USA to Pass Science Crown to China 1247
instantgames writes "According to a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research, rapid development of a science and technology base by populous Asian countries soon may threaten the economic position of the United States. Not only is the U.S. losing ground in high technology exports, but its very capacity to develop new technologies is declining rapidly with respect to the rest of the world. According to Richard Freeman, the paper's author, the sheer population of Asian countries may allow them to train more scientists and engineers than the U.S. while devoting a smaller share of their economy to science and technology." From the article: "The phenomenal growth of China's industrial base has been widely publicized, but Freeman focuses on what is perhaps the more important long-term indicator of a nation's prosperity - its re-investment in science and technology education.
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Bill Gates on US Education (Score:2, Informative)
The warning signs have been around (Score:5, Informative)
Still, some economists argue [foreignpolicy.com] that China isn't growing nearly as quickly as it could. How could that be?
One probable cause is that infrastructure for research and development has a long way to go in many developing Asian countries, especially China. Having some history behind your scientific community has its benefits. Thats why, even with our moral and ethical hurdles in the way, we're still winning the "great stem cell race." [foreignpolicy.com] For now.
(enjoy the plugs for great articles in my favorite magazine)
tcd004
Re:The Real Chinese Growth (Score:5, Informative)
The Hong Kong fashion industry grew out of the factories producing knockoffs of western designers, and now they are one of the fashion capitols of the world.
Why we NEED the Math and Science Incentive Act! (Score:2, Informative)
This is what we NEED! [house.gov] Not only is engineering tuition usually more expensive than that for liberal arts, but there are plenty of bright kids turning to business and econ so that they can start making six figures right out of college. Money matters to students, and most are not willing to put themselves through the stress of engineering education only to be saddled with loans the first 8 years after school. This bill of course would not eliminate that, but it would defray the costs enough to make engineering much more attractive to freshmen.
ANY bill towards reducing tuition costs is good, especially one towards engineering, math and science majors.
Re:The Real Chinese Growth (Score:5, Informative)
As for the broader point... I'm not sure which ridiculous extreme is actually better for the growth of a technological base: "Copy whatever you want, who cares if the originator doesn't get a dime" as in China, or "Don't write that code, there might be a ludicrous patent you'll have to spend $10 million getting declared invalid" as in the US. Certainly one can point to US industries such as the Hollywood movie business(*) that wouldn't exist today without rampant violation of intellectual property laws in the past.
Personally, I think China is going to give the west a rather solid run for its money in software. Our fervor for ever-stronger intellectual property laws is a legislative gun with which we're taking repeated potshots in the direction of our feet. I've been involved in IP disputes on both sides, and they are almost always big wastes of time and money that don't end up benefitting anyone but the lawyers. To the extent that Chinese companies won't have to suffer from that overhead, they'll be in stronger competitive positions. All of their web sites will have one-click ordering, one can assume.
Finally, the "they're just copying our stuff" point was a pretty common accusation leveled at Japan in the 80s and early 90s, if memory serves. It seems to have proven itself untrue over the years, and I have every expectation the same will be true of China.
(*) The reason the movie studios are in Hollywood is that they didn't want to pay royalties to Edison Labs for use of Edison's patented film production equipment. So the early would-be studio bosses headed west, where they'd be able to strike it rich before the folks on the east coast could track them down to demand payment. For some reason you don't find that little factoid on any of the movie studios' "history of Hollywood" web pages. Reference. [wired.com]
60's philosophy on waste management (Score:2, Informative)
Nuclear power is "still in the 60's" when it was OK to run a company, filling up your back lot with industrial waste, until you ran out of space, or went out of business, found somewhere to hide it/dump it, or all of the above. The name of the game in industry is "make our waste someone else's problem" or "make it go away". Dump it into the local river, into the sea, in a pit, or throw it up into the air...and hope nobody notices. This is precisely how current nuclear plants handle their waste; they drop barrel after barrel into concrete bunkers filled with water in their back yard, thinking some day it'll just disappear, or they can fold the company and run, leaving the government with the god-aweful mess (hint: metal containers, water...)
Right now, the US Government believes that the solution to the problem is to make it Nevada's problem (or is it New Mexico, I forget?), but either way, it's just another variant of "throw it somewhere out of sight".
When we have a way to make power and take the waste products and make them harmless in SUBSTANCE (not in CONTAINMENT), give me a buzz and I'll stand outside on the street with a pro-nuclear sign. Until then, I'm not willing to support a technology which will be guaranteed to be a major liability or outright disaster in a few hundred years.
Re:What do you expect? (Score:3, Informative)
Any sort of educational reform in the U.S. is politically impossible. Homeschooling and private is the only way we are going to get good education for kids in the immediate future.
Also, most "public" schools in the past were funded by local municipalities, or in some cases voluntary contributions from parents. The modern federal-education-leviathan is nothing like the "public" schooling before the 1960s (When the U.S. was #1 in education). When education was kept small and local, it was possible for people to have influence on it.
