The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation, according to federal and private experts who point to strong evidence like prizes awarded to

Americans and the number of papers in major professional journals.

Foreign advances in basic science now often rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of the trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor of the

nation's intellectual and cultural life.



"The rest of the world is catching up," said John E. Jankowski, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that tracks science trends. "Science excellence is no longer the

domain of just the U.S."

Even analysts worried by the trend concede that an expansion of the world's brain trust, with new approaches, could invigorate the fight

against disease, develop new sources of energy and wrestle with knotty environmental problems. But profits from the breakthroughs are likely to stay overseas, and this country will face competition for things

like hiring scientific talent and getting space to showcase its work in top journals.

One area of international competition involves patents. Americans still win large numbers of them, but the percentage is falling as foreigners, especially Asians, have become more active and in some

fields have seized the innovation lead. The United States' share of its own industrial patents has fallen steadily over the decades and now stands at 52 percent.

A more concrete decline can be seen in published research. Physical Review, a series of top physics journals, recently tracked a reversal in which American papers, in two decades, fell from the most to a

minority. Last year the total was just 29 percent, down from 61 percent in 1983.

China, said Martin Blume, the journals' editor, has surged ahead by submitting more than 1,000 papers a year. "Other scientific publishers are seeing the same kind of thing," he added.

Another downturn centers on the Nobel Prizes, an icon of scientific excellence. Traditionally, the United States, powered by heavy federal investments in basic research, the kind that pursues fundamental

questions of nature, dominated the awards.

But the American share, after peaking from the 1960's through the 1990's, has fallen in the 2000's to about half, 51 percent. The rest went to Britain, Japan, Russia, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and New

Zealand.

"We are in a new world, and it's increasingly going to be dominated by countries other than the United States," Denis Simon, dean of management and technology at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,

recently said at a scientific meeting in Washington.

Europe and Asia are ascendant, analysts say, even if their achievements go unnoticed in the United States. In March, for example, European scientists announced that one of their planetary probes had detected methane in the atmosphere of Mars — a possible sign that alien microbes live beneath the planet's surface. The finding made headlines from Paris to Melbourne. But most Americans, bombarded

with images from America's own rovers successfully exploring the red planet, missed the foreign news.

More aggressively, Europe is seeking to dominate particle physics by building the world's most powerful atom smasher, set for its debut in 2007. Its circular tunnel is 17 miles around.

Science analysts say Asia's push for excellence promises to be even more challenging.

"It's unbelievable," Diana Hicks, chairwoman of the school of public policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said of Asia's growth in science and technical innovation. "It's amazing to see these output

numbers of papers and patents going up so fast."

Analysts say comparative American declines are an inevitable result of rising standards of living around the globe.

"It's all in the ebb and flow of globalization," said Jack Fritz, a senior officer at the National Academy of Engineering, an advisory body to the federal government. He called the declines "the next big

thing we will have to adjust to."

The rapidly changing American status has not gone unnoticed by politicians, with Democrats on the attack and the White House on the defensive.

That's what happens when the system constantly lowers it's standards so "diversities" don't feel so "stoopid."

Instead of trying to encourage the best students to excel by pushing them to their limits, the "excuse mongers" blame "diversity" low achievement on racism and hold white students down to a learning level that is an embarrassment to this nation.

We, as a nation, waste billions on the lost cause of trying to modify our educational system to accommodate incompetent minorities instead of

spending the money on capable students.

Hence, "hi skool " graduates who haven't been motivated and encouraged to learn the hard subjects like math and science are ill prepared for technical

training in college.

As a result, the majority of college students in technical training (science

and engineering schools) are foreign students. That's OK as long as they stay here and contribute their talents to keeping this country technologically up-to-date. But, we are seeing more and more that other countries are encouraging

technical training and their best minds are staying at home and competing with the US.

It's all part of the "dumbing down of America" and it seems to be working.

I agree! Schools need to really focus on the smart kids who like and do well in math and science. The annoying race baiters can major in Ethnic Studies, which means they might get a sales job at Macys. Start tracking and let the losers fall between the cracks. America needs all the janitors it can get.

Science and engineering have already become something of an ethnic "ghetto" where the minorities do the hard work while the (mostly) white American management take the profits.

The pattern that exists locally also exists globally.

The general direction is for America to become a center of finance, military control, and protection of property rights (intellectual as well as real assets). In this horrific dystopian vision, America will become a "gated community" of rich people (of all races) who own businesses around the globe. The world becomes a "ghetto", and the Americans unfortunate enough to not be wealthy will become "slavemasters" in the third world.

Sounds far fetched... but if they can outsource the work, why not build all the universities there too?

The rich in American don't need the middle class. They would like nothing more than the abolition of the "middle class", so that there would be more poor people.

"Just take a stroll around the engineering building at a typical university."

Like YOU'VE ever been on a university campus.

"Yes I did spend a few years on the college campus."

Unsubstantiated Allegation

"I have an engineering degree and an MBA."

Unsubstantiated Allegation

"Graduated first in my class (undergraduate)."

Unsubstantiated Allegation

"Harvard B School also wrote a case study about my and the company I headed."

Unsubstantiated Allegation

"I've spent considerable time at Harvard reviewing that case."

Unsubstantiated Allegation

For more on logic at YOUR level, try reading "Logic for Neocon Dummies" (pardon the redundancy).

Sounds more like an upward spiral to me. Upward for whites, who don't need to work hard to get rich.

Can you say "racist security state"? You know, like the British empire's India or South Africa under Apartheid.

Under capitalism, capital is primary, and the state is the tool of capital. The state protects capital.

Wealth, at this time, is built through trade and innovation; or to be more plain, through sales of inventions. It used to be built through owning land and getting things out of it: food, minerals, etc. It still is, but today, a lot of value comes from innovation.

Today, the "next phase" is to trade in the ideas behind the innovations. This is intellectual property, where an "idea" becomes a kind of property, and the wealth is accumulated through royalties. The ideas being traded don't just lead to new inventions, but also "business processes" or how people conduct business.

When the idea of private property spread across America, it was into a land that didn't understand private property, fences, barbed wire, and borders. Private property was a social construction. It brought with it ideas of liberal democracy, but, also led to the end of millions of lives of the original Americans.

Likewise, the idea of intellectual property implies a levelling of capital. After all, almost everyone has a functioning mind, while not everyone has a plot of land. On the flipside, intellectual property will necessarily represent a further incursion of the power of the State over people.

Here's the dystopian vision -- If it's the rich liberal arts students who have the power, then the poor immigrant engineers will become the mental slaves. They will not own their ideas. They will become the lackeys for the elite, creating high-tech systems of social control to enslave those who are even poorer and work with their bodies.

El Loco,

A little questionnaire: do you, or have you ever, identified with one of these standpoints?

1. "The educational system is stacked against minority groups, but let's just cut our losses,"

2. "Minority cultures don't instill the value of a good education, so let's cut our losses instead of overcompensating," or

3. "Minorities are inherently stooopid and I'm a pro-aryan genetic predeterminist who thinks that whites have only gotten away with screwing all the minorities because of our larger craniums"

Whatever you think, you should try airing your basic paradigm of race in plain English. See how many people in the real world give you a warm "hip hip hooray," and how many (whites included) kick your ass in a New York second. You might be surprised at how much things have changed since the days that blacks had to sit at the back of the bus--which, for the record, was only a few decades ago.

Personally, I'm just glad that a perfect state of equal opportunity in the educational system happened overnight (I think it was around 11:30 pm sometime in 1985). Now they have no excuse.