This is the first time I've heard anyone say just 'give up' , you won't be able to compete with cheaper workers overseas, particularly you IT workers :
For individuals: You can avoid competition with Chinese workers by doing place-based work, which ranges in value from highly skilled (emergency-room surgery) to menial (pouring concrete). But the many people who do information-based work, which is most subject to competition, will have to get dramatically better to be worth what they cost. For government leaders: Improve U.S. education above all.
Of course he throws in the obligatory 'more education' argument , but leaves out the critical part: What industry/jobs should anyone pursue education in that can't be done overseas and cheaper ? He does mention that we should do 'place-based' work ... so maybe he wants everyone to go back to school to learn to work in 'emergency-room surgery' ?
The vast majority of the new jobs and industries that will be created in the coming years will be work that is digitized. Because of this, it can be performed anywhere in the world . So new technologies do NOT hold hope for Western workers .
Even a lot of medical work is moving overseas (perhaps not emergency room work) from analyzing test results that are digitized and sent around the work in seconds to doing surgery and dental work overseas for a fraction of the cost.
And teachers are viewed as place-based work but teaching may soon shift dramatically to being online or at least having some significant component of coursework being online.
There is not enough 'place-based' work to substitute for the mass of work being shifted overseas and at the same time, even if this could happen , there would be a surplus of people competing for 'place-based' work leading to significantly lower wages.
The only things that will slow this globalization down are:
1- Political instability in the world (good chance)
2- Energy getting expensive makes the world larger , not smaller (happening now)
3- Unchecked markets destabilizing countries (happening now with food and also oil)
April 30, 2008: 5:41 AM EDT
You have 7 years to learn Mandarin
Forget cheap imports. China's rise will soon be a force on Wall Street and Main Street and in Silicon Valley.
By Geoff Colvin, senior editor at large
(Fortune Magazine) -- Back in 2001 when the International Olympic Committee chose Beijing as the site of this summer's games, the event was meant to mark China's debut as a player on the global economic stage. But a recent study by the economist Angus Maddison projects that China will become the world's dominant economic superpower much sooner than expected - not in 2050, but in 2015.
While short-term investors are already cashing in on China's growth by playing the global commodities boom, smart long-term thinkers are contemplating what happens when China matures from an exporter of cheap goods to a competitor in sectors where the U.S. is dominant - technology, brand building, finance. China has almost wiped U.S. makers of low-value items like toys and socks, but by 2015 it may threaten Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500), J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), and Procter & Gamble (PG, Fortune 500). It will increasingly influence the S&P 500 and the mutual funds in our 401(k)s. So it's worth looking at how that will happen, what it means, and what anyone can do in the seven years before the baton is passed.
Just using the exchange rate to convert China's GDP into dollars isn't helpful in comparing the two economies, because China controls its exchange rate; by that method, China's economy might not pass America's for decades. Exchange rates apply only to tradable products and services; they aren't very useful in valuing nontradable goods in a country like China that is much poorer than the United States. So we need some way to compare the real value of China's economic output with America's, and economists have developed one. It is called purchasing power parity.
For example, Chinese construction workers earn a whole lot less than Americans do, yet they can still build top-quality buildings. If we used the exchange rate, the value of a new skyscraper in Shanghai would count much less toward China's GDP than an identical building in Chicago would count toward America's, which makes no sense. Purchasing power parity corrects the problem.
Will China take the crown?
Angus Maddison's forecast (which uses purchasing power parity) isn't built on outlandish assumptions. He assumes China's growth will slow way down year by year, and America's will average about 2.6% annually, which seems reasonable. But because China has grown so stupendously during the past decade, it should still be able to take the crown in just seven more years.
If that happens, America will close out a 125-year run as the No. 1 economy. We assumed the title in 1890 from - guess who. Britain? France? No. The world's largest economy until 1890 was China's. That's why Maddison says he expects China to "resume its natural role as the world's largest economy by 2015." That scenario makes sense.
China was the largest economy for centuries because everyone had the same type of economy - subsistence - and so the country with the most people would be economically biggest. Then the Industrial Revolution sent the West on a more prosperous path. Now the world is returning to a common economy, this time technology- and information-based, so once again population triumphs.
So how should we make the most of our seven-year grace period? For companies: Focus on getting better at your highest-value activities. Just because the Chinese will be fighting you in the same industries doesn't mean you'll lose. (Investors, remember that China bought $3 billion of Blackstone (BX) at the IPO price of $31 last summer, and the firm is now trading at $19.) It only means you'll have to work harder to win.
For individuals: You can avoid competition with Chinese workers by doing place-based work, which ranges in value from highly skilled (emergency-room surgery) to menial (pouring concrete). But the many people who do information-based work, which is most subject to competition, will have to get dramatically better to be worth what they cost. For government leaders: Improve U.S. education above all.
Those are the issues in China's becoming No. 1 that we most need to focus on. And as with so much else in China's recent history, we'll need to worry about them much sooner than we expected.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
What's left for the American worker?
Research science, the final frontier (in offshoring/outsourcing) .... let them do it overseas and we can then ' convert the scientific know-how from abroad into market gains and profits. ' .... Like Einstein and the European physicists who did the work on subatomic structures and then Americans raced to create the bomb and also the nuclear industry ...
We'll be more and more just the 'idea people' and marketeers . What makes these guys think that overseas people can't also figure out how to use new scientific findings and turn them into marketable products ?
Remember when offshoring supposedly meant shipping dirty, hard or mindless, repetitive work overseas ?
Some of the comments are pretty blatant and extraordinary .
The bad news is that there is no work left for anyone in the US that can be done economically.
The good news is that at least we don't have to crack open math or science books.
I particularly liked this quote:
In the short-term at least, higher spending on scientists by India and China could create a glut of them in these countries, driving wages down further and making the costs of acquiring science even lower.
More workers drives down wages ? This directly contradicts what Bill Gates and other corporate business people say, that we need lots more H-1B workers here because of the high demand for their unavailable skills.
April 20, 2008
Ping
How Scientific Gains Abroad Pay Off in the U.S.
By G. PASCAL ZACHARY
AT a time of economic belt-tightening, might cheap science from low-wage countries help keep American innovators humming?
Americans have long profited from low-cost manufactured goods, especially from Asia. The cost of those material “inputs” is now rising. But because of growing numbers of scientists in China, India and other lower-wage countries, “the cost of producing a new scientific discovery is dropping around the world,” says Christopher T. Hill, a professor of public policy and technology at George Mason University.
American innovators — with their world-class strengths in product design, marketing and finance — may have a historic opportunity to convert the scientific know-how from abroad into market gains and profits. Mr. Hill views the transition to “the postscientific society” as an unrecognized bonus for American creators of new products and services. ( Steve's note -> note that this bonus is only for the 'creators' of products)
Mr. Hill’s insight, which he first described in a National Academy of Sciences journal article last fall, runs counter to the notion that the United States fails to educate enough of its own scientists and that “shortages” of them hamper American competitiveness.
The opposite may actually be true. By tapping relatively low-cost scientists around the world, American innovators may actually strengthen their market positions.
“We shouldn’t fear the rise of science in Asia and other poorer countries. We should figure out how to take advantage of it,” says Patrick Windham, a lecturer in technology policy at Stanford and a former staff member of Congressional science committees.
