We’ve written so much about this topic, both here at Cosmic Variance, and on previous blogs, that I think I’ll provide minimal comment here and mostly let the article speak for itself. From The New York Times
A panel of experts convened by the National Academies, the nation’s leading science advisory group, called yesterday for an urgent and wide-ranging effort to strengthen scientific competitiveness.
The 20-member panel, reporting at the request of a bipartisan group in Congress, said that without such an effort the United States “could soon loose its privileged position.” It cited many examples of emerging scientific and industrial power abroad and listed 20 steps the United States should take to maintain its global lead.
“Decisive action is needed now,” the report warned, adding that the nation’s old advantages “are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength.”
…
The panel included Nobel laureates, university presidents, corporate chairmen and former presidential appointees. Their report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” said the proposed actions would require changes of law and new or reallocated funds. A summary of the report and a list of the 20 members is online at www.nationalacademies.org.
…
Its 20 recommendations doubled the number that lawmakers – including Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee, and Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat also on the committee – asked for nearly five months ago.
To create a corps of 10,000 teachers annually, the report called for four-year scholarships, worth up to $20,000 a year, that would help top students obtain bachelor’s degrees in science, engineering or math – with parallel certification as K-12 math and science teachers. After graduation, the students would work for at least five years in public schools.
Among the report’s other recommendations were these:
¶An Advanced Research Projects Agency modeled after the military’s should be established in the Energy Department to sponsor novel research to meet the nation’s long-term energy challenges.
¶The nation’s most outstanding early-career researchers should annually receive 200 new research grants – worth $500,000 each, and payable over five years.
¶International students in the United States who receive doctorates in science, technology, engineering or math should get automatic one-year visa extensions that allow them to seek employment here. If these students get job offers and pass a security screening test, they should automatically get work permits and expedited residence status. If they cannot get a job, their visas should expire.
¶The Research and Experimentation Tax Credit, scheduled to expire in December, should be made permanent and expanded. It goes to companies that increase their spending on research and development above a certain level.
To encourage private investment in innovation, the panel said, the credit should increase from 20 percent to 40 percent of qualifying investments.
Obviously, I think this is just great – to have a high profile, politically independent group of unimpeachably credentialed experts spelling out what is necessary for the U.S. to compete in the science and technology driven 21st Century. It remains to be seen whether we have, or will have in the near future, an administration with the vision, strength and determination to act on the recommendations.
October 13th, 2005 at 10:18 pm
I assume the early researcher thing is effectively a recommendation to raise federally funded NSF CAREER program (and like programs) to $100 million annually. Does anyone know what the NSF CAREER budget is now, or the total federal budget for these sorts of awards is?
October 13th, 2005 at 11:12 pm
They appear to be losing their competitive advantage
in spelling as well:…
“without such an effort the United States could soon
loose its privileged position…”
That should be “lose,” not “loose” – a common mistake
made by people who trust spellcheckers.
October 13th, 2005 at 11:40 pm
Pyracantha (hey, we have that growing in our yard!)– I was going to post the same thing. I hope the irony is not lost on anyone: the article is about us losing our competitive edge due to a lack of education… and the reporter made a spelling error. In the NYT.
October 14th, 2005 at 12:02 am
These all sound like excellent suggestions (the “Energy Task Force” sounds a little flakey, though, I’ll bet it ends up being an auto industry subsidy or something.) One thing that’s missing from the list is funding for high school students, IMO. There should be paid opportunities for bright high schoolers to get involved in research, or at least attend special summer programs in science and math.
October 14th, 2005 at 1:27 am
Speaking of spelling mistakes, here is a very nice one [from Peter Woit's comment section]:
“For if it is so that there are a multidude of Universes, then they have to admit that there is one Universe wherby the theory of strings does not exist?
”
A multidude of Universes! Sounds like a description of Sean or Mark or cvj….
