Category Archives: Economics

Posts exploring the economic impacts of science and engineering. The value of strong science and engineering practice has many benefits to the economy – directly and indirectly. Many countries are focusing their future economic plans on advancing their scientific, engineering and technology communities and creating environments that support scientists and engineers.

Stephen Hawking Joins Attack on Science Cuts

Stephen Hawking joins attack on science cuts

The Council, which funds public research in particle physics and astronomy, has to save Â£80 million over the next three years because of lack of Government funding. To add insult to injury, Nature reports that the Government has also raided a similar amount – Â£93 million – from the money raised from patents by the Medical Research Council, an act which has been condemned as a “breach of faith” by the Royal Society.

The newest category I added was for funding a month ago. This is another example of the important role funding plays in science. And is a reminder that political realities affect government funding science will receive. As I said earlier this month: If the science and engineering community are not well represented to our representatives the interests of the science and engineering community will get short changed. Many working is science don’t want to be involved in the political debate but those who are involved play an important role.

Africa Turning to China and India for Engineering and Science Education

‘Browning’ the technology of Africa by G. Pascal Zachary

The sudden influx of Chinese and Indian technologies represents the “browning” of African technology, which has long been the domain of “white” Americans and Europeans who want to apply their saving hand to African problems.

“It is a tectonic shift to the East with shattering implications,” says Calestous Juma, a Kenyan professor at Harvard University who advises the African Union on technology policy. One big change is in education. There are roughly 2,000 African students in China, most of whom are pursuing engineering and science courses. According to Juma, that number is expected to double over the next two years, making China “Africa’s leading destination for science and engineering education.”

China’s technology inroads are usually less dramatic, but no less telling. In African medicine, Chinese herbs and pharmaceuticals are quietly gaining share. For example, the Chinese-made anti-malarial drug artesunate has become part of the standard treatment within just a few years. Likewise, Chinese mastery over ultra-small, cheap “micro-hydro” dams, which can generate tiny amounts of electricity from mere trickles of water, appeals to power-short, river-rich Africans. Tens of thousands of micro-hydro systems operate in China, and nearly none in Africa.

Expensive Ink

$8,000-per-gallon printer ink leads to antitrust lawsuit

For most printer companies, ink is the bread and butter of their business. The price of ink for HP ink-jet printers can be as much as $8,000 per gallon, a figure that makes gas-pump price gouging look tame. HP is currently the dominant company in the printing market, and a considerable portion of the company’s profits come from ink.

The printer makers have been waging an all-out war against third-party vendors that sell replacement cartridges at a fraction of the price. The tactics employed by the printer makers to maintain monopoly control over ink distribution for their printing products have become increasingly aggressive. In the past, we have seen HP, Epson, Lenovo and other companies attempt to use patents and even the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in their efforts to crush third-party ink distributors.

The companies have also turned to using the ink equivalent of DRM, the use of microchips embedded in ink cartridges that work with a corresponding technical mechanism in the printer that blocks the use of unauthorized third-party ink.

Tip – by a printer from a company that doesn’t rip you off as much for ink: The Kodak 5300 All-in-One Printer, which uses ultra low-priced ink to help you save up to 50 percent. Kodak has made the strategic decision to compete with the entrenched printing companies by not ripping off customers as much. Ok I am not really sure how this really fits one this blog but I want to put it here so I will 🙂

Strategic Research Plan for Nanotechnology

Productive Nanosystems report for the United States Department of Energy:

This Roadmap is a call to action that provides a vision for atomically precise manufacturing technologies and productive nanosystems. The United States nanotechnology advancement goal should be to lead the world towards the development of these revolutionary technologies in order to improve the human condition by addressing grand challenges in energy, health care, and other fields. The United States can accomplish this goal through accelerated global collaborations focused on two strategies that will offer ongoing and increasing benefits as the
technology base advances:

1. Develop atomically precise technologies that provide clean energy supplies and a cost-effective energy infrastructure.
2. Develop atomically precise technologies that produce new nanomedicines and multifunctional in vivo and in vitro therapeutic and diagnostic devices to improve human health.
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Close cooperation among scientific and engineering disciplines will be necessary because of the nature of the engineering problems involved. This cross-disciplinary collaboration will bring broad benefits through the cross-fertilization of ideas, instruments, and techniques that will result from developing the required technology base.