Optimism about scientific globalization is a wrinkle on the familiar story of outsourcing. Just as United States companies have contracted out physical production, they can do the same for scientific “goods,” which range from formulas and ideas to the results of experiments.
In the short-term at least, higher spending on scientists by India and China could create a glut of them in these countries, driving wages down further and making the costs of acquiring science even lower. (exactly the process that business denies is happening now in other fields) .
“Science is the ultimate global activity,” says Richard B. Freeman, a labor economist with the National Bureau of Economic Research. “You can outsource research.”
Mr. Freeman, among others, questions whether there is a shortage of scientists in the United States. He cites evidence suggesting that American dominance in science will decline over time and that we should worry less about purported shortages at home and more about “developing new ways of benefiting from scientific advances made in other countries.”
Of course, scientific knowledge isn’t a thing, like a child’s toy or an electric motor, so the day may never come when “science” can be purchased from a Chinese or Indian catalog. For the foreseeable future, United States companies will need their own highly paid scientists “to evaluate the purchase of foreign science and to make sense of it in their own labs,” says Daniel Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University.
While the United States is expected to remain the home of choice for the world’s best scientists for some time, industry is increasingly striking deals with scientists in developing countries eager for wider exposure.
Seagate Technology, a leader in digital storage, pays scientists in Singapore to do basic studies, and even benefits from subsidies given those scientists by Singapore’s government, making the relationship even more affordable. Seagate runs a research laboratory in Pittsburgh. Roughly 10 to 20 percent of the lab’s budget for outsiders goes to scientists working abroad.
Benefiting from foreign science isn’t new. Last October, the Nobel Prize for physics, for instance, was shared by French and German scientists for their basic discovery of what is known as the “giant magnetoresistance” effect, which enables much more digital data to be stored on a disk drive. The breakthrough, by Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg, had essentially no commercial impact in Germany or France. But by using open scientific literature and attending conferences, Seagate found ways to capitalize on the breakthrough, which had been financed by European governments.
“This is a really good example of how foreign scientists help,” says Mark Re, Seagate’s senior vice president for research and head of the company’s research center in Pittsburgh.
Commercializing science isn’t easy, which is the main reason that rising scientists from India, China and other countries can’t readily achieve business success. In the case of the magneto effect, Seagate engineers ended up using different materials — at different temperatures — than the Nobel winners.
“We made the big step to get the scientific advance into products,” Mr. Re says. “And then we had to manufacture hundreds of millions of them. This is a very different challenge.”
PRECISELY because the gap between basic science and commercial innovations is large, Mr. Hill’s postscientific society makes sense to innovators on the front lines. One implication for the future is that the United States “won’t have to import so many scientists,” says Stephen D. Nelson, associate director of policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The association, which for decades has generally favored policies to expand the ranks of American scientists, is devoting a portion of its annual policy seminar next month to talk about the “postscience” situation.
Industry, meanwhile, is adapting to a world where scientific goods can come from anywhere — and fewer scientists work on abstract problems unrelated to the market. “It is no accident that many corporate labs have fallen apart,” Sean M. Maloney, executive vice president of Intel, says. “They were science farms looking for problems.”
We'll be more and more just the 'idea people' and marketeers . What makes these guys think that overseas people can't also figure out how to use new scientific findings and turn them into marketable products ?
Remember when offshoring supposedly meant shipping dirty, hard or mindless, repetitive work overseas ?
Some of the comments are pretty blatant and extraordinary .
The bad news is that there is no work left for anyone in the US that can be done economically.
The good news is that at least we don't have to crack open math or science books.
I particularly liked this quote:
In the short-term at least, higher spending on scientists by India and China could create a glut of them in these countries, driving wages down further and making the costs of acquiring science even lower.
More workers drives down wages ? This directly contradicts what Bill Gates and other corporate business people say, that we need lots more H-1B workers here because of the high demand for their unavailable skills.
April 20, 2008
Ping
How Scientific Gains Abroad Pay Off in the U.S.
By G. PASCAL ZACHARY
AT a time of economic belt-tightening, might cheap science from low-wage countries help keep American innovators humming?
Americans have long profited from low-cost manufactured goods, especially from Asia. The cost of those material “inputs” is now rising. But because of growing numbers of scientists in China, India and other lower-wage countries, “the cost of producing a new scientific discovery is dropping around the world,” says Christopher T. Hill, a professor of public policy and technology at George Mason University.
American innovators — with their world-class strengths in product design, marketing and finance — may have a historic opportunity to convert the scientific know-how from abroad into market gains and profits. Mr. Hill views the transition to “the postscientific society” as an unrecognized bonus for American creators of new products and services. ( Steve's note -> note that this bonus is only for the 'creators' of products)
Mr. Hill’s insight, which he first described in a National Academy of Sciences journal article last fall, runs counter to the notion that the United States fails to educate enough of its own scientists and that “shortages” of them hamper American competitiveness.
The opposite may actually be true. By tapping relatively low-cost scientists around the world, American innovators may actually strengthen their market positions.
“We shouldn’t fear the rise of science in Asia and other poorer countries. We should figure out how to take advantage of it,” says Patrick Windham, a lecturer in technology policy at Stanford and a former staff member of Congressional science committees.
Optimism about scientific globalization is a wrinkle on the familiar story of outsourcing. Just as United States companies have contracted out physical production, they can do the same for scientific “goods,” which range from formulas and ideas to the results of experiments.
In the short-term at least, higher spending on scientists by India and China could create a glut of them in these countries, driving wages down further and making the costs of acquiring science even lower. (exactly the process that business denies is happening now in other fields) .
“Science is the ultimate global activity,” says Richard B. Freeman, a labor economist with the National Bureau of Economic Research. “You can outsource research.”
Mr. Freeman, among others, questions whether there is a shortage of scientists in the United States. He cites evidence suggesting that American dominance in science will decline over time and that we should worry less about purported shortages at home and more about “developing new ways of benefiting from scientific advances made in other countries.”
Of course, scientific knowledge isn’t a thing, like a child’s toy or an electric motor, so the day may never come when “science” can be purchased from a Chinese or Indian catalog. For the foreseeable future, United States companies will need their own highly paid scientists “to evaluate the purchase of foreign science and to make sense of it in their own labs,” says Daniel Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University.
While the United States is expected to remain the home of choice for the world’s best scientists for some time, industry is increasingly striking deals with scientists in developing countries eager for wider exposure.
Seagate Technology, a leader in digital storage, pays scientists in Singapore to do basic studies, and even benefits from subsidies given those scientists by Singapore’s government, making the relationship even more affordable. Seagate runs a research laboratory in Pittsburgh. Roughly 10 to 20 percent of the lab’s budget for outsiders goes to scientists working abroad.
Benefiting from foreign science isn’t new. Last October, the Nobel Prize for physics, for instance, was shared by French and German scientists for their basic discovery of what is known as the “giant magnetoresistance” effect, which enables much more digital data to be stored on a disk drive. The breakthrough, by Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg, had essentially no commercial impact in Germany or France. But by using open scientific literature and attending conferences, Seagate found ways to capitalize on the breakthrough, which had been financed by European governments.