Re:Zero Sum Game and Education (Score:2, Informative)
GDP; last time i saw Luxembourg was number one and number two was Norway.
So what else are USA number one besides arrogance ?
Wanna learn Chinese? (Score:3, Informative)
"I Can READ That!" [amazon.com] is a gentle introduction to reading Chinese characters, focused on stuff you'd see while traveling in China. Won't really teach you how to say anything, though.
For self-paced learning of conversational Mandarin, nothing beats the Pimsleur language programs [cheappimsleur.com]. I can say from personal experience that after listening to just the first-level program, you will be able to ask for stuff in restaurants (and drop a few jaws in the process if you don't look Asian!), hold simple conversations with Chinese speakers, and start to make a little sense of the dialogue in Chinese movies and TV shows. There are three levels, each with about 15 hours of material.
If you have a Palm handheld, PlecoDict [pleco.com] absolutely rocks for building up your vocabulary of both spoken and written Mandarin. It has a great graduated-interval flashcard mode.
The New Practical Chinese Reader [chinasprout.com] is the latest edition of the textbook that's been used in just about every introductory Chinese language course in the English-speaking world in the last couple of decades. It is available with cassette tapes to help with pronunciation.
For more vocabulary, both spoken and written, Rosetta Stone [rosettastone.com] is good. Its major weakness is that it uses the same vocabulary words for all the languages it covers, and the word list is based on some Western assumptions; some things that take just one word in a typical western language take several in Mandarin, and you find yourself getting a small flood of new words with no clear idea of exactly what each one means on its own. But once you've learned the basic conjunctions and so on, that's not a big deal.
For actually learning how to write (stroke order) there's Easy Chinese Tutor [amazon.com], not a great piece of software but the material is decent and it even comes with a bunch of character tracing sheets you can print out and practice on.
Zhongwen.com [zhongwen.com] has a bunch of good resources.
What I really want, though, is for someone to do the equivalent of Destinos [learner.org] for Mandarin. Maybe in the form of a historical kung-fu soap opera comedy drama fantasy like the awesome Tian Xia Di Yi [yesasia.com]. I'd pay good money for that!
Re:That should go along nicely... (Score:2, Informative)
Basically, you can't dispose of medical waste without agreeing to dispose of nuclear power waste. A completely messed up situation.
Re:That should go along nicely... (Score:2, Informative)
Approximately 2% of so-called "low-level" radioactive waste is medical in origin. The vast majority, around 80%, comes from nuclear power plants. What makes it called "low-level" is that it doesn't include (a)spent fuel rods, (b)elements heavier than uranium, or (c)uranium mill tailings.
The relatively small amount of low-level nuclear waste that is medical in nature is fairly benign due to its very low level of radiation and short half-life. Unfortunately, the large majority of "low-level" waste is generally long-lived and quite radioactive.
Re:That should go along nicely... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bill Gates on US Education (Score:3, Informative)
This classic argument from incredulity seems to assume that early life possessed all the features of modern life, and that simply is not what any researcher says. Beyond that, most of these claims that abiogenesis was a one in x-teen zillion possibility are pretty suspect.
If this is what you think then I don't think your teacher gave you a very good general notion of what evolutionary theory says. Yes, mutations themselves are random, but evolution is not just a series of random steps.
None of this falsifies evolution. We can see variants and potential predecessors to these systems in existing organisms. Even invoking the word "magic" indicates that you have been seriously misinformed about evolutionary theory.You seem to be operating essentially from an argument from incredulity. Have you actually read any texts by researchers in evolutionary biology?
Re:Is it just me... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's [techcentralstation.com] an article that describes the situation.
A good quote:
"The paradox was that in the 90s stories on the front pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist were all about how the Japanese manufacturing industries through trade were driving US manufacturing industries into the ground and virtually wiping them out. And of course that did happen in consumer electronics -- the US basically got out entirely in the consumer electronics business. And the steel industry and the automobile industry came very close to being bankrupt, although not all companies in those industries were in that shape. But the industries themselves as a whole were in very bad shape because of, in large part, competition from Japan, which was able to deliver high quality products at lower costs -- yet the GDP per capita numbers at purchasing power parity exchange rates show that GDP per capita in Japan was roughly 30 percent below the US. So how could this be? And the only way to understand that is to look at the productivity of individual industries in Japan. What we found is that Japan has a dual economy. Yes, it does have some selected manufacturing industries that have high productivity, much higher than the corresponding US industries and in fact they have the highest productivity in their industries of any country in the world. And yet, the traded part of an economy is always a tiny fraction of the total GDP. A rule of thumb is that it's roughly at most 15 percent of the GDP. So what that says is that the standard of living is determined because the productivity of the country is determined by what happens outside these traded goods. Productivity of a country in total -- the average productivity -- is the average productivity of every single worker. So in that sense, every worker is equally important. If you have low productivity in the non traded parts of manufacturing and in the huge domestic service industry -- such as retailing and housing construction and so on -- you are going to have low average productivity even though you may have a handful of industries like automotive and machine tools and steel where you have the highest productivity in the world."
