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China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

bloomberg.com

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Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#261

Post by neuromantik8086 »

mrb wrote: post #132
msaharia wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That simply won't happen. 1. US isn't the only country which publishes in English. The entire Western hemisphere does. Not to mention India, already the most populous English-speaking country in the world, and has barely scratched the surface when it comes to English literacy. 2. Science needs interaction to thrive. Publishing textbooks in Mandarin is a very different ballgame than cutting edge research papers. I don…

« English will remain the defacto global Lingua Franca of science. » Just like Latin remained the defacto lingua franca of science? :-)

Latin arguably still ia the lingua franca of science when you look at specialized vocabulary (species taxonomies are the most obvious manifestation of this). Otherwise we'd be calling the outside of the brain "brain bark" instead of "cerebral cortex".

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#262

Post by neuromantik8086 »

rsj_hn wrote: post #160
mrb wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« English will remain the defacto global Lingua Franca of science. » Just like Latin remained the defacto lingua franca of science? :-)

Latin was the Lingua Franca of science until the 17th Century, or 1300 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire (Sorry Byzantium), so if that's not evidence for the stickiness of languages, I'm not sure what else you'd need. Wait for 1000 years after the North America, India, Western European civilizations collapse, and we'll see what international language scientists are using -- there's a good chance it will st…

That's a pretty gross oversimplification considering the dominance of Arabic as a scientific language during the Dark Ages (when Europeans preferred burning people to actually thinking). The word "algebra" is definitely not Latin.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#263

Post by neuromantik8086 »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #193
jjeaff wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't watch the news and problem solved. Life is great here and I rarely come across divisive political fights except on TV and the internet. The media thrives on it, so that's what they focus on.

I am/was in the same boat as OP. I moved back to Germany after almost a decade in the US (mostly Silicon Valley). Closing your eyes does not make the problems go away. Even if you don't care and avoid the tens of millions of left-behind people, for myself, looking at things like health care was enough to give me second thoughts. It is nice as long as it is nice. I had a colleague, enterprise sales, very good income,…

I'd speculate that part of the reason for why the U.S. is as dysfunctional as it is is that it still has yet to find its cultural bearings, and many people don't have the same sense of place that Europeans have. When you go to a small village in France, it seems to me that many people will be able to recount with pride (or shame) the most significant events that made that village stand out across hundreds of years of history.

In contrast, small villages in New York State or California only have around 300 years of history at best, and most residents were uprooted from their ancestral homes less than a century ago, so the same sense of grounding and appreciation for history is not there. Even the wounds of the American Civil War have not fully healed and probably won't fully until a few centuries from now.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#264

Post by baybal2 »

dh5 wrote: post #242
baybal2 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe it's time for US to let it down its own myth about American exceptionalism, and revisit the true cause of its current lead in global research: large influx of foreign talents, first from Europe, then Soviet Russia and now China/India. US was lucky to have this constant grab of the best minds from the rest of the world, but sadly, or maybe not, I can't see this would continue. That actually is US weakness, US a…

You are highly mistaken if you believe Chinese undergraduate courses are anywhere near the difficulty of American ones. Chinese classes involve having students going to have participation counted and maybe a trivial exam at the end. There is no studying done outside of some cramming at the end of the semester. Contrast that to the stream of assignments and tests from even lower-ranked schools in the US. You're right…

No.

2 year Chinese tech schools teach practical skills and trades. They may well be laxer than high school studies, in regard that kinetic, practical skills are easier to learn than abstract academic disciplines, but that doesn't mean that they did their job wrong, it's exactly the opposite.

I'm 100% sure who will win if you compare a grad of US college/tech school vs a grad of average Chinese tech institute on their first day of the job.

A Chinese electric bike maker tried to open a shop in US where they simply assemble them from knock down kits. It didn't work for them: engineering undergrads they hired struggled to get around simplest circuits and weren't able to work without supervision whatsoever. In desperation, they started hiring people with way more senior EE background, only to find out that while those will do the job, but only after meditating over circuit diagrams for half an hour for each part...

Something they couldn't imagine back in China, where from their words 9 out of 10 new young workers can learn to assemble the whole bike without a circuit scheme in a day simply because they had a lot of practice in the school.

