Scientific Boom?

[rdean]

yes.

i would further define 'we' as industry and research science in the united states which is demanding less engineers and scientists year-on-year, despite an acceleration of research dividends. the functions of engineering and research science are less and less labor intensive as indicated by these trends.

republicans, democrats and religion has nothing to do with that, does it?

You sir, are an idiot.

that may be so, but i, sir, am also a chemical engineer with a BSc in biology, squaring me between science and engineering (though i don't work in either field). i read an article in the AIChE quarterly to the effect of my 'rants' last year. here's something quick about that which i found online, no doubt sourcing the same job outlook stats...

source

Little or no growth in employment of chemical engineers is expected though 2012. Although overall employment in the chemical manufacturing industry is expected to decline, chemical companies will continue to research and develop new chemicals and more efficient processes to increase output of existing chemicals. Among manufacturing industries, pharmaceuticals may provide the best opportunities for jobseekers. Many of the jobs for chemical engineers, however, will be in nonmanufacturing industries, especially services industries such as research and testing services. Even though no new jobs due to growth are expected to be created, many openings will result from the need to replace chemical engineers who transfer to other occupations or leave the labor force.

i'm sure this varies by trade, however, invariably, the role of automation in monitoring, design and research has adversely affected the human component of virtually any occupation. as technology builds by way of exponents, this will increase, leaving engineering and science no quarter.

back to being an idiot, are you a blind idiot in the face of the implications that technology has on employment?

Did I call you an idiot? I'm sorry. You have a degree in Chemistry and Biology, but can't find a job in either? No, you're not an idiot. You're a lying idiot or possibly something as simple as a "fool". Good luck. Learn how to write a resume.

 

[Oddball]

I do wonder at what point we will hit the max saturation for the human mind. That is to say, at what point will we become so advanced that it takes a lifetime of study to get to a point in understanding of your field that you are no longer able to make discoveries. Already people are taking 10+ years to become experts in their fields, what happens when it take 40 years. Maybe our life spans will be sufficient to take it at that time.

Are you maybe omitting the fact that with an increase in knowledge, many of the old "facts" become obsolete and only useful in learning how not to make the same mistake twice?

That can be a real time and gray matter saver.

Each fact that is removed is replaced by 2 more facts that are far more complicated than before. Take a simple example: Bohr's Atom. Today, we know that model it false but it is still taught. Why? The simple explanation is that reality is so damn complicated that it is simpler to teach everyone the old model and only teach the advanced model to specialists. New discoveries may erase some of our old theories but they seem quite a bit more complex than the ones they replace.

OK...How about when the new knowledge becomes so commonplace so as to be self-evident; i.e. the Earth is round?

Today, very few are even taught about the findings of people like Eratosthenes, as we can look at pictures taken from orbit and see for ourselves.

 

[antagon]

i can't bring myself to knock my own field, and i will likely endeavor to force one of my unborn progeny into engineering, but simple economic mechanics might indicate that wherever jobs are rushing, constitutes the epicenter of a boom, and that inevitably there will be a bust targeting, foremost, employment.

no lessons have been learned by the bullish pets.com tech employee months before the economic adjustment which handed him his pink slip.

have you not made any observation of the shrinking ration of productivity accountable by labor, even (if not especially) in areas of research, engineering and technology? look at an oil refinery. despite being a largely automated process to start with, the amount of labor required to produce nearly twice the output, is about a third of what it was 30 years ago. engineers and technicians.

adjustment to this ratio are not made gradually, rather mergers, closures and aggregate layoffs occur in troughs in industry-specific cycles... at least thats how the world has worked up to this point. maybe a new world order has ensued.

 

[antagon]

this thread is getting some convo going, at last. thanks to all for contributing

Are you maybe omitting the fact that with an increase in knowledge, many of the old "facts" become obsolete and only useful in learning how not to make the same mistake twice?

That can be a real time and gray matter saver.

Each fact that is removed is replaced by 2 more facts that are far more complicated than before. Take a simple example: Bohr's Atom. Today, we know that model it false but it is still taught. Why? The simple explanation is that reality is so damn complicated that it is simpler to teach everyone the old model and only teach the advanced model to specialists. New discoveries may erase some of our old theories but they seem quite a bit more complex than the ones they replace.

OK...How about when the new knowledge becomes so commonplace so as to be self-evident; i.e. the Earth is round?