“This is a really good example of how foreign scientists help,” says Mark Re, Seagate’s senior vice president for research and head of the company’s research center in Pittsburgh.
Commercializing science isn’t easy, which is the main reason that rising scientists from India, China and other countries can’t readily achieve business success. In the case of the magneto effect, Seagate engineers ended up using different materials — at different temperatures — than the Nobel winners.
“We made the big step to get the scientific advance into products,” Mr. Re says. “And then we had to manufacture hundreds of millions of them. This is a very different challenge.”
PRECISELY because the gap between basic science and commercial innovations is large, Mr. Hill’s postscientific society makes sense to innovators on the front lines. One implication for the future is that the United States “won’t have to import so many scientists,” says Stephen D. Nelson, associate director of policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The association, which for decades has generally favored policies to expand the ranks of American scientists, is devoting a portion of its annual policy seminar next month to talk about the “postscience” situation.
Industry, meanwhile, is adapting to a world where scientific goods can come from anywhere — and fewer scientists work on abstract problems unrelated to the market. “It is no accident that many corporate labs have fallen apart,” Sean M. Maloney, executive vice president of Intel, says. “They were science farms looking for problems.”
Monday, April 7, 2008
Winning a lottery every day
Remember Steve Austin, the $6 million 'bionic' man ? That was supposed to be an amount of money to inspire awe in the vast majority of TV viewers back in the '70s .
Nowadays compensations for Hedge fund managers have regularly topped $1billion , for ONE YEAR's 'work' . Here's the new record, double last year's record, $3 billion .
Is one person worth $3 billion to any enterprise on earth ? Probably not, but there it is .
Most of us don't understand very large numbers (such as a $3 trillion ANNUAL federal budget !!) but their meanings become clearer when brought down to some easily understood context ... such as an hourly wage .
For those interested :
$3 billion (top Hedge Fund compensation) is 500 times the $6 million cost of a bionic man in the '70s .
$3 billion is $250 million / month .
$3 billion is $57.7 million / week .
$3 billion is $11 million / day
$3 billion is $961,500 / hour (assuming he works 60 hour weeks , for 52 weeks)
If he takes off a month to enjoy his earnings, bump everything up by another 8% or so , i.e. his hourly would be around $1.04 million / hour .
This is something we can all understand:
$11 million / day !!! Imagine winning an $11 million lottery every day for 365 days in a row !!!!
Pity the poor CEO today who gets only $30- 50 million or so ... $30 million is only 1% of $3 billion . Or to put it another way, the CEO would have to work 100 years at $30 million to get one year's compensation of this top hedge fund manager.
The hourly rate for the $30 million CEO is 1% of the Hedge Fund mgr's, or about $9,600 / hour.
Contrast this to an 'average' IT employee. The rule of thumb is that companies save $100K for every employee laid off. This is an average individual compensation, plus benefits and some other 'overhead' (room, electricity, office supplies, printing, etc) amortized per employee . A good round number to work with.
$30 million (CEO) = $100K (employee) x 300 . It would take the average employee 300 years to earn what the CEO earns in one year.
Hedge Fund mgr = $961,500 / hour (60 hour week)
CEO @ $30 million = $ 9,600 / hour (60 hour week)
Avg IT worker = $ 38 / hour (50 hour week)
April 7, 2008
Hedge Fund Managers Make Mint on Housing Crisis
By REUTERS
Filed at 7:08 a.m. ET
BOSTON (Reuters) - Millions of Americans may be facing the prospect of losing their homes, but a handful of fund managers have become the best paid in their industry -- taking home 10-figure paychecks last year -- by betting against mortgages.
John Paulson, who ran a medium-sized fund until last year, zoomed to the top of the industry's earnings table when he took home an estimated $3 billion in 2007, double what the top earner made in 2006, according to data released by magazine Trader Monthly on Monday.
By standing conventional wisdom on its head and deciding that housing prices could decline on a national level, and that investment-grade mortgage bonds would be subject to default in record numbers, Paulson, 52, set a new record for payouts on Wall Street, industry analysts said.
Paulson's $3 billion payout is equivalent to $26 for every U.S. household (114.4 million in 2006).
This year seems to be no worse for Paulson as his Advantage Plus fund was up roughly 8 percent through the middle of March. Many other hedge funds, however, are suffering heavy losses, with industry analysts estimating the average fund lost 5 percent in the first quarter. Hedge funds often promise to make money in all markets by using tools, such as shorting, that are off limits to other money managers.
Following behind is Phil Falcone, 45, whose shrewd housing market bets at Harbinger Capital Partners netted him a $1.5 billion payout. Falcone, a former Harvard hockey star, also made headlines by demanding changes at the New York Times Co.
As a group, the 100-best paid hedge fund managers earned $30.3 billion last year, 26 percent more than they took home in 2006, the magazine reported.
Both Paulson and Falcone squeezed past Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies and Steve Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors, perennial top earners who each took home between $1 billion and $2 billion in 2007.
Some of the previous year's top earners, however, fell far down the list and ESL's Edward Lampert dropped off completely as his investments in Sears Holdings Corp and Citigroup Inc soured last year. Citi wrote down billions on housing market losses.
John Arnold, who topped the 2006 list with a $1.5 billion payout he earned by taking the other side of a bet that felled Amaranth Advisors, made between $400 million and $450 million in 2007, the magazine reported.
Veteran oil trader T. Boone Pickens topped up his personal fortune with a $300 million to $350 million payout in 2007, a lot less than the $1 billion he took home in 2006.
Nowadays compensations for Hedge fund managers have regularly topped $1billion , for ONE YEAR's 'work' . Here's the new record, double last year's record, $3 billion .
Is one person worth $3 billion to any enterprise on earth ? Probably not, but there it is .
Most of us don't understand very large numbers (such as a $3 trillion ANNUAL federal budget !!) but their meanings become clearer when brought down to some easily understood context ... such as an hourly wage .
For those interested :
$3 billion (top Hedge Fund compensation) is 500 times the $6 million cost of a bionic man in the '70s .
$3 billion is $250 million / month .
$3 billion is $57.7 million / week .
$3 billion is $11 million / day
$3 billion is $961,500 / hour (assuming he works 60 hour weeks , for 52 weeks)
If he takes off a month to enjoy his earnings, bump everything up by another 8% or so , i.e. his hourly would be around $1.04 million / hour .
This is something we can all understand:
$11 million / day !!! Imagine winning an $11 million lottery every day for 365 days in a row !!!!
Pity the poor CEO today who gets only $30- 50 million or so ... $30 million is only 1% of $3 billion . Or to put it another way, the CEO would have to work 100 years at $30 million to get one year's compensation of this top hedge fund manager.
The hourly rate for the $30 million CEO is 1% of the Hedge Fund mgr's, or about $9,600 / hour.
Contrast this to an 'average' IT employee. The rule of thumb is that companies save $100K for every employee laid off. This is an average individual compensation, plus benefits and some other 'overhead' (room, electricity, office supplies, printing, etc) amortized per employee . A good round number to work with.
$30 million (CEO) = $100K (employee) x 300 . It would take the average employee 300 years to earn what the CEO earns in one year.
