Slashdot Log In
US No Longer Technology King
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Mar 28, 2007 04:48 PM
from the i-coulda-been-somebody dept.
from the i-coulda-been-somebody dept.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that according to a recent report from the World Economic Forum the US has lost the leading spot for technology innovation. The new reigning champ is now apparently Denmark with other Nordic neighbors Sweden, Finland and Norway all claiming top spots as well. "Countries were judged on technological advancements in general business, the infrastructure available and the extent to which government policy creates a framework necessary for economic development and increased competitiveness."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider US vs Canada http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/conten
Canada has a much lower population density, but it's far cheaper to lay fiber to 95% of the Canadian population than to 95% of the American population, because the average distance between two random Canadians is far less the average distance between two Americans.
Countries like the US/Britain/France/Germany, which are more evenly populated will simply require much more fiber/area for a given broadband penetration than countries like Canada/Australia/Brazil, which have huge clumps of people and vast areas of sparse population.
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Interesting)
You didn't hear these kind of excuses when the telegraph was the big communications network - it went to every town. And you didn't hear it when rail travel became prevalent - those tracks went everywhere, and if a mountain needed blasting to make way, the mountain got blasted. You can claim the Chinese worked like slaves to lay track - which may be true, but there is no shortage of cheap foreign labor in the US today - and they could be laying fiber (in fact, a lot of them are - just not enough).
The problem, as usual, is the self-serving traitorous bastards running Washington (the White House *and* congress - especially congress). When WW I started up, the US needed planes. Did they let the Wright Brothers push them around because they had some patent? No. They were like "look, guys, we need planes for the war, and you can't make them fast enough, so were throwing out your patent."
What happens now when we need equipment for the war? The multinational corporation making hummers whines "but we've got a contract - we make hummers and that's what we're gonna make." So what happens? We buy hummers that get our soldiers killed instead of the anti-road-bomb armored equipment we really need. (check this [go.com] out). What's that about? Some greedy frackin senators with their palms greased, that's what!
No more excuses. Build the infrastructure we need, make the equipment we need, and quick dicking around with the greedy corporations.
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
What's interesting is not the mean, but rather the standard deviation. The U.S. has a large concentration along the coast, but a third of the population is rural. That's very unusual. Most countries with low population density tend to have very high density along the coast and almost nobody anywhere else. Sweden, for example, has 84% of its population spread over only 1.4% of its land area. The U.S. has 80% of its people in urban areas, so a lower percentage, and spread across a whopping 3%. Thus, assuming the definitions of urban vs. rural are similar between those two statistics (I'm not certain), the urban areas are only about half as dense, and the rural areas are roughly 25% more populous.
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Informative)
Having been the Europe many times, I've often been asked by friends and colleagues why we in the US don't have high speed trains everywhere. Well, considering that - if we used the fastest TVGs and ICEs they have in the EU - it would still take about 7 hours to take a train from Seattle (where I live) to San Francisco - the nearest big city (assuming 300 KPH and slowing down for the occasional towns/crossings). Or 30 hours from Seattle to Miami, at the same average speed.
Compare that to under 2 hours for Paris to Brussels. It's just a different scale over here. And that makes telecom also difficult. Distances between big population centers would cover multiple EU countries. It takes a lot of time and a lot of money to pull more fiber from Seattle to Chicago, or Houston to Los Angeles... It's not a small 150-100 kilometer run of fiber; it's literally hundreds - if not thousands - of kilometers to cover.
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Informative)
I was a little surprised about your 7 hour time quote from Seattle to San Francisco, so I did some fact checking:
Google maps says that the distance between the two cities is 808 miles, or 12 hours 40 mins by car. Google converts those 808 miles into kilometers: 808 miles = 1 300.34995 kilometers.
The time it takes to travel 1300 kilometers at 300km/hour: 4.33 hours. So you were off by a substantial amount of time - 2 hours and 20 minutes or so.
High speed trains will become more popular when gas prices go up. That will affect both car travel and airplane travel. Gas prices are already high in Europe for car travel, and trains are a lot more comfortable that planes, so that's probably why they are more popular there. Particularly when you take into account all the security checkpoints they force you through at airports these days, it's a royal pain to fly.