Today, very few are even taught about the findings of people like Eratosthenes, as we can look at pictures taken from orbit and see for ourselves.

the concept of a full brain is interesting. i would argue that we have long used technology as a crutch to help us along in this respect: rediscovery>oral tradition>written tradition>education, etc. this has helped in squeezing more complication into less time.

i believe that specialization is important to consider in this debate. researchers seem to be far more specialized, whole organizations, in fact, to lend an informed consensus to science as a larger picture, which precludes the need for any one researcher to grasp this larger picture in its entirety.

as challenging as it is for some to accept, the role of computer's capacity for research has displaced that of humans in areas where we would otherwise 'drag our feet'. the mapping of genomes is an example that comes to mind.

 

[FA_Q2]

Are you maybe omitting the fact that with an increase in knowledge, many of the old "facts" become obsolete and only useful in learning how not to make the same mistake twice?

That can be a real time and gray matter saver.

Each fact that is removed is replaced by 2 more facts that are far more complicated than before. Take a simple example: Bohr's Atom. Today, we know that model it false but it is still taught. Why? The simple explanation is that reality is so damn complicated that it is simpler to teach everyone the old model and only teach the advanced model to specialists. New discoveries may erase some of our old theories but they seem quite a bit more complex than the ones they replace.

OK...How about when the new knowledge becomes so commonplace so as to be self-evident; i.e. the Earth is round?

Today, very few are even taught about the findings of people like Eratosthenes, as we can look at pictures taken from orbit and see for ourselves.

One would hope but those are small and simple. I doubt that Quantum Mechanics and Calc are ever going to be common knowledge. Maybe we will be capable of 'enhancing' humans in the near future. Though longevity is likely the best answer to saturization(sp).

 

[rdean]

Each fact that is removed is replaced by 2 more facts that are far more complicated than before. Take a simple example: Bohr's Atom. Today, we know that model it false but it is still taught. Why? The simple explanation is that reality is so damn complicated that it is simpler to teach everyone the old model and only teach the advanced model to specialists. New discoveries may erase some of our old theories but they seem quite a bit more complex than the ones they replace.

OK...How about when the new knowledge becomes so commonplace so as to be self-evident; i.e. the Earth is round?

Today, very few are even taught about the findings of people like Eratosthenes, as we can look at pictures taken from orbit and see for ourselves.

One would hope but those are small and simple. I doubt that Quantum Mechanics and Calc are ever going to be common knowledge. Maybe we will be capable of 'enhancing' humans in the near future. Though longevity is likely the best answer to saturization(sp).

Absolutely.

When I took Calculus, there were 44 students in the class. After 4 semesters (Calc 1,2,3,Diff EQ), by the time we got to Differential Linear Equations, there were 10 and 8 graduated.

An 18% graduation rate is not much to be proud of.

 

[ScottBernard]

An old joke in the aviation arms of the military is that airplanes are designed by people with Ph.D's; they're built by people with Master's Degrees; they're flown by people with Bachelor's Degrees; and they're maintained by people with High School educations.

Think more along a 'project to project' modality. You only need a handful of people to conceptualize and design. Then the group who will manufacture will be less skilled but more numerous. The operators will be technical in their intellectual discipline but not as knowledgeable as the designers. All the testing, operational parameters will have been thoroughly established, and maintenance will require less skilled people but they will be more numerous given the 'life expectancy' of the machine in consideration as it is fielded. They will have job security until the next replacement is developed.

 

[antagon]

An old joke in the aviation arms of the military is that airplanes are designed by people with Ph.D's; they're built by people with Master's Degrees; they're flown by people with Bachelor's Degrees; and they're maintained by people with High School educations.

Think more along a 'project to project' modality. You only need a handful of people to conceptualize and design. Then the group who will manufacture will be less skilled but more numerous. The operators will be technical in their intellectual discipline but not as knowledgeable as the designers. All the testing, operational parameters will have been thoroughly established, and maintenance will require less skilled people but they will be more numerous given the 'life expectancy' of the machine in consideration as it is fielded. They will have job security until the next replacement is developed.

with respect to stateside industry, design and industrial technologies along with globalization have changed this traditional hierarchy.

 

[rdean]

An old joke in the aviation arms of the military is that airplanes are designed by people with Ph.D's; they're built by people with Master's Degrees; they're flown by people with Bachelor's Degrees; and they're maintained by people with High School educations.