Hedge Fund mgr = $961,500 / hour (60 hour week)
CEO @ $30 million = $ 9,600 / hour (60 hour week)
Avg IT worker = $ 38 / hour (50 hour week)
April 7, 2008
Hedge Fund Managers Make Mint on Housing Crisis
By REUTERS
Filed at 7:08 a.m. ET
BOSTON (Reuters) - Millions of Americans may be facing the prospect of losing their homes, but a handful of fund managers have become the best paid in their industry -- taking home 10-figure paychecks last year -- by betting against mortgages.
John Paulson, who ran a medium-sized fund until last year, zoomed to the top of the industry's earnings table when he took home an estimated $3 billion in 2007, double what the top earner made in 2006, according to data released by magazine Trader Monthly on Monday.
By standing conventional wisdom on its head and deciding that housing prices could decline on a national level, and that investment-grade mortgage bonds would be subject to default in record numbers, Paulson, 52, set a new record for payouts on Wall Street, industry analysts said.
Paulson's $3 billion payout is equivalent to $26 for every U.S. household (114.4 million in 2006).
This year seems to be no worse for Paulson as his Advantage Plus fund was up roughly 8 percent through the middle of March. Many other hedge funds, however, are suffering heavy losses, with industry analysts estimating the average fund lost 5 percent in the first quarter. Hedge funds often promise to make money in all markets by using tools, such as shorting, that are off limits to other money managers.
Following behind is Phil Falcone, 45, whose shrewd housing market bets at Harbinger Capital Partners netted him a $1.5 billion payout. Falcone, a former Harvard hockey star, also made headlines by demanding changes at the New York Times Co
As a group, the 100-best paid hedge fund managers earned $30.3 billion last year, 26 percent more than they took home in 2006, the magazine reported.
Both Paulson and Falcone squeezed past Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies and Steve Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors, perennial top earners who each took home between $1 billion and $2 billion in 2007.
Some of the previous year's top earners, however, fell far down the list and ESL's Edward Lampert dropped off completely as his investments in Sears Holdings Corp
John Arnold, who topped the 2006 list with a $1.5 billion payout he earned by taking the other side of a bet that felled Amaranth Advisors, made between $400 million and $450 million in 2007, the magazine reported.
Veteran oil trader T. Boone Pickens topped up his personal fortune with a $300 million to $350 million payout in 2007, a lot less than the $1 billion he took home in 2006.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Buy American - but what is American?
Honda and Toyota make cars in American plants and in the past few years starting building major components like engines and transmissions in the US also.
Here Chevy and other American car manufacturers are rushing to China and Brazil and elsewhere to build major components for cars to be sold in the US. Some subcompacts are totally foreign made but sold under the Chevy name such as the Aveo.
So is it more patriotic (buy American!) to buy a Honda or Toyota than a Chevrolet ? Depending on the model perhaps, but overall the 'foreign' manufacturers may employ more American workers in producing their products.
Here Chevy and other American car manufacturers are rushing to China and Brazil and elsewhere to build major components for cars to be sold in the US. Some subcompacts are totally foreign made but sold under the Chevy name such as the Aveo.
So is it more patriotic (buy American!) to buy a Honda or Toyota than a Chevrolet ? Depending on the model perhaps, but overall the 'foreign' manufacturers may employ more American workers in producing their products.
A Chevy With an Engine From China
OSHAWA, Ontario — General Motors car engines were once the stuff of American legend. The Beach Boys sang, “nothing can touch my 409,” about a powerful Chevy V-8. Oldsmobile owners in 1981 were so angered that their cars had been fitted with Chevrolet engines instead of Oldsmobile “Rockets,” the subject of another hit song, that they successfully sued G.M. over the swap.
The company has since eliminated brand distinctions between engines, saddling them with names unlikely to inspire songwriters, like Ecotec, Vortec and Northstar. But some owners of the Chevrolet Equinox, a “compact” sport utility vehicle built in North America, might be surprised to learn the origin of the engine under their hoods — it’s made in China.
Last year, China exported more than $12 billion in auto parts, up from less than $2 billion in 2002 — the majority to North America. The increase in exports has added to the problems plaguing North American suppliers. Most famously, Delphi, which is seeking to emerge from bankruptcy, has closed dozens of plants and moved some production overseas to become more competitive, including to China.
Soon China will be exporting whole vehicles to North America. Last year, Chrysler signed a deal with China’s largest car company, Chery Automobile, to supply a Dodge subcompact.
One of the most important steps on China’s long march to becoming an auto exporter was the little-noticed arrival of the humble engine inside the 2005 Chevy Equinox.
“This is the first Chinese-made engine going into this market,” said Eric A. Fedewa, vice president for powertrain forecasts at CSM Worldwide, an automotive analysis firm. “It was an experiment to see if G.M. could use its facility in China to take costs out of a vehicle.”
G.M. neither promoted nor hid the fact that the Equinox engine (and that of its twin, the Pontiac Torrent) is made in China. The car’s sticker notes 55 percent of its content is make in the United States and Canada, 20 percent in Japan, 15 percent in China and the rest from elsewhere. But no sticker tells consumers the engine is built at Shanghai General Motors, a joint venture of G.M. and the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, a Chinese company.
Originally intended to power Buick sedans built for the Chinese market, the engine is the only one available in the Equinox base model.
Starting with the 2008 model, a larger American-made motor became an option in a higher-end version of the S.U.V. The same model of engine as the one made in China is produced at a G.M. engine plant in Tonawanda, N.Y., about a two-hour drive from the Canadian factory that builds the Equinox.
G.M. does not break out internal costs, so it is not known how the Chinese engines compare in price with those from Tonawanda. Mr. Fedewa said an engine of this sort typically costs $800 to $900 to make.
Even in an era of global manufacturing, the Equinox is exceptionally international. Its engineering was largely done here in Oshawa, headquarters of General Motors of Canada. It uses a five-speed automatic transmission made in Japan by Aisin Seiki, though G.M. is a leading manufacturer of automatic transmissions. And the parts are assembled at a factory in Ingersoll, Ontario, a joint venture between G.M. and Suzuki, another Japanese firm.
Suzuki was a major driver in the decision to use the Chinese-made engine. Dick Kauling, a senior engineering manager at G.M. Canada who helped develop the Equinox, said his group had worked closely with engineers at Suzuki, as well as G.M. engineers in Germany, China and Warren, Mich.
“The Suzuki guys said, ‘We have the global logistics that can make this happen,’ ” Mr. Fedewa said.
Suzuki proposed loading a container ship in Shanghai with engines, then having it stop in Japan to pick up transmissions on its way to Canada.
A 25-year G.M. veteran, Mr. Kauling, remembers when car buyers hotly debated the differences between the engines in G.M. brands, not to mention those from other automakers. But he said the old way of organizing production was less than efficient.
Early in his career, the company was running short of engines for Chevrolets but had a surplus of Oldsmobile motors. He was assigned to find a way to modify the incompatible Oldsmobile engine — the two brands had not even been able to agree on common bolt sizes — to fit into a Chevy body.
Now, Mr. Kauling said, “I don’t think we’re concerned where the parts come from,” adding, the Chinese-made engine “has got General Motors all over it.”