With international cooperation, the benefits of productive nanosystems will be delivered to the world faster. Coordinating a full international
effort is extremely desirable in order to minimize duplication of effort in smaller national programs conducted independently.

Randomization in Sports

Here is my comment on, The Sun Devil Suggestion System:

My father was a professor (of statistics, chemical engineering… at the University of Wisconsin. I remember one time he wanted the football coach to randomly select the play for certain situations. They would have say 4 plays for 3rd and 3. Instead of making the decision of which to run he thought they should just randomly pick from those 4. The idea was that would eliminate the coaches’ bias which the defense could predict and plan for. The theory was being more unpredictable would lead to more success. They didn’t go for it.

Here is a post on the Freakonomics blog today, Why Don’t Sports Teams Use Randomization? by Ian Ayres:

Levitt and others have tested the degree to which professional tennis and soccer players are successful at playing randomized strategies. But it remains a mystery to me why coaches don’t have random number generators (any laptop would do) to help them pick the next pitch in baseball, or the next play they will call in football.

He then goes on to discuss an equally interesting but different topic faulting coaches for failing to take enough risk in football – in going for a first down on fourth down. That supports my gut instincts. The “conventional wisdom” seems mainly about not “seeming stupid” not the best long term results.

USA Teens 29th in Science

The 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report has been released. The report examines the science of 15 year olds from 57 countries in math, science and reading. Once you get passed the poor design of the PISA web site you can find a great deal of data (which gives a great deal more depth to the results than just a simple listing of the top countries by mean score). But that list is interesting too.

*Rant* I find it amazing that sites can be so poorly run that they fail to even display without Javascript enabled. That is how badly run the PISA web site is, though. Here is the home page they direct you too: www.pisa.oecd.org/pages/0,2987,en_32252351_32235731_1_1_1_1_1,00.html – they need to have some people read about web usability (they should hire someone that knows how to apply the ideas of Jakob Neilsen, Jared Spool or 37 Signals).

Results for the Science portion (rank – country – mean score)(I am not listing all countries):

1 – Finland – 563
2 – Hong Kong – 542
3 – Canada – 534
4 – Taiwan – 532
6 – Japan – 531
7 – New Zealand – 530
8 – Australia – 527
9 – Netherlands – 525
11 – Korea – 522
13 – Germany – 516
14 – United Kingdom – 515
25 – France – 495
29 – USA – 489
49 – Mexico – 410

Science and Engineering in Politics

Politics of engineering by Patrick Mannion, EE Times:

Engineering interests historically haven’t been at the forefront of the political debate, at least not compared with those of, say, farming, law or health care. But given the importance of the technological advances that engineers help effect and the need to maintain our competitive edge in a rapidly changing global environment, that situation needs to change, and fast.
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Then came word of the $25 billion being handed to farmers in yet another subsidy, loudly denounced by some as welfare for the wealthy. I’m not going to get into the right or wrong of the subsidies–but I am amazed at the ability of agribusiness to get them at all. It shows the power of the farm lobby. Ditto for pharmaceuticals, HMOs, lawyers, “big oil” and so on. It underscores the relative political weakness of the engineering community.

If the science and engineering community are not well represented to our representatives the interests of the science and engineering community will get short changed. Especially since so few politicians in the USA have even a basic understanding of science and the scientific method. And a very small percentage have any advanced degrees in science and engineering fields or work experience in them. That being said the political arena is much like a tar pit: that is it is difficult to interact with without becoming entangled in a big mess. And it is not as though the scientific and engineering community are even close to unified but still the impact of political decisions is very significant and science and engineering leaders need to be heard.

China’s Economic Science Experiment – China’s 9 most senior government official are all engineers (in 2006 – I am not sure now):

When China’s leaders meet with Hu each week in Beijing’s government district, Zhongnanhai, they could spend hours discussing cables, switches, tool-making machines and control devices. That’s because every one of them has a degree in engineering. The president himself, the son of a tea merchant from Jiangsu Province, trained to build hydroelectric power stations, while the others hold degrees in electrical engineering, metallurgy and geology.

