Tide of International Science Moving Against US, EU 302
explosivejared writes "The Economist has a story on the increasing scientific productivity of countries like China, India, and Brazil relative to the field's old guards in America, Europe, and Japan. Scientific productivity in this sense includes percent of GDP spent on R&D and the overall numbers of researchers, scholarly articles, and patents that a country produces. The article notes increasing levels of international collaboration on scholarly scientific articles in leading journals. From the article: '[M]ore than 35% of articles in leading journals are now the product of international collaboration. That is up from 25% 15 years ago — something the old regime and the new alike can celebrate.'" Note that the "old guard" are still firmly in the lead on these measures of scientific prowess, but the growth rate is higher in the newcomer states.
Since were linking the Economist (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is another article by them about rampant fraud [economist.com] in China's research. More power to Brazil and other countries that are legitimately improving their scientific establishment rather than faking it till they make it.
But is anyone reading their output? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Here's the solution (Score:1, Interesting)
Science and faith are not mutually exclusive. If you look back at many of the scientific achievements you will find church men lurking around developing and encouraging the work. Where our culture seems to go wrong is when atheists are allowed to lay claim to science. This can cause the religious to reject ideas that they shouldn't because someone decides to claim that a scientific process disproves religion. Evolution is a mechanism for change within a species, it is not an explanation for the existence of life. Evolution does not preclude intelligent design, nor does intelligent design preclude evolution. Treating one as a substitute for the other is foolish. If faith could be proven it would no longer be faith. The state of education would be better if the anti-evolution (as a mechanism) crowd would listen to reason. It would also be better if all the "religion suppresses science" crowd would learn that judging by the data available at the time, Galileo's theories were inferior to the existing theories and that his arrest was due to politics and a refusal to admit what data showed.
To the grandparent. Let's keep subsidizing institutions only to have those subsidies be absorbed while students are still charged the same as before. That seems to have been a great way to keep tuition costs down. Let's encourage all students to study whatever they want and pay no attention to whether a poetry degree can ever repay the costs incurred. Let's allow unionized teachers to graduate undereducated students so that they can rack up more debt by taking remedial courses in college. Let's further offer unsecured loans and hope that no one abuses bankruptcy laws to get out of repayment. Unlike mortgages or car loans, your waiver of default is what mitigates the risk of default to lenders. The alternative is to have educational loans at rates similar to other unsecured loans (e.g. credit card or pawn/payday lending interest rate levels). I'll agree to an extent on your underpayment of skilled teachers, but the converse is that we overpay incompetent teachers and have a bloated administration that robs classrooms of their operating budgets.
Re:Has anybody in the US (Score:0, Interesting)
You seem to believe that their past history is a sure indicator of future progress.
Their past history of sub-par construction quality? Devastating losses of life due to building collapses during natural disasters? Thousands of school children dying when their 'papier-mâché' strength school buildings collapse on them? I don't believe that is progress at all.
Re:patents/capita (Score:2, Interesting)
Take a look at lab time per dollar. You might find that the Chinese researchers put in ten hours, and we put in one for the same cost, and Europe is the same.
Thus we are losing at the manufacturing end as well as at the research end.
In the USA/Europe?UK faculty and employee unions impoverish their research institutions with demands.
That said, I wonder if many USA/UK/European research tasks are exported to China?
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems like an incredibly dubious argument to me. Faith and Science are mutually exclusive and have nothing to do with atheists. It has to do with separation of scientific process and leaps of faith that can't be proven. Your arguments are typical of what the grandparent is trying to say. Faith assumes that observation is causality and science recognizes that observation can be related but not the cause. Tying observation to causality my be a natural defense in animals. We assume that the last thing we ate is the cause of our stomach ailments. This might be life saving, but it also makes us avoid things that don't make us sick. Science doesn't have this luxury. We need to root out causality to efficiently make scientific discovery. The beauty of science sometimes leads scientists to have faith is a high power, but it doesn't lead them to apply faith to the discovery process.
What is also hurting our institutions is the changes made during the Reagan era to reduce funding to higher education and place taxes on graduate student stipends. This was driven by your same argument, "Gosh we should stop funding universities because they are turning out to many liberal arts degrees." The government stopped funding universities and forced them into a quasi for profit position. Universities started drawing from the foreign pool of students whose governments had the foresight to fund the education of future leaders of arts and sciences. It is not surprising that our universities have a disproportionate number of foreign students, and they are returning to their homelands with the knowledge to succeed in science and engineering.