October 14th, 2005 at 4:00 am
Articles like the one in the New York Times illustrate the increasing disconnect between what is best for the long term competitiveness of U.S. science and technology and the forces that are actively working against it. From the article:
The proposed actions include creating scholarships to attract 10,000 top students a year to careers in teaching math and science, and 30,000 scholarships for college-level study of science, math and engineering; expanding the nation’s investment in basic research by 10 percent a year for seven years; and making broadband access available nationwide at low cost.
[...]
“This report shines a spotlight on the fact our country is losing its competitive edge,” Mr. Bingaman said. “Clearly there are steps we can take to regain our competitiveness, and the recommendations outlined in this comprehensive report give us a good place to start.”
[...]
The panel cited many examples:
¶The cost of employing one chemist or engineer in the United States is equal to about five chemists in China and 11 engineers in India.
¶Chemical companies last year shut 70 facilities in the United States and marked 40 for closure. Of 120 large chemical plants under construction globally, one is in the United States and 50 are in China.
So, let’s see. On the one hand there should be a big push to educate a new generation of scientists and engineers, while at the same time there are economic forces actively working to eliminate many of the employment opportunities for that fresh crop of scientists and engineers. This seems really ill-conceived — if there aren’t enough jobs for a large increase in specialists, creating an artificial supply of them will likely do more harm than good when the lives of those people are taken into account. Expecting increased funding for basic research in universities to provide long term employment for this new legion of technically trained people seems naive; additionally, those jobs typically don’t pay particularly well compared to what has historically been the case in industry. An increased supply can only improve competitiveness if those people actually end up finding work in the U.S. in their chosen fields. There is no shame in getting a graduate degree in physics and then working as a financial analyst, but it isn’t going to do anything to improve technological or scientific competitiveness…
A real change in U.S. scientific competitiveness can come when young, scientifically talented individuals see it in their best interest to pursue a career in science or technology rather than just, for example, going for a general business degree. If the technical jobs are there and they pay well, students entering the universities will see that and choose accordingly. The current lack of interest in those fields reflects the fact that many of the best jobs are being created or even moved to other regions in the world where a technically trained pool of workers is available AND that has significantly lower costs. “Significantly lower costs” is the key factor — you won’t see U.S. business trying to move a lot of technical positions to Japan, for example, in response to a shortage of domestic talent. Students aren’t stupid — they can see where the jobs are, and wisely they choose accordingly.
The long term loss of U.S. competitiveness is indeed a distressing thing to watch unfold, but trying to stop it by artificially increasing the supply of specialists is not the solution. Unless the significant short term economic advantages of moving technical work outside the country are eliminated, possibly by changes in tax policy, it seems that the loss will continue regardless of any supply of eager and competent people. (Of course, if those people are willing to work for the same wages as their overseas counterparts, that would be an entirely different matter…) Unfortunately, current government philosophy seems to preclude that the underlying problem will be addressed any time soon.
October 14th, 2005 at 5:42 am
Completely off-topic, but worthy mentioning
, have you seen this paper, by Tony Zee?? Simply very very very fun.
October 14th, 2005 at 8:01 am
While I believe the M has a point, I think there’s another issue at hand that needs to be taken into account: namely, the environment in which such student scientists would find themselves. Competitiveness is not merely about “how do we train more scientists?” but about “how does the US remain competitive in science?” If you have more funding for research (basic and applied), then you have more positions open for the scientists you’re training, and overall you create better science.
I work in materials science. The time it takes to take a newly discovered material to mainstream use is about 20 yrs, and around $100M. It goes through 4 stages: initial discovery, “valley of death,” specialized use, mainstream use. Industry is quite adept at taking care of the last two stages. Academia doesn’t do too badly at the first stage, though as more funding gets pushed towards applications it takes them into the later two stages as well. The “valley” is the extended period it takes to make a material workable, and is the place that nobody wants to put money.
I understand that the drug industry is (surprisingly?) similar.
