spirit of exploration and adventure, that the parent post so rightly assumes we need to get back.

Re:But of course

[tbjw]

The cultural anti-intellectual bias is, admittedly, pretty common where I'm from in Ireland. From what I've seen, though, it's worse in the US than in Europe & elsewhere. There are a large number of very bright people in the world who would like to come to the US and work as Scientists (doing the jobs Americans are unwilling to do). The problem is that the US immigration & visa policy is pretty forbidding. For instance, a graduate student on an F1 or J1 visa in the US can work only 20 hours per week and is not eligible for various forms of NSF money for conferences etc. Postdocs employed at American universities are often on visas that do not allow them to become citizens. Once these people find tenured jobs in their countries or continents of origin, since the US has not given them much of a stake in American society, they will often return home.

This all makes sense if one views the US as a Beacon of Science, a place where people are lucky to study for a few years. According to conventional wisdom, though, this will stop being the case, even if it is still true, and the US ought to adopt a much more inviting position towards young scientists who wish to study there than it has heretofore.

Given how fast the government moves, and given the general xenophobia in the US today, where immigration is viewed more as a threat than a boon, I doubt they'll figure this out quite in time.

Ben

Reduce the fear of being curious

[cryfordawnsend]

Seems like a better way to encourage innovation is to reduce the fear of being curious. The copyright and patent laws coupled with the sue happy legal system we have makes folks afraid to experiment, or at least to share the results of those experiments. If we can't completely remove the copyright and patent laws, at least reduce them down to something resonable in today's society, to maybe 5 years or so after initial release of a product. If they haven't made money in that time, then give someone else a try... my .02 --cfd

Re:But of course

[Ezubaric]

How did we not think of that! Throw more money at the problem, that always works

It doesn't take a damned expert to figure out what's wrong, ask any geek that's in high school or recently graduated.

But the NSF is constantly slashing budgets, and there's far less money to go around, which means grad students have to whore themselves out to military contractors and pharma companies. Less basic research is being done, and corporations (which used to have big R&D wings) are getting their work done in universities.

Maybe it's good that universities are transforming themselves into more practical places, but it's at the expense of basic science.

...We have it too good

[m93]

It has less to do with the amount of prizes and awards available, and more to do with how we live. The curriculum in public schools is devolving into a watered-down, bland concoction designed to make people feel good about themselves, while as a nation, we are no longer wowed by anything in the hard-scientific realm. Rampant consumerism is the final frontier now....We are in danger of being slaves to our own success.
We need a breakthrough that will capture the imagination of the public at large. (Evidence of life on other planets would be great) Either that, or a new great war effort to spur on innovation and discovery. I would prefer the former.

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[DaMattster]

I am not so sure. Why not look at the white papers that were written. Many have Asian last names and were foriegn born.

Prizes are not the answer - fund the NSF!

[starseeker]

Prizes help spur research towards specific, known, targeted goals. That's not a bad thing (ethical research is almost never a bad thing) but it's only a small part of the problem, and probably not the most important part.

So called "pie in the sky" research with no application in sight seems to be increasingly difficult to justify to those with the purse strings. If someone isn't solving a problem, defending it as worthwhile is difficult. From the article:

"Dangling prizes in front of innovators has benefits not found in the typical funding process. By offering a prize, government pays for success instead of rewarding a research proposal, as occurs with grants."

Research is not just success - in fact, it's not even mostly success. You can't budget just to pay for the successes, or no one will be able to afford to go after the prizes. Plus, failures can often teach as much or more than successes.

Fortunately, Kalil acknowledges that prizes are not all that's needed. Personally I am wary of ANY prizes being introduced since there is a temptation to be "budget minded" in the future by paring down to just the prizes, which sound good while being less effective in reality. Also, institutions might pressure researchers to head for goals that have a prize rather than pursuing something more interesting to the researcher.

Perhaps a good summary of recent problems can be found at the end of this ( http://www.ncseonline.org/Updates/cms.cfm?id=985 [ncseonline.org] ) article:

"Optimism about the current proposal to double the NSF budget in ten years is tempered by the failure of recent legislation to double the NSF budget in five years. The National Science Authorization Act of 2002, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush, called for a doubling of the NSF budget from FY 2002 to FY 2007. The annual appropriations bills have fallen far short of the doubling path specified in the NSF Authorization Act. The FY 2007 budget request for NSF is nearly $4 billion below the level authorized in the last doubling initiative."

There has been some movement in the House: http://www.ncseonline.org/Updates/cms.cfm?id=1182 [ncseonline.org] but now we will see what happens in reality. Apparently it is possible to sound good without actually putting the money into it, we'll hope that doesn't happen again. The recent shift in power in the House and Senate might be helpful - we will see.

I don't know if the US as a population is supportive of research though. I would be very interested in a survey which attempts to gauge the public's interest and support for general research funding - does anybody know of a good one?

US's domination was temporary

[hkultala]

USA was not dominant on the first half of the century.

Actually Adolf Hitler can be thanked for raising USA to "scientific domination"; Most jewish scientists fleed from central europe to USA because of nazis.

And some non-jewish german scientsts (like Werner von Braun) surrendered to USA when the war was ending.

Some european scientists why moved to USA between 1930 and 1945

Kurt gödel ( great mathematician )
Werner Von Braun ( main designed of V-2 ans Saturn V )
Albert Einstein( was visiting USA when hitler rose to power and because of that did not return to germany )
Paul Ärdös ( propably the most productive mathematician of all times, )
Stanislav Ulam, Polish, one of manhattan project scientists
Hans Bethe, nobel prize winner, manhattan project scientist
John Von Neumann, inventor the modern computer, manhattan project scientist .. actually the ONLY major american-born scientist I know from the last centyry are Robert Goddard and Richard Feynman.

Re:But of course

[spiritraveller]

Yeah! Everybody should conform to non-conformism. Everyone would be unique, just like everybody else.

You misunderstand the meaning of nonconformity. It has nothing to do with being unique.

It's about reaching your own conclusions, making your own decisions. If they happen to be the same as everyone else's, it doesn't make you a conformist.

It's a question of how you got where you are. You could have mainstream opinions and dress like everyone else but still be a nonconformist.

Logical Empiricism

[maximthemagnificent]

How about this: teach the bloody scientific method in all schools?

I was never formally presented with it during my public school education, which I find shocking. The US system
is filled with mediocre teachers because of the low pay. I spent my school days bored out of my mind, until I went to
college, where even then I found the professors more interested in research than in teaching (and they certainly weren't
very good at it). All this was in an ivy league school, no less. We take children who love to learn (a child will almost drive you crazy
asking "why, why, why?" and bore the love of learning right the hell out of them. One college I toured had monitors halfway
back in the lecture halls so the students could see the teacher clearly at the blackboard. Totally pathetic. I think a system of
hypermedia and peer tutoring could reduce the number of teachers allowing for far fewer, much more talented, much better paid
teachers to oversee it all. I have a professor friend (much older) at a state school who earns a very good salary working about
10 hours a week. He's totally honest about being paid far too much for far too little; and he's got tenure.

We keep learning too abstract in the US. How about having young students work on real engineering projects where they
actually need trigonometry and statics & dynamics? Maybe have a dozen different projects they can participate on (a go-kart design
class, for example), where they can learn to work in groups and where the rubber will meet the road math-wise. I know
I would've taken to that approach like a fish to water. Of course, I'm an engineer, so I may be biased, but I believe everyone
should be trained as an engineer, since it really just boils down to solving problems with the available methods, which I
think is a useful skill for everyone to have, regardless of how good they are at it. I believe science will dominate humanity's future,
and that everyone who possibly can should go into it. Who knows which one of use will have that moment of revelation that
changes history forever? Even if it's in another country, innovation crosses borders soon enough.

The US had about a century's worth of head start, and we squandered it. Out-sourcing isn't about other country's stealing our
jobs, it's about why nations with much smaller degrees of wealth can produce graduates who can rival our best and brightest.
It's all on us: quit your whining, turn off the TV, and pick up a freakin' book. Given how our nation's been acting lately, our
losing our sole-superpower status is a good thing in my estimation.

Oh yeah, and get rid of the summer vacation thing. The agrarian society is over, so the number of kids working in the fields
is too small to penalize all the rest. We have too many farmers anyway, but that's the subject of another post...

Maxim

Re:But of course

[testadicazzo]

It doesn't take a damned expert to figure out what's wrong, ask any geek that's in high school or recently graduated. Our problem is cultural, there's such an anti-intellectual problem in schools and the rest of society, actively encourage exploration (you know, the heart of science) throughout the development of today's youth, and within one generation we'll be sorted.