The idea of using the Chinese engine did not sit well with the Canadian Auto Workers, the union that represents workers at the Equinox factory. Because of its complexity, engine assembly uses a higher proportion of skilled, well-paid workers.
And Basil E. Hargrove, the union’s president, blames what he calls unfair trading practices by Asian manufacturers for much of the North American industry’s problems.
“Today it’s South Korea and Japan, and tomorrow it’s going to be China,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before G.M., Ford and Chrysler are going to deal with the crisis they face by going into these countries and shipping into here. Very few consumers ask: where is the engine built or where is the transmission made?”
Assessing the quality of Chinese manufacturing is difficult, partly because of the design of this particular engine.
Gabriel Shenhar, the senior engineer of Consumer Reports auto test division, said that in the Equinox the engine is coarse, noisy, uses more fuel than similar vehicles and produces relatively little horsepower for its size.
He did not blame the Chinese for those shortcomings. “This engine’s blueprint did not originate in China,” Mr. Shenhar said. “The 3.4 liter, 185 horsepower has always been a lackluster engine.”
He called flaws in the design “a reflection of G.M.’s lack of attention to detail and half-hearted effort on this car.”
A spokeswoman for Chevrolet, Carolyn Normandin, said, “Our vehicle comes with a standard six-cylinder engine, while most of our competitors only offer standard four-cylinder engines.” She added that the company will offer improved fuel economy in the next-generation Equinox. She declined to say when that will be introduced.
Some observers expect the new model will be out in about two years. Mr. Fedewa, the analyst from CSM, expects they will not be fitted with Chinese engines.
“Sourcing from halfway around the world is very challenging,” he said, referring to the difficulties of fitting huge transmissions into shipping containers and the possibility of supply-chain disruption.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Defining 'Talent'
I expected to find instances of high-level PhD's not being allowed to stay in the country in this article.
One of their examples of 'talent' . I am using the common definition for 'talent' to be 'foreign worker' is :
Gaurav Gaur, for example, an Indian who earned his M.B.A. from Cornell in 2004 .
A dearth of MBAs in the US ?? Well, perhaps he has particular special skills ,maybe higher math needed for working with derivatives for Hedge funds or for complex econometric modeling? Well, it's a bit more mundane:
....he is a senior project manager for the British bank ...
So the skills America is lacking are MBAs with 3 years of Project Management experience? Can't find this in the USA ? I think not .
And his wife is another 'talent' , needed in the USA :
...his wife, Bhavna, who has a master’s degree in social work ...
MSW's in short supply ? Vitally needed by business ??? I was unaware that Businesses were hiring MSW's ... maybe they are needed for all the workers affected by outsourcing/offshoring ?
March 24, 2008
Businesses Say New York’s Clout Is Emigrating, With Visa Policies to Blame
By PATRICK McGEEHAN and NINA BERNSTEIN
New York officials have long taken pride in the city’s status as a global gateway. But lately, senior executives of some of the country’s biggest corporations, like Alcoa, have been complaining that American immigration policies are thwarting New York’s ability to compete with other world capitals.
Every big employer in the city, it seems, can cite an example of high-paying jobs that had to be relocated to foreign cities because the people chosen to fill them could not gain entry to the United States.
In Alcoa’s case, one of its chief financial executives, Vanessa Lau, who is from Hong Kong, is working from the company’s offices in Geneva when she should be at headquarters on Park Avenue, according to Alain J. P. Belda, the chairman and chief executive.
Officials of large investment banks on Wall Street said the difficulty in obtaining visas for foreign workers, many of them graduates of American universities, had caused them to shift dozens of jobs to other financial capitals this year. In some cases, foreign-born professionals have grown weary of the struggle to get and renew a work visa in the United States and moved on to cities like London, where they say they feel more welcome.
“In a company like ours, we have people moving all over the place all the time,” Mr. Belda said. “This visa situation is causing difficulty.”
Mr. Belda is particularly frustrated, given that he is a Moroccan-born citizen of Brazil whom Alcoa brought to the United States in the early 1990s when immigration rules were looser. Now, with visas for immigrants with special skills tightly controlled and awarded in an annual lottery in early April, managing a global enterprise from New York can be a competitive disadvantage, he said.
“After 9/11, it just became more and more complicated,” Mr. Belda said. “You’re fighting to get everybody in, “he said, then fighting for renewal of their visas so that they can stay more than three years. “How do you move somebody with a family if they don’t know they’re going to be renewed?” he said.
Until now, visa restrictions have been seen as a problem that primarily affected technology companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the West. Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, has been railing against them for years.
But according to the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group, there is more demand for visas for specialized jobs in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut than in California, and most of the demand comes from small and midsize companies, not the largest corporations. The partnership, whose members include many of the city’s biggest employers, has lobbied legislative leaders, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles E. Schumer, for a relaxation of visa policies.
“New York’s ability to compete with London, which has much more open immigration, or with the emerging financial capitals in Asia and the Middle East, depends on mobility of talent, both in terms of new and current employees,” said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the partnership. “What people miss is, New York’s standing as an international capital of business and finance depends on the professionals within these companies being able to come to New York to be trained and groomed for leadership positions around the world.”
Indeed, companies are capitalizing on more open visa policies elsewhere to recruit some of the leaders educated and trained in New York. Gaurav Gaur, for example, an Indian who earned his M.B.A. from Cornell in 2004, said he seized the chance to leave New York last year for London to work for Barclays, though it meant turning his back on opportunities at Bloomberg L.P. and other American companies.
“The whole visa situation was one of the biggest reasons that I took the job,” Mr. Gaur said in a telephone interview from London, where he is a senior project manager for the British bank. “I didn’t want to keep going through this uncertainty — it’s just a nightmare.”
In New York, Mr. Gaur, 33, had managed to secure one of the three-year visas for professionals known as H-1B visas, and he probably could have renewed it for another three years, he said. But after that he knew he would be faced with the prospect of year-to-year renewals while he waited in a long and unpredictable line for permanent residency — and remained tethered to whatever company was sponsoring him for a green card.
Moreover, he said, his wife, Bhavna, who has a master’s degree in social work from Washington University in St. Louis, had work visa woes of her own in a field where few employers were familiar with the H-1B program.
In Britain, he said, “it’s drastically different.” There is no cap on work visas, and since he had a work permit, his wife was automatically allowed to work; she quickly found a good social work job.
“If I stay here for five years,” he added, “I automatically become eligible for a green card, for permanent residency.”
In the United States, companies apply for the three-year H-1B visas annually, starting on April 1. The demand typically far outstrips the total supply of visas, limited to 65,000 a year, with an additional 20,000 available for those with advanced degrees from American universities. Last year 120,000 applications came in on April 1 alone, including hundreds of duplicates, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services conducted a lottery for the first time.
This year, officials warned, multiple petitions by the same company for one candidate will be disqualified, to prevent businesses from trying to game the system.
In 2006, more than 10,000 companies sought H-1B visas for jobs in New York City, according to the partnership’s analysis in a soon-to-be-published report. Only about one-tenth of those applications came from the country’s 1,000 biggest companies, it said.
Data about who holds these visas and where they work is closely guarded. But judging by the applications filed, the partnership concluded that the greatest demand is from the New York area.