Think more along a 'project to project' modality. You only need a handful of people to conceptualize and design. Then the group who will manufacture will be less skilled but more numerous. The operators will be technical in their intellectual discipline but not as knowledgeable as the designers. All the testing, operational parameters will have been thoroughly established, and maintenance will require less skilled people but they will be more numerous given the 'life expectancy' of the machine in consideration as it is fielded. They will have job security until the next replacement is developed.

with respect to stateside industry, design and industrial technologies along with globalization have changed this traditional hierarchy.

Absolutely.

I don't like using Wikipedia as a "source", but they do a good job of spelling it out.

Creativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There has been debate in the psychological literature about whether intelligence and creativity are part of the same process (the conjoint hypothesis) or represent distinct mental processes (the disjoint hypothesis). Evidence from attempts to look at correlations between intelligence and creativity from the 1950s onwards, by authors such as Barron, Guilford or Wallach and Kogan, regularly suggested that correlations between these concepts were low enough to justify treating them as distinct concepts.

-------

The last year and a half, I've worked with two different design firms.
Typically, they have a "creative specialist" assigned to a project. But it's up to the engineers to sift through the "creative thought process" and come up with the most feasible design that give the biggest bang for the buck. It's never about "right or wrong", but about "the best possibilities".

When design teams are put together these days in big companies who have some money to spend; the most effective teams are made up of people who have been given psychological evaluations. If it were left up to a team leader, they would choose people that most like themselves, or, oddly enough, the opposite.

We now know that what works best is, get this, the Republican nightmare - "Diversity".

The group is chosen by people who don't work in that group that's a mixture of types - "big picture", "detail oriented", "creative", "cautionary", "doer" and so one. These types may not "like" each other, but we know that a balanced group of "types" are always the most effective.

The point is that "intelligence" and "creativity" have very little in common. If that were the case, "dancers, artists and actors" would all be "intelligent" and we know, most definitely, that is hardly the case.

 

[antagon]

An old joke in the aviation arms of the military is that airplanes are designed by people with Ph.D's; they're built by people with Master's Degrees; they're flown by people with Bachelor's Degrees; and they're maintained by people with High School educations.

Think more along a 'project to project' modality. You only need a handful of people to conceptualize and design. Then the group who will manufacture will be less skilled but more numerous. The operators will be technical in their intellectual discipline but not as knowledgeable as the designers. All the testing, operational parameters will have been thoroughly established, and maintenance will require less skilled people but they will be more numerous given the 'life expectancy' of the machine in consideration as it is fielded. They will have job security until the next replacement is developed.

with respect to stateside industry, design and industrial technologies along with globalization have changed this traditional hierarchy.

Absolutely.

I don't like using Wikipedia as a "source", but they do a good job of spelling it out.

Creativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There has been debate in the psychological literature about whether intelligence and creativity are part of the same process (the conjoint hypothesis) or represent distinct mental processes (the disjoint hypothesis). Evidence from attempts to look at correlations between intelligence and creativity from the 1950s onwards, by authors such as Barron, Guilford or Wallach and Kogan, regularly suggested that correlations between these concepts were low enough to justify treating them as distinct concepts.

-------

The last year and a half, I've worked with two different design firms.
Typically, they have a "creative specialist" assigned to a project. But it's up to the engineers to sift through the "creative thought process" and come up with the most feasible design that give the biggest bang for the buck. It's never about "right or wrong", but about "the best possibilities".

When design teams are put together these days in big companies who have some money to spend; the most effective teams are made up of people who have been given psychological evaluations. If it were left up to a team leader, they would choose people that most like themselves, or, oddly enough, the opposite.

We now know that what works best is, get this, the Republican nightmare - "Diversity".

The group is chosen by people who don't work in that group that's a mixture of types - "big picture", "detail oriented", "creative", "cautionary", "doer" and so one. These types may not "like" each other, but we know that a balanced group of "types" are always the most effective.

The point is that "intelligence" and "creativity" have very little in common. If that were the case, "dancers, artists and actors" would all be "intelligent" and we know, most definitely, that is hardly the case.

intellectual diversity - diversity in general - has been an american advantage since the jump. recognizing and mastering the divide between valuing something and merely exploiting it has been the challenge since.