The U.S. share of global science and technology activity has shrunk in some areas even as absolute activity has continued to grow, as China and other Asian countries have invested in science and engineering education and increased their research spending.
That's one of the main takeaways of the "State of U.S. Science and Engineering" 2020 report, published by the National Science Board Wednesday. The report has historically been published every other year, but starting with this year's edition, the NSB is transitioning its format from a single report published every two years to a series of shorter reports issued more frequently.
"While the U.S. remains a leading player, other countries have seen the benefits of investing in research and education and are following our example," said Julia Phillips, chair of the NSB Science and Engineering Policy Committee. "While China is not the only story, its dramatic annual rate of R&D [research and development] growth is impressive. Other countries have seen the benefits of investing in research, and China is on a path to shortly become the world's largest R&D performer.
National Science Board report finds US dominance in science is slipping
State of U.S. Science and Engineering - 2020 report
(Score: 4, Touché) by XivLacuna on Sunday January 19 2020, @12:50AM (23 children)
We got the most diversity! That's much more important than anything else.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @01:18AM
You just answered the problem.
(Score: 1, Touché) by NPC-131072 on Sunday January 19 2020, @01:28AM (7 children)
Clearly we need more positive discrimination [thecollegefix.com] to maintain a scientific lead.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:02AM (6 children)
Asians are too smart! That's not fair, let's foment discord between the Asians and the Blacks, with every other shade in between, While we Jews win!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 19 2020, @04:02AM (5 children)
The Jews have taken over banking/finance and entertainment... why do they need to bother with science when they've got all the money, and people willingly give money to them?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday January 19 2020, @04:55AM (4 children)
And nobody goes into working in science for the money.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 19 2020, @01:17PM (3 children)
Tony Stark and Elon Musk - and at least one of them is fictional...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:07PM
Bad example with Musk. He could be vastly richer than he is today if he simply agreed to join the price fixing cartel with Boeing/Lockheed and the US Government. Part of the reason capitalism is in trouble now a days. It's a lot more profitable for the players to rig the game when there's barriers to entry (which is basically the definition of aerospace) than to compete down to the lowest price. So much of our production has become intellectual property which entails government granted monopolies, so it screws the pooch of competition which is a fundamental core of effective capitalism.
I do believe he is genuinely 100% driven by Mars.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday January 19 2020, @11:05PM (1 child)
I'm not sure what you mean. Maybe we have differing definitions of "scientist", and I'm okay with that. I don't think of Elon Musk as a scientist. I'll definitely call him an engineer, entrepreneur, capitalist, marketer, etc., and I think highly of him. He creates and operates in markets that use scientific discoveries. I'm sure he employs and inspires many scientists, and that's a good thing.
Oh, that's right, he does scientific research: smoking pot- measuring and recording the effects. You got me there. :)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 19 2020, @11:22PM
Elon is a celebrity rich guy who makes money doing smart things - it's inevitable that Elon the man will be a "leader type" with less than stellar hands-on abilities (see also: Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, hell even Zuck & Gates...)
However, Elon's endeavors - as much or more than Thomas Edison's - are breaking new ground through research, whether strictly using the scientific method or not.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:10AM
Nothing like some racist stupidity! I'd get into a debate if it wasn't so pointless with you alt-righterz.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 19 2020, @04:00AM
It's not about diversity, it's about the quarterly report - what's our gross income and net profit in the next 90 days or less? How do you think long term investment looks on that report? Bad, almost always bad, at least for the next 90 days.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @04:09AM (6 children)
This is happening primarily because the private sector has figured out that it's easier to just buy politicians that allow them to engage in anticompetitive practices than innovate. At the same time, there are an increasing number of areas in which the mouth breathers on the right refuse to allow government resources be used for research.
The end result is that there's an increasing amount of research that can't be done in the US because there's no money and that's even before you consider the results of patents being used to block development rather than for use in products and the decreasing amount of money that the masses have to spend on new and innovative products. Which again aren't necessarily being made unless the corps have to as it's cheaper to abuse the political process to remove any liability on their part than it is to compete with other corporations to provide the customer with the best possible product.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 19 2020, @05:43AM (2 children)
What's the value of this amount of research? How many flasks are we generating per turn?