Large industrial labs and government labs used to shepherd materials through all four stages; now, industry only has the patience for the last two. Over the last twenty years, there’s been a push to make government funding for science (at the DOD labs, DOE labs, and funding for academia) more like industry, which I think is doomed to failure. But it’s a failure that takes more than twenty years to manifest itself in materials and new drugs *not* discovered. And a loss in competitiveness. Differences in salary is not the only problem.
Other countries are putting money into research earlier in the process. They’re also investing in educating their children. We waste our time deciding if we should teach creatitionism in science class. These are the more fundamental places where the US is losing competitiveness, and it’s why the environment matters. Putting money into making more scientists and scientific research doesn’t have the only effect of making more potential scientists. It makes more *science*, and that affects everything.
October 14th, 2005 at 10:26 am
M is right. The answer to the problem of America’s declining scientific dominance is not to lower the salaries of all technical people.
The answer is quite simple. If you want more of X, all you have to do is pay for it. I don’t mean paying people to work on generating more of X. I mean paying for more of X.
If, for example, if you want more physics papers, pay any American non-academic who publishes in a peer reviewed journal $2000 per paper.
If you want more breakthrough physics papers, pay the author an additional $10 per citation.
If you want a particular long-standing physics problems solved, pay a $1,000,000 to whoever solves it.
Those of us in academia are reluctant to admit it, but there’s a huge supply of untapped scientific brain power extant in the country. We don’t see much of it, because we’ve created artificially high barriers to entry into the business of profiting from this brain power. There are loads of people with scientific talent who are unwilling to bear the cost of starting a scientific career (much lower salaries than industry, frequent moves to often unpleasant locations, greater importance of social skills to cultivate job references, greater importance of career consciousness to survive due to scarcity jobs in one’s specialty, etc.).
Imagine what would happen to, say, the software industry, if it used the same hiring methods as academia. It would be destroyed. You wouldn’t be able to hire someone solely because you think they’ll write good code. You’d have to worry about letters of recommendation, degrees, and her CV. The software industry has flourished because it is less reluctant to hire high school drop outs, if it looks like they can code well.
It doesn’t hurt to remember that Einstein couldn’t get a job due to the need for recommendations. It was sheer luck that he landed a low-pressure government job that gave him time to think. What would have happened had he worked instead in a high-pressure industrial environment like Microsoft?
And in open robotics competitions, high school teams have beaten teams from places like MIT.
There’s brain power out there. To direct its output to science, we just need to pay for its output.
October 14th, 2005 at 10:42 am
I think some people here are missing the point. The aim is not to create more academics. The point is that almost all areas of the workforce are going to need to be significantly more technically and scientifically savvy than they are today.
I guess ultimately that might mean a modest increase in the number of faculty, but it’s industry that we’d like to supply with more highly trained people.
There’s no need to lower the barriers to entry into the academy – we get as many good people as we need, and are turning people away. But the technological and scientific knowledge needed for industry in its many forms to compete, requires more people to be trained in science and math.
October 14th, 2005 at 10:46 am
The problem with the model of “just pay for what end result you want” is that it hardly works for new discoveries, especially when the search may very well require 20 yrs or more (and if you don’t know what you’re looking for). Who pays for the investment of time for 20 yrs on the chance that there’s the big payoff at the end? Industry used to, but they’ve moved to a 5yr. (if you’re *lucky* it’s that long) timeframe, and gov’t is moving to that shorter time frame as well. Its a move that is ignorant of the process of science and technological development, and pays homage only to market forces.
As unfortunate as it may be, you don’t get science by just offering to pay at the end, and hoping the market will take care of the rest. We have that model already–it’s what’s failing. You *do* have to pay for people to work to make science.
This isn’t to say that market forces aren’t important (how well the jobs pay, etc.), but attempting to rely alone on the market is what got us here. We as a society need to decide what we from science, and how we’re going to pay for it.
October 14th, 2005 at 11:30 am
Belizean makes some interesting suggestions, but those raise some perverse incentives. There are already prizes for breakthrough research, including million dollar challenge prizes, as well as more classical formats like the Nobel prize.