You aren't wrong. But I think more can be said on the subject. As a physicist currently working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (it's where Einstein went to school), I would like to offer my perspective.

What the united states government should do, in order to preserve it's dominance in research and development is to STOP ACTIVELY HARMING RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT. What are we actively doing to harm research and development? Well, I'm glad you asked. Here are some of the things that I see screwing the U.S. research community:

1. The Patriot Act(s): The horrible progression towards a totalitarian police state. No I'm not exagerating, flamebaiting or fudding here. The fact that America no longer has habeus corpus, that America has now adopted the military strategies/justifications of imperial japan and nazi germany (pre-emptive war), the numerous videos of excessive violency by U.S. cops, the onerous security conditions international travelers into the U.S. are subject to... All of this stuff gets a lot attention in the civilized world, and has a harmful effect on research in the U.S. Of my colleagues about 5% categorically refuse to travel to the U.S. for conferences or employment. About 50% would never take a position in the U.S. regardless of the pay on moral or safety grounds, and virtually everyone, when looking around for conferences to attend, will, all other things being equal, pick the conference that is NOT in the scary police state. Just to give you an example, most of my colleagues would feel safer going to a conference in Singapore than anywhere in the states.
2. Stop trying to introduce political and economic bias into research. If you think censoring NASA's JPL and the so-called 'intelligent design' movments don't screw up both our reputation (which is important in getting the best people to come and do research in the U.S.) and don't screw up the research climate in the states, well, you need to rethink the issue. What are some issues that can't be studied without undue pressure in the U.S.? It seems to me that biology, atmospheric physics, and medicine have all suffer here, but I'd like to hear from colleagues in those fields how strong that effect is. One area where one hasn't been able to do good research in the United States is drug use and abuse. See http://www.biopsychiatry.com/ [biopsychiatry.com] for an excellent, if not entirely accessible discussion. Alternative energy and environmental research seems to be another victim. We need a government for whom science and facts are more important than faith.
3. The DMCA
4. Software and applied mathematics patents

I'm sure other points can be raised as well, but these are the ones I see most obviously damaging U.S. research. I would like to mention one more point which is less defensible. I believe the U.S. would benefit from more funding for basic research, outside of DARPA and war justifications. DARPA has been responsible for wonderful things, I just don't like how seemingly everything (in physics anyway) has to be linked somehow peripherally to war applications to get any funding in the states.

Besides the significant, immediate, direct, and observable impact these things have on U.S. science, they further reinforce the anti-intellectual climate you have complained about. Don't forget that one reason the U.S. enjoyed such a period of scientific dominance post WWII is we got all the great scientists the nazi's chased out of europe to come here. Now we're chasing away our best scientists.

Closing point, this line of thinking applies to many aspects of U.S. government. Before doing something to fix a problem, think a bit about what we are doing to create a problem, and see what we can do to address that.

Re:Here's an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, you hit the nail on the head. Now you Americans are starting to see why we Europeans threw the fundies and religious wingnuts out of Europe all that time ago.

Yes.. but when you threw them out, they landed here in America, which explains a lot really.

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[Idbar]

Agree with Damattser. I think the amount of foreign students in the US is constantly growing, and if another country provides education and high level research, people will also tend to go there.

Mainly, Americans have to be convinced that they can go do research also. The average undergrad student (if they get there) gets a job and runs away from the academy. Many high school students ran because they started making money.

US should motivate students to go for their graduate studies. It amazing the amount of asian (chinese and indian) people currently on technology programs.

So don't be so sure, after all, US had to "import" science to make important advances (Let's name just one... Albert Einstein?).

A think US has been in the lead, but all this budget they have been using for war, might cause a reduction of graduate students and slow down the pace of US Science. US have to start motivating people to stay in graduate programs with good incentives. And US Universities should be involved in that process.

Re:But of course

[Dr_Barnowl]

I completely agree that it's a cultural problem.

My 2 1/2 daughter had her state-mandated development assessment this week. The health visitor actually told us not to educate her too much on the grounds that if she was too far ahead of her school classmates she might not fit in. My comment was that that was the poorest excuse for mediocrity I've ever heard.

My daughter is obviously taking after her parents, who were both precocious children. In a culture where every other conceivable "difference" is sacrosanct and treated with kid gloves, our most intelligent children are being given very short thrift. You don't see state-sponsored "special" schools coping with their needs. Intelligence should be lauded and cultivated, instead, the culture is to exclude and mock these people.

Bad Culture

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus it would help if our culture placed more emphasis on the news and 'goings-on' of scientific research and less on celebrities and which nipple Paris Hilton exposed that week.

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[eric76]

As we export more and more jobs, especially manufacturing, it is only natural that we are going to lose our place in science.

If you have little or no manufacturing, you won't need much engineering to support the manufacturing. The less engineering we have, the less need for science to drive that engineering.

In other words, by exporting our manufacturing, we are exporting everything that depends on it as well.

The net result is that it will be nearly impossible for us to regain over the next few hundred years what we lose over the next twenty years.

We've made short term monetary gain our ultimate god. Many generations of future Americans will pay for that.

Re:Two factors

[rucs_hack]

As an outside observer I'd say your main problem is that an increasing number of your younger people are turning to religious explanations for the universe. This excludes by definition any ability to create new science, or expand existing science.

Much the same was happening when sputnik appeared. Post that event science was made a priority, evolution was reinstated, and america started to recover. The momentum from that event has kept you going for a fair while, but it looks like the scientists created from that era are diminishing in number, and creationists/religious leaders are gaining ground once more.

The essence of what I'm saying is that unless America manages to refocus itself soon, it's going to be in big trouble.

All it Takes is a Little Inspiration

[pkiesel]

Sure, our society de-values intellectual achievement vis-a-vis instant gratification and entertainment. However, as one who mentors secondary school students in engineering, I have seen first hand that those students who have even a slight inclination towards technology or science only take a little push to get them to pursue those interests.

My own daughter is a case in point. She has always been an artist and excelled in all her subjects, but until 8th grade had little interest in the physical world. That changed when she took a technology course with a very good instructor. He gives his classes challenges - mousetrap powered cars, egg drops, etc. and they go through what amounts to a full design cycle of problem definition, concept development, design, test and repeat, culmonating in a intra-class competition. He's pretty good at promoting these competitions and making it interesting for most students. Long story short, my daughter really got into her challenge: a CO2 powered crash sled with an egg cargo, and did pretty well in the competition. That, I think, was all it took to get her hooked.

When she got to high school, my daughter signed up for a robotics "club", kind of on a whim (but I'd bet her technology class experience helped her make the choice). Coincidentally (or maybe not), the club was led by the brother of the middle school teacher. The robotics club turned out to be a FIRST high school robotics team (Cybersonics, team 103, for those in the know), and consummed her life throughout her four years of high school.

She's now a sophomore in college, studying electrical and biomedical engineering. The biomedical part was another case of earlier inspiration - she took anatomy in high school and really liked it, too. She still paints for pleasure and gets A's in English, but knows her future is in biosensors, etc.

As I said, I mentor kids in engineering (through FIRST and team 103), and know that kids are not dumber now than when I was a kid - they just don't have things like the space race, displayed constantly and large in the media, to inspire them.

All it takes is a little push, and some of us are pushing instead of blaming foreigners and politicians.

Blowing shit up

[tttonyyy]

...is the problem.

Back In The Old Days (as they say in Cliché Magazine), you could make your own gunpowder and experiment with making your own model rocket engines and things like that. Doing these fun things as a kid leads to interest in later life for chemistry, electronics etc.

Now if you try and have some harmless fun you'd get into a whole bunch of trouble, because the powers that be can't distinguish between harmless experimenting and terrorism. Hell, in some parts of the states, you're not even allowed certain kinds of glassware, lest it be used for making drugs! How about nails? Should they be taken away lest I use them to nail people's heads?

And I suspect many people would be surprised by how many prominent figures in science have lead "interesting" childhoods. :)

The best scientists are the ones that did it as a child in their own time, and are inherently driven by their interest to find out more, make new discoveries, learn things. Not the people that did it as school because they couldn't think of anything else to do.

Westernised society has gone nanny/protectionist crazy, and you know what, it *will* suppress new talent.

Stop accepting crap systems research!!!