I think a key problem with this "let's throw money at it" idea is that a lot of research has baked in uselessness.
Last I checked, the decreasing amount of money was actually an increasing amount. Wouldn't be the first time a promising bit of research got torpedoed by the sign.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:47PM (1 child)
That's an impossible question to answer, you don't know until the research has been done. Some inventions like the car are relatively easy for people to imagine a use for an estimate the value to society. But, asking people about things like the Internet, people just wouldn't have any sort of meaningful guess for how much they'd get out of it. They probably would recognize that it could replace letters and in person communication. They might get it as a replacement for physical books, perhaps, but it's doubtful they'd foresee much beyond that.
Fair point, but keep in mind that due to inflation and the increasing cost of doing anything, that it needs to increase just to stay put. Much of the low hanging fruit type of research has already been done. On top of that, there is money being wasted on things like gender research and string theory that just makes matters worse and funding for climate research is getting worse.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:54PM
Really? You already gave a couple examples, cars and the internet where we could guess and get some of it right - particularly when we ask the scientists and engineers rather than the clueless common man.
Inflation is irrelevant. There is no significant cost to science from how many zeros are on your currency. The increased cost of doing anything is not just due to harder problems. It's also due to the public funding model which disengages the cost of a project from the scientific output of a project.
So what on climate research? It's vastly overfunded and overstaffed as is. And you already claimed that "you don't know until the research has been done", so how can you have these judgments about gender research and string theory? Maybe the next trillion dollar industry is hiding in present day gender research, right? /sarc
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday January 19 2020, @06:35AM (2 children)
This is fair, though you should acknowledge there are mouth-breathers on the left who oppose research which may undermine their dogma, just like the right.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:43PM (1 child)
The individuals on the left that oppose research are few and far between compared with the right and they mostly don't have any political clout. And they don't generally oppose anywhere near the amount of research that the ones on the right do. What's more, it tends to be based in actual understanding rather than fear of proving something they don't want to be true.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:56PM
Sure. I present the Precautionary Principle and its widespread use as a counterexample.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday January 19 2020, @08:55PM (4 children)
Sure, because the rise of fundamentalism, the constant anti-intellectualism, the corporate hegemony, and the profits-uber-alles mentality that stifles research and perverts grant funding aren't things. No, surely not. None of those. It's only the fact that people are trying to get more women or ethnic minorities into the field. Nothing else.
You are so full of shit the whites of your eyes have gone brown and smelly. Fuck off with this dog-whistling idiocy.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Sunday January 19 2020, @11:15PM (1 child)
The above doesn't exactly describe unicorns and zombies, but both of those cases are even more pathological.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday January 20 2020, @12:17AM
Christ, you're right, and that's *even worse...*
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:43PM (1 child)
"people are trying to get more women or ethnic minorities into the field"
that's a funny way of saying "discriminating based on race, gender and sexual preference".
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 21 2020, @12:08AM
I'm not a big fan of affirmative-action style programs either, if only because they are attempting to solve the problem at the wrong end of the pipeline. They're an aspirin for a cancer patient. But when the choice is aspirin or nothing...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @01:44AM (18 children)
Americans genuinely believe that the entire world is controlled by some magic "god", which means science can not be real. China? Not so much. Besides, the management brochures say just to get all tech from China/India and buy one of their smart phones because trendy.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @01:55AM (2 children)
Haven't been to the mainland, but in Taiwan I met a number of Chinese people that believed in all sorts of sky fairies. One of them bought a nice looking bamboo tool to scratch her skin, let out the demons the next time she got sick. Another burned fake paper money on a regular basis for good luck. Hard to believe that the Communists have managed to get rid of the old beliefs in the ~70 years they've been in control--but I'd be happy to be told otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:55AM (1 child)
The Chinese have a god for money. Not even the Jews have that.
(Score: 5, Touché) by c0lo on Sunday January 19 2020, @05:14AM
Yeap, totally opposite to Americans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Sunday January 19 2020, @05:11AM (13 children)
Yeah, no.
