oder_k

В сегодняшнем Physics Today. Обсуждающим прошлое и будущее российской науки - очень рекомендую.

Некоторые цитаты:
... leaders today, realizing that military power and economic growth flow from technology, frequently call for speedy scientific development and a knowledge-based society. Often that call is rhetorical, but ... official patronage and funding for science and education have grown sharply in recent years.
...
Is boosting resource allocations enough to energize science, or are more fundamental changes required?
...
Assessing the scientific worth of publications—never an easy task—is complicated further by the rapid appearance of new international scientific journals that publish low-quality work. Many have poor editorial policies and refereeing procedures. Scientists ..., who are under pressure to publish, or who are attracted by strong government incentives, choose to follow the path of least resistance paved for them by the increasingly commercialized policies of journals. Prospective authors know that editors need to produce a journal of a certain thickness every month. ... For example, chemistry publications ... tripled in five years, from 1040 in 1998 to 3277 in 2003. Many scientific papers that were claimed as original by their ... authors, and that had been published in internationally peer-reviewed journals, had actually been published twice and sometimes thrice with identical or nearly identical contents by the same authors. Others were plagiarized papers that could have been easily detected by any reasonably careful referee.
...
But bigger budgets by themselves are not a panacea. The capacity to put those funds to good use is crucial. One determining factor is the number of available scientists, engineers, and technicians. ... Even more important are the quality and level of professionalism, which are less easily quantifiable. But increasing funding without adequately addressing such crucial concerns can lead to a null correlation between scientific funding and performance.
...
According to a recent survey..., there are approximately 1800 universities. Of those, only 312 publish journal articles. ... For the top 20 universities, the average yearly production of journal articles was about 1500, a small but reasonable number. However, the average citation per article is less than 1.0.
...
An institution's quality is fundamental, but how is it to be defined? Providing more infrastructure and facilities is important but not key. Most universities ... have a starkly inferior quality of teaching and learning, a tenuous connection to job skills, and research that is low in both quality and quantity. Poor teaching owes more to inappropriate attitudes than to material resources. Generally, obedience and rote learning are stressed, and the authority of the teacher is rarely challenged. Debate, analysis, and class discussions are infrequent.
...
This lack of self-expression and confidence leads to most ... students, including those in their mid- or late-twenties, referring to themselves as boys and girls rather than as men and women.
...
But the still deeper reasons [of the problems] are attitudinal, not material. At the base lies the yet unresolved tension between traditional and modern modes of thought and social behavior.
...
Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame—the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: ...only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated...
...
Progress will require behavioral changes. ... In the long run, political boundaries should and can be treated as artificial and temporary, as shown by the successful creation of the European Union. Just as important, the practice of religion must be a matter of choice for the individual, not enforced by the state. This leaves secular humanism, based on common sense and the principles of logic and reason, as our only reasonable choice for governance and progress. Being scientists, we understand this easily. The task is to persuade those who do not.