[DoofusOfDeath]

I've studied graduate-level computer science at several American universities, and the one theme that I find most depressing is the lack of reality in the research. I'm afraid that this decoupling from reality keeps many computer scientists from actually being responsible for accurate research. For example:

• Many CS papers make motivational statements like, "The typical sensor network has...". That's complete BS. The authors have no accurate way of knowing what a "typical" sensor network is like. Because they've never seen a study that's sampled the world's sensor networks. They write papers that quietly confuse what's *really* typical with what the authors imagine would be typical. So there are two problems: (a) academic dishonesty in their writing, and (b) not facing up to the fact that they're guessing about the relevance of their paper, rather than actually having a well-grounded sense of relevance.

• A nearly complete lack of statistical sensibility for simulations and performance characterizations. Hey computer science researchers: how do you know how many repetitions of a simulation to run before you draw your conclusions? Why don't you draw error bars around any numbers in your graphs that represent averaging over multiple repetitions? If you don't have good answers to these questions, then I think it's quite likely that your conclusions are neither reproducible nor sound.

• Leaps of logic regarding models. I can't count (maybe because I'm rather dull ;- ) the number of ad hoc routing papers I've read that assume a circular-coverage radio model, and yet the papers make no mention of the fact that such a model is known to generally have have no connection to reality http://www.cs.virginia.edu/papers/p125-zhou.pdf [virginia.edu]. And yet the NSF keeps on funding this crap and not holding the researchers' feet to the fire. If there's peer review before these papers get into journals, it's an indication that even the reviewers don't care about or realize that the research described in such papers has no demonstrated connection to the real world. It's almost as though (gasp) computer science researchers have so much fun dreaming up protocols and programming simulations that they can't be bothered with the pesky work of checking their assumptions or validating their results.

Until we computer science systems researchers stop doing crap, wasted research, it doesn't matter how many papers we produce. Because what matters it the amount of good research we do.

Re:Is that so surprising?

[kahei]

Another brilliant civilization rejected science and went into a profound decline: it was the Middle-Ages Moslem civilization.

Oh, I don't think you can say they 'rejected science'. They were a group of cultures highly based on conquest -- first the Arab conquest of what is now 'the Arab world' and then the Muslim conquest of various other areas, such as Iberia, Indonesia, and Anatolia.

Result? Warrior class took control of some societies (Egypt), others became bogged down trying to keep control of their conquests (Almohads), others bit off more than they could chew and found themselves ruled by one violent Turkic dynasty after another (Persians etc).

Wait a minute. Warrior class takes control, energy is squandered trying to occupy strongly resisting regions, country is governed by feuding families that have nothing to do with the populace... ...hmm, it's not _exactly_ like America. But it ain't exactly different either, if'n you see what I mean :)

It's NOT the money

[mungtor]

This has nothing to do with slashing budgets. It has to do with the overall dumbing down of American school children.

The entire "No Child Left Behind" initiative would be more accurately called "Let's Weigh Down Our Brightest Kids With Some Fucking Morons".

It started when I was in school (80s) when people got their asses all in a twist about "tracking" students. If you're not familiar with that term, it basically means separating out the idiots and the trouble makers from the kids who actually have a chance. Of course, the slightly brighter parents of these sub-par offspring raised a huge stink about how it was damaging to their idiots to be segregated from the other children. The solution, of course, was to integrate them into all the classes. So, instead of a class full of bright kids doing something like dissecting frogs or building circuits you have 29 kids bored out of their fucking minds while the teacher tries relentlessly to impart Ohm's Law into some mouth-breathing fucktard.

My younger brother was in a "gifted and talented" class for all of 6 months (the entire length of the program) before somebody decided that he should be hobbled by other people's stupidity as well.

Also related to this entire fucking mess is the "why don't women do as well in science" question. The correct answer is "who gives a fuck", not "lets screw up the educational system to the point that NOBODY does well in science". Equality is not a fact of life, period. Some women are brilliant and excellent scientists, but they seem to be the exception in scientific fields. Respect them for their abilities, but don't turn all your resources towards teaching Sally _instead_ of Billy.

Things like that are why home schooled kids often seem so much brighter than public school ones these days. Not because of incapable public school teachers (although they exist), but more because of anti-educational policies that don't let them teach the ones who are willing and able to learn.

Harrison Bergeron was prophesy, and we're paying for it now.

The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem is all the whackjobs who claim science doesn't exist, and we need to believe in magic and bad spirits which can be dispelled with a spraybottle filled with cooking oil and prayer.

When you have religious whackos trying to claim "intelligent design" is more valid than evolution, and that evolution is "just a theory"... and making sure they indoctrinate children into their stupidity... it's pretty hard to compete with countries who do not have religious whackjobs.

It's always saddened me that of all the freedoms granted to American citizens, most of us choose to practice the right to be stupid and ignorant.

Re:Here's an idea

[DoofusOfDeath]

This is pure drivel. No one ever said, "Gee, I'd really like to understand better how the wave equation breaks down when our assumptions of a linear system aren't valid. But my belief that the universe shows signs of fine tuning just gets in the way."

Being a theist isn't a barrier to accepting most of the scientific community's conclusions, nor to participating in advanced research. Not being able to solve a system of linear equations, or having the good sense when to employ them, is. Not being curious about why the world works the way it does (perhaps because it was burned out of you by a bad education) is a barrier. Being more concerned about playing your PS3 and scoring weed, rather than helping to develop genetic treatments for certain forms of cancer, is a barrier. These are not barriers that can reasonably be attributed to specifically theists.

Surely you are not surprised?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not obvious? The educational system has failed many an American, and it is going to get worse if you yankees can't fix it. I'm regularly amazed at the number of Americans that don't know that China has a coherent written history that goes back more than two hundred years (the actual number is approximately a thousand depending on how you define it.), or that prior to the "Age of Enlightenment" in Europe that the Arabs were the engineering and research power-house. Eye surgeons in Dubai during the Dark Ages? Most Americans don't believe it was possible. If I had a drachma for every American who believes that the Wright Brothers were the first ones to fly I could probably buy every one of their government officials. I will not even consider the number of your university students who sincerely believe that most of your space program was an elaborate fake.

If you want a decent educational system inside the boundaries of the United States of America, you need to do the following:
- Vote for education, not for morons who think that science can be 'edited to fit policy'.
- Teach your children a work ethic instead of a "give me" ethic.
- Get involved in the education of your children. Pay attention to it.
- Support the teaching of sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, electronics, etc) at all levels.
- Stop expecting your school system to raise your children for you. Be a parent.
- Encourage analysis and in-depth research instead of rote parroting of 'facts' in schools.
- Stop litigating to force teaching to the "lowest common denominator" in your education system. It is a fact of life that intelligence is variable. Look at your politicians.

Just an outside observer.

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[Mr. Underbridge]

As we export more and more jobs, especially manufacturing, it is only natural that we are going to lose our place in science.

Quite the opposite. It is our high tech labor force that has priced itself out of low-level, non-innovative markets like manufacturing. A study of history would easily prove that - this nation has continuously become more high-tech while constantly shedding physical-labor intensive work elsewhere. An attempt to maintain a dying labor model in manufacturing spawned the original Luddites. Your suggestion is no different - smashing looms has never been the answer; creating the next better product is. That's where science comes in.

If you have little or no manufacturing, you won't need much engineering to support the manufacturing.

Science doesn't "surrport" manufacturing. High-level science and engineering invent things that are high-tech for a while, and are manufactured in the US as long as those things require a high-tech work force. Later they become commoditized and are moved offshore. By then we've moved on to something else.

The net result is that it will be nearly impossible for us to regain over the next few hundred years what we lose over the next twenty years.

What, low-paying manufacturing jobs that we send overseas? Good, I don't want them. Wouldn't you rather get rid of crappy jobs, while using research to generate new good ones?

We've made short term monetary gain our ultimate god. Many generations of future Americans will pay for that.

Actually, we're talking about re-investment into science and engineering here, which is long-term monetary gain. Short-term gain would be trying to squeeze a little more blood from the stone of manufacturing jobs, which isn't a growth industry. And I don't want future generations of Americans to pay be slipping and losing our wage advantage. The only way to maintain that is through an environment of innovation.

Put another way - we aren't smarter, nor do we work harder, than people in nations such as India and China. The only thing unique about us is our entrepeneurial environment which combines research at the highest levels with available capital to turn that research into products that generate thousands of jobs.

Flint, MI should tell you all you need to know about the wisdom of tying your economy to manufacturing.

They left out number 3

[davmoo]

3. The United States and its citizens needs to place as much importance and admiration on the sciences, and those who persue knowledge in them, as they do on sports players, movie stars, and "socialites".