Read the whole thing.
Re:That should go along nicely... (Score:5, Informative)
1. The waste is toxic, and not biodegradable, so it remains toxic for longer than the lifespan of any historical civilization.
2. The waste can be used to build nuclear weapons.
3. Reactors can melt down.
4. Reactors can accidentally emit radioactive material into the atmosphere.
5. Reactors wear out, and when they are no longer usable, the entire reactor is itself toxic waste, and remains that way for longer than the life of any known civilization. Tearing down the reactor inevitably releases this waste into the environment - the groundwater, the soil, and the atmosphere.
It's quite possible that all of these problems can be solved. It's also true that in some cases, coal power is worse than nuclear. For example, fly ash from coal contains a certain number of parts per million of uranium, radium and thorium, depending on where it was mined.
But let's be clear. Pebble bed solves the meltdown problem. That's all it solves. It doesn't solve the waste problem.
Theory is that breeder reactors might solve the waste problem - in fact, what they allow you to do is extract about 75 times more energy from the same uranium, which is very cool indeed, and what's left is much less radioactive than what you started with (but it's still radioactive).
Unfortunately, the best example we have of a fast breeder reactor is the Superphenix reactor in France. This was shut down in 1997 because it began to fail in exciting ways, prematurely, particularly due to problems in the liquid sodium (!) cooling system. So this technology, unlike pebble bed reactors, isn't as stable as one would wish.
So we've completely addressed problem (3), and there's the possibility that problems (1) and (2) may be partially addressed by breeder reactor technology at some future time. But they aren't completely addressed even in the future, and aren't addressed at all in the present. Plus, we're still left with the other two problems, which are quite significant.
So you do the math. What's the cost/benefit analysis for coal? For solar? For nuclear? For wind? For some combination of these? If you think the answer is easy, you probably haven't actually done the math.
I think the reason for the wide disparity of opinions on this topic is that (a) people value different things differently, and (b) nobody is really even talking about the same thing.
For example, when someone talks about recycling nuclear fuel with breeder reactors, they're speaking hypothetically, even if they don't know it, because the technology isn't yet mature enough to be able to say that it's actually usable in practice. All current practical experiments have thus far yielded failure, although some have been more successful than others, and we do know that the basic idea does work.
Likewise when someone talks about getting energy from kites, it's also hypothetical, because nobody's actually doing it in production yet. Once again, there have been trials, and we do know that the basic idea does work, but we do not yet know if it can be used in practice, en masse.
Both things are interesting, but when you're discussing energy policy decisions, neither thing is presently relevant, and neither will be until they have demonstrated success in production.
Likewise, for some people, the value of generation techniques that produce no first-order pollution byproducts (i.e., combustion byproducts or fission byproducts) is more attractive than techniques that do produce these byproducts. It's important that we not let ourselves be fooled by the lack of first-order byproducts when the second-order byproducts overwhelm the first-order byproducts (e.g., the debate about the net energy cost to build a solar panel).
But assuming that we are taking these factors into account, it's still possible that even if the generation cost of, for example, solar, in dollars, were more than the generation cost of, for example, nuclear, it might still be better to build solar, because we are not counting certain externalities which, while they don't cost in dollars, do still matter.
Re:Bill Gates on US Education (Score:2, Informative)
don't think we will still have 2x the economy of biggest competitors in 50 years but I think we are in good long-term shape.
You don't have it now. "Stagnant" Europe has a larger one. God I hate ignorant Americans. And yes it may be flamebait, but theres no one that can say it's offtopic.
Re:Mega Rant and Rage (Score:1, Informative)
Holy shit. Did you even read any of the responses, or are you just assuming? (I'm going to bet on the latter.) Clearly, this was NOT the "typical" response of slashdotters.
Re:Emulation, not innovation (Score:1, Informative)
Never mind that the Chinese invented paper, gunpowder, rockets, the first deep water navy, and a bunch of other things.
Re:Mega Rant and Rage (Score:1, Informative)
Really? You and I must be reading different threads. At least half of the posts modded +3 or higher pay no heed to either insightful or humorous commentary about other countries, but blame everything on the "fundies" and the Bush administration - actually, the same thing you did (excerpt below):
It's the US population that votes in a President who is only semi-literate. It's the US population that votes to supplant science with dogmatic religion and yet rail against another equally dogmatic religion, that being ironically, one of the few foreign affairs that genuinely, even if only out of fear, interests the average US person.
From what I've been able to tell here and elsewhere, the "typical slashdotter's reaction" is anti-religious, intelligence-insulting, and derogatory remarks to white Christian Republicans living in the "Great Flyover".
Re:Bill Gates on US Education (Score:1, Informative)
You must be thinking of Norway, because Sweden doesn't have one drop of oil. Maybe you have heard of companies like Volvo, Saab, (Sony)Ericsson, ABB, IKEA, H&M, SKF, Bofors, Boliden... all from Sweden. Besides that, Sweden has a big forest and mining industry, and also a big industry working with bio-engineering (steem cell research) and that stuff.