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Informative)
I've ridden ICE some rather nice distances. Except for construction work, it was straight. I've also ridden Amtrak around the Pacific NW between Spokane/Seattle, Spokane/Portland and Seattle/Eugene. This is 137,858 square miles for Germany, 98,466 for Oregon, and 71,342 for Washington. These two states are larger than Germany, with just over 9 million in the space of 82 million.
Spokane to Portland or Seattle takes about 8 hours. This is using a heavy sleeper liner that travels between Chicago and Seattle, taking approximately 46 hours. It is also available once a day, leaving at 2 in the morning from Spokane.
The Eugene-Seattle line is a newly built train from Taiwan based off the type used in Europe for regional lines. The train is available about 6 times a day, takes 5 hours to do Eugene-Seattle, partly due to layover. It's actually a really nice train and has a good bistro car along with it's own built in movie service. It's also slower than driving.
Much of the reason why they are slow is the US hasn't built new rail lines in a very long time. Most of these lines are just improved versions of the ones first laid down after the Civil War. And some of these lines skip major towns in semi-rural areas because their spurs don't have enough traffic. Southern Oregon lacks Amtrak service because of this. The line East of the Cascades was kept up, but the line going parallel to I5 (the major West Coast freeway) can't carry modern trains.
Most of these lines have to slow down every 5 to 10 minutes as they cross highways and city streets. Compare this to European dedicated lines that have their own right of way and don't need to slow down except for stations...
Now consider the coast of refurbishing the entire rail network in the US to have its own right of way. Billions upon billions. There's talk of going maglev in some small sections of the country along populated stretches. One plan to connect LA and Las Vegas has already spent billions for about 1 mile of track.
And one related note. The reason US telecom lags is because 15 years ago we were the best in the world. Billions upon billions were spent by the DoD to build a hardened land line network that can survive a nuclear war. Mandates extended this out to nearly every hamlet. It gave the US spare capacity for a number of years. While Europe and Asia didn't have this large infrastructure and skipped to new generation wireless.
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget the damn rural areas already. It's a nice excuse, but our infrastructure is still slapdash, crawling with shoddy and inconsistent speeds, and woefully behind, even in the largest metropolitan areas.
This always comes up (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
Canada, for example, has a population density of 3.2 on that chart. Yet it too has excellent broadband penetration (markedly superior to the united states) because despite having an average of 3.2 people per square kilometer, the vast majority of people live in dense cities along the southern border, while vast amounts of geography range from virtually to completely uninhabited.
Several of the nordic countries are similarly laid out. With dense urban populations, and large virtually unpopulated areas where its mountainous, glacial, or arctic tundra.
The GP's post which indicated that these countries had a higher population density than the US is of course patently false, however, he had the right idea. Broadband becomes viable as the population density reaches a threshold in the regions where the population density reaches that threshold. In a these Nordic countries (and Canada), nearly the entire population lives in regions where the population is "dense enough". While in regions where the population isn't that dense, there often isn't any population at all.
Thus despite Canada's excellent broadband availability to like 95% of its people, if you threw a dart at a map of canada, you'd more than likely hit a spot where there there wasn't access. Indeed, this is because you'd more than likely hit a spot where there wasn't any PEOPLE.
In the US, however, there are huge numbers of people living in regions that simply aren't that dense. You throw a dart at a map of the US and odds are there will be people living under it, but probably not enough of them to make broadband viable.
In other words, population density simply indicates the total number of people divided by the total amount of space, and says nothing about where they actually live. If you took everyone in the states and relocated them all to Texas the US would have the exact same population density it has now, but getting everybody broadband access would be comparatively trivial.
cheers,
Re:Poor excuse! US population centers much larger (Score:5, Informative)
The first thing here is not to confuse broadband 'availability' with broadband 'subscribers'. Canada and Nordic countries have both high availability, and high subscription rates.