But paying $2000 awards per refereed paper will firstly lead to lots of new refereed journals; secondly it will put interesting pressure on the referees and provide some creative tension between author and referee. Further, when I was a student I was told the mean cost per paper was about $20,000; for individual PI level collaborative research. It is more now, I’d guesstimate about $30,000 per paper.
Finally, it’d be nice to get $10 per citation (in “approved journals” only?) but this would simply create very powerful incentives to cite a lot of colleagues in each paper. There is already a bit of a problem with “citation circles”, this would exacerbate that issue beyond all belief.
I agree with Mark, the problem is not generally the absolute supply of academics; a simple dynamic equilibrium estimate tells you the supply of those is fairly assured. The problem is lack of technically educated general workforce; people in economically and politically key position with negligible quantitative or scientific training.
As Dallas notes, the time constants in this problem are hard to deal with, it takes a decade to train someone to research level, starting from high school; and it typically takes another decade to get productive results, and recognise that the results were valuable.
Finally, people going into soft professions as a guaranteed lucrative career are going to be in for a big shock.
October 14th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
“The problem is lack of technically educated general workforce…”
Pay $2000 to every 17-year old whose passes a techical competancy exam.
“The problem is …people in economically and politically key position with negligible quantitative or scientific training.”
Takes care of itself when the above suggestion is adopted, thus increasing the technical competency of voters.
“But paying $2000 awards per refereed paper will firstly lead to lots of new refereed journals”
Freeze the list of appoved journals to those currenty in existence.
“…it will put interesting pressure on the referees and provide some creative tension between author and referee. ”
The authors are non-academics almost certainly unknown to the anonymous referee. If by “pressure” you mean that the need for referees might rise, have the program pay refs per paper examined. Also as the number of published non-academics rises, so will the supply of potential referees.
“[The cost of writing a paper] is more now, I’d guesstimate about $30,000 per paper.”
True. But federal coffers are not infinitely deep. If you could sell $30K, that’d be great. But $2K is a decent incentive, especially for unencumbered young people.
“it’d be nice to get $10 per citation (in “approved journals” only?) but this would simply create very powerful incentives to cite a lot of colleagues in each paper.”
The program is limited to non-academics. Academics are already paid to publish and rewarded for citations. Citation circle problem will be smaller amongst non-academics, because they are less likely to know each other.
“The problem with the model of “just pay for what end result you want” is that it hardly works for new discoveries, especially when the search may very well require 20 yrs or more…”
No one’s talking about dismantling academia, just supplementing it. In theoretical work relatively few discoveries take 20 years. A 25-year old physicist or mathematician is more likely to make a major discovery than a 45-year old. For experimental work the $2K per paper program doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless we allow the general public free use of SLAC, Fermilab, and Hubble. Even if many discoveries take 20 years, there are many that don’t. The program would make the later sort more likely.
“There’s no need to lower the barriers to entry into the academy – we get as many good people as we need, and are turning people away.”
Who wants to do that? The idea is to increase American scientific output by rewarding non-academics whenever they contribute to it. My only point about barriers to entry is that they result in a certain pervalence in the non-academic population of scientifically talented people who are unwilling to penetrate these barriers merely to be rewarded with an academic career.
October 14th, 2005 at 3:45 pm
Sheepish apologies for my terrible spelling in the previous post.
October 14th, 2005 at 5:26 pm
Side comment: is it just me and my incomplete English, or is “rising above the gathering storm” a really bad case of mixing metaphors? (since I cannot imagine how and for what purpose one would rise above a gathering storm…)
October 14th, 2005 at 5:55 pm
Moshe, we will discuss this over martinis and dinner on Sunday in Vancouver!
