Most importantly - this blog flushed out a trend .  A few ‘confessed’ of a former career in science or engineering. There were civil engineers, statisticians, one life scientist and a couple of programmers and a software engineer.   This trend is profound - the trend away from STEM employment due to continued outsourcing and the flood of H1-B’s  from areas where we create a product or work towards collective knowledge that seeds new technology.  Sad.  On the good side, the addition of these individuals - myself included - may create a professionalism that has been lacking in that field before - Hence articles like mine and my friend who created Ethyl Broomhandle.   But few would argue that the future of our country would fare better if people like this were about the business of creating new technology and products.  Getting people like this BACK TO WORK IN THEIR CHOSEN STEM FIELDS - would help secure our infrastructure, create new sources of clean energy and advance medical science.  But when a country throws its best and brightest into the garbage can of poverty - what do you think will happen?

A real estate colleague of mine from another geographic area  recently wrote an article on  private forum about a REALTOR all of us in the business are all too  familiar with. He named her Ethyl Broomhandle  and I would give this agent credit for his diatribe, but I have a feeling that he wanted his comments to remain anonymous.

We all know her.

The most obnoxious real estate agent that God ever created.  Aggressive, nasty, mentions repeatedly that she has been in the business since the dawn of time.  Agents cringe in horror when a buyer falls in love with one of her listings.  I’ve written about her before on professional forums. In fact – a good chunk of my time with my real estate coach is spent talking about how to deal  with the Ethyl Broomhandle’s of the real estate world without finding myself at the bottom of a bottle of Cabernet every night.

But through all of this,  I never came clean.  Well I have a confession to make… you see I created Ethyl…I did this 20 years ago when I was young and foolish. While the public was focused on the cloning of Dolly the cloned sheep – they didn’t know that a group of mad scientists – of which I was one  – had  created clones of thousands of “worst nightmare”  real estate agents and deposited them in every brokerage across the continental US.

How did this happen?

You see – about 20 years ago when I was first starting out as a budding mad scientist – we were under a lot of stress.  We decided that we deserved to have  a “fun project” to lighten our burden.  Then one night a couple of us got drunk while watching Star Trek reruns we got our inspiration from this episode: The clip gives you the conclusion…

In this episode – Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy decided to create hundreds of copies of a henpecking android to punish Harry Mud for causing problems for the crew of the Enterprise.  He was was left on a small planet with 500 “Stella’s” all screaming at him.

We were cloning almost everything – so why not a REALTOR? Why not clone the worst most aggressive, useless, pointless REALTOR in the world – make thousands of copies.  No one would mind – their purpose in life would be to torture other REALTORS and everyone hates REALTORS anyway. If we were caught, we could argue that we did this as a public service.

But we didn’t stop there – We chose the DNA of the “original” Ethy Broomhandle. Her name was actually  Stella DragonLady and she was a piece of work to begin with.  But  we souped up her DNA with several genes and enhancers .

1. We added alleles dragonlady 1, 2, & 3 – genes know to enhance sarcasm and bitchiness.
2. We added the jackass promoter.  In men this piece of DNA enhances  the phenotype of the “jerk.” In women it enhances  the ability to seek out male companions with money – who ironically are generally jerks.
3. We also threw in the  a newly discovered gene called cha-ching in order to be sure our clones could smell money.
4. We  incorporated the gene called puff. We called it that not only because source of inspiration came from something you puff – but because this clever gene removes all inhibition to blatant self-promotion and exaggeration. An individual possessing the enhanced version of this allele is capable of repeating “I’ve been in this business for over 100 years” every five minutes with a straight face.
5. Our final touch was to add  the catclaw promoter – which works synergistically with the dragonlady locus taking the phenotype to a whole a new level of bitchiness.

Now one of our progeny – Ethyl Broomhandle  has come back to remind me of my dark past.  I guess the experiment worked.

© 2010 – Ruthmarie G. Hicks – http://thewestchesterview.com – All rights reserved.

