The Glade 4.0

Thanks for the clarification on the H-1B program. I don't see where in your link it's mentioned that it started in April, and I assumed it started at the beginning of the new year.

As for the war on sciences bit, the issue is in our schools and the overall general de-emphasis on science being a good field of endeavor. Therefore we don't produce enough home grown people with the right skillsets to fill our demands.

Further, counter to DE's idea, most of these positions aren't something that you can just re-train someone for. They are highly specialized skills that require years of education and experience to fill.

Clearly we have no one around to fill these jobs. More Foreigners please!

Aren't you railing in another thread about how Republicans blame the unemployed for being lazy/undereducated?

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No that wasn't me railing about that particular foible of Republicans. My name isn't Xeq.

I'm not sure that article is really relevant. Sure there is some bias in hiring. Hell, I'm maybe even guilty of that as if someone has been unemployed for a couple years with absolutely nothing to show for it I definitely ask more questions about why. Is that being unfair? Maybe, but I will tell you this. When companies lay off people, they start with the dead weight. The people who aren't performing are the first to go. Now sometimes they aren't performing because they somehow got into the wrong position or a personality conflict. But that can also show some limitations in judgement or personality that as a hiring manager I need to be aware of.

Now before anyone gets all up in arms, I've been on the other side of that coin as well. I got laid off after 9/11 because the project I was working on was in effect dead weight. It wasn't revenue generating, internal only and when Q4 revenues are 30% of projected well ****'s gonna happen. Getting back into the work force sucked. It was a year before I had a full time job again. And that meant taking a large step backwards in both career and pay (to the tune of roughly a 40% paycut).

The issue (and this has been going on for far longer than the current recession) is that in the high tech sector there has been a continual shortage of qualified people in the US. This isn't that they don't want to hire people or that Americans are demanding too much money. It's that you can't find people with the required skills, education or experience.

Aizle, I still cannot fathom that there has been a war "the sciences" for 20+ years by the religious right. Could you give some evidence supporting this?

I have seen no evidence of an overall general de-emphasis on science being a good field of endeavor. As a matter of fact, "There have been significant gains in course-taking at the national level, increasing from only 45 percent of students taking chemistry in 1990, to 55 percent in 1996, and 60 percent in 2004. The proportion taking three years of math increased from 49 percent in 1990 to 72 percent in 2004, and the proportion of students completing four years of math increased from just 29 percent in 1990 to 37 percent in 1994, and to 50 percent in 2004."



How is the religious right responsible for the supposed overall general de-emphasis on science being a good field of endeavor?



According to research conducted by the The Urban Institute:






Finally, I'll leave you with this to ponder:

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

If there's a continual shortage of qualified people in the U.S. tech sector, and these jobs take "years of experience to fill" and most of the jobs are going to non-immigrant H1B visa holders rather than US citizens or even permanent residents... gee, I wonder what the problem is?

Yeah, these companies are either going to outsource or hire cheap foreign labor on a visa rather than a U.S. worker because you can get away with paying an Indian a "living wage" because when he goes back to India that money is a hell of a lot more than a living wage. Meanwhile, there went 6 more years of education and experience.

See, if these visas were immigrant visas, not non-immigrant H1Bs, then a lot more of these people would stay and be real U.S. workers. Many would eventually become citizens. These sorts of people, however, illustrate exactly what I've been talking about. They are not immigrants who just want to come here and be Americans like you and me. They are Indians or Pakistanis or Chinese or whatever that want to come here, earn a few bucks, and go home.

This problem is no different than agricultural workers coming here and driving Americans out of the crop-picking line of work. This, however, is worse because while any reasonably determined person can learn to pick oranges, with excessive numbers of H1Bs we're exporting our technological superiority. Awesome. Now we know how India and Pakistan learned to build the BrahMos and Babur. Great.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

According to the interview the H-1B visa employees would often decide to become citizens and end up becoming citizens.

For consumption.

http://www.pewforum.org/Science-and-Bio ... elief.aspx

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

That's because "often" is a weasel word.

NYT









Even the liberal rag people still pretend is a premier newspaper agrees with this. It does so even as it neatly switches gears from "Technology worker" to "student" to "Science and Engineering PhD" as if the rules for technology workers and students or professors were all the same.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Is that supposed to address my questions?