Re:CULTURE!

[o'reor]

and the fact that we don't have a big exploration goal.

Can't agree more. What about a national (or even better, international) research & industrialization program focused on renewable energy ? That is also a worthwhile exploration goal (think of hydrogen fusion, if we put the same effort on it as the US govt put on the lunar space program in the 60s...).

Not only would it help industrialized countries wean off of fossil fuels, but such an effort would also boost the economic activity in these countries, most of which have been severely affected by the massive outsourcing wave of the late 90s/early 2000s.

It would certainly be more beneficial to science and industry as a whole than trying to invade yet another oil-producing country.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

But in the end, the village STILL can use the hawk to prepare themselves for rain in advanced. In the end its still two strong beliefs colliding. And in the end, does it really matter who is right and who is wrong?

The science explanation is the right one, but there's nothing wrong with them having their own views and beliefs on the event. You're talking about a less developed and less educated community though - I'd be more worried if someone in the US believed it. Even that is fairly harmless, until you take it further and start pushing your beliefs on others and denouncing the opposing belief. That's when it DOES start to matter who is right or wrong.

For there is only one damned truth out there: your own. And there is only one person who needs to hear about it: you. Because in the end if you die and rot in a hole, or die and your consciousness carries on through the stars forever...

You're skipping the whole living-your-life bit for the ending where it doesn't really matter. What does matter is when the education system has people too scared to teach evolution, and where people want Intelligent Design being taught in schools. How about when someone's ("their own") beliefs seemingly justifying blowing themselves up in a plane with hundreds of other people? Do people's beliefs still not matter?

When you're teaching people to blindly follow some vague rules without questioning them, you're asking for things to turn out badly. I'm sure the vast majority of religious people are good people, but their belief system is open for abuse by a determined minority, and that's a worry for us all.

Re:But of course

[Yartrebo]

You left one out:

5: Religion attacking science. It's hard to train scientists when a large chunk of the population believes that the world is under 10,000 years old.

Re:It's NOT the money

[Smidge204]

The problem with your analysis is that the people effected by the dumbing-down were/are too young to have been effected by the layoffs when they became popular.

The people who went to school in the 80's (myself included) have only been working at their career jobs for a few years by this point, assuming they have a college education. We won't feel the real effects of "No Child Left Behind" for at least another 20 years. In the meantime, the bulk of today's academic workforce was educated in the 1960's and 1970's.

Your inappropriate rant is off by a few decades. (But you'll probably blame public education, right?)
=Smidge=

And what exactly is wrong..

[OneSmartFellow]

... with persuing the one known road to success in Science. Education !

Let the nation laugh at Missouri (or whatever state it was) that wanted to define pi as 3 to make math easier for their students, at all those idiotic Bible-Belt states that insist upon trying to skew the curriculum with their religious dogma, at states that allow public funds to be spent on automobile racing tracks and professional sports stadiums while cutting funding for their school systems, at states that have year on year lowered the standard required to obtain a High School Diploma.

Go to Eastern Europe if you want to see who the US will competing with in Science in not 20 years but 5. Look at their curriculum, and the amazingly high level of general education they achieve with much less.

Re:The real problem

[Shaper_pmp]

A-fucking-MEN!

I would kill for mod-points. How is the parent still languishing at 0, a full half-hour after it was posted?

People want respect and money, but they'll compromise on the money for respect and self-worth.
Culture and the media dictates how much respect people get for their job.
Our culture and media is getting pretty vehemently "anti-expert"[1].
Scientists are basically paid experts.
Remove respect from a profession, and watch people desert it.
Remove people from a profession, and watch the country fall behind in that field.

Cheapen science in the media, encourage the perception that experts have no more to offer than anyone else and your country falls behind because nobody wants to waste time learning to become something so disrespected. QED.

Footnotes:

[1] Are there really always two sides to every story? Does everyone's opinion really have equal weight? Should everyone always have equal input on every decision?

If you answered yes to all three, congratulations - you're a fully-paid-up brainwashed member of our generation.

You're also wrong, and likely dangerously stupid.

What about flying a plane - should we leave it to the couple of guys who've trained for years to do it, or should we consult everyone on the plane and have a vote about which way to turn to avoid the other oncoming 747?

Say it with me: Equality is an abstract goal, not an existing achievement.

Wow

[MarkusQ]

Uh, no they didn't. In both elections, more people voted against him than for him, or at least thought they did. And many of those that voted for him wouldn't have if the media had been more honest with them and not repeatedly worked to cover up his lies.

Wow. Can you also convince yourself that the sky is green and that the Sun rises in the west (or at least it *would* if the media stopped lying about the east)?

BTW, with all the close elections in the mid-terms where is all the nuts claiming the Democrats *stole* the elections? Or does that only happen when it's Republicans winning?

Wow. This is exactly the sort of emotionally charged irrational invective that (IMHO) is making it so hard to practice science in the US. Your heated response to two points (the claims that 1) more people voted against Bush than for him, and 2) even fewer would have voted for him had the media been more forthcoming/honest) contains...what? A rhetorical question about the color of the sky, a straw man about symmetry in election fraud, one explicit and two implicit ad hominim attacks, and absolutely nothing about the points you pretend to be responding to.

So let me show you how this whole logical argument thing is done:

• First, to substantiate my points which you seem to be trying to question:
  • No one disputes that Gore got more votes than Bush in 2000
  • No one disputes that Bush would have gotten fewer votes in 2004 if the media hadn't:
    • Sat on the unwarranted wiretapping story till after the election
    • Downplayed the level of violence in Iraq
    • Allowed the Whitehouse lies about contact with Abramoff to go unchallenged until after the election
    • Failed to aggressively pursue the phone logs showing repeated calls between the New Jersey election tampering operation and the Whitehouse during the 2002 midterms.
    • And so on and so forth...
  • Which leaves the claim that more people voted against Bush than for him in 2004 (or at least thought they did) as the only vaguely controversial claim in my post. While you might argue the validity of exit polls (which showed Bush loosing until they were "adjusted" to match the official results) or discount the impact of election fraud, you have not done so.
• Now for your remarks:
  • I do not believe the sky to be green.
  • I do not believe the sun rises at all; rather on most parts of the globe for most of the year it appears to rise (generally in the wast) because the Earth rotates on its axis. Note that, near the poles, it may appear to rise or set in the north or south but, to AFAIK, never in the west.
  • To my knowledge the media is not "lying about the east", though I admit that I can't even imagine how you could lie about a direction.
  • While I do not know of any "nuts that are claiming the Democrats stole elections", I'm sure they are out there. You might want to try the Free Republic, as that particular type of nut can often be found there.
  • Your question as posed (Do people only claim that the Democrats stole an election when the Republicans win?) is nonsensical. What I believe you were trying to ask is, "Does the frequency of claims of electoral fraud depend on the party of the winning candidate?" to which I would respond no. It seems to be much more strongly correlated to evidence of actual shenanigans (machines not registering votes, precincts reporting negative votes for one candidate, people who voted for themselves not receiving any votes, precints repoerting more votes than registered voters, etc.

    The fact that, as you note, such incidents tend to be strongly correlated with Republican candidates winning is possibly a statistical fluke, unless you are wanting to suggest that there has been an organized effort on the part of the Republican party to subvert our democracy.

  --MarkusQ

In other words...

[Thundersnatch]

...give us free money, now! This is merely a budget-grab by an NGO. Happens all the time.

An environmental group says: "The earth is warming! We need a crash program to figure this out, right now! Trust us, we're a bunch of Ph.D., so we're way smart!".

Then an oil-industry consortium says: "We need more domestic oil and natural gas. We have to start drilling now, but we need to do it on land we don't own because we're all tapped out, and the economy is threatened. Trust us, all our expert geologists agree!"

A few lunches with a congressman, plus a campaign donation or two, and billions from the public treasury flow directly and indirectly into their hands.

This is called lobbying. Just because it's a group of "science educators" doing this doesn't mean they're not after personal gain (higher budgets, more grants, more status). They're just trying to get in on the gravy train that the U.S. Congress provides.

Re:But of course

[sam_handelman]

Firstly, you overstate the cultural problem. It is true that American students are somewhat less likely to pursue careers in science and engineering than our east asian counterparts - but that's driven by economics. Lawyers and MBAs have better employment prospects (all else being equal) than scientists and engineers. The same is not true in east asia, where it is much more difficult to make a go of it as, for example, an attorney. First thing we do, we kill all the lawyers.