Stunning, isn’t it???

OK - the next chart is the history of the budget defecit - as a function of percent of GDP.  The budget deficit during World War II was due to government subsidies for the war effort.  The boom that followed was one where the middle class made the most strides in achieving the American Dream.  The engine that drove that boom…government spending on the war.  The debt went (temporarily) sky-high due to the war effort.  BUT, this stimulated INNOVATION (read STEM jobs) and employment (read manufacturing) for many. It also shows that balanced budgets are more likely to be achieved during presidencies where democrats sat in the Oval Office.  Why?  They were not afraid to tax progressively. We need to spend on infrastructure and research.  But, what about the deficit you ask?  See where the money is in chart 1.  Tax where the money is.  Progressive taxation which slows down the relentless progress of the top 1% shown above is the most effective way to achieve a balanced budget.

We don’t make things any more. We have abandoned innovation and R&D in favor of market manipulation.   Why make money through innovation when manipulating markets and creating bubbles is so much more profitable?  The creation of the so-called “ownership society” forced many a mathematician, scientist or engineer (yours truly included) to leave our innovative  havens of discovery.  When a Ph.D. in my field is looking at a 70 hour work week that pays less than $40k a year - staying in place is no longer an option.  the fate of many STEM careers has been similar.  Offshoring, outsourcing, insourcing - call it what you will….but the bottom line is this: scientists and engineers have been forced out of their fields because “market forces” have created a situation where a livelihood can not be sustained. So most of us ventured forth  into the  world of business and we have plied our intellectual capacity in the market place.

The lesson here is NEVER underestimate an intellectual…..the best and brightest are a flexible bunch and  have a knack for being able to apply themselves to whatever task is at hand. Even if underhanded - we excel at being the best.   When we apply ourselves to making gobs of money with no regard to the consequences and with no underlying concerns about the trivial (such as whether what we are doing is right, underhanded or just plain wrong) we tend to kick ass.   Never was this seen so blatantly as is in the housing meltdown.  Many a brain with an mathematical bent wound up plying their craft at hedge funds instead of developing innovative algorithms or finding new sources of renewable energy.  Instead of contributing to solving our problems, they’ve been instrumental in creating more problems than we could ever imagine.   But hey! It’s a living…..So what if the world economy nearly collapsed!  Now here is the result of such intellectual might. Instead of “These brilliant guys” Jon Stewart is calling them “These F@#king Guys”

Enjoy the clip -its from April of this year - and realize that Goldman Sachs could not have done this without help from the mathematically gifted…

© RMGHicks - http://www.americasbrokenbraintrust.com

With the 2010 House of Representatives elections as well as the 2010 Senate races coming up and the majority in both houses up for grabs - the republican deficit hawks will be looking to cut the federal budget. Generally by  trying to make the already hard-pressed middle class bear the burden.  But the democrats would have some real ammunition if they use this deficit calculator.

Although I can’t embed the calculator - I did play with it - here is what I came up with - There I just solved one of the nation’s most pressing problems!

1. Meet the Deficit Calculator:

The blue bar indicates where the deficit will be by 2020  if things are unchanged.  The deficit will be approaching the 90% mark which is a tipping point according to Ragoff & Reinhardt where growth performance in economics starts to deteriorate.  (When the debt/GDP ratio = 90%)  By clicking the options on the left side - you can select “Policies” that will either reduce or increase the deficit.

2. Change the World!  Decide how to reduce the debt to GDP ration!

Some surprising results:

The two most effective methods of reducing the deficit were:

A. Being allowed to negotiate medicare drug prices. This whacked 10% off the deficit by taking $2.1 trillion out of the budget.  That put the debt to GDP  down to 75% in one shot.

B. Another 2.1 trillion would be whacked off if our government would impose a financial speculation tax.  This is a tax that would barely touch long-term investors.  It would impose a 0.25% transaction tax on equities.  First of all, I find that number staggering because it implies how much trading is going on.  People who are trading by the hour or by the minute - large hedge funds and the investor class are largely responsible for the massive amount of trading that this figure indicates.

