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.
Just too bad (Score:5, Funny)
We here in the States have much more pressing issues [msn.com] at the moment... Science is for pagans and heathens
Re:Just too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just too bad (Score:5, Funny)
I read that article and I think maybe they're trying to solve the wrong problem. Rather than training more priests to perform exorcisms maybe they need to stop looking for demons in everything.
When all you've got is holy water, every problem looks like a demon.
Re:Just too bad (Score:5, Funny)
Our Coder who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy namespace.
Thy pointers come.
Thy loops be done
in source as it is in binary.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our spaghetti code,
as we forgive those who spaghetti codes us,
and lead us not into the goto,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the editor,
and the compiler, and the linker,
for ever and ever.
Amen.
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So what prayers do I need to exorcise C++ threading bugs?
In the name of the Gates, the Torvalds, and the holy Jobs, I command you to leave this box NOW!
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LOL. Thanks
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Re:Just too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just too bad (Score:5, Interesting)
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Religion /per se/ may not be the problem, but I can tell you as an American, that religion in this country is most *definitely* against science. You need look no farther than the creationists (aka, intelligent design proponents) and those against stem cell research to see just how strongly religion opposes science in America. It doesn't help that anti-intellectualism has been ascendant in America for (at least) the last three decades. Even ignoring t
Citations given. (Score:3, Insightful)
So the bulk of th 1.5 million homeschooling market teaches something that has been known to be wrong for 150 years (200 year
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It's worse than that. Louisiana is now officially looking at changing textbooks in order to get rid of evolution. They want to replace one of the best documented scientific theories in existence with "I dunno how this works, ergo God did it". If the rest of the US decides to go down that path, I don't foresee a very bright future for science and technology in America.
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HAIL Cthulu!
When the Great One returns, all will be revealed.
Re:Just too bad (Score:5, Funny)
I say make more people MBAs! We need more MBAs!!
(What do MBAs actually do? Cause at my work all they seem to do is regurgitate things I say and make very boring power point presentations with the same clip art and generic percentage data about general stuff)
MBAs talk to other MBAs. It takes an MBA to do that, really. Without MBAs in between, you don't know what engineers and other riff-raff would be up to. Just look at the OSS communities without MBAs, they're total disasters, no useful output what so ever, total waste of human resources.
patents/capita (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:patents/capita (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, one of the other measures of "productivity" was the amount of money spent. That's not what "productivity" means.
The number of published papers *that get cited by others* would be a much better metric.
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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:patents/capita (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Like many bosses say: "Ten hours in the lab can save you one hour in the library". In my eyes, working hard does not beat working a little and thinking a lot. Research simply takes time.
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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.
Re:patents/capita (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that's the problem, science workers just get paid too much money...
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.
Re:patents/capita (Score:5, Insightful)
There's something similar in India where, I think, you're required to publish at least one refereed paper as an undergrad to get your degree. The result is a tsunami of really, really low-quality papers.
Exactly. A million appalling undergraduate-student papers published under duress don't come close to a single piece of quality research. The OP never really seemed to factor this in, it just looked at quantity. Heck, gimme a printing press and SCIgen and I can make Burkina Faso a world leader in science publication, at least until they run out of trees.
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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 peop
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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.
Yeah, and this mechanism hinders deep research. The problem is that the most interesting research subjects are also the riskiest ones. You cannot publish papers on failures, therefore you are highly pressed to go for the low hanging fruit. This means that journals will be full of the (n+1)th refinement of a well known algorithm/technology/formula/theorem.
We need more scientific risk-taking.
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Not only that, one of the other measures of "productivity" was the amount of money spent. That's not what "productivity" means.
In a world financed by consumer debt, that's precisely what "productivity" means.
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How about the number of non-falsified and non-plagiarized works? Suddenly China disappears! *gasp*
Yep... (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? Increasing a baseline of 10 by 1 is 10% growth. Increasing a baseline of 1000 by 10 is 1% growth. Even if the metric is valid, which would you take?
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I completely agree with your comment.
Yet, when I look at universities in the US, they play a similar game. In the last university I was in (top 5 in engineering), the faculty were consistently pressured to produce patents, and many of the faculty agreed it was the right path to go on.
And heck, even quantity of publications is a dubious measure...
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Patents are bullshit. There is often an striking lack of important information, and you cannot touch it for 20 years in fear of litigation. Patents, science is not.
some us schools think collaboration = cheating on (Score:2)
some us schools think collaboration = cheating on some class projects and parts of other school work.
Some even think that collaboration on papers is cheating as well.
Re:some us schools think collaboration = cheating (Score:4, Insightful)
Likewise, school work is to be done on ones own, except where indicated as a group task or in cases where one needs it explained.
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"Likewise, school work is to be done on ones own"
Why? What if someone is actually helping you and explaining to you how to do the work so that you can later do it yourself? If they are cheating and merely copying answers without learning the material, it will show. It's their education and their own fault.