  Secondly, more money would help. The percentage of incoming NIH grant requests that are funded (and the same is true of other federal agencies) has been dropping steadily for years. A natural result of this is that the US will fail to suck east asia and europe dry of potential scientists, which is what happened during the late 90s when NIH funding was meeting demand for research grants. Second thing we do, we give all the lawyer's money to the HHMI.

  By comparative standards, US education is a Deweyist fantasty. We do a much better job at teaching free thinking and critical thinking skills than China or Singapore (I don't actually know about India.) Furthermore, gifted students, the high quantile, perform *better* out of US schools, on average, than out of any country in the world. Now, our educational system serves black, poor and minority students, including especially gifted black students, *very* poorly. Many of the smartest poor people (mostly black, but a few white) I know were (in spite of standardized test scores in my quantile) denied access to higher track secondary education on the basis of poor grades in junior high or elementary, which are in turn an unambiguous result of rascism (and secondarily classism.) If we could root out rascism in the lower levels of our educational system, this would 1) help to ameliorate the climate of anti-intellectualism, which is in large part a response of the systematic exclusion of a large body of the population from the benefits of education and 2) greatly increase our pool of available scientists.

  However, for the US to lose it's domination in science is basically inevitable. It is also a good thing, and a healthy and natural result of improvements in human civilization worldwide. The US is not expected to lose its dominant position because the quality of US science will decline - it will lose its dominant position because the quality of east asian science will increase. There are 2.5 billion people in east and south asia - that's *eight times* the population of the US. Given a level playing field, they'd be expected to produce eight times as much science. Even if the US has a four-fold advantage - like, say, a third of the gifted scientists emigrate here to the US instead of staying in their home countries - the US will still "fall behind".

  Well, that's good! I'm an American, but I have no desire to have my boot on the neck of the people of the world. The US should not be in a position to monopolize scientific progress for itself, or to use international intellectual property arrangements to guarantee capital streams from the rest of the world into the coffers of rich US-based multinationals.

  In sum - yes, the US, mainly the government, should "throw more money" at science, and yes, the quality of our educational system needs improvement (chiefly, it needs more money.) But none of that will change the writing on the wall - the US will not dominate the world perpetually.

Re:It's the State, stupid

[Garse Janacek]

I'm waiting for the day someone will come along and say: wait a minute, maybe this SHOULDN'T be provided by central government.

Of course you can argue this, but it should be from a general ethical perspective (i.e. this isn't the state's job), rather than on the basis that state-funded education and research has failed.

Where was funding coming from in the days when the U.S. was the undisputed scientific leader (and expected to remain so)? While some private entities were involved, most of it was government.

What countries are displacing us in quality of scientific education these days? Countries that have state-run education and state-funded science.

The problem isn't fundamentally that the government is involved in science -- government has been funding science since before the scientific revolution (e.g. the patron system), and an awful lot of important progress would have been substantially delayed without it. Plenty of modern states are doing well scientifically while still allowing government involvement. The problem right now is that the U.S. government is being stupid about how it involves itself with education and research (displaying bizarre priorities, and putting funding wherever the President, rather than the actual educators, thinks it should go). That, and a culture that is much more hostile to science than it has been in the relatively recent past.

Now, if you think that support shouldn't be provided by a central government on philosophical/ethical rather than pragmatic grounds, well I disagree, but that's a reasonable point of view, at least to a degree. But it's far too simplistic to say that such a system can't work out practically.

Re:Is that so surprising?

[Lex-Man82]

So, let me ask you again: is that so surprising? I think not. Another brilliant civilization rejected science and went into a profound decline: it was the Middle-Ages Moslem civilization. Think about that for a minute.

Same thing happened to Spain in the 17th century

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[SnowZero]

No kidding. What happened to good old American scientists like we used to have... You know, the ones with names like Einstein, Von Braun, and Tesla.

Oh wait...

graduate more scientists and engineers?

[Wansu]

while another advises that the National Science Foundation fund more graduate students and increase the amount of the fellowships.

Here they go again.

They're fixated on the supply while ignoring demand. The demand for technical people has dropped because we don't make things here any more. The R&D is done where things are made. A country that doesn't make stuff, doesn't need a bunch of scientists and engineers. Heck, we aren't using the ones we've already got. Why do they think graduating a bunch more will help? For the scientists and engineers, that'll make things worse.

The problem isn't the supply of labor, it's the supply of jobs. But the only ideas we ever hear are to "fix the schools."

Our shortfall in science has a root cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Yesterday on the BBC world service I heard high school kids discussing science and why the UK sucked for science enrollments. Well, in Malaysia the kids were encouraged from early on to go into science ... so far so good ... probably easy enough. Then, in high school, quite a few kept on their science studies motivated by the opportunity to become doctors. There is the rub. In the lesser developed and more populated areas of the world, medicine is a potent motivator for science studies. Burgeoning populations have a huge unmet need for medical care and an almost infinite market for the science skills the students learn. Doctors are respected members of society so studying science is rewarded by social progress and money. Not everyone becomes doctors but the ones who do not carry their skills into the rest of society. The US benefits because we import the excess medical production from the rest of the world and avoid having to actually restructure society to produce our own.

So, what have we learned? If we want to produce scientists, produce an employment market in which science is rewarded. Actually PAY scientists for their value. Instead, what does the US do? We decry the absence of scientists being produced in the US and import scientists from other countries. That means that there is NEVER a shortage of scientific skills that might increase their price. Instead, science is paid at the same rate as anything else. What, exactly, is going to motivate people with that scehario?

Oh, maybe we should go to the moon. Good idea except somebody already did it (US!). The first trip to the moon produced integrated circuits and fueled the last 40 years of progress. This time, we will just buy our ICs from Asia and turn the conquest of the moon into the high tech equivalent of flipping burgers. Exactly what challenges are there in the moon? The first trip fueled advances in analog and then digital computing to calculate the trajectory. The capsule had to be light and reliable and smart so ICs were required. Rocketry and communications benefitted. This time the trip will simply be a matter of spending a fortune to buy existing technologies and apply them to an abstract goal of repeating our past success.

I can take an air conditioning vacuum pump, pieces of tungsten, a pinch of rare earth minerals, some glass, a bit of magnesium and some nickel wire and sheet metal and make a functional vacuum tube. No particular challenge there and I could build a radio. So what?

Our society has evolved to a point where we feel the need to turn our economic status into global advantage, mostly through military might. We did it with a lame-brained StarWars proposal and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We tried phenomenally smart munitions in the hope of a war without casualties. It worked once so let's try it again. Second time, not so much. Well, let's scale up our effort. Let's conquer the moon. Hurry up because the other economic powerhouse, China, is headed there too. Let's make sure we are there ready to weaponize our position and turn our economic power into military might.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of our planet is besieged with diseses resulting from poverty. The upper 2% of the world's population holds 50% of the world's wealth. We run around with tremendously expensive flyswatters trying to hold back the flies while the corpse of the planet feeds more maggots than we can imagine. It never occurs to us that if we helped the rest of the planet maybe we would have fewer flies to deal with. We focus on lawyers and MBAs who produce wealth primarily through agressive application of their knowlege. They work as hired guns for the 2% of the world who have the money to pay them. Somehow, nobody has the money to pay for eradicating malaria, cholera, and other diseases. We feed our population with frankenfoods and industrialized farms that spread disease to our own people because a few cents in the cost of food means a fortune at

Re:But of course

[lukesl]

But the NSF is constantly slashing budgets

To clarify, it's not the NSF that is slashing budgets, it's the President and congress that have been slashing the NSF budget, forcing them to make tough decisions. I'm sure the NSF would like nothing more than to fund more research.

Foreign vs. Domestic does not matter

[snowwrestler]

I'm sure I'll get flamed for this, but ultimately it makes no difference to the nation whether we raise or import our scientists and engineers, as long as we get the benefit of their advances first. IMHO the idea that the U.S. was at some time a powerhouse of home-grown scientists and engineers is a myth. Across the board, in every discipline you will find immigrants as well as born-Americans at the heart of our success.

Does anyone really care where Einstein, Teller, or Fermi (for example) were born? No, what matters is that we figured out nuclear technology first. America is a nation of immigrants and we should try very hard to resist the impulse to close ourselves off to it. If the next bioengineering genius is French I want to make it very attractive and easy for him to immigrate to the U.S. rather than stay in France.

USA leads the way

[dreamstretch]

But the USA will always lead the way in the field of Creation Science.