In the case of a region like NYC, I'm sure it has very high broadband *availability*. (Meaning that if you live in NYC you could get broadband if you decided to, and you probably even have a choice who you get it from.) But I concede that even in places like New York, the subscription rate falls short of other countries.
That said, to address your comment:
New York alone contains more people than all of Sweden and Norway combined. I am sure New York City takes up far less space than Norway and Sweden combined. So why don't cities like LA, New York and Chicago have at least as good broadband penetration as nordic countries? From what I read they don't.
You make a valid point.
New York, is actually the 4th most wired city in the United States, according to this article:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/articles/art030
That said, I don't know. If I were to speculate I would expect that the answer lies with social issues like poverty and illiteracy, and/or a lack of education. This strikes me as likely for two reasons:
Firstly, it seems logical to suggest that the poor/illiterate would be less likely to subscribe to high speed internet access
Secondly, this is an area where Canada and the Nordic countries differ from the US. Their inner city problems, poverty, and illiteracy rates are markedly lower than in the US, so its reasonable to suggest that it might be responsible for the difference.
regards
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Interesting)
The Chinese or Indians (or both in concert) landing a man on the moon.
I fully suspect that is what it's going to take.
Re:Telecomm (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the moon was a place in the outback where people hadn't been before (I was only four).
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Got any facts to back that up?
According to the American Religious Identification Survey [cuny.edu] "The proportion of the [American] population that can be classified as Christian has declined from 86% in 1990 to 77% in 2001" and the number of people who believe in no religion AT ALL doubled from 1990 to 2001.
Sorry, homeboy. You're wrong.
Where do you live, btellier? (Score:5, Insightful)
We now have a President who is "Born Again", and recognizes Christ as his personal saviour. His old Attorney General, John Ashcroft, a devout Assemblies of God member, used to anoint himself with oil. We have many members of Congress, both in the Senate and the House, who are ordained ministers in their churches. Some are LDS Bishops. I would venture to say that the percentage of devout Christians holding office in various levels of government in the US exceeds that of the general population. Which oath do they hold to? Their duty to country, or to a church?
You've got people who firmly believe that the US Constitution states that the USA is a Christian nation. I've got in-laws who used to believe that I was damned to Hell because I was raised Catholic and not a member of the Church of Christ.
We have a member of the Texas House who firmly believes that the Earth is the center of the Universe, and that we never landed a man on the moon, and that satellites are held in orbit by magnetism, not gravity - because Newton's Laws are wrong and he can prove it. http://www.fixedearth.com/geosynchronous_sa.htm [fixedearth.com] (I had to post that link because it's a hoot. His proof is that a LaGrange point is where gravity stops because it's where it balances out. Give the man a Nobel!)
We had an Army General (2 star?) who fervently believed we would win in Iraq because his God is greater than their God, Allah. Someone forgot to tell him they're one and the same. Jehovah, too.
These are the people who've been running this nation for the last dozen years or so. Their's are the people who backed a "Crusade" in the Middle East, thinking we'd set them "free".
Oh. And that CUNY study? Does it take into account that many black Southern Baptists are becoming Muslims? And the biggest immigrant groups in the US today are Hispanic Catholics (and Protestants) and Muslims from the Middle East and SE Asia?
Just because the percentage of people identifying themselves as Christians has gone down (how accurate is that study) does not mean that the number of people who identify themselves as religious has gone down. Or that the percentage who identify themselves as Born Again has gone down.
I don't need to cite references. All you need to do is get out of your ivory tower (sorry, that actually sounds religious!) and look around. Wake up. You're missing an entire country out there!
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2123546.stm [bbc.co.uk]
To remind you of your original point:
You [the United States, presumably-- I'm not religious, nor do I export anything] are currently exporting extreme religions (yup, that's what a lot of uk people think of the Johovahs witnesses that come calling, nut jobs to be avoided at all costs),
To support your point that the US is exporting extreme religions, you link to an article about a church elder who abused a kid. How does that show extreme religions being exported in any way, shape or form? In what way does it prove that "uk people" are avoiding Jehovah's Witnesses? Hell, how do you even define what "extreme religions" are? How does it show anything other than, "hey one guy did one bad thing!"