I think it is great that China and India have the wherewithal to see what is required to be a dominant economic and political power. They aren't sitting on slashdot arguing over faith versus science. They are just working hard at discovery knowing it will pay off.
PacRim Jim (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:patents/capita (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that there is a bonus _per paper written_ in f.ex. Chinese institutes, so that it becomes very attractive to just swamp the community with papers. And when you write papers, you cite your colleagues.
There simply is no good metric. You have to judge the quality of the papers and authors by reading them. Tht is not the answer accounting departments want to hear, though.
"Economist" does not know shit (Score:1, Interesting)
Their methodology is worthless, and even their name is a marketing gimmick. Why it is regarded as "intellectual" or even scientific is beyond me -- whenever they publish anything within the areas of my expertise, it is either some kind of fashionable bullshit or hearsay.
I am a CS professor, and I've been on review and program committees for conferences taking place in China. There are some good submissions, but most of the work submitted is incremental, or of inferior quality, and much of it gets through review, gets published, and brings the authors the "citation metrics" they are rewarded for by the Chinese government. Think of it as mutual grading on the curve for scientists, by scientists who want a promotion. Similar things exist in the US and EU in certain communities (especially when they are primarily funded by government organizations) but on a much smaller scale. I do not blame those researchers, though: they were handed the rules of the game, and they make the best of it. We still warn our grad students to beware of "International" conferences and journals - there is a strong chance that such a publication could be worthless for their careers.
Now, for those of us who went to school in Eastern Europe and in Asia, the situation with science teaching in the US public schools is incomprehensible -- how, on such comparatively huge budgets, can it be so bad? According to an American Mathematical Society study, Chinese high school graduates tend to know math better than US high school teachers! Teachers unions and BS pedagogical theories promoted by various "Ph.D.s in Education" who teach those teachers have a lot to do with it, but it still does not make sense. Many school districts are now considering "Singapore textbooks", as if Singapore is some kind of a math and physics powerhouse - but in fact these are just old style textbooks, before the Dept. of Education and dozens of BS pedagogical theories that made their inventors' careers.
Still, even though public education in the US has major problems, the supposed great upswelling of published research out of China is just a game of numbers, people organizing to work around arbitrary metrics with which an authoritarian government tries to steer economy. Anyone who knows could tell that to the Economist's jornos, if they would only listen instead of rushing to write fashionable crap.
Re:some us schools think collaboration = cheating (Score:1, Interesting)
You know people can get through college without having to study, assuming they are an active member of a good frat? Most profs tend to have the same test questions, and most decent frats will have those questions on file to study. Combine that with a dossier of what profs do for exams and their political leanings, and all it takes it going to the test dates and the final with a list of answers memorized, and that is an easy "A" without interfering with the drinking binges.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Interesting)
How about we add onto that -- everyone knows sports heroes and rock stars contribute far more to a society than advances in the hard sciences and engineering. We all know that 300 years from now, Justin Bieber's song lyrics will be immortalized and will become a must study for every student in future times, while the advances in graphene, memristors, and biofuels are absolutely meaningless and will be forgotten in ten years.
It is far more important for high schools to have the football stadiums, and as big, if not larger Jumbotrons than the rival. Far more important than funding science labs, or hiring and retaining competent staff. Woe to the school district that doesn't have available skyboxes for parties during the Friday night games.
It's our own fault (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know how it is in America, but here in the Netherlands a lot of Chinese and Indian people come here to get their Ph.D. They write their thesis and a few articles, get their Ph.D., and go back to where they came from, taking all the experience that you need for performing their specific 'trick' with them. One Ph.D. costs on average around 400.000 euros. I think when these people leave for their home country we should at least make them pay part of that money back. If they can't they have to stay here and we can pluck the fruits of our investment.
Re:patents/capita (Score:3, Interesting)
Undergrads publishing is indeed going a step too far. The problem also lies in university administrators, who are happy to use "papers published" as a metric for quality and dole out funding accordingly. Some researchers thrive in this as they are very good at publishing quickly, others, perhaps more thorough, have trouble getting any funding..
I myself like to publish a few well-researched papers per couple of years. My rate is at the moment at less than 1 publication per year.