A modest proposal

[RogueWarrior65]

Well, if Americans quit watching Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, major-league sports and other pointless wastes of time maybe their idle (not idol) brains could be put to better use. IMHO, I believe that competitions like FIRST should be broadcast on ABC, NBC, CBS during primetime and during sweeps week. And the prizes should be major...like full scholarships to major universities.

Re:But of course

[radtea]

Of my colleagues about 5% categorically refuse to travel to the U.S. for conferences or employment.

This conforms to my experience as well. I've worked in the U.S. in the past, as recently as last summer, but with the passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspends habeas corpus for aliens, I will no longer enter the U.S. for any reason. YMMV, but I'd strongly recommend any non-American who can avoid it, to stay out of the U.S. until the current fight between the government and the consitution is over. There is no doubt that the constitution will win in the end, but who wants to be one of the tens of thousands being tortured in secret prisons while that happens?

America has not been a safe place for foreign high-tech workers for some time [maherarar.ca], and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 makes it a considerably less safe place. You may look at this and think, "Well, I'm not a Syrian-born Muslim, so I'm in no danger." But I'm sure Arar, if the thought crossed his mind at all, thought, "I am a Canadian citizen, going peacefully about my business, in no way connected to terrorism of any kind, so I'm in no danger."

Re:Here's an idea

[Lord Ender]

Being a theist isn't a barrier to accepting most of the scientific community's conclusions, nor to participating in advanced research

This is pure drivel. There is a reason that almost NONE of the most eminent scientists in the world are religious. Why study the natural universe if anything could change at any time due to magic? Why try to cure a disease through science when you could just pray? Why should you learn science if it is OBVIOUSLY a flawed process (since it contradicts the abrahamic legends)?

Try discussing the space program with a religious person. They don't see the point in it. We don't need to develop the technology to save humans from cosmic disaster! God wouldn't let an impact wipe out his creations!

Yes, there are a few good scientists who practice intellectual contortion and cognitive dissonance so that they can hold on to their comforting supernatural delusions. But how many people might there be studying the universe through science today, if the majority of children hadn't been brainwashed since birth to believe that we already have all the answers in the form of old books?

Re:It's the State, stupid

[Opportunist]

If science is a matter in private (i.e. corporate) hands, we're running into dangerous waters.

Corporations want something in return for their money. They would never fund fundamental science, what they want is applied science. They don't want to invent coherent light, they want a CD player. They don't want to research encryption, they want DRM. They won't fund seismic geology research, they want to find oil easily.

The problem is that, with private money being the only source of funding for science, we'd be stuck. We'd get tools that are better and better in what's already been done, but we won't get tools that do new things. If it was for corporate science, we'd still be stuck with (highly automatized) telegraphs, we'd drive around in (very comfortable) steam cars and we'd send our messages using (very fast and reliable) pneumatic delivery.

Or, more accurately, they would. We could most likely not afford it, unless it was meant for the consumer market.

Re:CULTURE!

[Rycross]

How about movies like Armageddon? I recall a scene where the good-old-everday-regular oil drillers ripped up the drill that NASA made, because obviously they knew more about doing work in a harsh environment than the scientists.

Hollywood loves a "everyday man outsmarts the scientist" plot. Because your average person wants to think he's someone special, and having a character that they can relate to beat out all the eggheads gives them that feeling.

Re:Foreign vs. Domestic does not matter

[blurker]

It's not just about importing talent. It's also about exporting jobs. If a US engineer must earn $80k to stay afloat, and an Indian engineer can work for $20k, then the $60k savings in many cases is enough to overcome the distance and cultural barriers. It's not that I oppose immigration of foreign talent. Quite the opposite -- my parents are immigrants. I just think the playing field is distinctly skewed now, and it will HURT our competitiveness long-term, not help it. Many who favor globalization think the solution for the american worker is to simply get re-trained, but trained as what? If the professional jobs are all vanishing, then no amount of training is going to help! I think a solution is going to have to span everything -- massive increases in govt support for education and research, responsible controls on immigration and outsourcing, and some attempt to identify WHO is benefitting from the brain drain and get them taxed to reflect the cost they are putting on our society.

Re:Foreign vs. Domestic does not matter

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Does anyone really care where Einstein, Teller, or Fermi (for example) were born? No, what matters is that we figured out nuclear technology first. America is a nation of immigrants and we should try very hard to resist the impulse to close ourselves off to it. If the next bioengineering genius is French I want to make it very attractive and easy for him to immigrate to the U.S. rather than stay in France.

And thus, companies should not have to pay for the talent they use because they can always import more, right? In the end, this is just another cheap-labor argument and a way for the corporations to get an educated workforce without paying for it. I've got news for you- bioengineering and other sciences are about EDUCATION, not TALENT- and unless we start educating our kids, there will be no reason for anybody to immigrate to the US at all- we'll be just yet another third world backwater.

We Still Need Blue Collar Jobs

[HighOrbit]

What, low-paying manufacturing jobs that we send overseas? Good, I don't want them. Wouldn't you rather get rid of crappy jobs, while using research to generate new good ones?

Apologists for exporting our standard-of-living have been repeating this mantra for years. I'm sorry to burst your education-is-the-answer bubble, but not everybody is going to get a PhD (or even Bachelor) in engineering. We will always have a large section of our society who, for whatever reason (aptitude or personal perference, poor choice, etc) will NOT go to college and will NOT become engineers. We still have to provide meaningful jobs that pay a living wage to these people. And retraining these folks into programers or network support (or whatever) means nothing if we are going to also export that job to India or import an H-1b to take it away in a few years.

Manufacturing jobs are typically not rock-bottom low-paying. They are often moderately-paying union jobs with health insurance, pensions, and fringe benefits. They are the kind of jobs that allowed the development of a broad-based lower-middle class that formed the backbone of American society in the 1900s. They are the kind of jobs that allow a guy to own a small house with a yard on an affordable mortgage with enough left over to have a decent standard of living.

I agree with Cluckshot's post that we are waging a trade war against our own citizens. We are exporting manufacturing blue collar jobs while importing cheap immigant labor to take the remaining blue collar jobs. And please don't repeat the racist lie that these are "jobs American's won't do". That is a lie. They will do them for decent pay, but not for peanuts. I have relatives who work in landscaping (cutting grass) in rural Missouri, which has almost no immigant labor. They make a modest but decent living. They wouldn't be able to make a living in Virginia (where I live), because it is teeming with cheap illegal immigrant labor that has pushed out the native workforce in those types of jobs. I have no doubt that native born americans would do that work in Virginia, if they weren't undercut by an illegal workforce that does not get paid benefits, often gets paid "under the table", and is not subject to labor law. We have placed our blue-collar citizens in an unregulated and unfettered global labor market that really is a "race to the bottom".

I am normally a free-trade libertarian, but I've come to realize that something is wrong. There is a famous quote attributed to Yogi Bera - it goes something like "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is". In theory, and all other things being equal, trade will benefit both parties and increase the wealth of both. But in practice, all other things are not equal. This is where the ivory-tower economics of free-trade break down. There are just too many uncontrolled variables that their theories do not take into account. The largest uncontrolled varible is the dissimilar reglatory environoments between the US and the east asian economies. In China, free labor unions are outlawed, so workers can not bargin for higher wages or benefits as they could in a regulated true market economy (yes, true markets are also minimally regulated to preserve competition and bargining). Environmental and work safety regulations are unenforced, if they exist at all. This means that all the economic theories about efficiency and trade are blown out of the water. The classic theory is that if another country can make a good more efficiently, then it is good to close down the old inefficient factory and apply the resources to more efficient endevours. But China does not make goods more cheaply because they are more efficient. They make goods more cheaply because they have artificially low costs - no labor rights, can pollute to high-heaven without enforcement, and have a rigged exchange rate. That's not free trade, that's rigged trade.

I've digressed, so going back to the orig

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Tell the truth- graduate studies should NOT be the responsibility of the individual or the government, but the corporation. If having a PHD actually paid enough to pay back the student loans needed to get one, you'd see tons more Americans going for graduate degrees.

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[Jason Earl]

The secret to America's success in maintaining the science gap with the rest of the world is that we have historically poached the best and the brightest from everywhere on the planet. That's the truly scary thing about the current outsourcing trends. It isn't surprising that there are piles of intelligent and motivated Chinese and Indians that are making real breakthroughs in all sorts of fields. It *is* surprising, however, that for the first time in a generation many of these folks are not moving to the West to take advantage of their skills. The U.S. economy holds all sorts of bonuses for educated folks with drive and ambition. People in the U.S. have access to funding that is unmatched in the rest of the world. As long as it is relatively easy for smart people to emmigrate to the U.S., and as long as the U.S. is seen as *the* place to go to turn your ideas into fat piles of money, then the U.S. will maintain its technology lead.

