In the special issue of Nature devoted to Science in China, Richard Van Noorden's article China by the numbers says:
China's blazing economic growth has cooled in recent years, but the nation's scientific ambitions show no signs of fading. In 2000, China spent about as much on research and development (R&D) as France; now it invests more in this area than the European Union does, when adjusted for the purchasing power of its currency. That surge in funding has paid off. China now produces more research articles than any other nation, apart from the United States, and its authors feature on around one-fifth of the world's most-cited papers. Top Chinese scientific institutions are breaking into lists of the world's best, and the nation has created some unparalleled facilities.
The article contains some excellent graphics summarizing spending on science, the scale of China's experimental facilities, research productivity, and the Chinese scientific workforce.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2016, @11:27PM
China now produces more research articles than any other nation, apart from the United States, and its authors feature on around one-fifth of the world's most-cited papers.
So they've mastered the art of Science SEO. That's the first step in the international propaganda wars of Science.
1. SEO
2. Scandal
3. ???
4. Profit!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @12:46AM
Science isn't really like search engine optimization. At all. There's this referee process that vets research. If SEO and profit are part of your vocabulary, chances are you wouldn't understand it..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @01:04AM
Whoosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @01:01AM
And most of it will be ignored because the papers are not written in english.
If there is an actual bias in science it's that many institutions ignore papers written in non english languages.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by Snotnose on Monday June 27 2016, @01:24AM
[quote]And most of it will be ignored because the papers are not written in english.[quote]
This is the insidious part of it. The Chinese can read the english papers, yet the west can't read the Chinese papers. By the time Trumpillory catches on it will be too late, the Chinese will be at the forefront of various sciences.
Here's hoping my Social Security will survive the waves of destruction that I see coming to the USA in the next decade or so.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday June 27 2016, @01:28AM
All hail being 1" off when pressing a button :(
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday June 28 2016, @12:23AM
So I get modded "disagree" with no comment as to why.
Whomever modded me disagree, please enlighten us as to why you think I'm wrong.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by CRCulver on Monday June 27 2016, @03:35AM
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @09:35AM
大多數中國科技論文其實都是用英文寫的。
There, FTFY.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday June 27 2016, @01:12PM
Yup, anything else would be very weird and counterproductive for the Chinese.
I'll also add (in case one really thinks it's meaningful to play with numbers in this manner, which it isn't) that since China has something roughly like a quarter of the world population Chinese science funding/efforts probably aren't at that level or at a 1 to 1 ratio of "science per person" yet. And before all the people come along who like to say that this or that group has a higher ratio: these are nonsense numbers without actual meaning because no scientist or even a group made of all living scientists do it all from scratch by themselves —they're standing on the shoulders of giants and all that (in fact there aren't really even any giants just lots and lots of people during at the very least the last three hundred years but truly much further back than that in many very important fields like mathematics (yes not a science but very useful for science (another nested group of parentheses because I triggered the "nesting parentheses" rule and I'm too lazy to rewrite it :P))).
Anyway best regards to China; please continue to "scare" everybody else into going back to or continuing to do (more) science :)
P.s. to China (hey they might read this!): please stop reverting to "Maoist" bullshit like you're doing with HK booksellers/gossip traders. You're better and smarter than that now and you know exactly what you'll end up doing to yourself when you continue down that road, it's the wrong direction (no matter how popular it might seem to be or how many else make the same mistakes or worse). You hadn't even finished walking all the way in the right direction yet (prisoners & organs, Tibet, local abuses) so it won't take you long to fuck it all up for yourselves if you're not careful... >:(
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @06:35PM
Good points.
I would love if the Chinese produce quality science. I'm worried that all they may end up doing is flooding the journals with useless trash. The SEO comment earlier in the thread is on the money. Submitting papers to journals is a total PITA nowadays - presumably a barrier to entry - but for us "old guys" (I'm 42) who can't spend the entire day formatting a docx file it's too much effort; front page separate, signed copyright forms sent by fax from every author, images in tif format at 420 dots/inch, tables submitted separately, Figures submitted separately, Figure captions entered twice - once in a special web form and once as a separate docx file, etc. The winners will be the ones who can stand the most punishment, Darwin-style.
The reviewing quality is also patchy. I've had reviews where the guy's only objection was "The simulation results are totally unacceptable". Rejected. Likewise I've reviewed papers where the 2nd reviewer just wrote a few words, e.g. "Not clear what the novelty is". Rejected. That is some 1/2 assed shit. But again, if the reviewer is being sent shit to wade through 10 times a month, I can understand the lack of effort.