October 14th, 2005 at 7:24 pm
I want to address one point critically. These sorts of ‘reform and improvement’ rhetoric always profess doing something to motivate people with good minds to become teachers, on their way to some other more lucrative opportunities. Where are we as a nation, dependent as we are the best possible K-12 education we can develop, going to be successful if we only support programs that pay for teachers for five years. The first three years are involved in learning how to teach, the next two are most often used to find the best fit between one’s skills and understanding with set and setting of grade levels, communities, framework/standards expectations and so forth. If we continue to support teaching only as a transition experience for our better minds, we reduce education to yet another service sector provider system. Teachers, at every level, are professional academics and need to be honored and treated as such. We need to motivate some of our best minds to be career teachers, particularly in the sciences and math strands.
quick aside to Moshe in #15–think airplane pilot approaching developing line of intense low pressure cells along a frontal boundary.
October 14th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
Thanks Spyder, I now have a mental image but not sure how that relates to the subject matter. It may well take those martinis for me to appreciate all the subtelties.
October 14th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
Paying someone $2000 to pass a competency exam would encourage a bunch of people to study to the exam and for some significant pressure for cheating. It would have a negligible effect on actual technical competence in the population.
As for the refereeing issue: authors currently take it very personally if you reject their paper, if they are amateurs and there is real money at stake I would expect them to become even more insistent. Who would referee a paper in such circumstance?
Fix the number of journals, someone will just increase volume size. The academic publishing industry is already aggressive and money driven enough.
This is gimmickry and doesn’t address the basic issue, which is not for a few people to find niches to make progress in, the issue is the lack of a large population pool which has depth and technical competence in scientific matters.
Either at the BSc or PhD level. By either measure, looking at the total population in the US which has shown competence to that level, in for example physics, the one thing that stands out is the very small absolute number of people involved.
October 15th, 2005 at 2:55 am
“Paying someone $2000 to pass a competency exam would encourage a bunch of people to study to the exam and for some significant pressure for cheating.”
An old problem. The solutions applied for test with higher stakes (MCAT, SAT, GRE, Bar exams) could be applied here.
“It would have a negligible effect on actual technical competence in the population.”
It would have the same effect on the population as board certification tests and bar exams have on the medical and legal professions respectively. It would guarantee a certain level of specialized knowledge. It would, moreover, combat the pervasive belief among many juveniles that studying isn’t cool. Getting $2000 is cool.
“As for the refereeing issue: authors currently take it very personally if you reject their paper, if they are amateurs and there is real money at stake I would expect them to become even more insistent. Who would referee a paper in such circumstance?”
Pros have a much higher stake in getting their papers published than do amateur in this proposal. The current system of refereeing and handling disputes seems to handle pros fairly well. There’s no reason to think that it would fail when applied to amateurs who have far less at stake and would be correspondingly less irate upon receiving a rejection. As usual, the anonymity of the referees will protect them.
“Fix the number of journals, someone will just increase volume size. The academic publishing industry is already aggressive and money driven enough.”
An increase in the number of volumes would be expected if the quantity of scientific output actually rises. The purpose of fixing the list of approved journals is to prevent the appearance “vanity” journals that only pretend to peer review.
“…the issue is the lack of a large population pool which has depth and technical competence in scientific matters….the total population in the US which has shown competence to [the Ph.D.] level… is …[a]… very small absolute number of people…”
It’s not clear that if there were suddenly 50 million physics Ph.D.s in America that it would be a great day for American physics. The degree would become worthless. You’d have disgruntled people who wasted four years getting this worthless degree. And salaries in the technology sector to which these people would naturally gravitate would plummet, their skills being a dime a dozen.
In summary, there were two question addressed in this thread, to which I’ll briefly state my answers:
Q1. How can scientific output by Americans be increased?
A1. Access unused scientific talent in the general population by paying for desired results.
Q2. How can technological innovation by Americans be increased?
A2. It can’t be done. Incentives would only have a marginal effect as they would be insignificant compared to rewards from the market. Increasing the technical education of the work force won’t work, because this would lower salaries and cause talent to flee the tech sector.
Unless we’re willing to totally isolate the American economy, we have to face the fact that the value of technical labor is falling due to its rising prevalence in the third world.
