The More You Know

The National Science Board reports that scientific and mathematical knowledge among my fellow Americans lags behind the rest of the world. From the NY Times article on the subject:

Many Americans remain ignorant about much of science, the board said. Many are unable to answer correctly when asked whether Earth moves around the Sun (it does).

That parenthetical statement kills me. Ted Alvarez adds this observation:

Americans are not terribly far off the mark in some science fields, but there's a particular ignorance when compared to other countries concerning two major subjects: evolution and the Big Bang.

In an election year when a presidential candidate who denies the validity of evolution is a serious contender, that doesn't surprise me. Yet as bad as this "willfully ignorant" condition may sound, the current state of science and technology in the U.S. is a mixed bag, as outlined by Computing Research Policy Blog:

• world science and engineering activities are shifting from the US and Europe, the traditional leaders, to Asia.
• US share of high tech manufacturing has stayed above 30 percent over the last twenty years
• Two-thirds of US R&D funding comes from industry and only 28 percent is from the federal government
• 2007 had a major downward curve in constant dollars of federal support for academic research
• Defense research, mostly development, accounts for over half of all federal R&D
• China’s PhD attainment is on a steep up curve but is still significantly below the US
• There has been an increase in S&E bachelors degrees in the US in all fields EXCEPT computing
• Most foreign born PhD candidates in the US plan to stay in the US
• 80 percent of the public supports federal funding of basic research and 40 percent believe there is too little federal funding of basic research

I put the alarming stuff in bold. I'm not worried about The Rise of Asia (TM), or some other variation of the "Yellow Peril" fearmongering  favored by so-called "populists"; but the "brain drain" involved here is troubling. It's good to see that there is significant support for public funding of basic research.