Lately I’ve been hearing comments about things like declining research competitiveness, bright young Indians choosing to stay in India instead of come to the U.S. to seek their fortune, and comments about how even the research that is being done in American universities is increasingly being done by foreign students. Some international talent(which presumably has scores of advisors helping with these decisions) is even choosing to be paid in euros instead of dollars. The troubling thing about this is that instead of these comments coming from the more rabble-rousing section of the web, they’re coming from intelligent, well-read people with a worldly perspective. If you were looking for the proverbial “canary in a coal mine”, wouldn’t you think these people would be about the best indicators you could find in that respect?

While I like to think that Steve’s post was particularly prescient, in fact if you were listening to the same sources he apparently has been, it’s blindingly obvious. I don’t claim to be anywhere as smart as the people I linked to above, but I don’t think you really need to be if you’re listening to the right people, and overwhelmingly they’re saying there’s a problem.

Of course, we didn’t get ourselves in this mess overnight (become a consumer economy instead of production economy, as Maitri so deftly puts it), and we won’t dig ourselves out of it overnight either. Let’s just hope that our years of neglect of the educational system turn out better than our years of neglect of the levee system.

I also thought most Belgian ales were produced by spontaneous fermentation.

via Tipping the Spherical Cow.

My colleague Attila pointed me to X2, an effort by the Institute for the Future to collect and collaboratively rank hypotheses about future directions of science. When I read about it, it sounded interesting, but coming from futurists, I rather expected it to be all style and no substance.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a substantial amount of interesting content on the site, and it seems like the core functions all work as expected. Instead of being just another pawn in my attempt to own the first page of Google results for my name, William Gunn, (I dominate Mr. Gunn already 😉 ) I might actually spend some time there.

The basic function of the site is similar to Scintilla, in that users submit content and you can rate it and find related content you may not have seen, but instead of being fed by a collection of RSS feeds
(though there are user-suggested feeds as an input source), users submit “signals”, which are short essay-style blurbs about an idea or concept whose time is coming. “Hypotheses” can be written about the proposed meaning of a signal, and “forecasts” combine a set of signals which illustrate a trend. Because the types of content aren’t just blog posts parsed from a feed, the site isn’t overrun with noise, such as the scienceblogs.com blather that has troubled my use of other recommendation engines. Interestingly, the “Add a feed” link simply goes to a project info blurb, so perhaps they’re working on that very problem.

I said I would say nothing more about the efforts of some legislators to encourage and protect the teaching of their religion in our schools, but now Louisiana, my state, has gone and done the same idiotic thing Florida did. This is a nakedly obvious attempt to drum up some poll participation from the values voters(see stem cells and the 2004 election).
In the words of The Gambit Weekly,

the last thing Louisiana needs now is to portray itself to the world as an intellectual backwater.

Antonio C B Oliveira had himself tested and wrote a little program to compare the results, finding only 23 discrepancies out of 560299 calls made by both services. Megan Smolenyak’s husband’s tests from both services were compared by Ann Turner, who found 35 disagreements among 560128 co-calls.

The called disagreements are fewer than the no call differences, which certainly seems like an acceptable rate to me. I wonder what the disagreements would be if someone were to have themselves tested twice, using two independent samples, say 6 months apart?

The Genetic Genealogist has a nice summary.

Philip Greenspun, an entrepreneur who became successful at software development after completing a PhD in EE, has a popular essay on careers in science. I tend to agree with his pessimistic viewpoint, but I do think that things are a little different in medical research than physics. I think jobs are a little easier to come by, for one. I think it’s also important to keep in mind that his perspective is based on the extremely competitive east coast academic environment, and that he actually has been successful in the non-academic route.

The main point he seems to be making is that there are less women than men in academic science careers, not because women are less capable or more concerned with family life or anything, but rather that there are more men simply because men are the only ones stupid enough to let their ego influence their career choice.

A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?

I know that my sense of identity and self-worth is tied very closely to my career. When things are going well, I feel like I’m doing the right thing, but when I can’t get anything to happen, I get depressed. I can certainly understand that women, who tend to experience assaults upon their self-worth from all directions from an early age, are a little better at eventually choosing more appropriate things to base their self-esteem upon.

via infoproc, some commentary from the life science POV at Bayblab

Readers, please permit me a short, non-science related rant. I don’t do this sort of thing often, so if you’re looking for more like this, go here.

The Academic Freedom Act is promoted as allowing science teachers to critically discuss evolution. However, science teachers have always been able to critically discuss any kind of theories in their classroom. No one has ever been fired or reprimanded for critically discussing any theory in the proper context. Critical discussion of the Holocaust or racial differences in intelligence are comparatively WAY more taboo, but you don’t see legislation to protect teacher’s freedoms to discuss these things, so don’t be misled – the one and only purpose of this is to teach creationism to public school children. I’m willing to bet there are churches that will happily sponsor tuition for parents that can’t afford to send their kids to a religious school, so this law is entirely unnecessary even for that purpose.

There’s a common misunderstanding that the purpose of teaching the theory of evolution is to replace the religious accounts of creation. That’s not the case. Evolution doesn’t teach that there is no god, just that there doesn’t have to be one. Evolution can’t answer the question of why we are here and where the universe originally came from, and it’s not meant as a replacement for whatever anyone believes regarding mankind’s place in the universe. It’s just a theory that explains what we can see as far back as we can see it, no further. Since it’s the best one that fits with available evidence, it’s the only one that can be taught in a secular context such as a public school. Stated this clearly, it’s hard to see where the misunderstanding came from, which has led many people to conclude that this actually wasn’t a misunderstanding at all, but rather a deliberate attempt to incite people against “godless atheists eroding our moral foundation”. When you consider that the Dominionists actually do want scripture taught as fact in public schools and they do want the Bible to be the highest law of the land and they do organize to elect leaders whose primary qualification is their faith, it’s easy to see how one could come to that conclusion.

In the end, anyone is free to believe whatever they want, but when they start making decisions on behalf of others, their duty to their constituents supercedes their personal duty to their faith, and there’s no way to justify your actions on behalf of your constituents without basing your decisions in consensus reality, not your personal version of it. I’m under no illusions, by the way, that rational, data-driven analysis underlies most legislation. People make decisions based on “gut feeling” all the time. That’s different, because the decisions made by those who place their personal faith above the duty to their constituents are based upon written scripture and doctrine, not divine revelation to them personally. If our elected leaders were having mystical experiences in the stateroom, it would be a different matter. That’s the last I’ll say about this – back to real science.