How about finding a demographic study that shows the religion gaining influence over time, or perhaps an opinion poll from UK citizens about their acceptance of Jehovah's Witnesses? Those might actually be more relevant to your initial point than this 1-page newspaper article you Googled.
looking for the ark....
http://www.noahsarksearch.com/ [noahsarksearch.com]
There's nothing on that website about funding. For all I know the entire thing is a single guy with a lot of free time, and given the quality of the website that seems a good guess.
Then again, let's assume it is being funded by someone... so what? Unless you prove that the amount of funding goes towards finding Noah's Ark is increasing over time, this does nothing to support the original point.
(Or perhaps you think it should be illegal to fund searches for mythical objects? I, and a lot of other Americans, happen to believe in freedom. If someone wants to spent money to find the flying spaghetti monster, who am I to stop them? They can do what they want.)
the links between americans extreme religions and isreal/funding of end time stuff
http://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cm
This link goes to a book review. I haven't read the book. If anybody reading this has, please comment on it.
(I will say that President Bush is not a "fervent Christian fundamentalist." If would be interesting to see what definition of "fundamentalist" includes President Bush.)
problems with science in the US classroom
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleU
"Not available" error.
That enough?
Not for me. And I'm not even Christian-- I just have a pretty well-developed BS filter.
Re:Telecomm (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
However, our military is one of the comparative few that has regularly spun off non-sensitive research into commercial applications. The old BMDO (Ballistic Missile Defense Organization) group (they've since changed their name) was primarily charged with seeding commercial ventures with government-funded research results. Worked rather well over the past couple decades.
So yes, if all that money simply goes into bigger and better weapons it could be considered a waste from a civilian perspective. But when it is shared and used to improve the private sector, it is anything but.
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
And yes, it is required for computer science. Evolutionary algorithms derived from the natural world are a major part of the field, with application to everything from DNA research
Corne, D. Meade, A. Sibly, R. 'Evolving core promoter signal motifs', Proceedings of the 2001 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, vol. 2, 1162-1169, 2001
to satellite placement:
Williams, Edwin, William Crossley and Thomas Lang, 'Average and maximum revisit time trade studies for satellite constellations using a multiobjective genetic algorithm', Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, 49, 3, 385-400 2001
No acceptance of evolution, no science...
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
Well if that shrinking minority of Christians just happens to be running the country, driving policy (banning gay marriage?) then people may well get that impression. Maybe less a growth in numbers and more a growth in power and influence. I suspect as the number of practising Christians continues to drop that desire to grab power and influence will only increase as an attempt to stop the slide.
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
America is facing many urgent problems from runaway deficit spending to the continual erosion of federal agency responsiveness and even respect for fundamental human rights. Yet certain politicians seem obsessed with gay marriage during election season - the very time when we need to judge them on their positions and history regarding real issues that actually affect America.
In summary, I worry that Americans are extremely susceptible to distraction by highly irrelevant issues and that exploitation of this weakness gravely impacts the quality of their government. I think that we are seeing the results of this poor governance right now in lost jobs and expertise.
Re:Telecomm (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there may not be an actual upswing in the amount of people
Between the ongoing "we can teach creationism as if it's valid science", banning all forms of science which run afoul of the religious right, and and administration which seems to believe that God is personally on their side
However, maybe the rest of the USA are just so damned busy watching American Idol and following everything which is happening with Brittney Spears they're just too damned politically apathetic to stop the bullshit which seems to become policy. Either way, in terms of the way the US is projecting themselves nowadays, there might as well have been an uprising or a takeover or something.
Cheers
Re: Were you there? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoa, whoa. You were doing ok until here, where you slip up. It is perfectly reasonable to assume, given the existence of early Buddhists, that there was a Buddha. Was he in fact in possession of all of the traits they attributed to him? Probably not, from a skeptical outlook - most likely, he was just a very smart, insightful and charismatic individual. Likewise Jesus. The scant evidence does not prove he exists, but the simplest explanation is that such a person - not necessarily a divine one - did, in fact, exist. Don't mix up the existence of the supernatural Christ with a human Jesus. Don't compare the existence of the human Jesus to the existence of Xenu, these are completely different issues.