Despite what educators believe (especially primary educators) the state of the American primary education system really has very little to do with America's technological lead. Who cares how much smarter Ethiopian high school students are than American high school students if the Ethiopian students have to come to the U.S. to do advanced research? America is more than happy to let other countries pay to have their young educated and then poach the best and brightest when they start to be income earners.

Like most everything else America's technological lead really is more a question of economics than education. Only idiots think that our success has something to do with race. Of course our leading technologist, scientists, and thinkers used used to be foreigners. Now, however, they are Americans. When some other country learns that particular trick then the U.S. will have real problems.

Re:Blowing shit up

[Anon-Admin]

They passed a law where I live that makes it illegal to own a filter that filters any liquid into a pyrex beaker. All to stop the "Meth epidemic!"

I personally called the law enforcement at the state capitol and reported all the representatives for violating the law.

No more Coffee pots!

They laughed at me but hay, it is a stupid law!

I look at it this way, asking congress to fix this problem is a bad idea. They only have two choices, Make it illegal or through money at it. Nether will fix the problem.

Big Science, and how we got here

[Animats]

3. The United States and its citizens needs to place as much importance and admiration on the sciences, and those who persue knowledge in them, as they do on sports players, movie stars, and "socialites"

That was the case in the 1950s. Baseball players made $6,000 to $10,000 per year. [mlb.com] And they had to unionize to get that. The movie industry had the studio system [wikipedia.org], where actors were hired as employees under a deal which allowed them to be fired but not to quit and go to another studio. That lasted until 1954, and except for a very few performers, being a movie star didn't mean being rich. Musicians were doing even worse; the big money in music was being a band leader or a record company. People who inherited money but weren't good enough to make it themselves were derided as useless wasters and taxed at very high levels.

But physicists and electronics engineers were almost worshipped. They were the people who ended WWII. Understand what a big deal this was. Without radar, the Battle of Britain probably would have been lost. British Spitfires only had enough fuel for about twenty minutes of combat, so Fighter Command had to have accurate information about where the enemy bombers were, or the fighters would be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Without the atomic bomb, defeating Japan would have been a long, bloody slog. Invading and conquering Japan was expected to be at least as big a job as invading and conquering Europe had been; harder because the distances were longer, bloodier because the landing area was totally hostile, unlike France. Then, one day, the US dropped the Bomb. And suddenly it was all over. (Read Thank God for the Atomic Bomb [eiu.edu], by Paul Fussell. Fussell today is a famous essayist, but in 1945, he was an infantryman who'd been in combat and was part of the army getting ready for the invasion of Japan.)

That's how we got Big Science. Big Science was invented to win WWII, and it paid off. Big time. It continued to pay off during the 1950s and 1960s, with jet aircraft, computers, rockets, nuclear power, antibiotics, color TV - things that affected daily life.

We've been there. It's over in the US. Today, in China, being an engineer means a much better life than most of the people around you. That's why they're on the way up and we're on the way down.

Re:We Still Need Blue Collar Jobs

[Mr. Underbridge]

Apologists for exporting our standard-of-living have been repeating this mantra for years. I'm sorry to burst your education-is-the-answer bubble, but not everybody is going to get a PhD (or even Bachelor) in engineering. We will always have a large section of our society who, for whatever reason (aptitude or personal perference, poor choice, etc) will NOT go to college and will NOT become engineers.

That's what is so great about a tech economy: you don't have to! The salaries of all jobs are dragged up via supply and demand. Why else would a janitor here have such a high salary compared to the rest of the world? Put another way, if we do the same work as the rest of the world as a whole, and we're not smarter, or harder working, what is there to sustain the high salaries even non-tech Americans make? The answer is nothing. So unless you want to see the national standard of living deline for everyone, be very glad for the economy in which you find yourself.

They are often moderately-paying union jobs with health insurance, pensions, and fringe benefits. They are the kind of jobs that allowed the development of a broad-based lower-middle class that formed the backbone of American society in the 1900s. They are the kind of jobs that allow a guy to own a small house with a yard on an affordable mortgage with enough left over to have a decent standard of living.

You're right. That was great in the 1900s. But we're not living in the 1900s anymore, and you either evolve or die. We can't freeze the clock and hope that Asia, Europe, etc don't catch up with us. They will, and as a result we need to stay ahead of them.

They wouldn't be able to make a living in Virginia (where I live), because it is teeming with cheap illegal immigrant labor that has pushed out the native workforce in those types of jobs. I have no doubt that native born americans would do that work in Virginia, if they weren't undercut by an illegal workforce that does not get paid benefits, often gets paid "under the table", and is not subject to labor law.

In Virginia, where I also live, the unemployment is ridiculously low, and you can't find a legal American who's willing to do the work they do for the wages they earn. And why do jobs in America, even non-tech jobs, pay more here than in their homelands? See my previous analysis above. What force would you like to see artificially sustain the wages of menial labor jobs? Magic? Even then, the lowest paying jobs in Northern Virginia run $10/hr. That's higher than anywhere else in the world. Be grateful we live in such an economy.

I agree with Cluckshot's post that we are waging a trade war against our own citizens. We are exporting manufacturing blue collar jobs while importing cheap immigant labor to take the remaining blue collar jobs.

And all the while maintaining a healthy 4% unemployment rate. That's the problem that you don't get - we have no unemployment and *still* we have to outsurce jobs and bring immigrants in. So your best argument is that we're outsourcing manufacturing jobs because we're generating white collar jobs instead? That's a bad thing?

And please don't repeat the racist lie that these are "jobs American's won't do". That is a lie. They will do them for decent pay, but not for peanuts.

Well, duh! It's not racist - people in America who can work legally will choose higher paying more fulfilling jobs and leave the crappy low paying jobs for people who can't speak English. Please explain to me how this is bad. If there were a glut of experienced, responsible, hard-working, English-speaking people who were unemployed, you might have a case, but there aren't and you don't. Find me some guy who says "man, I wish I could work in a factory instead of what I'm doing now." Who is this guy? Where does he live?

I've digressed, so going back to the original point, we need manufacturing jobs in this country because not everybody is go

Re:The real issue

[maxume]

There needs to be less school, not more. Especially 'structured' time. There are plenty of things an interested 7 year old can learn, but there isn't much at all that an uninterested 7 year old can be made to learn. Any system that denies that lots of students are uninterested lots of the time is destined for failure. Wait until they are a bit older to force stuff, like when the student has a better idea of what they want to do. Basics are pretty solid even in today's second grade, so no worries there, except maybe some more work towards identifying the students that already get it and letting them do something more fun than sit there bored out of their minds.

And school needs to be less focused on worky-worky, not more. Most people are perfectly capable of doing a huge range of jobs, given a little bit of task specific training, in spite of the education that they have received, not because of it. School should be about making people aware of what's out there, the breadth of human knowledge, 'small' as it is, is absolutely astounding and introducing people to things that tickle their brains is a much bigger win than making sure that absolutely everybody has forgotten a detailed time line of American history.

The fact is, there are enough lazy, self centered and dishonest people out there that no education system, ever, can fix the problems we have. The problems get better all the time, as people become wealthier it tends to become 'easier' to be honest, but there are plenty of insanely rich people that are right bastards, so go figure.

And to pick a nit, if you don't think that landlords charge for property taxes in the rent they charge, well, I don't know what to tell you, other than of course they do.

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[Grishnakh]

People in the U.S. have access to funding that is unmatched in the rest of the world. As long as it is relatively easy for smart people to emmigrate to the U.S., and as long as the U.S. is seen as *the* place to go to turn your ideas into fat piles of money, then the U.S. will maintain its technology lead.

It *is* surprising, however, that for the first time in a generation many of these folks are not moving to the West to take advantage of their skills.

This is the problem right here. Back in the "old days", smart people from other countries moved to the US because they could more easily do their work here, and also because it was simply a better place to live; their own countries were war-torn, economically depressed, etc. But this is no longer true. Highly educated Indians no longer want to move to the USA because they like India just fine, and don't want to deal with culture shock and having to fly across the Pacific twice a year when they can enjoy a better standard of living in their own country with a smaller salary. Money doesn't go nearly as far in the US as it used to back in the 20th century.

We still have tons of people trying to immigrate here, but they're all dirt-poor uneducated Mexicans who want to work as landscapers, and they're certainly not going to be the next generation of scientists. So if we want to continue to lead, we have to grow our own here. Unfortunately, that's not happening; our education system sucks, we have an anti-intellectual culture that favors football and NASCAR, and jobs in science don't pay squat.

