It's all in good intention to ask about these things and take them into consideration, but to make some of these technological advancements possible, not only do we need the money to fund the research, but we need a multitude of brilliant, and more importantly, educated minds to conceive of the solutions to the problems we are about to face...
It all comes down to money:
But obviously, education and science are not exactly our focal points as a nation.
So it's all well and good to say that education and scientific research are important to the American government, but is innovation really what drives them? Innovation isn't cheap, but imagine a world where grant money isn't something to be competed over, but something that is allocated on a need basis.
I hate to be one of those people who posits that our government is only concerned about getting their hands on more oil, but I can guarantee you that if we spent half as much money looking for alternatives to oil as we do asserting our rights to the resource, we wouldn't be dependent on it any more.
We've spent a lot of time in this course thinking about video, the benefits of being able to transmit a message to our audiences in a new way, and the time that is saved by the viewer when they watch a video, rather than reading a paper. The dichotomy between showing an idea versus describing an idea is an interesting concept. My question is, do we get as much stuff out of watching a video as we do out of reading a paper?
We know that some of our brain functions actively turn off when we watch television because we don't have to actively participate with the information that we're trying to absorb. Rather, we can veg out in front of a screen. Learning aurally and visually requires an active listening capability that is something that must be fostered and nurtured in an individual.