The Glade 4.0

Depressing.

I'll refrain from further comment lest this go directly to Hellfire.

I'm sorry. I could have taken that talk more seriously if the map that "has the area of each country apportioned according to its surface area on the globe" wasn't... a Mercator Projection.

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/shrug

I don't know that it bothers me that much. I've got a few issues with what he's attempting to sell:

1) The slides are based on country size rather than population. I'm sure Canada, for example, is not as non-existent on the research front as the presentation would have you believe.
2) The first slide is a map, a Mercator Projection*, that really distorts surface area; not a good representation of surface area, as he'd have you believe. The second slide is research papers published in 2001. When he shows the slide he tells us is change in published research papers from 2000 to 2010, he's really showing a slide that represents growth in scientific research papers from 1990 to 2001.
3) Japan has approximately 40% of the population of the US, yet in 2001 (the second slide in the presentation) the US had three times the number of papers published than Japan, the nation with the next largest number of papers published; you'd never get that from the depiction.
4) The numbers of papers published in the US grew from 1990 to 2001 (third slide), you'd never get that from the presentation.
5) Finland, for example, had an increase of 390 papers per million people, Singapore had 484 and Australia had 211. In comparison, Japan had an increase of 148. That's something that's damn near impossible to quantify based on the third slide.
6) Research is not a zero sum game. The more research the better. In 1990, 80 scientific papers were
published per million people worldwide, this increased to 106 per million by 2001. That's a good thing.
7) I'm not getting the connection between this and "how Americans treat science".

edit: D'oh, beat me to it, what Kaffis said*.

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