I mostly read papers from people I trust (i.e. people recommended to me by my supervisors, people I have met and dealt with at conferences and the odd "gem" you stumble across), regardless of the journal they publish in. That said, the sheer barrage of publications means I have no hopes of keeping up with all developments. The days of the well-researched 50-page publication detailing the work of 10 years of research is unfortunately long gone. I get hired for two years, I have to start publishing after a year.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe we just increase the subsidies for students in math, science, and engineering?
In addition to making the desperately needed technical degrees more affordable and available, doing so might provide the impetus for many students to actually choose those technical degrees.
Re:patents/capita (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I wonder if many USA/UK/European research tasks are exported to China?
Why would they need to? The average American grad student doesn't cost that much, and undergrads are even cheaper/free.
Also, most of the grad students in the sciences are Asian. I think about half my class is from China, and there are maybe five Americans (most whom are 1st generation) including me.
Where is Iran? (Score:1, Interesting)
They are the fastest growing scientific sector in the third world, ranking first in terms of growth rate (ahead of China). Unlike China, 1/4 of their published papers are co-authored with Western countries showing that it's valid science. They regularly rank high in world rankings for fields like nanotechnology, neurology .etc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Iran#International_Rankings [wikipedia.org]
"A 2010 report by Canadian research firm Science-Metrix has put Iran in the top rank globally in terms of growth in scientific productivity with a 14.4 growth index followed by South Korea with a 9.8 growth index.[107] Iran's growth rate in science and technology is 11 times more than the average growth of the world's output in 2009 and in terms of total output per year, Iran has already surpassed the total scientific output of countries like Sweden, Switzerland, Israel, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Austria or that of Norway. ...
Other findings of the report point out that the fastest growing sectors in Iran are Physics, Public health sciences, Engineering, Chemistry and Mathematics. Overall the growth has mostly occurred after 1980 and specially has been becoming faster since 1991 with a significant acceleration in 2002 and an explosive surge since 2005."
That the article in the OP fails to mention Iran strikes me that it's poorly written and non-credible. Most of the Chinese science is not valuable worldwide and is marred by widespread fraudulent unscientific claims.
Re:Where is Iran? (Score:1, Interesting)
More info:
"More than two-thirds of the population of Iran is under the age of 30, one quarter being 15 years of age or younger. Iran also exhibits one of the steepest urban growth rates in the world according to the UN humanitarian information unit. According to 2005 population estimates, approximately 67 percent of Iran's population lives in urban areas, up from 27 percent in 1950. According to the International Monetary Fund, the Islamic Republic of Iran ranks first in "brain drain" among 61 "developing" and "less developed" countries it measured. More than 150,000 Iranians leave the Islamic Republic every year, and an estimated 25% of all Iranians with post-secondary education now live abroad in "developed" countries of the OECD. As of late 2006 nearly 70% of Iran's science and engineering students are women. Furthermore according to UNESCO world survey, Iran has the highest female to male ratio at primary level of enrollment in the world among sovereign nations, with a girl to boy ratio of 1.22 : 1.00. Science growth in Iran is the highest worldwide."
How is this country not a candidate for world domination?
Re:Here's the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
We've been doing it or 2,000 years, and it seems to have worked out ok. I don't mind changing the system, but first you have to convince me that your changes won't make things worse.
You remember the huge economic surge which occurred when the Industrial Revolution really kicked off? Coincident with programmes to extend education to the masses?
Re:Just too bad (Score:1, Interesting)
If you think that religious fanaticism doesn't have anything to do with the (relative) decline in US scientific productivity, you haven't been paying attention.
Citation needed
Re:Just too bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Here's the solution (Score:2, Interesting)
In the cause of "refine and improve" let me suggest the following...
We put accountants and generalist managers [effectively] in charge of all scientific funding. For projects to be allowed to continue, they must be explained clearly and precisely, but in terms the scientifically-illiterate can grasp. The generalists, having the balance of power, can then make a "reasoned judgement" on whether to continue paying for the elitist frippery called "research" (instead of the important stuff like expense-account lunches, continuous face-to-face meetings around the world and powerpoint-projected wallpaper-to-go).
To make it even more interesting, build-in the assumption that science is a linear activity, like constructing a wall with bricks. "How many ideas have you has today/this week/this month?" would be a good initial benchmarking question. The answer can then be used to ramp-up quotas in future years to DEMONSTRATE INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY. Perfect! Ultimately, some sacrifices may have to be made - like abolishing coffee breaks - but scientists like to work hard and aren't in it for the money, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Time to pencil it in on the wall-planner...