China might have had a nice period of 30 years where religion was all-but-banned and the particular vareties of magical thinking that we like here are less common, but other absurdities, like Traditional Chinese Medicine have huge inroads for similar levels of stupid.
People are people everywhere, and that means stupid
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:51PM (5 children)
You say Traditional Chinese Medicine as if the government isn't spending tons of money on research into the safety and efficacy of those traditional practices. You also say that as if there isn't at least some access to more modern forms of treatment, which there is. There are issues with Chinese medicine, but what you're saying is inaccurate.
They use TCM because it often times works. Yes, proof by induction isn't great, but doing medical research is hard and there's a lot of medical practices in the west that are based on even less. The recommendations for sodium intake are based on the experiences of 6 patients in France with high blood pressure from the better part of a century ago. And nobody seems to think that's a problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @05:42PM (2 children)
Western medicine is driven by unthinking application of a catalog of assumed probabilities. Just read about a case where a thirteen year old girl was vomiting up her food and losing a lot of weight. They gave her psych pills, because girls like that must have bulimia. A year later she comes back with the vomiting and refkux. Now they scanned her and found out her stomach was herniated through her diaphragm. They let her keep the stomach, installed a grommet to prevent her stomach from herniating again. She comes back a while later with the same symptoms. Doctors order another scan and now discover she actually suffers from SMA syndrome, which may have been the cause for all her problems.
A rare disease for sure, but it shows the lack of broader analysis in reaching a treatment decision.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 19 2020, @11:23PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @03:16AM
Tiger penis may have been better for her than the psych drugs.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday January 19 2020, @11:23PM (1 child)
>They use TCM because it often times works.
People pray to God because it often times works. We forget when it doesn't.
As a previous poster stated, people are people, i.e. stupid and so very fallible.
The Chinese are very good at double think. They praise TCM, but when shit hits the fan, they go to a Western doctor. They praise their country, but those that have the money are moving it and their families to the West as fast as possible. They praise socialism, but they're even more capitalist than the West.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @04:59AM
The point you're ignoring is that they're engaging in research to evaluate whether or not it's working and when it does work weather it works better than other options.
I get that it's China so, they don't know anything about medicine, hurr, hurr, hurr, but you're making yourself look like a moron. I used to live over there and they use both, it's not unusual to go to a doctor and receive both medicine and herbs to address the problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:58PM (6 children)
Other than Communism.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Sunday January 19 2020, @09:28PM (5 children)
The set of things that stupid people deem religions is quite large. Thank you for your contribution to the list though.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 20 2020, @04:19PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @04:23PM (3 children)
It's a dumb point based on a dumb interpretation of a dumb theory of ideology. Within those confines, though, it does technically qualify as a point, so there's that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 20 2020, @07:10PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @08:11PM (1 child)
The comparison of ideology to religion is inherently vacuous, almost whenever it's made. All people everywhere believe at least some incorrect things through bad information, bad deductions, social conventions, occasionally literal delusions, often under the umbrella of common sense. Religion distinguishes itself, not through ferver or wrongness, but by the umbrella of understanding that dictates the belief.
Particularly distinguishing for religion against other ways of getting things wrong: a fundamental tie to an unprovable supernatural element, an implicit moral value tied to belief as an end to itself, and sometimes a claim to final and unquestionable moral authority that can never be questioned derived from the supernatural component.
People, largely assholes with no moral structure at all, will just toss anyone who fervently believes anything on any moral grounds into that group because they can't or won't separate making moral inferences from claiming final authority, and glibly ignore the other two characteristics. It's not just communism that gets this lazy-ass treatment.
Now if you wanted to argue that the CCP was a cult, you'd have an easier time of it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 20 2020, @11:28PM
"Vacuous" says the man who just supported that claim with a meager observation that people believe things.
Particularly distinguishing for religion against other ways of getting things wrong: a fundamental tie to an unprovable supernatural element, an implicit moral value tied to belief as an end to itself, and sometimes a claim to final and unquestionable moral authority that can never be questioned derived from the supernatural component.