So, how does that blue bar look after implementing these two actions?

In this scenario the debt to GDP ratio is down to 66% or just 6% shy of the Maastrict Treaty - which was the debt target set for membership in the Euro Zone - a largely ignored number - but a goal that would put our country into  safe financial waters.

C. A quick end to the wars in the Middle east would take another 5% out of the debt to GDP ratio - putting the ratio just 1% above the Maastrict Treaty

I Went One Step Further - and added money for Infrastructure, R& D - areas that have been squeezed in recent years.  According to the calculator this added another 10% to debt to GDP ratio.

Sooo - now I had to compensate for this action….

This could be made up for by Imposing an upstream price on GHG emissions.  (A carbon tax of about $0.05 per gallon of gasoline  along with reduction of the military budget with respect to nuclear arsenal, some R&D as well as canceling some platforms that might have been on the chopping block anyway - as too impractical and expensive.

The jobs provided by working on infrastructure issues and green technology, and various neglected R&D would help put the United States back on track as an INNOVATOR nation and not merely an importer of technology from abroad.  It would feed those with higher degrees in technological fields- the very high-skilled professionals that we have starved for years - and provide a base for a future in which we actually produce not just consume.

That would put us down to a 64% dept to GDP ratio..(4% shy of the Maastrict Treaty goal.

But those are my ideas - What are yours?  Have fun with the link.

© 2010 - Ruthmarie G. Hicks http://AmericasBrokenbraintrust.com All rights reserved.

Now it looks like the republicans are dancing around with fly paper on their shoes.  When asked what they would do to cut deficits - what programs they are willing to cut - they do a Kabuki dance combined with a limbo act in order to avoid an substantive answers.  They definitely didn’t want any unpopular answers to “stick.”  David Gregory found that out when he tried to nail If it weren’t so pathetic - it would be funny. By his own words - their stated agenda was “gauzy” at best. Here is a segment from “Meet the Press” with David Gregory.  Listen carefully and see if you can find ANYTHING of substances from Congressman Pete Sessions or Senator John Cornyn  - both from Texas.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This type of rhetoric has been a while of in coming. Recently the republicans have been beating their chests and stamping their feet about the federal deficit.  It’s a fascinating site to see when they spent eight years claiming that deficits don’t matter.  This claim, in response to the  billions in tax cuts that were given to the richest 5% of the population back in the golden day when our country actually enjoyed surpluses.   It’s hard to imagine that less than 10 years ago our country enjoyed an embarrassment of riches from an irresponsible Administration - run by - (gasp!) DEMOCRATS…

Well the republicans decided that this meant everyone was OVER-paying and they took care of that! The wealthiest in the nation didn’t take their largesse and let it trickle down to the worker bees.  They took the money and ran - laughing all the way to the bank.  This left the country deep in debt while in the midst of two wars - none of which needed to be paid for - because - well - deficits don’t matter. So the irony of the situation is that the deficit hawks turned into maniacal spend-thrifts just when the nation should have been saving for a rainy day.

The crisis of 2008 showed just how short-sighted this policy was.  It also ushered in the Obama era and now the spend-thrifts have gotten religion and are trying to squeeze a weak economy over yet another cliff.  They are playing a dangerous game.  Let us pray they don’t succeed.

It was interesting to see Chris Matthews response to this class act in evasive maneuvers.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

© 2010 - Ruthmarie G. Hicks - http://www.AmericasBrokenBraintrust.com

One of the most confusing issues to the public is the way each party points fingers and indulges in the “blame game.”  The Bush adminstration were masters at blaming Clinton for things that happened nearly eight years after Bush had taken office. After blaming Clinton for everything from the terrorist attack of 9/11 and most notably the financial melt-down of 2008 - which happened nearly 8 years after Clinton left office - I find it amazing to see them feigning innocence and taking no responsibility for the deepest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The crisis that pushed us into this hole actually happened on Bush’s watch.