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If said cheating is done in secondary school and helps one to get a tertiary placement in preference to someone who did not cheat, it doesn't matter to the displaced scholar that the person who displaced them got found out or failed the course later on.
Similarly, if a person obtains employment on the strength of academic results which aren't valid, not only does the person they displace get impacted potentially hampering them at the start of their career, the reputation of the cheats educational qualificat
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"Similarly, if a person obtains employment on the strength of academic results which aren't valid"
If an employer is hiring people based on the imaginary grading scales present in the school systems, that is their first error.
"It's this last which should motivate educational institutions to ensure that their students complete their qualifications honestly."
Banning all collaboration whether good or 'bad' isn't the answer.
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"so I assumed that you would be able to comprehend the fact that I was not referring to permitted and/or required collaborative efforts."
No, I was talking about projects that were originally meant to be done alone but you asked for the help of another to show you how to do it, not projects specifically intended to be group projects.
Re:some us schools think collaboration = cheating (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, many teachers agree that student can work together on homework to figure out the approach to a problem, as long as they are not copying actual solutions (i.e. once the approach becomes clear, they stop and finish the problem independently, before moving on to the next problem). The vast majority of my teachers actively encouraged doing that, but were clear that merely copying solutions was very much unacceptable.
A few of them further specified that if while collaborating on the approach the the group as a whole finds the solution, a notation to that effect should be added to the paper, so the grader does not assume the basically identical answers are a result of copying.
One area none of the teachers ever touched was the collaborative process of checking answers against each other once everybody has completed the assignment. That is because that is a thorny area, and comes very close to the issue of simply coping answers. Done correctly, this process helps students find and understand mistakes they made, resulting in better understanding of the overall material, especially since by the time students get graded material back, and realize they made a mistake, the class has advanced far beyond that point, making students feel less comfortable asking questions, and also often just no longer care.
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You'd think that since nearly everybody in the real world collaborates on projects, that academic institutions should want to encourage collaboration.
Chinese science (Score:5, Informative)
But citation of English-language articles in Chinese journals by other publications remains low.
Maybe it's because Chinese science isn't trustworthy enough? [bbc.co.uk]
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.
Re:Chinese science (Score:5, Insightful)
It is well known in the academic field that if you keep sending your crappy paper to journals, it will eventually get published. And I can tell you that I review a LOT a crap those days. Measuring papers is stupid,, it won't discriminate good papers from bad papers. The editors are supposed not to publish bad papers, but eventually they will. There is no good (IMHO) to discriminate those. So let's not use the number of paper as a metric of how good countries are at science.
In which country do people go for their study if they ARE going to another country looks like a much better metric to me. And let's face it, no one goes to india, china or brazil. It might come and I wish that eventually they will. I wish those country will produce good science. But let's face it. Right now, they have 20 years to catch up.
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And let's face it, no one goes to india, china or brazil.
Don't know about China, but quite a few do go to India/Brazil - cheaper alternative to the US, and not everyone can get to the US.
One place many people also end up going: Singapore. They've invested heavily on recruiting top faculty (a bunch from my highly ranked alumnus abandoned the US and moved there).
Has anybody in the US (Score:2, Insightful)
Ever done this [youtube.com]? How long would it take, do you think, it would take to rebuild a place like, say, oh, I don't know, New Orleans?
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Is concrete required in a steel framed building? And please, I hope you didn't expect the video to show every detail... The inspections could have been continuous throughout the process. For one thing, it's an early experiment. Improvements will be made. You seem to believe that their past history is a sure indicator of future progress. Stagnation is not universal. It's highly localized when considering the global scale. Right now some people are entering a dark period, and others are just coming out of one
Re:Has anybody in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
They may have been doing floor by floor inspections while the rest of the construction continued. There is little need for whole-building inspection for each construction phase, let each phase for a floor be inspected when that floor has completed that phase. That floor can then continue on to the next phase.
It is hard to know for sure, but it looked like they were using pre-fab concrete slabs inserted in the lattice.
The not pausing for settling is definitely a valid concern.
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That's the old army, now thy hire contractors to do construction.
Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got a great idea.
Instead of making college free like other countries, let's raise the cost of going to college so high that nobody can afford it.
Instead, we'll let them take out loans that will put them in debt for the rest of their lives.
We'll make the interest rates so high that they'll never be able to pay it off.
And to stop them from going bankrupt like businessmen or anybody else who is overwhelmed by debt, we'll make it illegal for them to go bankrupt.
(Note to self: Don't forget to underpay science teachers and destroy teachers' unions.)
Re:Here's the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's also have society not value science and let's put superstitious thought on equal ground - say "Intelligent Design" or some other such nonsense on par with Evolution. Or have folks poo-poo a rational explanation because the idea of reincarnation just fits the "facts" so much better. And when someone who tries to put the rational view forward and discount the superstition, let's call that person "intolerant" of others beliefs.