Tyson spends 7:30 addressing 9th-12th century Islam, followed by 5 seconds showing one billboard regarding the Big Bang Theory, then proceeds to talk about the "astounding" number of Jews who've won the Nobel Prize, and finishes with "not why 85% of The National Academy rejects God, I wanna know why 15% don't".

I'll throw a clue out there, Jews believe in God.

Yet, this speech gave no answers to the questions I posed about the war "the sciences" for 20+ years by the religious right. It only addressed anything regarding religion in the US by showing one billboard. Further, he didn't even address concerns about the supposed "overall general de-emphasis on science being a good field of endeavor".

Really? If that's your attempt at addressing the empirical evidence I presented, I'd have to question the integrity of your statements as not coming from a factual basis, but rather the way you "feel" about the state of affairs of which you're fearful.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Surely you don't need me to go an post the many many lawsuits to force teaching of creationism as "science". Then you have the below video which is the religious right in their own words. And the link below the video is an article by a gentleman that used to be a Republican but has been disillusioned by the direction the party has taken.



http://open.salon.com/blog/ted_frier/20 ... _education

From the article



There are more examples in the article.

That's not an article. That's a blogger's opinion piece.

Edit: In fact it really illustrates the hypocrisy of the entire assertion that some religious right "war on science" has taken place. He points out that 80% of education in this country takes place in the public schools, and harps on the lawsuits over Creationism which the religious right has lost over and over and over.

Aside from the silliness of then complaining that the RR has decided to relegate themselves to irrelevancy by "educating" their kids in ways that guarantee they'll only parody themselves.

The left has succeeded in getting the RR essentially neutralized in public schools. Teacher's unions dominate public education and are overwhelmingly democratic.

So, it's the left, not the right that is resaponsible for any "war on science". Its the left that is responsible for high school cirricula that require 4 years of social studies and English but only 2 or 3 years of math and science. That science, by the way, tends to be biology and geology far more than math and physics. Maybe if the left were more interested in teaching chemistry and physics and less interested in tacitly attacking the religious right by making evolution education the primary focus of science we wouldn't have this problem.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Didn't you get the memo DE? This is what 'journalism' is now...

Um, what? Evolution is the primary focus of science in public schools? Not sure where you heard that. I can't even remember talking about evolution in high school. And we had it broken down to 1 year of biology, 1 year of physics, 1 year of chemistry. From what I've seen it's very similar in most high schools today. Where are you getting this idea from?

Well gee, first of all you confirmed part of what I was saying: 3 years of science. In most places, high school is 4 years long, and even when 9th grade is still in middle school that doesn't actually change where it is in terms of progression, just where it is administratively.

Second, I don't know where you get off with this "Not sure where you heard that" based on your personal experience. If I were to go based on nothing more than my personal experience, I'd be exactly right; high school for us went 2 years biology, 1 year chemistry, and 1 year of physics. The final year was not even mandatory, and could be filled with things other than physics for kids that were not in "college prep" or higher tracks. My wife's was similar (in a completely different state) except that she didn't take chemistry or physics.

Then there's the fact that public schooling does not include just 3 or 4 years of high school. While earlier on there's a fairly even distribution of life, earth, and physical science simply because it's almost impossible not to cover basics such as states of matter, once 6th grade rolls around the focus shifts:

From the California Science Framework for public schools in the most populated state in the nation:



One full year each of biology and geology versus a year devoted to physics and chemistry together. One might point out the need for underlying math education first, but as long as one can add, subtract, multiply, divide, understands what an exponent is and what the basic order of operations is, there should be nothing in middle school chemistry and physics that is not manageable. Furthermore, those operations should be understood by the end of 6th grade/early 7th grade even for a track designed for average students.

This is hilarious in light of what's presented later in the document for grades 9 through 12. The document first acknowledges that biology is customarily covered first, then chemistry, then physics, and then says "well, but schools should have flexibility to do things differently if they wish". Fine and dandy, except that there's little incentive to change. Tacitly, this was acknowledged in the 6-8the grade section, with reference to biology being taken early in high school, and chemistry and physics later in high school. Essentially, the document pays lip service to the idea of moving physics or chemistry earlier into the high school years, but that's it. The earlier years, however, are when science is mandatory.