So expect no relief in the months ahead. Clarity of thought in politics is a contradiction in terms. By the time the election finally rolls around, if you aren’t totally confused - - then you are probably only listening to one side of the story a la MSNBC or FOX news.  The ability to get a sense of equilibrium and reality requires a requisite loyalty to one “news” channel  - and I use the word “news” loosely.  Most of today’s news is a cacoffiny of numerous one-sided versions of the same topic - with no common ground between any of them.

This is why I love Jon Stewart  Comedy Central - On TheDailyShow -  Jon can take the gloves off and call a spade a spade and do it with grace and humor.  This was aired  a little over two weeks ago, but it doesn’t get dated.

©2010 - Ruthmarie G. Hicks - AmericasBrokenBraintrust.com - All rights reserved.

Let’s take a drug that is near and dear to my heart.  Erbitux.  Erbitux has earned Imclone major money since it was approved in 2008 for clinical use.

But how did we get to a drug like Erbitux.  The conservatives will be clapping their hands and jumping up and down saying “See - the private sector provided for this discovery and the profits that resulted.  NOT SO FAST.

The story of Erbitux begins way back in the 1950s in the public sector where funding by the government allowed  Dr. Stanley Cohen to begin research on “growth factors” that seemed to be involved in cell proliferation.  First he discovered NGF (nerve growth factor) - this - in turn -led to the discovery of EGF (epidermal growth factor.)  The amino acid sequence of same was published in 1973.  He won  a  Nobel for that discovery in 1986.

Like most growth factors - EGF influences cellular proliferation and survival.  It was the first of many proteins discovered that have similar characteristics.  Each of these influence proliferation, survival and differentiation in some way.  When EGF and other growth factors bind to its receptor on a cell surface it triggers a signaling cascade within the cell that pushes the cell toward the replication pathway.  Out of control proliferation, results in cancer and inhibition of EGF reduces that risk.

The EGF pathway was but one that was under study.  Throughout the late 70’s and through the early 90’s the public sector labs funded primarily by the NIH and NSF worked to tease apart these signaling cascades in the hope of better understanding cancer and cancer metastasis.    This sort of work is ongoing as these pathways have turned out to be highly complex and redundant with numerous feedback loops.  Indeed, during my 15 years at the bench, I worked on two signaling cascades in an ancillary way.

The information gathered from those years of discovery in what is largely academia and the public sector opened the doors for privately funded VC and biotech companies to carry the ball right to the patient’s bedside.

Enter Erbitux -  chimeric (mouse/human) monoclonal antibody created by Imclone that blocks the action of EGF by binding its receptor.  In 2008 it was approved for use.  Many people were employed in the initial construction of the antibody and in the pre-clinicial and clinical trials.  I won’t even begin to mention the numerous people who held employment in the public sector working on these pathways.

It has proved to be a blockbuster drug. It continues to produce tremendous amounts of revenue for the treatment of head and neck as well as colon cancer. And for me - well - it gave my father an extra year of life when he had exhausted all other treatment possibilities for metastatic colon cancer.

For those doubters that think that the private sector could have done better - then why didn’t they?  Well, I can’t honestly imagine in any Venture Capitalist rubbing their hands together with glee about factors in snake venom and salivary glands that might promote cell growth.  Particularly in the 1950s when Watson and Crick had only just discovered the structure of DNA.  No one knew how DNA made protein and the notion of using genetic engineering in mice to generate a chimeric antibody that would block a receptor was about as plausible as intergallactic travel is to us.  Particularly since we didn’t even understand receptor-ligand interactions and knowledge of the immune system was in its infancy.

Bottom line - VC would NEVER have funded that kind of basic research for decades in order to give birth to a new class of drugs that might or might not prove to be a reality. Just too risky.   Funding medical research in the public sector creates the seed money for new venues that can later be exploited in the private sector.  There is nothing wrong with using the public sector to spur technology - in fact, it is an essential component to the process.