There! Now, I am going to pray to the almighty Zeus - the creator and master of ALL gods - so that HE'll forgive all this science non-sense and the worship of the mythical God of Abraham.
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.
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.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
We should support Teachers; however, My 8 year old student should also have the benefit of a Union.
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We should support Teachers; however, My 8 year old student should also have the benefit of a Union.
Then tell her to get off her dead ass and organize.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
The US needs to change its financial industry's philosophy of squeezing every penny out of its own people rather than increasing the productivity out of its real investments. People are not their investment, they are their junkies.
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So we should go back to the high taxes on rich folks like we had before Reagan? Yea, the 70s were really productive years for the US.
Perhaps we should find a balance, and understand that most people making $250k to $500k a year actually earn it, and if you overtax people in those brackets, they have no reason to continue to invest in their companies (most of them ARE self employed). So you literally tax away jobs as well when you raise taxes on the "rich" to 70%. Keep in mind that people who make just $1
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understand that most people making $250k to $500k a year actually earn it
Sure they earn it ... just like the winners of Publishers Clearing House and Powerball earn theirs. Good hard work, and all that.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that this is even possible indicates to me that there exists an inequity problem that NEEDS to be corrected through taxation.
So we should go back to the high taxes on rich folks like we had before Reagan? Yea, the 70s were really productive years for the US.
Sure, the 70's weren't so great when taxes were at 70%. But the 50's were pretty good when the top income bracket rate was 91%. So maybe the key is to get it back up to 91%.
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And yet the 1950's and 1960's were very productive and the top marginal tax rate was 91% until JFK lowered it to around 70% in the early 1960's. Tax rates, as long as they're not ridiculous, don't have much to do with whether jobs are created or not. Businesses don't hire people because you give them a tax break. They hire people because they think they can increase their income by hiring a person more than it costs them to hire that person. The costs to a business of employing someone are paid with pre
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The problem is you're quoting two people known largely for their disastrous economic policies. America has been on a tax-cutting binge for decades and the result is economic stagnation. Thatcher turned entire regions of Britain into economic wastelands. Perhaps you could quote someone who has a shred of credibility.
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Keep in mind that people who make just $159,619 or more are in the top 5% of wage earners, but pay 58% of all income taxes.
Do by any chance the top 5% of wage earners also get an undue percentage of the total of all income?
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People should be responsible for their actions. This includes the debt they accumulate. We shouldn't have to legislate to the lowest common denominator.
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Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
"Making college free" - you mean using tax dollars to pay the tuition for... everyone? As it stands, probably 50% of the people who show up for class at university should have settled for trade school. Instead, they will spend 5-6 years getting a philosophy or art degree and then working as an assistant manager at Borders. I don't want to subsidize this any more than I already have to (interest deferred school loans).
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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:Here's the solution (Score:5, Funny)
Oh God! A Borders assistant manager.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
:D
Best series of responses, EVAR!
Thanks for the initial comment - couldn't have said it better myself. We've already gotten to the point where college degrees are so common that they're essentially worthless - making them "free" by fleecing taxpayers would only exacerbate the problem.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
So why exactly both of you haven't realized the easiest possible solution to this "problem"?
(namely: focus on promoting hard science & engineering degrees ... as happens at my place, which generally does have free education - but, on top of that, recently many students of engineering studies can count on additional scholarship virtually just because of what they chose to study, as long as their results are decent)
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
We've already gotten to the point where college degrees are so common that they're essentially worthless - making them "free" by fleecing taxpayers would only exacerbate the problem.
Sure, if you start from the perspective that college education is a zero-sum game related to some piece of paper that lets you into the "club" of people who get good jobs. If you start from that perspective, then of course you don't want any competition.
I would be perfectly happy living in a world where everyone had a college degree, provided the degrees actually came with a real education. I also think the country would be a whole lot richer in that case, probably by more than enough to make up for the "fleecing" you mention.
In the real world, a more practical goal isn't to get everyone a college degree, but to make sure that talented people who could benefit from one (and consequently make us all richer) don't wind up flipping burgers instead 'cause they can't afford the tuition. Alternatively, we could just make sure that rich, dumb kids get all the opportunities.
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Sure, if you start from the perspective that college education is a zero-sum game related to some piece of paper that lets you into the "club" of people who get good jobs.
Historically, that's all they've ever been. A talented hard working individual can learn far more on his own at the local library than can be taught to a beer-swilling buffoon by even the most talented of educators. Colleges and Universities provide the opportunity for learning, but they've never made much in the way of guarantees. The only degrees that mean a damn are the ones in hard sciences, medicine, and engineering - all others really are just a "club membership" designed to get better jobs for gra
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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?