People, largely assholes with no moral structure at all, will just toss anyone who fervently believes anything on any moral grounds into that group because they can't or won't separate making moral inferences from claiming final authority, and glibly ignore the other two characteristics. It's not just communism that gets this lazy-ass treatment.
The obvious rebuttal here is that first, Communism places a supernatural importance on the value of labor and attributes a supernatural power of obstruction to the various, mostly imaginary enemies of Communist progress like counterrevolutionaries, Capitalists, reactionaries, etc. For an example of the first, Karl Marx claimed the supremacy of labor ("labour theory of value") in economics even to the point of claiming they should be receiving reward for all future use of the products of their labor. This mystical value of labor could not be annulled even by generous wages, the product shifting to other hands, or deliberate action of the workers themselves.
For example of the second, upon the successful establishment of the USSR virtually all industrial and agricultural efforts were put into the hands of worker groups. When this started to fail, the government started demanding [wikipedia.org] retaliation against perceived enemies:
The point here is not the well-known brutality of the regime, but the certainty that 100 kulaks (basically, relatively wealthy peasants who owned their own farm land) could be found to blame for it.
Second, there is the social observance of Communism, including the repurposing of religious buildings as museums for Communism. All that changed was the target of worship.
Cults are a subcategory of religion, by connotation considered to be unusually wrong or extreme. The nightmarish habit of most Communist governments to arbitrarily turn directions and destroy hapless people who got in the way would validate the definition of cult, but it doesn't make them not a religion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:35PM
Are religions or social issues a more inhibiting force now a days?
Try doing any research whatsoever in genetics or suggest anything that runs against tabula rasa / the blank slate hypothesis, and you'll get labeled, removed, and blacklisted faster than you can blink, literally even if you are the person who took the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA. That's because of social issues. I'm not sure where religion is even playing a part anymore. One might argue stem cell research, but that's now completely legal in the US and there are even multibillion dollar government institutions dedicated solely to it. Similarly for things like evolution which is now a regular part of curriculum everywhere.
I do think China is winning largely on that social issues aspect. They're focused on optimal outcomes while we're increasingly focused on equal outcomes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @01:50AM (8 children)
> to a series of shorter reports issued more frequently.
I guess no one was reading the big report issued every two years, so now they are going to spoon feed us?
From tfl:
> But while China's publication output exceeds that of the U.S. in terms of quantity, China trails the U.S. and the E.U. in terms of citation impact -- a measure of how frequently publications are cited.
This is what I suspected. I've been peer reviewing engineering papers for many years now and the ones from China are becoming more frequent, but rarely are worth publication. Not to say that US and Euro papers are all great, I send a fair number of them back for changes too.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:01AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Sunday January 19 2020, @05:15AM
It takes a while to build up a respectable faculty and refine quantity into quality by identifying shortcomings and purging(or more likely sidelining) those who produce mediocre results.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday January 19 2020, @06:40AM (5 children)
First we shipped over all the manufacturing technology to China so that stuff could be "designed in California" or where ever because we wouldn't want Americans to have manufacturing jobs that pay well enough. Now China and other countries have been using this tech and seeing what it does and what we do with it -- they aren't morons. Before long, there'll be no reason for the designs to come from CA -- they'll just make them all in house. At that point, US publishing houses won't matter.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Sunday January 19 2020, @08:24AM (2 children)
It's a generational problem. The public schools in the US are a faint shadow of what they were in the 50s, 60s, 70s when the US actually had a goal of leading in science and technology. Those generations are either dying off, retiring, or otherwise getting pushed out of the way by dogma pushing illiterates. So what we have now is a tsunami of scientifically illiterates that has been building up for two or three generations. This might be a symptom of quarterly budgeting ideology or just anti-knowledge ideology or both because cutting the basics ends up costing society a lot more than was initially "saved" in the cuts.
Reagan led the way in starting the wackdoodles on their jihad against teachers and cutting school budgets again and again [neatoday.org] every few years. You can't educate without teachers plus a minimum amount of money for the classrooms and materials. It's just not able to happen. The US is now reaping the harvest it has sown for 40 years. Why has that path been chosen for the country?