All I'm saying is you can't rely on the review process to take care of quality. It will easily get overwhelmed when the SNR falls low enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @01:41PM
Mentions pre-WWII-era Japanese nuclear research publications being sometimes ignored: http://www.omatumr.com/abstracts2005/PKKAutobiography.pdf [omatumr.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @01:05AM
now it invests more in this area than the European Union does, when adjusted for the purchasing power of its currency.
Before or after Brexit?
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday June 27 2016, @01:42PM
Numbers like that are usually highly misleading (see my other post, and it barely scratched the surface) but it's an interesting question.
The UK spending on science is probably much less than the following could be misinterpreted to mean but I know the UK amounted to about one sixth of the EU market (few MSM or "experts" seem to give much thought to that which is of course also interesting; it wasn't just "one member" that left but one sixth of the entire EU market¹). I don't know what todays developments are yet (could be anything: it's all speculation and manipulation to begin with) but it could offer part of an explanation as to how the stock exchanges in the EU did worse (fell further) than the ones in London on Friday (another thing that wasn't widely pointed out). And since many don't seem to know it: the fall in the exchange rates of British pounds is a massive boon to any industrious and exporting (raw materials too) economy.
¹ I bet the "elite" retards like Juncker [wikipedia.org] didn't ever consider that and still don't.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday June 27 2016, @02:28AM
The Republican Party in particular has turned against science. The US will lose its #1 status to China before much longer anyway, but attitudes like that will make it happen sooner.
It also hurts that universities are scrambling for money. Many of these new private universities are the worst for that. I hear that Trump University is basically a scam, which certainly fits all I've ever heard about The Donald. Student loans are another horrible scam. All that inadvertently lends strength to the anti-intellectual idea that higher education is bull, just an excuse to squeeze people for money.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday June 27 2016, @02:53AM
The Republican Party in particular has turned against science.
Which Republican Party would that be? The Republican one or the Democrat one? /sarc
For example, it's not the Republicans arguing that increasing minimum wage and labor protectionism will mean more jobs via some highly contrived model of consumer demand-based economics (although I do hear that there are a few anti-immigration Republicans arguing for higher minimum wage on the basis that it'll mean less migrant workers employed). Or that consensus matters more than evidence (in a variety of areas).
Then there's the universal expediency exemptions employed by everyone who ever plays the science card. We have to follow the science to my naturally logical point of view, unless it's inconvenient. Then we'll disregard the science.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 27 2016, @04:05AM
The one that bothers me is "the science is in, the debate is settled" when, in-fact, the science is in a horrible state of disagreement and conflicting conclusions, but the debaters have cherry picked their studies and lined them up in a pretty presentation showing just how much "science" backs them up.
And, on the other end of the scale, laws that require "consensus, peer-reviewed, evidence based methodologies" but, in reality, it's all a political posturing game - people do what they want until there's sufficient (political/legal) pressure to change, and even though the law is calling for a "science based approach," the science rarely, if ever, comes into it because the legal/court system is so onerous that the laws requiring the "science based approach" are never actually interpreted in court, it's all settled in pre-trial negotiations.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @09:41AM
but the debaters have cherry picked their studies and lined them up in a pretty presentation showing just how much "science" backs them up.
The same way the anti-science crowd cherry picks portions of the Bible to combat any science they encounter?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 27 2016, @03:59PM
The same way the anti-science crowd cherry picks portions of the Bible to combat any science they encounter?
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday June 27 2016, @05:33PM
Good point. It's the opposite problem, "doubt is our product", that I see more.
Some special interest sees in some science a threat to their profits, usually research that shows their materials are unsafe, and instead of trying to solve the problem, fires up a propaganda campaign to throw doubt on the research. The techniques include demanding impossibly high standards of proof, making up and cherry picking facts to fit the decisions they want and trying to present that as science, and even ad hominem attacks on the researchers, try to smear the scientists as just as venal as they and supposedly everyone are. This is what Big Oil has done about the CO2 pollution their products adds to the atmosphere. We had a big fight over asbestos, and we're still not quite done with lead. We're still hunting around for better refrigerants for air conditioning that won't destroy the ozone layer or make Global Warming even worse when they escape, having moved from R-12 to R-134a, and now looking at moving on to HFO-1234yf. The fight is still hot over plastics such as Bisphenol A and phthalates, and of course the War on Drugs. Big Tobacco was the pioneer of the modern "doubt is our product" propaganda campaign.