More than one-fifth — 21 percent — of the applications were for jobs in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, according to the report, titled “Winning the Global Race for Talent.” In contrast, about 18.2 percent of the H-1B visa applications were for jobs in California. Texas ranked fourth behind New York and New Jersey with about 7.7 percent of the applications, according to the report. A survey by the partnership found that employers had complaints about other immigration policies, including long delays in obtaining visas for employees transferring from offices in other countries and visas for their employees to make short-term visits to the United States. They also said they were constrained by big backlogs on applications for employment-based green cards, which offer permanent residency to sponsored workers.
The partnership recommended adjusting the cap on H-1B visas to meet demand and more than doubling the annual limit on employment-based green cards to 290,000 from 140,000. It also suggested exempting workers with advanced degrees in science and math from any cap on H-1B visas and extending the term of visas for workers receiving practical training to 29 months from 12 months.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which advocates less immigration, dismissed the partnership’s argument as merely “trying to bend the law to benefit them financially.”
The H-1B visa program creates a form of indentured worker whose pay, on average, is lower than that of American counterparts, Mr. Krikorian contended. The only morally defensible way to bring workers into the country, he said, is with green cards that allow them to quit working for the sponsoring employer and stay in the United States. Still, he added that he opposed increasing the number of such green cards without the immigration service’s raising its standards “so that it’s really Einstein immigration.”
Ms. Wylde disagrees.
“It’s a 20th-century, pre-globalization mentality that thinks somehow American companies and jobs can grow if we cut ourselves off from foreign talent,” she said.
One of their examples of 'talent' . I am using the common definition for 'talent' to be 'foreign worker' is :
Gaurav Gaur, for example, an Indian who earned his M.B.A. from Cornell in 2004 .
A dearth of MBAs in the US ?? Well, perhaps he has particular special skills ,maybe higher math needed for working with derivatives for Hedge funds or for complex econometric modeling? Well, it's a bit more mundane:
....he is a senior project manager for the British bank ...
So the skills America is lacking are MBAs with 3 years of Project Management experience? Can't find this in the USA ? I think not .
And his wife is another 'talent' , needed in the USA :
...his wife, Bhavna, who has a master’s degree in social work ...
MSW's in short supply ? Vitally needed by business ??? I was unaware that Businesses were hiring MSW's ... maybe they are needed for all the workers affected by outsourcing/offshoring ?
March 24, 2008
Businesses Say New York’s Clout Is Emigrating, With Visa Policies to Blame
By PATRICK McGEEHAN and NINA BERNSTEIN
New York officials have long taken pride in the city’s status as a global gateway. But lately, senior executives of some of the country’s biggest corporations, like Alcoa, have been complaining that American immigration policies are thwarting New York’s ability to compete with other world capitals.
Every big employer in the city, it seems, can cite an example of high-paying jobs that had to be relocated to foreign cities because the people chosen to fill them could not gain entry to the United States.
In Alcoa’s case, one of its chief financial executives, Vanessa Lau, who is from Hong Kong, is working from the company’s offices in Geneva when she should be at headquarters on Park Avenue, according to Alain J. P. Belda, the chairman and chief executive.
Officials of large investment banks on Wall Street said the difficulty in obtaining visas for foreign workers, many of them graduates of American universities, had caused them to shift dozens of jobs to other financial capitals this year. In some cases, foreign-born professionals have grown weary of the struggle to get and renew a work visa in the United States and moved on to cities like London, where they say they feel more welcome.
“In a company like ours, we have people moving all over the place all the time,” Mr. Belda said. “This visa situation is causing difficulty.”
Mr. Belda is particularly frustrated, given that he is a Moroccan-born citizen of Brazil whom Alcoa brought to the United States in the early 1990s when immigration rules were looser. Now, with visas for immigrants with special skills tightly controlled and awarded in an annual lottery in early April, managing a global enterprise from New York can be a competitive disadvantage, he said.
“After 9/11, it just became more and more complicated,” Mr. Belda said. “You’re fighting to get everybody in, “he said, then fighting for renewal of their visas so that they can stay more than three years. “How do you move somebody with a family if they don’t know they’re going to be renewed?” he said.
Until now, visa restrictions have been seen as a problem that primarily affected technology companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the West. Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, has been railing against them for years.
But according to the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group, there is more demand for visas for specialized jobs in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut than in California, and most of the demand comes from small and midsize companies, not the largest corporations. The partnership, whose members include many of the city’s biggest employers, has lobbied legislative leaders, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles E. Schumer, for a relaxation of visa policies.
“New York’s ability to compete with London, which has much more open immigration, or with the emerging financial capitals in Asia and the Middle East, depends on mobility of talent, both in terms of new and current employees,” said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the partnership. “What people miss is, New York’s standing as an international capital of business and finance depends on the professionals within these companies being able to come to New York to be trained and groomed for leadership positions around the world.”
Indeed, companies are capitalizing on more open visa policies elsewhere to recruit some of the leaders educated and trained in New York. Gaurav Gaur, for example, an Indian who earned his M.B.A. from Cornell in 2004, said he seized the chance to leave New York last year for London to work for Barclays, though it meant turning his back on opportunities at Bloomberg L.P. and other American companies.
“The whole visa situation was one of the biggest reasons that I took the job,” Mr. Gaur said in a telephone interview from London, where he is a senior project manager for the British bank. “I didn’t want to keep going through this uncertainty — it’s just a nightmare.”
In New York, Mr. Gaur, 33, had managed to secure one of the three-year visas for professionals known as H-1B visas, and he probably could have renewed it for another three years, he said. But after that he knew he would be faced with the prospect of year-to-year renewals while he waited in a long and unpredictable line for permanent residency — and remained tethered to whatever company was sponsoring him for a green card.
Moreover, he said, his wife, Bhavna, who has a master’s degree in social work from Washington University in St. Louis, had work visa woes of her own in a field where few employers were familiar with the H-1B program.
In Britain, he said, “it’s drastically different.” There is no cap on work visas, and since he had a work permit, his wife was automatically allowed to work; she quickly found a good social work job.
“If I stay here for five years,” he added, “I automatically become eligible for a green card, for permanent residency.”
In the United States, companies apply for the three-year H-1B visas annually, starting on April 1. The demand typically far outstrips the total supply of visas, limited to 65,000 a year, with an additional 20,000 available for those with advanced degrees from American universities. Last year 120,000 applications came in on April 1 alone, including hundreds of duplicates, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services conducted a lottery for the first time.
This year, officials warned, multiple petitions by the same company for one candidate will be disqualified, to prevent businesses from trying to game the system.
In 2006, more than 10,000 companies sought H-1B visas for jobs in New York City, according to the partnership’s analysis in a soon-to-be-published report. Only about one-tenth of those applications came from the country’s 1,000 biggest companies, it said.
Data about who holds these visas and where they work is closely guarded. But judging by the applications filed, the partnership concluded that the greatest demand is from the New York area.
More than one-fifth — 21 percent — of the applications were for jobs in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, according to the report, titled “Winning the Global Race for Talent.” In contrast, about 18.2 percent of the H-1B visa applications were for jobs in California. Texas ranked fourth behind New York and New Jersey with about 7.7 percent of the applications, according to the report. A survey by the partnership found that employers had complaints about other immigration policies, including long delays in obtaining visas for employees transferring from offices in other countries and visas for their employees to make short-term visits to the United States. They also said they were constrained by big backlogs on applications for employment-based green cards, which offer permanent residency to sponsored workers.