There are a lot outside the US pushing for a final implosion, the Saudis, China, and Russia. However, to make matters worse there are actual political parties inside the border pushing for the destruction, not to mention a great many organized groups. The latter thrive in a low-education, dogmatized environment thus making the situation a little worse.
The US needs a Marshall Plan for itself to get out of the pit it has been actively digging since Reagan's backers paid a certain group of hostage-takers to hold on to their victims until after a particular election.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:58PM
Things are gradually changing on that front, but there's still so much bullshit being taught to children. People keep teaching that race is a thing and that racism is the cause of where some of these communities are today. But, if you actually look at the history of the US, the degree to which a community was persecuted is a poor predictor of where they'll be a couple generations down the road. You saw it with the Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Germans, Russians, Jews and numerous other groups that were subjected to astonishing levels of abuse and had extensive efforts to hold them back and yet these days things have gotten to the point, where it's hard for most young people to fathom that those groups were ever really oppressed. When we had a ballot measure last fall to bring back affirmative action the Chinese and Japanese were the only people of color that weren't going to get any "help" from it.
A lot of it though goes back to the home. We've created policies that make it hard for parents to be at home monitoring their children and helping them develop the necessary habits. There are 168 hours in a week and school is only about 35 hours or so, the remaining 133 hours are at not school and that has a huge impact.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @04:27PM
Nah we train more scientists and engineers, both in terms of raw numbers and percentage of the population, than ever before. Our schools, for all their multitudinous problems, are better than they were.
In terms of spending to put those people to work, particularly on large-minded projects that don't immediately turn a profit, way lower.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 19 2020, @08:36AM (1 child)
We need to remind people of that from time to time. Americans have always had a mindset that the rest of the world is stupid. In the '80's, I heard many a steel worker claim that nobody can make steel like we can. In the time since, we've seen Europeans, India, and China go far down the road to making equal, and sometimes better steel than we ever did. Yes, even China. I mocked their products because they sucked. In the past couple years, I think some of their products suck less. Still a lot of suckage, but sucking less.
They're even making crappy tool steel now, and producing molds for our industry. Molds from China cost about 80% of molds from Europe or the US. They are far more costly to run, because they need tweaking to begin with, and break more often, but they do run. A cheap suck-ass tool is better than an expensive tool, if you ask any MBA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @10:01AM
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:06PM
Lesson from the new world to the old world:
Manufacturing follows cost
Design follows manufacturing
Science follows design
Power follows all of the above
Lesson from the new, new world to the new world:
ditto, but why did you forget?
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday January 19 2020, @04:18PM
The best explanation of this is the book "dumbing us down" by John Taylor Gatto.
The second best, I think, is this diagram showing how wealth has been sucked out of the bottom 90% of the american economy, which is where inventions and scientists come from.
https://archive.is/ZinJT [archive.is] Why aren't you poor people pursuing science more! Because life sucks, there is no disposable income. I have at least 10 business ideas I'd like to start but this is not an ecomony where you have the sort of income to 'pursue your dreams', everyone is scrambling, all of the time. So gtfo with your complaints about the lack of science. Rich people are sciencing plenty in their ivy league ivory towers.
The third, or one of the best explanations is my page of semantical discussions about words whose meaning is being undermined by degenerate culture:
jmichaelhudson.net/important-definitions
This article is like "why be science hurtin so bad, bitch? Bring on that prequel! I wan see what happens next! Get me some a those bounty pucks, aw yeah fo real!" The actual language of english culture is degrading under our feet, no thanks to oligarch operated mass media and oligarch operated social media, who I believe has this semantic disintegration as their intent.
Look up 'bitch talk' in the list of defined terms with ctrl f and take it from there. The truth is sad, but sometimes at least a little bit funny.
Short answer though is they want science and innovation and knowledge all controlled in their secret laboratories and for the rest of us out here to get science and knowledge doled out to us like caged chickens get their water from the tube.
I reject this, as well as the entire uniform degenerate culture that every single subculture in the world is experiencing at the same time, thinking everyone is just out to get just them. I'm just saying what dr. who would.
thesesystemsarefailing.net