I see propaganda as one of our biggest problems. Would better education enable more people see through the bull? What about the people who run these big businesses, can we get them to see that running propaganda campaigns is folly? More recently, some have begun to grasp that, and have changed their tune somewhat, but I still don't feel they can be trusted not to be fools. Suppose the like of Exxon's denialism of Climate Disruption had actually worked, and based on their assurances that there's no harm in burning more carbon, we go right on pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere until Antarctica and Greenland melt, and coasts everywhere drown? That ultimately gains Exxon nothing, quite the opposite. So far, we've kept the nukes sheathed. Be a hell of a note if we succeed in keeping the nukes leashed, but succumb to Climate Disruption. Exxon would go down in history as the poster child of reckless unbridled capitalism that puts immediate profit before all else, and shifts all responsibility and blame for external costs to others, the ultimate act of selfish evil, who managed to overturn our world nearly as thoroughly as if nuclear war had happened. Exxon was smoking in the restaurant, and trying to tell the rest of us the smoke is not a problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 28 2016, @03:16AM
Some special interest sees in some science a threat to their profits, usually research that shows their materials are unsafe, and instead of trying to solve the problem, fires up a propaganda campaign to throw doubt on the research. The techniques include demanding impossibly high standards of proof, making up and cherry picking facts to fit the decisions they want and trying to present that as science, and even ad hominem attacks on the researchers, try to smear the scientists as just as venal as they and supposedly everyone are. This is what Big Oil has done about the CO2 pollution their products adds to the atmosphere. We had a big fight over asbestos, and we're still not quite done with lead. We're still hunting around for better refrigerants for air conditioning that won't destroy the ozone layer or make Global Warming even worse when they escape, having moved from R-12 to R-134a, and now looking at moving on to HFO-1234yf. The fight is still hot over plastics such as Bisphenol A and phthalates, and of course the War on Drugs. Big Tobacco was the pioneer of the modern "doubt is our product" propaganda campaign.
That's not who's been selling doubt [slashdot.org] to me in the latest Slashdot thread:
My perception of the Hansen paper was that it's impossible to rule out large non-linear changes in sea level rise due to ice sheet dynamics that we don't understand too well, not that it would absolutely happen. Many other scientists have made more linear predictions. The future will tell. Meanwhile sea level is rising faster than earlier linear predictions so far.
This guy has several dozen similar posts like that in the particular discussion. When an argument hinges on it being impossible to rule out large problems, then anyone can pull the same rhetorical trick and fail to rule out other large problems that are at odds with the argument. That's the problem with the fallacy of arguing from ignorance.
What gets ignored here is that oil companies don't really have a dog in this fight. For example, they had record profits a few years back and oversupply now. Neither was due to demand reduction from the concerns over global warming, but had everything to do with supply variation and some demand reduction from the recent recessions. That leads to the second bit of ignorance, namely, we have that fossil fuel companies get greatly outspent by the pro-climate change side. Non profits like the World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace greatly outspend parties like Exxon or the Koch brothers. Yet the propaganda getting spit around only talks about the supposed Big Oil propaganda.
I think we should instead think of why environmental propaganda is so remarkably ineffective rather than dwell on the small amount of pro-oil propaganda outlets out there. I think the answer is that environmental propaganda is so clueless, viciously repetitive, and counterproductive that it does the work of undermining the climate change threat model all by itself.
For example, a common argument is that humanity will have to weaken its standard of living in order to preserve the environment. Right there, you just lost everyone who values a standard of living more than the environment. First, you concede (whether you intended to or not) that environmentalism leads to a decline in standard of living while modern society less trammeled by environmental regulation does not. That drives off most of your would-be supporters right there.
Second, for those wise in the way of demographics, wealthy people are low fertility and less polluting than poor people. This sort of argument encourages a dysfunctionally poor and highly polluting society. High standards of living are essential to environmental protection rather than being an obstruction to remove.
Third, when such people get into power, we see a variety of dumb policy choices which enforce the public's impression of their foolishness such as Germany doubling the price of its electricity for no real gain to the environment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @09:38AM
I hear that Trump University is basically a scam
Trump University was a "how to make a killing in real estate like The Donald" program. It was not portrayed as a real school of higher learning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @06:02PM
US students have ipads, chromebooks and learn about MS office in 10th grade while their parents have never heard of leenox, so we have nothing to worry about.