Re:Here's the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Teaching everybody to read and do basic math has huge benefits.
Offering classes to everybody to learn Psychology, Calculus, Organic Chemistry, and the History of Western Civilization, and then dumbing down all those courses so that everybody graduates, may not.
I doubt that most college graduates learn much from half of the courses they end up taking. Most college graduates do not go on to become leaders in their fields of study, or doing anything in their field of study. Most college graduates end up being the manager at the local store, or the guy who sells you replacement windows, or whatever.
Think about how free education would actually work - colleges would rapidly become just like a much more expensive version of public school. Whatever government metrics you collect are the ones they'll aim to deliver on. Critical thinking is impossible to measure, so it won't be the focus of teaching. Passing some exam will likely become the focus of the process, but the exam will of course have to be designed such that anybody could learn enough to pass it so exceptional students will get ignored, just as they are in most public schools.
The problem with college education is that the costs have gotten out of hand. Most fields do not teach much in their undergraduate programs that wasn't taught 50 years ago. Heck, I majored in something that was only discovered 60-70 years ago and still 80% of my in-major courses were on foundational topics that did exist 50 years ago, though of course with less modern content. There is no reason that the cost of education needs to go up at the pace that it has.
If a half-decent college education were completed in a year-round 40-hour-per-week program like most trade schools you could get it done in 1-2 years and it could probably be done for a very modest sum. College delivers lots of stuff that you don't really need, in a very inefficient way. The last thing we should do is start tax-funding it in its present state.
And I do believe that most people who currently attend college would be FAR better off in a trade school.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
You're a good example of someone who didn't get a good liberal arts education.
In humanities 101, I learned to state my opinion and support it with evidence.
All you're doing is expressing your opinion. You don't support your opinion with evidence. You don't know what evidence is. You don't understand why it's important to support an opinion like that with scientific evidence.
For example, you want to destroy the public schools and replace them with vouchers (and charter schools, presumably). There is actual research that shows charter (private) schools are no better than public schools, and sometimes worse:
http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/education/charterschools.asp
We found that, on average, charter schools had no significant impacts on student achievement in math and reading.
Re:Who in their right mind would choose science? (Score:3, Interesting)
The days of Bell labs, PARC et. al were great...
Keep in mind that Bell Labs was largely the result of utility regulation.
The profit model for Bell was costs+x%. The more cost they had, the more profit they made, courtesy of the utilities commission. So, as long as the research had ANYTHING to do indirectly with the phone system it was paid for. The company didn't really care if it was useful, although obviously they had some incentive to try to get additional value from it.
Companies have learned how to structure regulations so that they can make the profits without having to pay a bunch of engineers.
I don't disagree that the country needs more of an R&D atmosphere, but such a thing only exists when there is a regulatory climate to support it. Rarely does R&D actually pay off from an financial standpoint - at least not at the individual-company level. It tends to be more of a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats thing.
Re:Who in their right mind would choose science? (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly right.
We have no shortage of scientists in the US; there's actually a good argument that we have a big surplus compared to the number of researchers investors and businesses are willing to fund. We've increased the number of people we're training while simultaneously experiencing the near complete destruction of the commercial basic science R&D market (hint: pharmaceutical research =/= basic science). Research is done in universities, then moved into startups which employ 1 PhD scientist and a handful of engineers on a shoestring budget. That startup is then blown out of the water by a bigger government-academic-commercial cooperative effort from Korea, China, Brazil...
Well, we did a good job training them in capitalism!
Re:This just in... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, they don't.... It's more like, "Fallow fields that aren't drenched in blood."
There's something a bit wrong with this metaphor. You'd think that blood would be a fairly good fertilizer. It's mostly water, of course, but it has a significant organic component that's already broken up into single-cell packets which will decay quickly. So it should be good plant food.
There's gotta be a better metaphor ...
Re:Here's the solution (Score:2, Interesting)
The other problem with this idea is when the benefit of the degree isn't measurable in dollars and can't be paid off easily by the person even after graduation. For instance people more educated in philosophy and history make better voting decisions which lead to a better run government but have very little chance in finding work that will pay enough to make the college degree worthwhile from an economic point of view. Those subjects could be covered in some type of vocational school though so maybe what really needs to happen is that we require several more years of paid for schooling for people who pass some type of test like the ACT/SAT.
The hard sciences aren't the only thing that are important to society, they just happen to have the most direct impact on the economy.