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A mini editorial.  The lead article on the Japanese passing the U.S. in supercomputers makes me wonder what other fields are led by Japan and nations other than the U.S.  I wrote an article on this subject a couple of years ago, and could use your help in updating it.  Can you name some fields of S&T where you think the U.S. does NOT lead the world?  I don't need hard data, just a lead for further research on my part.
R. D. Shelton, Editor:  rds@wtec.org
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In This Issue of ITRInews
Japanese Lap the U.S. in the Supercomputer Race
Science and Engineering Indicators 2002 Released
U.S. Production of Physical Science PhDs Tanks
Zerhouni Confirmed as NIH Director

Featured Organizations in International S&T:
KISTI: Korean Institute of S&T Information
Clearinghouse of Specialized Search Engines for S&T

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Fig. 1. The Earth Simulator supercomputer.  Note the rising sun on the fuselage.

Japanese Lap the U.S. in the Supercomputer Race   NEC Corporation announced  on March 8 the delivery of the world's fastest computer, an ultra high-speed vector parallel computing system known as "the Earth Simulator." Assembled from 640 specialized nodes each containing 5,104 processors made by NEC, the new supercomputer occupies the space of four tennis courts and has achieved a computing speed of 35.6 TFLOPS of its theoretical maximum of 40 TFLOPS. The achieved performance is over five times the speed of the next fastest supercomputer, the ASCI White Pacific at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  The NEC press release is at http://www.nec.com.au/hpcsd/index.html  John Markoff wrote an article on the policy significance of the Japanese accomplishment in the April 20, 2002 New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/20/technology/20COMP.html  Jack Dongarra posted a presentation in April, 2002 on the architecture of the Japanese machine and its advances above competitive supercomputers.  http://www.cs.utk.edu/~dongarra/esc.pdf [TFLOPS = trillions of floating point operations per second]

 
 

Science and Engineering Indicators 2002 Released Again the NSF has produced a masterpiece of S&T information in message and a half-dozen media.  The report is available in hard copy for free at NSF and in HTML and .pdf formats on the Web at http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind02/start.htm Some overall slides are available in .ppt format, and tables are in .xls.  Finally, you can get the report for free on CD, just by asking online.  What more could you want?    One theme of the report is to demonstrate that the U.S. is indeed maintaining its world leadership of S&T, which is the main goal of the Federal research agencies http://www.ostp.gov/html/OSTP_insideostp.html The metrics chosen include the market share of high technology products, total investment in R&D, patents, citations, et al.  It goes on to say, though, that other nations see the good results from the wise U.S. investment in S&T and are starting to do the same.  The report warns that they may even some day come to challenge the U.S. lead. http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind02/c0/c0s1.htm  For another view with some other metrics on world leadership see American Leadership of Science and Technology: Reality or Myth? by your editor. http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/myth.pdf

U.S. Production of Physical Science PhDs Tanks The S&E Indicators 2002 is full of interesting data, but this graph was the one that I've been waiting for.  I believe that it partially explains why S&T publication by U.S. researchers tanked in the 90s.  Some of the main sources of publications are grad students, new PhDs, and their advisors.  This graph shows that the U.S. ran out of steam in production of PhDs in natural sciences and engineering in the late 80s, while the Europeans and Asians came on strong.  Another interesting graph in the report shows that the main reason for the decline in the U.S. curve here is the sudden decline in the number of foreign grad students in NS&E in the U.S.  http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind02/mmslides/mmo-07/mmo-07.jpg They had been the mainstay of U.S. graduate schools for decades, since Americans are not so interested in S&T.  Why? The report makes the case that European and Asian countries have greatly expanded their graduate programs in NS&E during this this period, so that fewer students are coming to the U.S.  A small confirmation of this theory comes from WTEC's two most recent international technology assessments in spin electronics and quantum information sciences.  In both cases the experts identified a shortage of grad students and post docs as the bottleneck resource in pursuit ot these fields in the U.S. Some caveats.  The step function in the European curve in 1990 came when the DDR was absorbed into West Germany. However, that curve is only for Germany, France and the UK; if the whole EU were included, their domination of the U.S. in this metric would be even more telling.