© 2010 Ruthmarie G. Hicks - AmericasBrokenBrainTrust.com

In the subsequent pages Krugman goes on to describe a national economy as a “closed system” while individual companies are more “open systems.” By analogy he described the garbage collection system in his township. The town had decided that it didn’t want its own land fill. Although it collected the garbage, the ultimate disposal was outside the town. Thus, garbage dumps and land fills are “open systems” with respect to the township. But garbage disposal in the United States as a whole - is a closed system. The trash has to go somewhere and moving it from place to place doesn’t change the total volume of landfill that we use as a country on iota.

I see a similar analogy in how the training of scientists was managed in our country over the past 20 years or so. I came up in the era where everyone was anticipating the great scientist and Ph.D. shortage. Articles appeared willy-nilly in the journals Science and Nature. The Scientist wrote of dire predictions if the problem wasn’t addressed. Qualified students were encouraged to enter the sciences and seek higher degrees because surely as surely as the sun rises, there would be a crying need for new investigators and there would be plenty of work in industry if Academe didn’t suit us.

The early 1990s saw a bolstering of the NIH and NSF budgets - particularly once Clinton was elected. This allowed established investigators to expand their labs and add more graduate students and post-docs to their budgets. This in turn led to a greater demand for student’s and an increased number of visas being granted to those who wished to study in the US. Investigators and universities saw no problem in this. After all each investigator’s laboratory represented and “open system” into which graduate students and postdocs flowed in and out. The same held for each university. If there wasn’t room in one lab for a student once they graduated, there was a whole country full of labs, both industrial and academic, that would surely employ the student or post-doc. In the meantime no one was factoring in the impact of all this foreign labor on the so-called scientist “shortage.”

Most investigators continued to see science as a field of infinite possibilities and projects. The trouble is that there are just so many labs and so many companies - the number of student’s and post-docs that can be absorbed into the entire system as fully employed scientists is quite finite. The Krugman analogy here would be the parking lot at the train station. Most train stations in the Tristate area have parking issues. Prof. Krugman found that he could get a space when he arrived early enough. But he secured his spot at the expense of others who would arrive later and find no spot. The system was “closed” and getting what you needed meant someone else had to go without.

For scientists and engineers this means that finite funds prevent infinite avenues of investigation from expanding indefinitely. At some point - saturation is reached and the spill-over (no matter how marvelously qualified) is left in the lurch. At best they are left in a perpetual no-mans land of indentured servitude as post-docs for years and years.

Now we see the darker side. As foreign-born scientists supplanted Americans, remuneration became more and more problematic. This created a vicious circle in which Americans fled science. But the glut continued unabated. Now it has come to the point where even foreign nationals are disgusted with the long hours and poor pay. They are looking towards “home” for a better life. So eventually we will truly have a shortage - a shortage that was fueled by a monster glut and rampant exploitation.

So the question remains….in the present state of affairs - how will America ever be able to compete again? It takes years to train a scientist or engineer. It’s nothing like the 2-year M.B.A. or a 3-year J.D. We ought to congratulate Academe though….they managed to create a future shortage out of a glut all while providing a top-notch education for our competition in the global market. Good going guys.

© 2010 - Ruthmarie G. Hicks - http://Americasbrokenbraintrust.com - All rights reserved.

My concerns are based on personal experience. As someone who holds a Ph.D. that I hardly use, the question above is far from moot. Ask anyone who has a degree is science, math, computer programming, engineering and the like. Many underwent extensive educations which were taken with the idea this would pay off in the form of increased remuneration for years to come. When I was an undergraduate, I had a job in a graduate school working in the registrar/bursar’s office. The specialized in engineering and computer science. The students flooded in each semester. The classes were held from 6 PM to 10 PM Monday through Thursday. Some students were on campus every night - others were around twice a week. This went on for years. Even in the mid to late 80s, it was expensive and certainly intellectually demanding and very time consuming. It’s been about 21 years since I worked in that institution. But these days I often wonder about the fate of the students who came through those doors. Are they still employed? Have they been outsourced? Did someone with an H1-B replace them with a lower salary? Given what happened to the monetary value of my own Ph.D. , these questions aren’t idle musings.

