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development of a solid foundation of reliable knowledge is the key for high techs. If you don't know the basic, hardly you'll be creative.
High techs meaning what exactly?
You are aware that Tesla hardly wrote anything down and he developed A/C and the CRT.
In the private sector R&D was replaced with M&A. It is cheaper to just buy a company or license technology then to fund research. In many cases a company will simply buy out another one not so much to use their research but to shut it down. Sometimes they can work in tangent with one another to pretty much stop production of improvements. Phoebus cartel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia at the same point the Big Three in Detroit said in the 1970's that getting a car to get 25 mpg would be a death trap. Now SUV's can get 30-35...
How does one budget for a discovery anyway? You can't...that's why it is so expensive. Yes of course science works upon itself but that is of no assurance of another discovery. A drug clinical trial for example might take years. There is no real way of making it faster without compromising the scientific data let alone the ethical issues of issuing a drug that is not exactly safe (see Fen Fen and Vioxx)
Research is now mostly government, non profit and open source. Finding profit is fine. But it has to be sustainible and the sad reality is that there is so much that is being opened now that as technologies have become cheaper there frankly is no way for businesses to compete. Microsoft couldn't compete with open sourced operating systems and office apps so it's now a video game company. Kodak is gone largely due to tablets, land line telephones are gone due to cell phones and phone book companies are invalid due to websites. Profit basically is the low hanging fruit. Few businesses these days can plan ahead more than nine months, large corporations maybe twice that.
Solid knowledge is fine for tech but most of tech is on teams. The era of one single programming making a program died out decades ago. Even then there are many programs that are simply rewritten. I used to know a COBOL programming that openly said no one makes a new COBOL program you just rewrite what was left. Entire GUI's, operating systems and yes even games can use the same game engine. It could be Flash based, HTML 5, Open GL..most can be reused. Ask anyone that does animations or presenations as frankly content is reused all the time. Disney for example rehashes much of the same content as does Pixar.
What is new and alarming to me is that while the US performance remains the same, other countries are improving and will surpass us, so we are actually dropping. Also alarming, that many people in this country do not see the value of investing more in our education system--other cultures that do value education are performing well. I saw some Asian kids interviewed, and the reason doing well is important to them is very culturally instilled, and it is not in the US.
That being said, I think that, as noted in the WP, the study itself has some flaws.
The USA "invests" far more money in education than do other countries. Throwing money at the problem isn't solving it. You're right it has to do with the culture and parental attitudes as well as the students' attitudes.
The USA has such a generous safety net that people figure they'll live high on the hog if they do well in school or if they don't, education doesn't seem all that important.
Touche'. The peasant children growing rice don't score nearly that well, because they aren't in school they are picking rice.
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Originally Posted by johnnytang24
How does that account for the next four? There are no rice paddies in Hong Kong.
It's not about rice paddies or inner city ghettos or rural votech high schools. It's about disparity, which is ripe here and in China; although to a much greater degree in the east. None of the post below is to discount talent to be found in any nation either, but the idea that one or another national culture can be held responsible for PISA results that do not address an entire nation is off the mark.
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Originally Posted by TheBookofLife
What makes you think that? Even the peasant children are tested, they will still be on the top. It is to do with the standard the country sets up. Meantime, those children study harder than the city children because they know that they do not have too much to depend on when they grow up and believe that education will give them a chance. Other reason is that generally the Chinese people value education very much. We had professional education institutions way back 3000 years ago. Confucius was the father of the Chinese education system.
Don't you worry about your younger generation?
Why not look into this topic rather than go on assumptions you hope to be correct for whatever biases. It's not hard to figure if you just pause to think about it. We're comparing cities/small regions to whole nations or a minority within a country to the majority in another. Why? We're all well aware of the disparity in the US. You cannot honestly say rural Mississippi is representative of the elite in Boston metro-west or at any of our magnet schools. I don't understand why anyone in the US would think of us as a culturally and socioeconomic homogenous nation. When comparing nations those things matter.