Ethanol: Science Based Solution or Special Interest Welfare

I believe the way to deal with the need for energy resources should be primarily science and economics based. I do not think it should be based on who can best reward politicians for giving them a bunch of federal dollars. Ethanol Craze Cools As Doubts Multiply by Lauren Etter, Wall Street Journal

A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that biofuels “offer a cure [for oil dependence] that is worse than the disease.” A National Academy of Sciences study said corn-based ethanol could strain water supplies. The American Lung Association expressed concern about a form of air pollution from burning ethanol in gasoline. Political cartoonists have taken to skewering the fuel for raising the price of food to the world’s poor.
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A study coauthored by Nobel-prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen said corn ethanol might exacerbate climate change as the added fertilizer used to grow corn raised emissions of a very potent greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide. The ethanol industry replies to that one with an Energy Department study concluding that use of ethanol reduces greenhouse-gas emissions by 18% to 28% on a per-gallon basis, provided that coal isn’t used to run ethanol plants.
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Mr. Dinneen, who has been lobbying on ethanol so long he’s known as the “reverend of renewable fuels,” says he’s “reasonably confident” Congress will raise the ethanol mandate. He says he’s talking with the military, labor groups, Southern black churches and others about how ethanol can help them. “We’ve got to build the biggest, baddest coalition we can.”

I am skeptical of claims that mainly focus on getting the government to subsidize your production and erect trade barriers to foreign supplies to the USA. I don’t mind a few $Billion even (quite a lot of money) to be invested in research on biofules but just creating a massive payment, taxation and regulation scheme to funnel money to special interests is not a good idea.

Engineering Education Study Debate

Engineering education study draws industry fire by George Leopold, EE Times:

In a radio debate with Salzman on the NPR program “Science Friday,” Intel Corp. Chairman Craig Barrett blasted Salzman’s “backward-looking analysis.” Said Barrett: “The U.S. cannot be successful if we are only ‘average’ ” in math and science. “[S]aying we’re ‘OK’ because we’re average just can’t be right. That’s backward looking. That’s not looking ahead at competition with India, China, Russia and others that are putting heavy emphasis on education.”
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Salzman did, however, conceded one point to his critics, acknowledging that the engineering field in the U.S. isn’t what it used to be. As a profession, “engineering is not a field that has a bright future,” he said. Quoting an engineer interviewed for the Urban Institute study, Salzman said, “It was a great ride, but it’s over.”

Previous posts on the study (The Importance of Science Education – Math and Science Education Assessment). I doubt the engineering ride is over – but everyone is entitled to their opinion. As I have said many times the economic future will be greatly influenced by science and engineering. Those countries that succeed in creating a positive economic climate for science and engineering development will find economic rewards those that fail to do so will suffer. The USA has come through a period where they received great economic benefit from science and engineering supremacy. There is little doubt other centers of excellence will emerge and gain the benefits. But if the USA were to actually fall backward (not just see the relative position decline as other countries gained ground) that will be a serious problem and one I think is unlikely.

Who Should Profit from Yellowstone’s Microbes

The Gold in Yellowstone’s Microbes

Year by year, Yellowstone’s hot waters are yielding remarkable new microbial specimens with implications for medicine, agriculture and energy, as well as offering clues to the formation of earliest life on Earth and maybe even on Mars. The potential financial windfalls are enormous, as evidenced by one big jackpot.
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Yellowstone microbes (and those from a few other hot spots on the planet) may also hold great promise for bioremediation — cleaning up chemical pollution, oil slicks and smokestack emissions — as well as the means to accelerate biomass fermentation and develop drought-resistant crops. And there is more to be discovered: Probably less than one percent of Yellowstone’s microscopic life forms have been discovered and studied.
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the National Park Service signed a secretive research-sharing agreement with Diversa Corporation in 1998. Non-profit groups quickly cried “bio-piracy!” when they found out and sued the Service over the arrangement. While a federal court dismissed the case, it ordered the Park Service to address the issue… But the Park Service is still trying to come up with an acceptable, benefits-sharing agreement that might allow bio-prospecting of microbes and disclosure of findings, with a fair return to the Park from any commercial success.