The partnership recommended adjusting the cap on H-1B visas to meet demand and more than doubling the annual limit on employment-based green cards to 290,000 from 140,000. It also suggested exempting workers with advanced degrees in science and math from any cap on H-1B visas and extending the term of visas for workers receiving practical training to 29 months from 12 months.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which advocates less immigration, dismissed the partnership’s argument as merely “trying to bend the law to benefit them financially.”
The H-1B visa program creates a form of indentured worker whose pay, on average, is lower than that of American counterparts, Mr. Krikorian contended. The only morally defensible way to bring workers into the country, he said, is with green cards that allow them to quit working for the sponsoring employer and stay in the United States. Still, he added that he opposed increasing the number of such green cards without the immigration service’s raising its standards “so that it’s really Einstein immigration.”
Ms. Wylde disagrees.
“It’s a 20th-century, pre-globalization mentality that thinks somehow American companies and jobs can grow if we cut ourselves off from foreign talent,” she said.
Friday, March 14, 2008
The New Math is the Old Math?
Funny 'findings' ....
First off, is it just coincidence that this report was released one day after America's greatest social scientist and education expert, Bill Gates, urged Congress to press for a greater emphasis on Math/Science education (as well as increased access to foreign 'talent') ??
While parents clamored for the 'old math' curriculum, they won't blame the education establishment for implementing 'new math' methods over the last couple of decades, perhaps because of the threat of suits against boards of educations and teacher's unions. Instead, like a teacher breaking up a schoolyard fight with ' Ok, now makeup, you're both wrong!' they conclude that both math teaching methods have merit :
The report tries to put to rest the long, heated debate over math teaching methods. Parents and teachers have fought passionately in school districts around the country over the relative merits of traditional, or teacher-directed, instruction, in which students are told how to do problems and then drilled on them, versus reform or child-centered instruction, emphasizing student exploration and conceptual understanding. It said both methods had a role.
Child-centered education! Reminds me of phonetic spelling that is currently in vogue now; later on the students are unable to adopt to correct spelling.
They find algebra to be the breaking point in learning math and then deduce that not being able to understand and manipulate fractions causes the algebra problems:
Fractions are especially troublesome for Americans, the report found. It pointed to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, standardized exams known as the nation’s report card, which found that almost half the eighth graders tested could not solve a word problem that required dividing fractions. Panel members said the failure to master fractions was for American students the greatest obstacle to learning algebra. Just as “plastics” was the catchword in the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” the catchword for math teachers today should be “fractions,” said Francis Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
And here's some ideas explained in quasi-computer lingo, suggesting that students are no more than computers , to be programmed :
First off, is it just coincidence that this report was released one day after America's greatest social scientist and education expert, Bill Gates, urged Congress to press for a greater emphasis on Math/Science education (as well as increased access to foreign 'talent') ??
While parents clamored for the 'old math' curriculum, they won't blame the education establishment for implementing 'new math' methods over the last couple of decades, perhaps because of the threat of suits against boards of educations and teacher's unions. Instead, like a teacher breaking up a schoolyard fight with ' Ok, now makeup, you're both wrong!' they conclude that both math teaching methods have merit :
The report tries to put to rest the long, heated debate over math teaching methods. Parents and teachers have fought passionately in school districts around the country over the relative merits of traditional, or teacher-directed, instruction, in which students are told how to do problems and then drilled on them, versus reform or child-centered instruction, emphasizing student exploration and conceptual understanding. It said both methods had a role.
Child-centered education! Reminds me of phonetic spelling that is currently in vogue now; later on the students are unable to adopt to correct spelling.
They find algebra to be the breaking point in learning math and then deduce that not being able to understand and manipulate fractions causes the algebra problems:
Fractions are especially troublesome for Americans, the report found. It pointed to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, standardized exams known as the nation’s report card, which found that almost half the eighth graders tested could not solve a word problem that required dividing fractions. Panel members said the failure to master fractions was for American students the greatest obstacle to learning algebra. Just as “plastics” was the catchword in the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” the catchword for math teachers today should be “fractions,” said Francis Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
And here's some ideas explained in quasi-computer lingo, suggesting that students are no more than computers , to be programmed :
For example, the report found it is important for students to master their basic math facts well enough that their recall becomes automatic, stored in their long-term memory, leaving room in their working memory to take in new math processes.
And this guy needed to get a PhD to figure out that kids need to know the facts' ? Who's been keeping math facts away from them then ? I guess in child-centered education the teacher gets out of the way and doesn't impose facts in students .Dr. Faulkner, a former president of the University of Texas at Austin, said the panel “buys the notion from cognitive science that kids have to know the facts.”
And here is the good Doctor confusing the meaning of 'talent' (he may know a bit of math but little about corporate double-speak) . He should know that Corporations and employment agencies have defined 'talent' to mean 'foreign workers' . All he had to do was listen to Bill Gates' talk to Congress the previous day, lamenting about the inability of Microsoft to access 'talent' because of limited immigration laws .
Dr. Faulkner said the current “talent-driven approach to math, that either you can do it or you can’t, like playing the violin,” needed to be changed.
Report Urges Changes in Teaching Math
American students’ math achievement is “at a mediocre level” compared with that of their peers worldwide, according to a new report by a federal panel, which recommended that schools focus on key skills that prepare students to learn algebra.
“The sharp falloff in mathematics achievement in the U.S. begins as students reach late middle school, where, for more and more students, algebra course work begins,” said the report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, appointed two years ago by President Bush. “Students who complete Algebra II are more than twice as likely to graduate from college compared to students with less mathematical preparation.”
The report, adopted unanimously by the panel on Thursday and presented to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, said that prekindergarten-to-eighth-grade math curriculums should be streamlined and put focused attention on skills like the handling of whole numbers and fractions and certain aspects of geometry and measurement.
It offers specific goals for students in different grades. For example, it said that by the end of the third grade, students should be proficient in adding and subtracting whole numbers. Two years later, they should be proficient in multiplying and dividing them. By the end of the sixth grade, the report said, students should have mastered the multiplication and division of fractions and decimals.
The report tries to put to rest the long, heated debate over math teaching methods. Parents and teachers have fought passionately in school districts around the country over the relative merits of traditional, or teacher-directed, instruction, in which students are told how to do problems and then drilled on them, versus reform or child-centered instruction, emphasizing student exploration and conceptual understanding. It said both methods had a role.
“There is no basis in research for favoring teacher-based or student-centered instruction,” Dr. Larry R. Faulkner, the chairman of the panel, said at a briefing on Wednesday. “People may retain their strongly held philosophical inclinations, but the research does not show that either is better than the other.”
The report found that “to prepare students for algebra, the curriculum must simultaneously develop conceptual understanding, computational fluency and problem-solving skills.” Further, it said: “Debates regarding the relative importance of these aspects of mathematical knowledge are misguided. These capabilities are mutually supportive.”