 
 

Zerhouni Confirmed as NIH Director  Elias Adam Zerhouni was appointed by the President in March to be Director of the National Institutes of Heath, an agency whose research budget is greater that that of all other non-defense Federal agencies combined.  He was confirmed by the Senate on May 2, 2002.  Dr. Zerhouni, 51, was a radiology professor and academic administrator at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  He was originally from Algeria and is a Muslim. A brief bio is at  http://icmic.rad.jhmi.edu/People/zerhouni.html  The LA Times had an article on May 1 on his confirmation hearing.  http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-000030985may01.story?coll=la-headlines-politics

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FEATURED ORGANIZATIONS THIS MONTH
KISTI Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information is a Korean Government-sponsored, non-profit research institute with a history of about 40 years. In addition to foreign technology watching, it plays an important role in Korea as a national hub for an S&T information network.    KISTI representatives briefed WTEC on their activities in nanotechnology on a recent visit to the wilds of Baltimore. KISTI has a staff of nearly 300 and impressive facilities, including several supercomputers..  http://www.kisti.re.kr/english/

Specialized Search Engines on S&T One approach to narrowing a search on the Web is to use a search engine that searches only sites that are relevant to a particular discipline.  There are clearinghouses of such specialized search engines at http://invisibleweb.com (the "search engine for search engines"), http://www.searchengineguide.com, and in the subject tree of sites like http://www.yahoo.com.  Many such specialized engines search only sites from one organization; for example the IEEE has one that searches just their publications, which include over 100 journals and thousands of conference proceedings.  Your editor gleaned though these sources and found some of the most useful search engines for S&T. This is just a sample.  More later.

Search Engines for Science Fields in General

Mad Scientist Network. Got a science question that's driving you crazy?  Submit your sanity-endangering question to the self-proclaimed Mad Scientists on the Network or search the Archives of previously answered questions by topic area, grade level and/or date. Questions and Answers in the Archives date back to 1996. The Mad Scientists field questions in 26 areas of science from Agriculture to Zoology.  http://www.madsci.org/MS_search.html

U. S. Government Sites  The powerful search engine at FirstGov connects you to millions of web pages - from the federal government, local and tribal governments and to foreign nations around the world. On FirstGov.gov, you can search more than 51 million web pages from federal and state governments, DC and U.S. territories. Most of these pages are not available on commercial web sites. FirstGov has the most comprehensive search of government anywhere on the Internet. http://firstgov.gov/

NEC Research Index The "Earth's largest free full-text index of scientific literature."  http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs

Science Daily  provides up-to-date news on the latest findings and research in science from astrophysics to zoology. Simply type a keyword query or phrase to retrieve breaking news releases from universities and research organizations worldwide, links to relates sites, images, software downloads, book reviews, online magazines and over 200 science newsgroups. Every news release received by the site contains links to the site of the contributing institution.  http://www.sciencedaily.com/search.htm

Search Engines for Chemistry

ChemSoc, the Chemistry Societies Network, is hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Visitors to this site will gain access to books, career info, online publications, databases, virtual resources and other materials, electronic or otherwise, for a career in chemistry. ChemSoc also offers ChemBytes, a virtual newspaper daily headlines, job info, weekly business reports, and more. ChemBytes may be searched with a keyword query.  http://www.chemsoc.org/cgi-bin/fx.exe?DB=chembyte

Chemie.de  Search engine for chemistry and related sciences from Germany, but mostly in English. http://www.chemie.de/search/hindex.php3?language=e

Rolf Claessen's Chemistry Search http://www.claessen.net/chemistry/search_en.html

Search Engines for Space S&T

NASA-Wide Search.  The 4 million public Web pages in NASA's Web space provide a considerable challenge for people searching them. - You can search the broadest collection of public NASA Web pages by using this search engine, provided by Spacelink at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. http://www.nasa.gov/search/index.html
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Copyright © 2002 WTEC, Inc. Comments to rds@wtec.org please.

