an interesting report on how the usa is falling behind in funding (employing) and educating in science research. here are a few quotes i found particularly interesting.
Last year, more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China, compared to 350,000 in India and 70,000 in the United States.
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.a couple of the reccommendations:
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.
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.
full report ny times article
2 comments:
here is the deal... you see engineering isn't all its cracked up to be. its sold as this you'll be rich and friggen intelegent! well.. you know one thing pretty good, but you still can't write a decent paper. an undergrad with two english classes could write a better paper than an engineer.
in the US, from my experience, the engineers are worked to the bone. raises, promitions, and decent compensation is far and few between. stack on that the beuracracy that exists in this country and I'd venture a guess that you'd get a better product FASTER from those 11 (probably engineers with masters) in india. the few that I know actually work well into the night to have a major portion of the project done when the boss (the guy in the US) gets in in the morning. they are amazing.
The US needs to resell (think marketing and promotions) the attractiveness of being an engineer. when you stop and look at it objectivly its not that good of a job. it just adds to the office pale syndrome.
the method? start with better leadership. define the projects and teams upfront so that the engineers CAN be successful instead of wallowing in stupidity of leadership. then promote the good ones, and get the crap ones to move on. when the degree reflects awe in the eyes of others like it use too, THEN we'll have more students taking it up again.
then again, maybe your right, maybe the students really are stupider now (what ever happened to a C average, we just overly inflated the supposed intelegence while india and china beat us at our own game)
yup. its a ramble, but if you made it this far it means you liked it.
i wonder if software developement is the only field where we seem to have 100 people doing the same simple task day in and day out. what ever happened to spending a bit for a packaged solution and being happy with it. why spend more to re-invent the wheel; just to call it your wheel?
it frusterates me how much MY management (those above my emediate boss) are frusterated when i voice my opinions and holding my peers accountable to do SIMPLE things instead of me doing it FOR them all the time they are way more happy when i do little things for everyone who is too disinterested to learn how to do their jobs well while the core of our department is in disarray and no one cares (because it's not on the surface) - i term this the rotting core no one pays attention to.
upper managed is WAY more concerned about me being ready at a moments notice to setup a video projecter for them then the penetration testing, security cleanup, raid additions, backup verification, secured code, technical documentation, higher peer accountablity, ect stuff i was HIRED to do. this bothers me. i wonder if i should let the core rot far enough so the surface of the apple is not so shiny? do you think then they'd notice?
they'd probably fix things then AND get rid of the person that brought it to their attention. funny how that works.
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