The standard your country sets up is to abuse Chinese people and the US is first in line to reap the rewards, which is nothing to be proud of over here or there.
Quote:
China is Cheating the World Student Rankings System
Enough is enough: Beijing must supply national data to assessors and not simply the results of a small minority of elite students
...
The OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams are held every three years. Coming first and third respectively in the 2012 exams are the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong.
However, China is uniquely not listed as a country in the rankings — unlike the U.S., Russia, Germany, Australia and other nations judged on the basis of their country-wide performances. Instead, China only shares Shanghai’s score with PISA. (Hong Kong, a Special Autonomous Region of China, sends its own data.)
I am sure he has no explanation. All he has is bigotry. He has a hard time to accept the result. He him self is very self-involved. The result agitates him that he has to call me silly rabbit and ask me to use my thinking cap. Why is it so hard for the American people to face reality?
Yes, you really need to start using that noodle of yours that you are parading to be the end all be all of US destruction. Putting your head in the sand about the realities both nations face will not bring you closer to what you hope for.
eta: Maybe you are just a troll, but if not this passive/aggressive little girl thing you have going is creepy.
Let me explain this result by sharing a story. I volunteered in an ESL classroom once, full of Asian housewives (mostly Korean but same culture in general).
We were studying the basic clock - differentiating am/pm.
One card said: "The children study at 11:30" and the women all said "The children study at 11:30pm".
I said no - the children study at 11:30am. The children sleep at 11:30pm. The children in the picture were 6-7 years old.
They corrected ME and said no, their children study at 11:30PM, because they need to get good grades and midnight-6am was good enough.
So, there you go. No, I'm not making this up, I really found it to be an eye-opening experience. You read about moms doing this in Asia, but it was the first time I heard it right from them directly.
Interestingly enough, Finnish children start school fairly late - 'pre-school' is at 6. I know in Asia, a lot of children are pushed into education by 2-3, whereas in the US it tends to be 3-4-5. There seem to be merits to starting late as well
Interestingly enough, Finnish children start school fairly late - 'pre-school' is at 6. I know in Asia, a lot of children are pushed into education by 2-3, whereas in the US it tends to be 3-4-5. There seem to be merits to starting late as well
The whole of Finland will always outpace the whole of the US and the whole of China. I think it has more to with size of the population, which is easier to care for and how their government allocates available resources. Further, I suspect that their largely homogenous population plays a role. There are many variables that come into play before educational approach comes into play.
It's not about rice paddies or inner city ghettos or rural votech high schools. It's about disparity, which is ripe here and in China; although to a much greater degree in the east. None of the post below is to discount talent to be found in any nation either, but the idea that one or another national culture can be held responsible for PISA results that do not address an entire nation is off the mark.
.
There is no disparity in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, or any of the other Asian countries?
Hong Kong is an Autonomous Region, Singapore, Japan, S. Korea, etc are all countries.
There is no disparity in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, or any of the other Asian countries?
Hong Kong is an Autonomous Region, Singapore, Japan, S. Korea, etc are all countries.
I'm not saying that other nations do not outpace the US. I am saying that the. US as a whole is not reflective of our regions and that disparity can be seen within and between the 50 states.
Further, answer these questions. I'm curious to what you all think.
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But what if there are “serious problems” with the Pisa data? What if the statistical techniques used to compile it are “utterly wrong” and based on a “profound conceptual error”? Suppose the whole idea of being able to accurately rank such diverse education systems is “meaningless”, “madness”?
What if you learned that Pisa’s comparisons are not based on a common test, but on different students answering different questions? And what if switching these questions around leads to huge variations in the all- important Pisa rankings, with the UK finishing anywhere between 14th and 30th and Denmark between fifth and 37th? What if these rankings - that so many reputations and billions of pounds depend on, that have so much impact on students and teachers around the world - are in fact “useless”?
This is the worrying reality of Pisa, according to several academics who are independently reaching some damning conclusions about the world’s favourite education league tables. As far as they are concerned, the emperor has no clothes.
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