Let's look at North Carolina:

5 possible science sequences

Note that in this chart, "physical science" is not the same as "physics". Therefore, in every sequence except the first one, geology/biology are front-loaded, with "physical science" stuck in there, and in one sequence "principles of technology I and II" In only sequence I and II are both chemistry and physics even possible without taking one or the other as an extra science elective, and even in sequence II it's quite possible to do without one or the other by taking "physical science". This is all even assuming that NC mandates 4 years of science; the situation gets worse if its less, especially taking up years with things like "physical science".

We aren't demanding that kids take physics or chemistry, but we are demanding they take biology and geology. No, teachers are not just standing there preaching evolution year after year, but the fact is that the types of science most likely to touch on that issue are receiving the most emphasis, whereas the sciences most needed for preparation for engineering and other rigorous courses of college study are the easiest to skate out of entirely.

Of course, there are other possibilities as well. Geology and Biology are widely regarded as "easier" and therefore the thing to take if you just want to pass, not to mention that it's more statistically beneficial to a school system to pass a kid in an easy class than to fail them at a hard one. The types of people to want to get degrees in "education" furthermore, are not also often those most interested in chemistry or physics, and given the minimal requirements for those classes, many teachers may have no exposure to those beyond middle school at all. In fact, I know that some don't.

Still, it is very hard to imagine that there is no desire to avoid "correcting" the beliefs of kids who are taught Creationism by their parents. That would be dandy, except that these parents are the most likely to pull their kids out of school to "protect" them from science in the first place. One wonders if kids exposed to chemistry and physics and socializing with more moderate students might not be more likely to call "Creationism" into question as a scientific answer to how the world was created eventually on their own anyhow.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Wow, did some people ever miss the point of Tyson's segment?

And you want to run around talking about confirmation bias?

What Tyson was pointing out was that, at one time, the Muslim world was the cradle of civilization. They were the pioneers of science and technology. They were the primary discoverers of knowledge. Then they decided that science and mathematics was the work of the Devil, and they experienced a technological regression from which they have never recovered. Now, theirs is a primitive civilization.

The Muslim empire was a theocracy, and for 300 years it stood at the forefront of scientific exploration. Today, there are more Muslims in the world than Jews and Christians combined, yet they represent an embarrassingly small minority of people making scientific discoveries. By contrast, the Jews who have been utterly decimated over the past two thousand years have fielded a large portion of Nobel laureates.

A war on science is not an unfounded fear. We have seen it happen before in history. It ruined the Muslim empire. They have not recovered. They are not making scientific discoveries. Meanwhile, the Jews who spent centuries as homeless vagabonds, are movers and shakers. They didn't even have a country, their temple razed so that not a single stone rest upon another, but they are at the frontier of human knowledge.

The billboard that Tyson references is a celebration of ignorance. (That segment was also longer in the original speech, it was cut out for YouTube's ten minute limit). As he points out, you have to pay quite a bit of money to put those up. The overall message is, "Reject science and come back to church." It is people celebrating their ignorance, and pushing others to devalue knowledge in favor of ignorance.

The billboard is representative of the push to have intelligent design taught in science classes. Here is a rather excellent explanation of why ID is not science. Suffice to say, the point isn't up for debate, least of all by any of you. Furthermore, the judge who wrote that received death threats from angry Christians. At the end of the day, to the religious contingent really doesn't care that ID isn't science. They simply wanted to remove science and use the classroom to push their religion onto the masses, and are angry that someone put a stop to it.

With regards to the statement about not caring why 85% of the Academy rejects God, but wanting to know wht 15% doesn't - that is the more interesting question. We know why 85% of the Academy rejects God. They don't need it. God is not answering any unknown questions for them. They don't look up at the sky at night and say, "Wow, I wonder what that is. I think it's angels being born." They look up and say, "Wow! Those are balls of gas, mostly hydrogen, undergoing nuclear fusion millions of miles away! Some of them are so far away that they don't exist anymore, and I'm just now seeing their light!"