Personally, I think we should just throw the towel in. It'd be better to just let another culture concentrate on science, one which actually values science and people who work in it.

Re:Foreign vs. Domestic does not matter

[Slithe]

If other countries are nice enough to educate our workforce for us, why not allow them? Lenin once said, "the capitalists will sell us the rope by which we will hang them." This way we can concentrate our funds on ensuring that the U.S. remains the best place to come for innovation. If the rest of the world ever wises up to the deal, THEN we will need to focus on educating home-grown talent. I do think we need to ensure that H1B workers are not treated like slave labor (i.e. allowing a lengthy job search time, easy application for permanent residency/citizenship, etc.).

Re:Taxes... or tuition?

[gravesb]

One of the reasons tuition is so high is because of the amount of low interest federal loans available to students. This increases the money in the market for a limited resource, and allows the colleges to charge more money. Harvard has a Billion dollar endowment. Giving more money to colleges through taxes is not the solution. Instead, there needs to be an increase in supply, either through additional colleges or trade schools for people interested in entering fields that do not require a college education. Also, if we are so behind in science, we need to examine how colleges are spending their money. History and liberal arts are essential, and people should be able to study whatever they want, but at some point we need to do an assessment on how many history teachers we really need compared to how many we are educating. Throwing more money at a problem is not always the way to solve it. People's ability to waste money is amazing.

Re:The real problem

[Grishnakh]

India I would say is very religious, but also much in love with scientific learning. China is only irreligious because of intense religious persecution, and I don't think we want to go there. Japan is very secular, and very good at science, but maybe not so good at the creative and innovative aspects of discovery as Americans, culturally speaking (although they may be making progress in those areas). South Korea has a lot of born again Christians, and still is full heartedly embracing technology and science.

There's a big difference between most of these countries and America: except for SK, their religions don't conflict directly with science. Christianity does, because the Bible says the earth is 6500 years old (don't argue with me about interpretation; that's the interpretation than Christians believe in).

India has a very odd religion that reminds me of Greek mythology. But it doesn't seem to be something they bring up in their daily lives much, or that affects their day-to-day activities much, or especially that has anything to say about science. If it weren't for persecution, China would probably be mostly Buddhist, which is more like a philosophy than a religion, and again doesn't conflict with science. I'm not sure how the South Koreans are doing with born-again Christianity, unless the BAs aren't the same people doing the science.

The Muslim world, of course, is ultra religious and vehemently anti-modernity, which carries over into a disdain for science.

I don't know about this. Malaysia and part of India are Islamic as well, and they seem to have no problem with science, technology, or modernity. Two of the tallest buildings in the world are in Malaysia, as is lots of high-tech work. While a large portion of Muslims (the ones closer to the middle east) are obviously very violent and warlike, I don't see how their religion at all conflicts with science the way Christianity does.

In my opinion, it is the U.S. system of separating church and state that has enabled both religion and science to thrive here.

Only because the religious wackos aren't the same people who have done all the scientific work in the past. Recently, fundamentalist Christianity has gained new strength with much of the population turning to it for some reason, so now science is going out the window.

Re:Taxes... or tuition?

[king-manic]

US defense spending 2006: 470.2 Billion

so your telling me 470.2 billion dollars is spent on 660,000 troops with no fat to cut? that there aren't any no bid contracts for provisions and supplies for a soon to be over invasion that couldn't be put towards education or that there isn't excessively expensive white elephants like a missle defence program that could be reudced in scope? My my. we spend almost a million dollars a year on each soldier with absolutely no way to cut this?

Also for tarrifs, tarrifs are artificial price increases to protect native industries. High tarrifs does not protect yoru industry, only make less incentive for them to be more productive. For instance the formerly high tarrifs on import cars and import car parts. This lead to the now high reputation of american cars world wide? So in your world american cars are the quality and sales leaders?

You labor under a fairly simplistic view of the world economy. Tarrifs and subsidies may help some of your native industries but in general hobble your ability to compete. There are more markets then just the Us, currenty the US is the single largest market but if you try to get high tarrifs this may change. The US maintains a lot of it's foreign policies and relations through economic coercion. Trade is it's number one tool to ensure it gets it's way. If you become a protectionist/isolationist state you'll soon fidn your influence and importance greatly diminished. It's something thats up to you guys to decide but Ma and Pah voter isn't goignt o look kindly on their $0.99 piece of crap chinese plastic become a $9.99 chinese piece of plastic crap so you'd have a fairly hard time trying to institues those tarrifs int he first place. The tarrifs are of a dubious value, and int he long run simply hobble you in the world wide market.

Re:But of course

[Grishnakh]

This is exactly right. I'm American, and I think we should be getting the "best and brightest" to move here. However, uneducated farm workers are not that. But any time you complain about this, people call you "anti-immigration", as if there were no difference between uneducated farm workers and highly educated foreign scientists.

I'd be happy for us to take all the smartest people from around the world. But I don't want all of its idiots.

Re:Blowing shit up

[Lord Ender]

This is an inevitable consequence of natural human empathy, democracy, mass-media. If you let kids experiment with explosives, a very small number of them will kill themselves. And perhaps (as you clearly think) that is a justifiable price for the inspiration it produces.

But once it does happen, the media will tell the story, and voting parents of the world will empathize with the poor mother of the dead boy. They will react emotionally, fearing for their own children, and decide that no amount of inspiration is more valuable than that single human life. The politicians will enact their wishes.

You can fight that battle, buddy, but you won't win unless you abolish one of (empathy,democracy,media). Good luck, though. I would like to fire a rocket off my apartment roof :-)

Re:We have a bigger problem...

[Jason Earl]

We still have tons of people trying to immigrate here, but they're all dirt-poor uneducated Mexicans who want to work as landscapers, and they're certainly not going to be the next generation of scientists.

At one time the same thing was said about every wave of immigrant that has come to the United States. Yesterday it was the Irish, Italians, or Chinese (to name a few of the more controversial groups), and today it is the "Mexicans." A certain part of the American population has always been prejudiced against the current wave of "dirt poor" immigrants. Yet somehow these immigrants (and their children) have generally managed find a way to contribute in the long term. The company doing my landscaping this year was run by a very nice man formerly from Ecuador. If his kids work half as hard as their father I am sure that the sky is the limit for them. If not, well, someone has got to cut the grass. I sure don't want to.

Of course, I happen to speak Spanish (I went to high school in South America), so I might feel a little different about "dirt poor" Mexicans than some Americans. People are people no matter what color their skin, and no matter what sort of opportunities they have had to get an education. America has plenty of jobs for those people that are willing to work.

So if we want to continue to lead, we have to grow our own here. Unfortunately, that's not happening; our education system sucks, we have an anti-intellectual culture that favors football and NASCAR, and jobs in science don't pay squat.

I am not going to argue that it wouldn't pay to improve our school system. I've got three children myself, and I have a vested interest in making sure that they do well in life. Not that I am particularly concerned. There are plenty of academic opportunities for American children that apply themselves. Those students that don't apply themselves are unlikely to do well no matter how much money we throw at the system. That's the real difference between Americans and the rest of the world. The price of failure here is not really that great. If you fail to get into the "good" school in India then your life is basically over. Like the article said the other day India will graduate more than a million students this year that are unqualified to work in India's growing outsourcing industries. Instead of making hundreds of dollars a month in the outsourcing business these graduates will make tens of dollars. That's the sort of difference that tends to really focus people's attention. Students outside the U.S. work much harder because the stakes are higher.

As for our "anti-intellectual" culture here in the U.S., I think that you will find that sports heroes are revered the world over. I worked for a fantasy sports website for a while and Indians are every bit as crazy for cricket as Americans are for football and NASCAR. We can simply afford to pay our heroes more money. On the plus side we also pay our scientist far more money as well, including giving them access to toys that folks in other parts of the world can only dream of. No matter how you slice things up America still does far more research than any other country on the planet. If you want to play in the big leagues and snag the big money you have to come to America. As long as that's the case, that's precisely what people will do.

Once folks are here, whether their last name is O'Malley, Xin, Gupta, or Hernandez, they still end up becoming Americans. Personally, I like it that way. Like I said before that's the real trick. America is a nation that will happily claim the credit for the accomplishments of folks who were born all over the globe :).

Re:It's NOT the money

[repruhsent]

Do the civilized world a favor and leave your opinion out of it. Thanks.