To stay competitive American tech companies will be forced to fire local Americans and hire remote third-worlders. Unless the American tech workers are willing to work for third-world wages, they need to find other lines of work.
October 15th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
Typing as someone who lives in a post-industrial service oriented economy, (The UK) I naturally have an interest in this kind of topic.
Be warned, I will meander about a bit, because I am writing this off the top of my head, and long logical arguments are not my forte.
People will naturally vote with their feet. If they can get better salaries in non-science jobs, they will not do them. Plus there is a limited number of science jobs nowadays anyway, since our industry is shafted and even things like biotech have limited capabilities to absorb people.
The amount of scientific knowledge and interest in the UK is quite low- numbers taking chemistry etc at university are so low that some departments are closing. There are also insufficient jobs available for the graduates, who frequently end up in jobs that require some clear thought and numeracy, rather than actual science jobs. But at the same times, science Tv programs and magazines are moderately popular.
As for Belizean, economics is the problem indeed. Why employ a US graduate when you can take the same dollars from the USA and employ 8 in China? However, over the medium term, like 20 or 30 years, the situation will even out, as China comes up to the USA’s level and becomes a mature economy. Therefore this problem will not last forever, just long enough to eradicate large swathes of the scientifically educated and employed population, as has occured in the UK.
Belizean:
“Access unused scientific talent in the general population by paying for desired results.”
Except that these days, science is done by large corporations and universities for a reason. That reason is the capital invested in equipment, the time needed to learn how to use that equipment, the access to libraries and ability to stay cognisant of that field. Can you name many scientific (As opposed to engineering) advances from the past 50 years that came from the general public as opposed to university of corporation employed people? This is simply an effect of the increased specialisation necessary to do productive scientific work. Anyone watching the “intelligent design” debate will probably have seen people who are apparently scientifically educated, often even with PhD’s completely misunderstand the evidence for evolutionary theory and make a complete hash of attacking it.
Belizean:
“Pros have a much higher stake in getting their papers published than do amateur in this proposal.”
Professionals have higher career stakes; amateurs have higher emotional stakes. Anyone who’s seen the debates about free energy and suchlike, let alone people who think Einstein is utterly wrong, can see how people like that would deluge journals with papers “proving” that something is wrong, and would get really annoyed when they were turned down. Which is not to say there wouldnt be anything worth considering, just that there would be a lot of dross to sort through, and the situation would be quite confused.
Another problem is that it would probably be a public good for a large part of the population to be scientifically educated an aware. However, as Belizean says, this would on the face of it leave a lot of disgrunteld unemplyed people. In this I agree with him. The problem is instead how to inculcate scientific thought and critical thinking at school, without directing it towards any particular discipline. This would avoid the problem of surplus PhD’s.
Another of my pet niggles about the UK is that the gvt etc are trumpeting our wondeful research base. However, this comlpetely ignores that it is all very well providing a service to the rest of the world, namely research (when I was at uni, apparently british post docs were one of the cheapest forms of research in the world) but then the UK doesnt benefit because the spin off business’s are abroad, as well as the company headquarters, the associated service industries, the manufacturing etc. This is the side of globalisation they dont mention much.
October 15th, 2005 at 3:08 pm
[...] News from Science The New York Times runs a feature on the National Academies’ report to Congress lamenting “an Erosion of the U.S. Competitive Edge in Science” « David Bacon, The Quantum Pontiff; Mark Trodden, Cosmic Variance [...]
October 16th, 2005 at 9:09 pm
Why would there be a lot of disgruntled people if more people learned science?
Are there a lot of frustrated historians or literature theorists?
Science is part of liberal education, it is not a professional degree by and large. It is good to know more science as a matter of general education, much as knowing history, languages, literature etc is a good.
As is, a large fraction of people who learn science don’t do science. This is not a bad thing, it means that there are some people out there who know some science in other fields. Often influential and well paid people. Including people with PhDs in theoretical physics or cosmology. This is good, more are needed.
