A big fat hermaphrodite with a Flock of Seagulls haircut and only one nostril!

[elfs]

The National Science Board released its Science and Engineering Indicators, 2008, and absolutely everything I've been saying about America's coming third world status is backed up:

• U.S. grade school students continue to lag behind other developed countries in science and math.
• In 2000, the United States held about one quarter of the world's 194 million tertiary degrees. Twenty years earlier, the U.S. share was closer to one third.
• From 1994 to 2004, U.S. firms increased the number of people they employed in R&D jobs outside the United States by 76%. Foreign firms increased their investment in US R&D by only 18%.
• Federal obligations for all academic research, basic and applied, declined in real terms between 2004 and 2005 and are expected to drop further in 2006 and 2007.
• Several Asian countries, led by China, experienced more rapid growth in knowledge-based industries than did the United States in 2004 and 2005.
• The U.S. comparative advantage in exports of high-technology products has eroded: the U.S. trade balance in advanced technology products shifted from surplus to deficit starting in 2002.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is nothing wrong with the minds of the citizens of Asia, India, or Africa. The only way the United States can stay competitive against other nations is to create acadamic and industrial environments so attractive those minds want to come and produce their research and developmental miracles here. We are not doing that. Intelligent design is my bugaboo, but it's just one of the thousands of ways our country manages to look idiotic to the rest of the world.

Comments

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Quite true, all of it. The brain drain from North America overseas is staggering; as a woman with an earned D.Sc. in applied physical science and damn fine publication record (if I dare say so myself ^_^ ) my opportunities in the past few years are significantly better as an expatriate, just about anywhere outside the States or Canada.

Every single person in my specific field within Canada, every one of is, is presently working overseas, either part- or full-time. One does not need to look too far to see why our industrial and technical capacities are just about kaput.

Thanks, Elf. Appreciate the reminder.

Angharad Lewis
(a pseudonym since I do like what I do for a living....)

Losing a lead isn't the same as falling behind

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Claims about US educational problems are based on bad data. Pretty much everyone making these comparisons is motivated to make the situation look worse than it is. Educators want more funding. Employers want more qualified candidates to choose among. Politicians want voters to feel threatened. And of course there's the Lake Wobegon effect; we're biased to assume our children ought to be doing better than they are. When independent researchers take an unbiased look at the actual data, the results don't look so bad.

http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html

There's plenty of room to improve the US educational system, but the major problem is that we undereducate the best students and overeducate the worst. No matter how much we pretend otherwise, not all students are above average.

There's no threat to the United States from educational advances and increased productivity in other countries. The world is not a zero-sum game, and the US does not prosper by exploiting stupid foreigners; it never has.

And government involvement in academic research is a bad thing, not a good thing. Politicians and bureaucrats do not make good scientific decisions. This is true of liberal secular humanist bureaucrats just as much as it's true of conservative Christian fundamentalist bureaucrats.

. png

Re: Losing a lead isn't the same as falling behind

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, a lot of the evaluation of education is measured according to a standard that I saw defined in an editorial in an editorial in Analog many years ago: Hyperdemocracy. "Equality of opportunity is measured by equality of results." If some students, or some schools, do better than others, we can take money away from them and throw it at the schools or students that aren't doing as well, so we can bring them up to the others.

Re: Losing a lead isn't the same as falling behind

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

That's the problem, all right.

I certainly don't want to see anyone get any less education than they can absorb. At least in primary and secondary schools, effective education almost always pays for itself. But by the same token, we can't afford to fund ineffective education. Err on the side of overeducating, sure. Stuff as much of it into as many heads as possible. But understand that some heads will inevitably accept more than others, and be prepared to stuff accordingly.

Worse, when the state asserts that everyone is entitled to equal results, it creates a feeling of entitlement. This is a perfectly understandable effect, of course, but it's poisonous. In law-abiding citizens this results in destructive political behavior... and some will take this feeling even more personally. I believe that a sense of entitlement is behind a lot of criminal behavior.

. png

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Oh, it extends beyond just mere studies, Elf.

I spent the bulk of the 1990's in grad. school, working on a PhD in Physics. Before I even started working on my dissertation, it was clear that job prospects were Not Good.

Government labs were shrinking or closing. Grant money was far tighter. Industry was shutting down all of its R&D departments. And there were plenty of post-docs, people with their doctorate but no permanent position in academia, going from 2-year stint to 2-year stint, some for 10+ years. They were all still in the pipeline, waiting. And they were all still in the pipeline because all of those recently-laid-off, experienced scientists decided that they'd go and teach at one of the non-research colleges. By the mid-90's even 2-year community colleges were refusing to even consider applicants for physics instructor positions who didn't have several years of teaching experience. (For comparison: when I was in high school, the same 2-year colleges would hire people with masters degrees in physics to fill their vacancies.)

But this is only just an external manifestation… the rot runs much, much deeper.

About 2 years ago, I came to the rather uncomfortable realization that I'd been tilting a windmills, trying to explain science to others in the online forums I'd once participated in. People didn't want to know or understand. The wanted validation. I saw much the same thing, 10 years ago, on USENET newsgroups devoted to physics: wave after wave of crackpot, looking for Blessings From On High. Attempts to explain actual observations, attempts to educate, were greeted with hostility.

In more recent years, what discourse there was has all but evaporated. And I have to finally admit what I've noticed, yet ignored: Nobody really gives a flying phuque about science. If it validates their worldview, they use it. If it doesn't, they attack it. The science itself is nothing more than voodoo to them.

And it holds equally true for the highly educated as well as the not-quite-as-educated: unless they're scientists themselves, science is nothing more than vodoo to be used to justify their worldview.






I will note, however, that this is an attitude native to the US, not something innate to humans. While in Germany, I noticed that people, highly-educated or not, deferred to scientists because they knew their own field. You showed respect for another person's area of expertise; you didn't attack them for it. Like in this country.