UK lawmakers warn Blighty to invest more in science, or else The UK government is endangering "competitiveness, productivity and jobs", due to its systematic underinvestment in science and R&D, Whitehall's Science & Technology Committee has warned. A damning report on the UK's Science Budget said the UK has fallen below the OECD average for R&D investment in science and is "well below" …
c'mon guys. Get your priorities right.
We need countywide high-res full colour CCTV with speech recognition and voice fingerprinting. The spooks will of course have a back door so they can go discretely about their business (along with favoured politicians). The {other} crims will therefore have this ability the following day along with Russia and China. America won't have to bother as GCHQ will pass all the info to them anyway.
These people cutting back spending need to remember to plant some seeds and add some fertiliser or there will be no crop to harvest.
No investment, no return. Education and health are the two most important things, they come before second home expenses and gerbil felching. Sort it out now.
Oh hang on, they don't give a shit because we've only got shoes that don't fit but we keep trying them on anyway, at every other general election.
The salary of someone involved at a high level in Science or Engineering for an extended period of time has the same salary as someone involved in the financial sector for the same amount of time with the same level of qualifications, experience and competence are compensated to the same extent, then I'll be reporting on the incidence of airborne swine.
Back in the 70s when I was at University, the brightest engineering and science graduates were heading towards accounting and finance, rather than research. The banks and accounting firms were prepared to pay far more than the likes of GEC, ICI, BP et. al. The only exception to that was IT, but now even that seems to have fallen back.
The same arguments were used then, but nothing has changed, accountants like to treat everything as a cost that they can cut, or an asset they can realise.
yep. I work for one of the research councils and I haven't had an increase in my take home pay for 5 years. And on Friday we had an email about increased NI contributions from April 2016 so that's another £35 a month, wiping out last years (still not had it yet) 1% pay award. Why the feck would you want to work in public sector research! Still as long as MP's are happy with their 11% eh
Although, when I think about it... why is the predicted return on my pension scheme failing so badly that the scheme has to be restructured for greater contributions in order to maintain benefits? Is it a fall in the quality of financial investment managers, in which case we need to invest more in that area, or is it that increases in medical care leads to an unexpected longevity increase in the population, in which case we should stop investing in health care research and let the f***ers die sooner? Mmm... Catch-22.
Although I hasten to add that in around 20 years time, I'll be one of the f***ers.
Because they need your money now to keep the City going for another few years - they'll be long gone in 20 years times.
Also the pension companies are not taking any risks with life expectancy; as of now men retiring in the next few years are assumed to survive another 30 years past the (moving) official retirement age, so in 20 years time I guess you'll get your government pension around 75 and you'll be expected to make it last for 40 years.
"But I actually get less now than I did 8 years ago because of bigger changes to the pension scheme contributions."
Less still when you factor in how much the cost of just about everything has risen in that 8 years.
At some point you need to say "much as I love the job, I just can't afford to work here anymore"
OK, at the high end, we have Bill Gates and Warren Buffet while at the entry level, we have computer science and engineering vs everything else. Based on that, at least, it looks like STEM areas are a reasonable investment if you want to encourage people to be productive and make pretty good salaries.
Pigs on the wing?
Maths test for MPs consisting of a single question:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19801666
Just over 3/4 of Labour MPs and just under 1/2 of Tory MPs got a simple probability question wrong.
They'd be lambasted if their literacy was at the same level as their numeracy. But in the UK innumeracy is, it seems, acceptable - even in a job where it would seem to be, at the very least, something of an asset.
Sociology, Psychology, Economics, Climatology and other statistical sciences may not have as much value to the economy as engineering, chemistry, physics, medicine, psychiatry, biology, metrology and etc.
How do we assess what science has more value?
What subjects are just yuppy spawn crèches with a science tag on it?
@Martin Gregorie
Yes, but the original comment was "And within those take physics, which is more valuable; applied, theoretical or experimental?"
If there was free reign for which science was most fun to watch, I'd have gone for "reproductive biology".