I myself been around the electronics industry since 2007, and I saw times and times again newcomers from the West failing at running manufacturing enterprises in China because they have zero regard for having real engineers at assembly line, and the level of education of workforce in general. They think that they can hire cheapest grunts possible, and then "smart managers" will somehow make it all work with some smart tricks.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#265

Post by Balero »

p0nce wrote: post #209
ISL wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my branch of physics, the best Chinese papers are beginning to make leading contributions to their subfields. As it turns out, if you make a well-funded and sustained effort at something, you can get good at it. As an example, within my specialty: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0431-5

When will we have to learn Chinese to get to state-of-the-art results? Honest question from someone that need to read paper from its field.

How many paper's are published? Would it be economical to have them translated? Could we have a few people translating papers as a full time job?

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#266

Post by neuromantik8086 »

hatmatrix wrote: post #50
throwaway713 wrote: post #36

The quality debate about scientific merit aside, if the U.S. wants to remain "the best", then we need to incentivize the best scientists and researchers in other countries to come here and become U.S. citizens. A lot of famous physicists, mathematicians, and logicians have done this over the past 100 years. Unfortunately, the attractiveness of becoming a U.S. citizen is waning because (1) current U.S. policies on sci…

> current U.S. policies on science are extremely unfavorable to foreign researchers To U.S. researchers also - the proposal funding rate is so low on account of the resource/PI ratio that many U.S. researchers are moving to Europe where there is greater promise of hard funding.

Yup. The stats at the bottom of this page are fairly depressing:

http://homepages.rpi.edu/~newbeh/WhyFundScience.html

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#267

Post by 3pt14159 »

aroberge wrote: post #229
3pt14159 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised at how high up Canada / Switzerland is in the rankings. Both pretty small for that much impact.

?? Canada's population is roughly 1/10 of that of the US and the article count shown for Canada is also roughly 1/10 of that of the US. Exactly how is it surprising?

Well, as a Canadian, I guess I'm surprised we're so similarly outmatching the rest of the world. I figured there was more going on in Italy or Brazil than there seems to be.

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#268

Post by sangnoir »

bambataa wrote: post #191
adventured wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US social safety net is drastically better today than it was in the recent past (eg 1980 or 1990). It's now comparable to the OECD median. I know this is an unpopular statement, because for decades it has been a common attack point to go after the US on this front. However the US is spending a lot more per capita on its welfare policies, inflation adjusted, than it was a few decades ago. Particularly since the mi…

Do you know how that increased welfare spending breaks down? How much of the increase is going to pensioners vs poor working age people?

and how much of the increase is going to juicing the bottom line of corporations like Walmart and farm conglomerates? Both parties love food stamps. Total government expenditure, by itself is not a good measure of the actual outcome

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#269

Post by tralarpa »

tralarpa wrote: post #218
dash2 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. It seems clear that where you start from plays a role. At the same time, it seems obvious that Latin grammar (3 genders, 6 cases, 4 verb conjugations, 5 noun declensions, multiple moods etc) is more complex than Italian... or am I wrong?

> At the same time, it seems obvious... English: "My wife sent me an email", but "My wife sent an email to me". Yes, very obvious :)

LOL, I got a downvote. I didn't know there is a "Party against Grammatical Cases" on HN :)

Re: China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math

#270

Post by rafiki6 »

oh-kumudo wrote: post #176
throwaway713 wrote: post #36

The quality debate about scientific merit aside, if the U.S. wants to remain "the best", then we need to incentivize the best scientists and researchers in other countries to come here and become U.S. citizens. A lot of famous physicists, mathematicians, and logicians have done this over the past 100 years. Unfortunately, the attractiveness of becoming a U.S. citizen is waning because (1) current U.S. policies on sci…

US certainly has a cultural problem, out of all major countries out there, US has a weird position where a significant population denies evolution/climate change, and turned those topics into highly political charged issues. Also the US education system prior to college takes an another interesting aim to cultivate students' confidence, not by equipping them with logical training, but circumventing hard subjects like…

Sorry what makes you think the second largest economy in the world is by any measure poor? These countries are quite wealthy, despite the fact that a large chunk of their populations are poor.
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