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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 bein
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We've been doing it or 2,000 years, and it seems to have worked out ok..
I would submit that it really hasn't. One way of looking at history is as a struggle between people who wanted to keep education and related privileges exclusive, and other forces that pushed to open them up. We live in the richest society in the history of the planet in part because those forces are currently ascendant.
Past performance, future results, etc. But in a world of uncertainty it's one of the safest bets I can think of.
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+1
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The value of a diploma shouldn't be measured by its scarcity, but by the knowledge acquired. The decline of that standard driven by a profit motive is the only issue I have with it.
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Interests rate so high? We're you born in the 90s or something?
how about dropping filler classes like art history (Score:2)
how about dropping filler classes like art history and other off your major stuff just to fill a needed # of college courses. Some colleges have up to 1 year of filler that can be cut to save costs and let you take less time and or more class on your major.
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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
But is anyone reading their output? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But is anyone reading their output? (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the fact that China, India, Brazil and a host of other countries are trying to shed their 'third world' moniker, I would both expect and accept the fact that these countries are starting to do more research.
I'm not sure how anyone expects them to improve their technology base otherwise unless it's to simply to buy everything from the US / UK / EU. Where's the fun in that? Furthermore, it's not like the entrenched powers are keen on sharing much of what we know with other countries. So what the hell do you expect them to do? You can't download everything from the Internet.
And besides, the US really needs this to occur. We need some scary boogeyman (preferably foreign) to create some sort of gap that we have to fill lest the American Way of Life become endangered. I am really hoping that the Chinese get a viable manned space program going in a few years so we can 'catch up'.
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A major part of my job is tracking down research that has been done on various topics and passing it along to a user. Every time I do a search for one of my users I use about 30 different databases (ScienceDirect, Worldcat, Google Scholar, etc.). What can I use for Chinese journals? Yes, there are a few databases (whose names I can't recall off the top of my head), but they are extremely limited. I don't have the sorting and filtering abilities I do with other databases. Oftentimes the title and abstract ar
obviously (Score:2, Offtopic)
it is obvious why this is happening, it was obvious in this comment [slashdot.org], it was also obvious much earlier, but it's hard to find much earlier references.
But I was just considered to be 'funny' [slashdot.org] because I stated the reasons and the solutions to economic problems that are experienced by the western world and 'economies' that have very high social obligations and expectations.
here is how it will end for USA [slashdot.org]
Not enough info (Score:4, Insightful)
I realize the linked article is in the Economist - but there's very little information regarding the methodology behind UNESCO's conclusions. What little that is there leads me to believe they're just doing bulk counting without regard to quality.
From what I've seen (FWLIW I work in a university engineering department), the top minds of countries such as India and China do their best to get out of there. They take faculty positions in the US; they go to Europe; or they go to Taiwan or Japan.
And while the article seems to imply that the lack of citation of China's journals from the western world might be some degree of latent racism, it provides zero evidence to support that conclusion. I am also left to wonder why Indian and Chinese scientists working in the west don't seem to have that problem.
Who in their right mind would choose science? (Score:5, Insightful)
My father has a PhD from a fancy school in the US. (Genetics)
When I was looking at a career path, he warned me off pure science. He was right.
Fighting for tenure and the climate towards R&D in general is nuts.
The days of Bell labs, PARC et. al were great - people forget many of the advances today came out of those investments made by public and private industry.
Now, increasingly, advances in semiconductor manufacturing, wireless tech - all comes from overseas.
Sigh.
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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 s
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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
PacRim Jim (Score:2, Interesting)
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Those 'scare' graduate positions are filled with highly qualified students willing to work for less than minimum wage. I know - I did it, and there was no great line of equally qualified Americans waiting for my job. And if you think that we have no intention of staying, I suggest you look at the makeup of the faculty at these universities.
They the best people for the job, and significantly lower the bar for US students. I've been on recruitment committees - some places are allocated domestic ahead of time,
Trantor - Terminus (Score:2)
I'm sure it was many years before Terminus overtook Trantor in the sciences as well.
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:We don't need no science (Score:5, Informative)
We have Sarah Palin and she can see Russia from her front porch
What Palin actually said was
"They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."
http://www.slate.com/id/2200155/ [slate.com]
Which is literally true since from Little Diomede part of US territory and Alaska you can see Big Diomede which is under Russian control.
A legitimate critique of Palin would be that she considered Russia being visible from an island of Alaska, as saying something useful about her international experience and foreign relations.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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: (Score:2)
Here, troll, have a candy bar.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Here, troll, have a candy bar.
Give him a few more, throw in some sugar cubes and a few cans of Red Bull. Maybe he'll get diabetes, fall into a coma and die. Evolution in action.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Scientists in the US "accept the consensus" on global warming as much as any scientists around the world. It's the general public that has been misled by a well financed disinformation campaign.