@TRT,
I'm not convinced "reproductive biology" would be that fun to watch considering the great majoritory out there...
Wasps dragging spiders to their slow demise, zombie fungus taking control of ants so they can infect more ants all the while enjoying a meal on six legs, bacterial mitosis (seen one you've seen a billion), plus the vast majority of hairless apes showing their wobbly bits in ways that makes you wish you hit next quicker or preferably gone blind with the fun stuff.
I don't entirely disagree - but if you look at where science investments go - your 'not as much value' elements make up a very small amount of the total.
And I do think you are slightly in danger of succumbing to Douglas Adam's 'telephone sanitizer' syndrome. You might personally value psychiatry over sociology, but society needs some of both. Not much use inventing and building widgets if your factory gets burned down in a riot because you neglected society.
I'm pretty sure sociology as a subject or career has had little or no effect one way or another as far as riots are concerned.
Maybe you're thinking of inequality or lack of social movement?
The only link between riots and sociology I can think of is the amount of sociology students in any given riot...
;-)
No, I was thinking sociology as a science - 'the scientific study of social behaviour, its origins, development, organization, and institutions. It is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, social disorder and social change'.
"Not much use inventing and building widgets if your factory gets burned down in a riot because you neglected society."
At the moment your widget factory is going out of business because society was screwed over to the point where noone could afford them. After it closes and unemployment booms, it'll be squatted in and set fire to.
Science shouldn't be about money, it should be about learning and the pursuit to push the human race forward. However we live in a capitalist society so that mostly goes out the window.
What they should do is make the education of science free and then anyone with the above ideals will go forward. As it stands no one is going to put themselves into debt to work in a science job when they can do something else and get paid a lot more with a lot less debt.
Scrap university fees and get rid of the crap "I'm only doing it to get a 2.1. and put it on my c.v." degree's.
It is stupid to encourage and enable too many people to do higher education in narrow STEM (or arts) subjects which may not be in demand at least a decade ahead. You just get more (expensive) unemployed graduates, people in mismatching lower grade jobs and a student debt time bomb!
Highly specialised division of labour only works well in an Industrial Age, it has already become an increasing liability in developed, Information Age countries e.g. tech. oriented jobs need some arts skills, and arts oriented jobs need some STEM skills too. It is already the case that most people will have to change career several times during their lifetime!
Developed countries are already in transition to a Design Age, so there needs to be more hybrid STEM and arts courses in schools and universities, so that people are wholly educated, so that they can adapt better. There also need to be tax incentives for businesses to train employees to upgrade their skills for the design age, to prevent needless unemployed burden.
Business should also be encouraged to donate to validated, public, STEM research organisations or even researchers, including for areas like Psychology, via tax incentives, because state funding bodies are often poor investors!
The odd thing about UK student debt is that after 30 years it goes back to the taxpayer to pay off, so it is really an additional selective income tax in all but name. The major risk for current and future students is that at some point the powers-that-be will realise that, like all the other cunning schemes to off-balance-sheet government debt, this doesn't actually avoid the problem of paying it off, at which point they'll start amending the loan payback rules for everyone.
There was an excellent talk given by Ken Robinson, about the modern school system being invented for producing factory workers. (Highly recommend viewing, makes a lot of sense).
Perhaps, society is going to have to realise that not everyone can reach the same standard in the given amount of time?
The problem with universities (in both the US and UK AFAIK) is they have a perverse incentive to string out the time spent in class (to collect more fees), to dilute the student/professional ratio (to spend less), and at *no cost* suggest you can have less schooling (their marketing dept will never tell you one of *their* degrees will not get you a job).
And governments keep wanting to redefine the "S" in STEM, to mean something it isn't.
Of course, it doesn't help the situation that to be successful in politics you can be mediocre at everything else...
P.
Really? Here? Comp Sci is a science, and one that has had significantly more impact than Sociology or Musicology. Data science is an emerging area of Comp Sci and is changing the world even as we engage in this discussion. Science is the quest for knowledge undertaken using scientific principles. In what way is A-B testing not the scientific method in action?
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