If you want to increase the number of working scientists, as opposed to the number of scientifically educated people, then you need to have consistent steadily increasing funding. Dumping a lot of money in the system rapidly leads to diminishing returns as you start to pay for bad science. Continuously changing direction and priorities introduces uncertainties and misdirected effort.
The time constant to make a scientist is long, ~ 10 years. You need consistency and reward on time scales longer than that.
Oh, and you need a competent pool people to recruit from, so you need a K-12 system that does not actively destroy mathematical ability or interest in science.
That is all.
$2000 per paper is too little to have any positive effect but large enough to cause trouble. But mostly it is irrelvant to the issue.
October 17th, 2005 at 3:46 pm
I take it you are in the USA? Over here in the UK, the whole “liberal education” stuff died decades ago. Universities have been producing professional qualifications for most of the 20th century, I understand part of the basis is the German system from the 19th century.
Which is not to say that science isnt important in a well rounded education, just that making trans-atlantic comparisons will be hard in part because the university systems are differently set up.
The point I am trying to make, is that especially these days, a degree in science is often hard going, and frequently not rewarded very well in monetary terms. Thus, less people do such degrees. Why do a science degree then go and become a manager somewhere when you can either work up to such a job straight from school, or do a degreei n business studies and step straight into such a non science job with an even higher salary?
Then, I am aware of various people who have graduated, and taken several years to get a proper science related job. Myself included. Its taken 4 years to get a proper degree related job, and now I have it its great fun. (apart from the management, but hey, you get that everywhere.) This kind of problem leads to less people doing science degrees, because they cant see that they will get a good job at the end of one. It also leads to peopel moving into other areas. Now, what if these people did want to do scienctific work originally?
My point is that there would be more disgruntled people if they did science degrees because they were itnerestedin teh science, but when it came time to use the science in real life, in a job, they find they cant ebcause there are not enough jobs in the area they wish to work in, thats a problem.
I do totally agree about what needs to be done to produce numbers of working scientists. But to increase the number of scientifically educated people, all I can suggest is improving science education at school, and making everyone stay on until 18 so they have more time to learn science.
November 6th, 2005 at 10:44 pm
11-6-05
some three (3) “point five” degrees, and some 44 years later
do they (?) still pay teaching assistants around $1800 (not $18,000) per year “plus tuition” ??
does “Japan Inc” finance (in the USA) seed, or startup, deals ?? most VC people “stick” to mezzanine deals
Is/Are DARPA, and the SBIR programs, STILL underfunded ??
Is there STILL no “general” category in THEIR (DARPA or SBIR) “wish lists” ?? what do you guys think of HR 2795 (The Patent Act of 2005) ?? same is “pending”, and “coming around the bend”
November 6th, 2005 at 10:57 pm
and what about the some 50,000 to 150,000 engineers (etc) is the USA who are now, in effect, “raising tomatoes” ?? A “mind is a terrible thing to waste”, right ??
and why train/educate people for jobs which don’t (and/or won’t) exist ??
and do “we” still “pooh pooh” guys like Goddard (rocketry), Carlson (xerography) Armstrong (FM transmission), and Gould (certain basic lasers) ??
how “clueless” can we be ??
November 6th, 2005 at 11:06 pm
hmmm—sons of MDs become MDs (but seldom engineers, physicists, etc)—sons of lawyers become lawyers (but seldom engineers, physicists, etc)
(sigh) sons of engineers or physicists become MDs or lawyers (but seldom engineers or physicists)
Are we STILL “clueless” ??
in part, I went into investment banking (periodically)—for “de money” !!!
QED, and SEMPER Fi (yes, former USMC too)
November 6th, 2005 at 11:21 pm
oh well, some believe in a million or so years we will
be “just ether floating around in the universe (in between “strings” ??)”, so, why worry ?? in the meantime, or prior to that “ether existence”, we can always just deflate the dollar (relative to, say, the yuan), and then perhaps FULL employment will exist
(but same for inflation–say gasoline at $20 per gallon ??)