Many academics and business people a like now say that such education should be a lifetime effort. That fields of work will come and go - but that re-education into new fields every decade or so will be the norm. That this is not necessarily a bad thing. Really? To these notions I say BULL$%#$!

Why? The time and expense makes such an on-going educational imperative is wildly impractical and of dubious financial benefit. Degrees are expensive and time consuming undertakings. Even back in the 80s and 90s the cost was far from trivial. What made the time and expense worthwhile was the belief that once completed, the graduate really “had something” worthwhile - that would pay off for years to come.

Now, entire career paths and the courses of study required for admission are being created and commoditized with alarming speed. The hapless student chasing these degrees often finds their “cheese moved” before they even come out of the education pipeline. Going in - the student sees this as a viable career with high demand - this creates a flood of people chasing the same dollars. The flood creates a glut and industry adds salt to the wound by importing “cheap labor” from abroad. This scenario appears to be repeated over and over again throughout many industries and fields of study.

But how practical is this for the average worker? The answer is that it isn’t. We are getting to the point where a Master’s degree might get about six years of milage out said degree. Then the cycle has to restart when “retraining” becomes necessary. How many degrees are we going to have to take, in order to stay viable? Does it even make any sense to take theses degrees? I don’t know, crunching the numbers, it doesn’t seem to be very practical. For anyone taking a Ph.D. the stakes couldn’t be higher. The pipeline to graduation is so long that a student entering a Ph.D. program is more likely that not to be seeing a very different employment market when they emerge.

My point is this - education is valuable - however, if there are no jobs going with these degrees - people are simply going to truncate their educations. Resulting in a further dumbing down of our society. The brain trust we are counting on is being eaten alive by academia and industry alike. No one has clean hands on this one. Academia certainly aided and abetted the situation with respect to biomedical science. Breaking the American brain trust ? It’s already broken.

When I had such encounters I answered honestly that being a successful scientist was about as practical as trying to become a movie star or professional athlete. Further, there was no striking it rich for the few that “made it.” Income prospects for even the most successful in the field were moderate at best. At worst, they were consigning themselves to a life of poverty.

Last night I went to a “State of the Union” party where supporters of Obama got together to discuss the issues of the day and watch Obama’s address to the nation together. Although most of us were 40+ with a smattering of 30-somethings, there was one student from Stamford who happened to be a biology major.

We watched the State of the Union and amid the encouragement that Obama offered would be scientists and engineers - I had to advise caution to this student. Not surprisingly, he agreed with me. He felt that mid the grim statistics, the post-doctoral logjam, and literally piss-poor pay for the “successful” that you would have to be crazy to pursue a career in science.

Unfortunately for Obama and for the country as a whole, all the grant money in the world for education is pointless unless there are well paying jobs at the end of the educational pipeline.

But more important, what this type of encounter show us is that there truly are young people interested in pursuing science and engineering as career paths. The difficulty is that these careers are just not viable from a practical standpoint. So they turn to other fields such as law, finance, banking and sales. One has to wonder just how many people can be sustained in these fields.

It is this narrowing of viable income producing fields that has our country on the ropes. There are precious few places for people to go in order to earn a viable living. Everyone is flooding into the few niches that will actually produce the “green.” This is exacerbated by the fact that there are no more safety nets. The widening income gap has created a society of rich vs. poor. The poor are truly becoming POOR. The best and the brightest of our youth have a choice: they can choose to pursue their dreams and end up poor - or set them aside and end up rich. More and more, they are choosing money over dreams. From a practical standpoint - this is the right choice for the individual - but the wrong one for society. However, will society treat these people any better for doing the right thing? No, it won’t.