with the conservatives nationally hating inventors, artists innovative creative types and educators. Is this contributing to the USA decline in inventions. I believe our future is also bleak and believe it to be related to the rightys hatred/disrespect of teachers, professors, actors, hollywood, ie creative types. Also the Reagan mentality of dismantling/telling people that government involvement in higher education and R&D is bad. Reagan wanted and ran on dismantling the departments of education and department of Energy, he did damage both. And what two areas are right now destroying us, hmmmm gas, education, innovation. So the gas companies have done so much for us in the last 30 years haven’t they.

As an example when I was in college I was working at DOE as a intern part time. The project I was working on was unconventional gas extraction in advance of mining. Basically the government was removing the natural gas in advance of mining an area, which utilized the gas, made the mine safer and decreased the ventilation costs of the mine. As an experiment I was also involved in the tracking of costs and projected gas flow. This experiment was a year away from actually making money when ronnie closed the experiments because he said let the oil companies do the research, they are better than government. Shame he did that as it was never published. he obviously was not a student of technology, I think the first telegram was funded by the government which allowed us to this day to be a communications lead. There are so many major inventions in the past funded by the government including where the universities were the incubators doing the high financial risk initial research, that spun off into companies.


inventions?


November 13, 2005
Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge?

By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
Baltimore


Questions for the debate:
1, Are we losing our competitive edge because we are doing as Reagan wanted keeping government out of research? IE our government is as Reagan inferred the problem, not the solution.

2, Should we do as Reagan said let industry who knows better than government continue to take the lead, and solve energy problems? Technology?

3, Does the attacking by the right of the teachers, artists, creative people actually damage our competitiveness/inventiveness?

4, The alarm has been sounded. will we do something about this inventive gap that is growing the wrong way, that we may now be losing?

5, does it matter if we lose this war?

Before I start to address some of the very important questions you raise, let me point out that those of us on the Left have to take as much of the blame for this problem as the Right. There is a tendency for some on the Left to dismiss science as "just another belief system" no more valid than any other, just as there is a tendency for some on the Right to dismiss science in favor of faith. There is also a tendency to prefer what is "natural" over what is technological. The reality, of course, is that science is one of the two noblest endeavors of humanity (the other being art.) Technology should not be rejected, but used properly.

1. I think the great tragedy in both government and industry is the lack of support for pure research, which is the true source of knowledge. Both are willing to support research which has a specific goal, but that's not how science works. I'm not really that worried about the United States no longer being Number One in science and technology; I'm worried about the world's losses.

Link



It boggles the mind how much could have been learned from the proposed Superconducting Supercollider.



This is the big problem, I think. Not so much the Right or the Left, as much as the fact that the typical American doesn't know much about science and doesn't care.

2. Both government and industry need to work hand in hand. Both need to encourage basic research.

3. The attacks on science and technology by the faith-based portion and the short-sighted pro-business portion of the Right, and by the "post-modern" portion of the Left, have nothing but negative effects on society in general. The rejection of the well-established principle of biological evolution; the dismissal of strong evidence for global warming; knee-jerk attacks on the possibility of safe nuclear power; these are all shameful.

Here is a good article by science fiction writer David Brin (whose politics are best described as centrist/pragmatic/libertarian) in which he reviews the book The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney.

Link



This is why it feels like the Right is to be blamed for attacks on science. Ever since 1980, the Right has had real political power in the United States. Today, of course, it has just about all the power. The Left has no power at all to speak of. If we did, we would be just as likely to make harmful attacks on science.

4. I don't know. I hope so, or we all lose.

5. Yes.