The president convened the panel to advise on how to improve math education. Its members include math and psychology professors from leading universities, a middle-school math teacher and the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Closely tracking an influential 2006 report by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the panel recommended that math curriculum should include fewer topics, spending enough time to make sure each is learned in enough depth that it need not be revisited in later grades. That is the approach used in most top-performing nations, and since the 2006 report, many states have been revising their standards to cover fewer topics in greater depth.
The report calls for more research on successful math teaching, and recommends that the secretary of education convene an annual forum of leaders of the national associations concerned with math to develop an agenda for improving math instruction.
Ms. Spellings said Thursday that she would convene such a meeting. She emphasized the importance of math education for all children and said the report underlined the need for parents to teach even young children about numbers and measurements.
Ms. Spellings said she hoped the report would help persuade Congress to approve the president’s fiscal 2009 budget request for almost $100 million for Math Now, an instructional program proposed last year and not financed.
The report cited a number of troubling international comparisons, including a 2007 assessment finding that 15-year-olds in the United States ranked 25th among their peers in 30 developed nations in math literacy and problem solving.
Fractions are especially troublesome for Americans, the report found. It pointed to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, standardized exams known as the nation’s report card, which found that almost half the eighth graders tested could not solve a word problem that required dividing fractions. Panel members said the failure to master fractions was for American students the greatest obstacle to learning algebra. Just as “plastics” was the catchword in the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” the catchword for math teachers today should be “fractions,” said Francis Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
After hearing testimony and comments from hundreds of organizations and individuals, and sifting through a broad array of 16,000 research publications, the panelists shaped their report around recent research on how children learn.
For example, the report found it is important for students to master their basic math facts well enough that their recall becomes automatic, stored in their long-term memory, leaving room in their working memory to take in new math processes.
“For all content areas, practice allows students to achieve automaticity of basic skills — the fast, accurate and effortless processing of content information — which frees up working memory for more complex aspects of problem solving,” the report said.
Dr. Faulkner, a former president of the University of Texas at Austin, said the panel “buys the notion from cognitive science that kids have to know the facts.”
The report also cited findings that students who depended on their native intelligence learned less than those who believed that success depended on how hard they worked.
Dr. Faulkner said the current “talent-driven approach to math, that either you can do it or you can’t, like playing the violin,” needed to be changed.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Bill Gates - Clueless in Seattle
Same old Bill Gates song ... Americans are dumb, so smart foreigners are needed ....Also, the reason that all H1-B's are gone in one day is that Indian outsourcing firms grab 80% of them and then slowly supply American firms with sub-contractors over the intervening year ...
And this quote:
Microsoft last year wasn't able to get the visas for roughly a third of the people it had planned to hire, he added.
OK then , ask the question : 'How many foreign workers did you plan on bringing in and what were the skills required AND also, how many American workers did you plan on hiring and what were the skills required? ' The assumption is 1) that the foreign workers had special skills that there NO Americans had and 2) Microsoft has a need to hire a lot (thousands??) of workers here in the US (versus how many overseas?) .
Why doesn't the Gates Foundation sponsor a college scholarship program IN THE US that would give incentives to local 'talent' to go to the college of their choice for FREE ?
Currently the most prestigious science fair in the country
gives out a top scholarship of $100k and then smaller $25K ones to the top High School science and math students (leaving out that many of them are not working independently but have professional family and outside help) . With College educations costs approaching $200K at many of the best private colleges, this is pitiful.
The Gates foundation (or even Intel) could easily create 100 or more FULL pay scholarships. 100 scholarships at $200K each would only set back the foundation a measly $20 million, much less than the cost of a single CEO at most American corporations.
It would also show young people that science careers are valued and not just for those who have an entrepeneural bent.
Overseas students see science and engineering careers as upwardly mobile since they can make several times the average salary of their country doing this work. If Americans could also make several times the average American salary in science and engineering then many would also flock to these fields, but this is not the case. In fact wages are declining because of the influx of H1-B workers, the very remedy that Gates is suggesting.
When the dot.com boom of the late 90's was going strong, there were more Computer Science majors than colleges could register, because of the financial possibilities this career offered . If American firms offer premium American pay then Americans will supply the 'talent' demanded. But if foreign workers are brought in to depress wages then few Americans will be enticed to these fields.
Gates to urge immigration, education reform
Microsoft's chairman will push Congress to let more skilled workers in the U.S. and increase math and science classes.
March 11, 2008: 4:15 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Bill Gates is coming back to Capitol Hill with the same wish list he's had for years: more visas for highly skilled workers, more math, science and engineering in schools and more money for technology investment.
On Wednesday, Gates' scheduled testimony before the House Science and Technology Committee will amplify the call for major overhauls in education and immigration laws to help the U.S. technology industry stay competitive globally.
Congress has heard the requests before, especially about increasing the cap on H1-B visas, which are granted to skilled foreign professionals. While a Microsoft spokesman said there's been a "real effort" by Congress and the Bush administration to move the ball forward on broad immigration reform, they have failed.
Gates, who visits Washington about once a year, is also expected to meet privately with policy makers during his visit, said Jack Krumholtz, Microsoft Corp.'s managing director for government affairs. He declined to identify them.
The Microsoft co-founder has long championed such reforms -- especially raising H1-B visa cap -- and made a similar case before a Senate committee a year ago.
"We have to welcome the great minds in this world, not shut them out of our country," Gates said last year in testimony. "Unfortunately, our immigration policies are driving away the world's best and brightest precisely when we need them most."
Krumholtz thinks the changing political climate makes for a more responsive audience this time around.
"He sees this (appearance) as an opportunity in the political season ... to put out a call to both the Congress and to the current administration with an eye toward the new administration," Krumholtz said.
Not everyone sees the climate as warming to Microsoft's position. Roger Kay, a technology analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates, said an election year may be a difficult time to advance the issue, as it could be labeled a threat to American jobs. Democrats, relying on support from labor groups, might not want to push for legislation that lets more foreign professionals in this country.
The hot-button issue for the technology industry has been to find high-skilled workers in the United States and overseas.
The industry has long pushed for the H1-B visa cap to be raised from its current level of 65,000. In 2007, the quota was filled on the first day applications were accepted.
Krumholtz, who expects the same thing to happen this year, said it's an issue on which Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) and its rivals, including Google Inc. (GOOG, Fortune 500), Oracle Corp. (ORCL, Fortune 500), Sun Microsystems Inc. (JAVA, Fortune 500) and others agree. Microsoft last year wasn't able to get the visas for roughly a third of the people it had planned to hire, he added.
Gates will also urge for educational reforms to encourage more students to get into math and science. Last year, Gates said American high schools have one of the lowest graduation rates among industrialized nations.
"It's not an either or proposition," said Krumholtz. "We need to do both."
But Gates will also touch on positive developments, such as a Philadelphia high school that focuses on using the latest technologies and another effort to provide tech skills to the U.S. work force, Krumholtz added.
While Gates is expected to devote most of his time toward his philanthropic foundation starting in July, he will remain chairman of the company he founded.
Krumholtz said he doesn't know what Gates plans to do in the future, "but I can speak to the fact that I know these are issues that he is very passionate about."
He does know what Gates is doing one day into the future. On Thursday, he will deliver a keynote speech to a sold-out Northern Virginia Technology Council.
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