Scientology - there was a Ron L. Hubbard. Mormonism - there was a Joseph Smith. Religious movements nearly always start with a powerful leader figure. As skeptics, we would view those people as ('merely') exceptional human beings, not divine or supernatural as the adherents of those faiths would. But let's not deny the likely existence of the individual itself.
I for one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, that's not really unexpected (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, that's not really unexpected (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well, that's not really unexpected (Score:5, Funny)
It all comes down to quality, and at Fjord, quality is job 1.
What else do you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What else do you expect? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, no - it's only been in the last 15-20 years that we've -really- seen a lot of corporate abuse of their position (not that it didn't happen earlier, but it didn't necessarily happen at the same scale), and the predictable, to some, results.
Re:What else do you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I'm blaming failing state controled services IN ALL ARENAS on corporations not paying for the services they use. Education of workers should be a primary value of any long range thinking company that needs skilled workers- yet for the past 20 years we've had a tax revolt removing money from the schools and making sure corporations pay a significantly lower percentage than they did in the 1950s. Education is just the most visible. Crime is second. But as a state worker working for Oregon Department of Transportation- I have to say roads and shipping are not far behind.
Validity of the criteria? (Score:4, Insightful)
One small think they left off -- marginal tax rates. High rates like Sweden positively drive innovators away.
Re:Validity of the criteria? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, there are several ways to avoid the high marginal taxes - at least in Denmark. The only thing that is really expensive is conspicuous consumption here and now - if you save it up for your old age, you will get a substantial tax discount. Also, there are significant tax breaks for companies.
I am in fact a successful innovator (not taking over the world any time soon tho), and I'm staying. Denmark has been very good to me, both growing up, and as an environment for innovation. Hey, in some countries I understand you have to pay for your education. In Denmark I got paid, both during my masters and during my PhD. That's pretty hard to beat.
Re:Validity of the criteria? (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. (Score:4, Insightful)
Name one complete sub-assembly inside of your computer which had the majority of the R&D and Fabrication done in the USA.
Of that sub-assembly (assuming you have named one), which components are utilizing NEW technology developed here in the USA.
I would like to know why the USA (given a dedicated effort) could not take back the crown of technology power house without doing so by stifling our competition over seas.
There has to be enough room in the future technology development for us to foster and train our citizens to come up with new concepts which will not rely on foreign brains, labor, or money to develop, market, and sell.
Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Until the US fixes its priorities we're going to continue to fall. Perhaps the US can keep buying talent from other nations, with H1-B visas, but unless the scientists are given fruitful environments they simply aren't going to come up with anything new or revolutionary. What encouragement do the nation's thinkers have to keep improving their ideas when the laurels and rewards are going only to the people who manage them like a column of assets? It's plain demoralizing to continually refine a product for a year only to see executive support lost and funding slashed. Graduate students and post-docs, while they provide a significant source of intellectual labor, cannot compete with happy and eager experienced scientists in other parts of the world.
Extreme levels of government regulation, oversight, interaction, and micromanaging are probably a significant contributor to the death of American technological innovation as well.
Metric critique #1 (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, if it was on a 100 point scale, the US could have slipped from, say, 99.9 to 99.8, and that would have been enough to slip from first to seventh. Or maybe the objective score would have been a much larger slide. Maybe the US objectively climbed, but just not at the same rate as the other countries. Being that all ten of the top countries have the same mature technological apparatus, I am imagining that whatever shuffling took place in the ratings was rather minor. The actual differences between technology adaption between the US and Iceland might be almost indistinguishable.
"Dumbing down of America" (Score:5, Interesting)
I am starting to agree with my wife, given evidence like: Bush family buying massive amounts of land in South America, Dick Cheney primarily investing his own money overseas, etc.
I believe that people with real power in the USA are "cutting loose" the middle class and lower class. I write about this in my blog a lot: the best thing to do is to invest heavily in yourself: education, personal learning, pay off debt, invest, and save.
Whatever... (Score:4, Insightful)