Meanwhile, a lot of religious people have this belief that they must reject science for God. They look at science as though it's the work of the Devil attempting to lure them away from their Bibles. They look at evolution, at the Big Bang, and all they see is the Devil trying to lure them away from Jesus. Most don't want to admit it, because you can't stand around in a society full of computers, automobiles, and airplanes and say science is the work of the Devil without being treated like a complete and utter lunatic. Nonetheless, when it all comes down to brass tacks, that idea is at the core of the religious objection to science: It is the work of the Devil trying to lure us away from God.

Now, we have this 15% of the Academy that looks up at the sky and has the exact same thought about hydrogen undergoing fusion that their non-religious colleagues have, yet they still see God. They know full well that the universe is the result of a complex interaction of physical laws that does not require their God to exist, or any god at all for that matter, but they still see the glory and majesty of God revealed to them in their telescopes and microscopes. Many of them feel a deeper connection to God in their laboratories than they do in their churches, because in their laboratories they discover new aspects of God that were previously unknown to humanity.

That 15% is the interesting topic to study. Why do they see God when other religious people see the Devil? Why do they see God when their scientific fellows do not? What's different about the way that 15% looks at the world? When we figure that out, we can reach the rest of humanity. Much of this is addressed here:

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age[/url]There is no consensus among historians about what caused the end of the golden age of scientific thought int he Islamic world. they certainly did not, however, somehow decide it was the "work of the Devil."



No, there are [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups]not more muslims than Jews and Christians combined.[/url]

Strike two. Try to get your basic facts straight before you start pontificating.



Yes, it pretty much is.



First of all, I don't think anyone here would seriously contend that ID is science.

Second, even if we were, you do not tell us what is and is not up for debate by any of us. Just because you went out and got an engineering degree on your second try does not mean you are now in a position to talk down to everyone else here on science in general. If you want to talk at length about electrical waveforms, and the difficulties of making smartphones more durable, you go right ahead. However, quite a few of us have degrees in science, and even if that science is not as mathematically rigorous as engineering, we still understand quite well what is and is not science. You're an engineer, you're not Neihls Bohr.

Third, just because some heavily fundamentalist groups have pushed heavily for Creationism and ID in a classroom does not somehow establish that these are what's responsible for any shortage of technically qualified people in the U.S. In fact, despite your carrying on about muslims, I'll point out that 2 of the nations cited as common donors of technical people - Pakistan and India - have very large muslim populations.



So in other words, 85% of the Academy rejects God for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with religion.



Except that most religious people who reject Evolution don't also reject other aspects of science. This is complete nonsense; what's really hilarious about it is that Creationists tend to say things so absurd that they are almost stawmen of themselves. Yet you've managed to take an already-caricature viewpoint, and strawman it to an exponentially greater degree of absurdity! That's really pretty entertaining.

You have the same problem as Tyson: you want to take the most absurdly extreme religious viewpoints, strawman them, then pretend as if there's some sort of justifiable reason to fear this boogyman of religion. Like I pointed out already, science has won over religion. We are not, lawsuits aside, teaching pseudoscience in the schools. The sort of people that want to shield their kids from scientific knowledge are only going to render themselves irrelevant. Furthermore, they are not going to engage in any meaningful "war on science" because the majority of religious people do not want Creationism or ID in school any more than you do.



Exactly where do you get off speaking for these people as to where they do and do not feel closer to God?



Since "other religious people" do not see "the Devil" in "Science", we can leave this question aside. Some religious people may see "the Devil" in the Theory of Evolution in particular, but very, very few reject science of other kinds. Yes, yes, this is a weird cognitive dissonance and makes no sense. We all get that. It's absurd enough without you exaggerating and strawmanning it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Most. Very few. Criticizing someone for speaking in generalities when you do it all the time. The hypocrisy runs deep in this one.

Niels Bohr.

Wanted to chime in and mention that when I graduated high school, only two years of science classes were required for graduation. One "life" science (biology) and one physical science (chemistry). That's a damn shame IMO. I went on to take Physics as an elective.

When I was in high school ( back in the Dark Ages) I took biology and chemistry. We covered a section on Creationism vs Evolution in Biology 1. One of my classmates came up with a unique reason why the planet Earth grew life...we are the result of an alien spaceship doing a garbage dump while passing by.

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

Except I'm not criticizing him for speaking in generalities; I'm pointing out that his generalities don't bear any resemblance to reality.

The irrelevancy runs deep in this one.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."