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DATE	FEATURE ARTICLE	URL
Apr 02	Japanese Lap the U.S. in the Supercomputer Race	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N42.html
Mar 02	Criteria for Basic Research Performance	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N41.html
Feb 02	Internet Growth Slows	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N40.html
Dec 01 /Jan 02	Japan Ups S&T Paper Quality and Quantity as U. S. Declines	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N39.html
Nov 01	Marburger Shakes Up OSTP	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N38.html
Oct 01	Impact of Terrorism on R&D	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N37.html
Sep 01	US Technologies Lead;  US Technologists Lag	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N36.html
Aug 01	Doctors of Economic Warfare	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N35.html
Jul 01	Marburger to be OSTP Director	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N34.html
Jun 01	Nano is Huge, and Getting Bigger	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N33.html
May 01	R&D Budget Crash	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N32.html
Apr 01	As DotComs Wilt, Internet Sprouts	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/N31.html
Mar 01	Research Famines: FY2002 Budgets	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/ITRInews30.html
Feb 01	Sherwood Boehlert:  New Science Committee Chair	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/ITRInews29.html
Jan 01	Andreessen's Law for the Internet	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/ITRInews28.html
Dec 00	S&T Policy of the Bush Administration	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/ITRInews27.html
Nov 00	Research Feasts: FY2001 Budgets	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/ITRInews26.html
Oct 00	Gingrich Praises Clinton	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/ITRInews25.html
Sep 00	Industry Leads U.S. R&D	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/ITRInews24.html
Aug 00  (Extra)	Americans Like Being No. 1  and Want to Keep It That Way	http://itri2.org/ITRInews/ITRInews23.html
Aug 00	Pale Green Manufacturing:  US is 3rd out of 3	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews22.html
Jul 00	Science and Engineering Indicators 2000 Released by NSF	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews21.html
Jun 00	American Leadership of S&T: Reality or Myth?	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews20.html
May 00	Think That Government is Investing More in Research? Think Again.	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews19.html
Apr 00	Who's Getting U.S. Patents?	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews18.html
Mar 00	Bottom Line II: Trade Deficit Skyrocket Explodes	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews17.html
Feb 00	S&T: Ready for Prime Time?	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews16.html
Jan 00 /  Dec 99	New Technology Czar(ina)	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews15.html
Nov 99	Output in Papers: We're Number One?	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews14.html
Oct 99	Is International S&T Assessment Needed?	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews13.html
Sep 99	200GB Disk: 40 Films on One CD	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews12.html
Aug 99	Rep. George Brown Adjourns	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews11.html
Jul 99	More Good News / Bad News  from the Academy	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews10.html
Jun 99 /  May 99	Teraflops Computers Meet Gates' Law	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews9.html
Apr 99	GPRA Metastasizes Abroad	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews8.html
Mar 99	Who's On First?  (US, But Not for Long)	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews7.html
Feb 99	Who's the Bear, and Who's the Bull? Japan Doubles R&D; The US Cuts It	http://justice.loyola.edu/~rds/ITRInews6.html
Jan 99 /  Dec 98	The Bottom Line:  US Trade Deficit Skyrockets	http://itri.loyola.edu/NEWS/ITRInews5.htm
Nov 98	NRC to State:  Ignoring S&T is Ignorant	http://itri.loyola.edu/NEWS/ITRInews4.htm
Oct 98	Is S&T to Blame for the Asian Financial Crisis?	http://itri.loyola.edu/NEWS/ITRInews3.htm
Sep 98	The Y1.998K Problem: Y2K Arrives 0.002K Early. Markets Crash, PMs Fired, Orioles 31 Games Behind	http://itri.loyola.edu/NEWS/ITRInews2.htm
Aug 98	Left Hand/Right Hand: NSF and NAS Both Assess US Math Research	http://itri.loyola.edu/NEWS/ITRInews1.htm