70% of Science Award Finalists Are Children of Immigrants

Tweet


Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

Immigrant parents' focus on science and math pays off for their kids, a new report finds. CREDIT: © Jonathan Ross | Dreamstime.com View full size image

Immigration is a boon to American science and math, a new report asserts, noting that 70 percent of the finalists in a recent prestigious science competition are the children of immigrants.

The report by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit research group in Arlington, Va., states that many immigrant parents emphasize hard science and math education for their children, viewing those fields as paths to success.

Statistics supporting that belief: According to a recent Georgetown University study on the value of undergraduate majors, the lifetime median annual income for someone with a bachelor's degree in engineering is $75,000, compared with $29,000 for a counseling or psychology major. [Infographic: Highest-paying College Majors]

That study found that the highest earners are petroleum engineers, with median annual earnings of $120,000.

Only 12 percent of Americans are foreign-born, the NFAP report says. Even so, children of immigrants took 70 percent of the finalist slots in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search Competition, an original-research competition for high school seniors.



Of the 40 finalists, 28 had parents born in other countries: 16 from China, 10 from India, one from South Korea and one from Iran.

"In proportion to their presence in the U.S. population, one would expect only one child of an Indian (or Chinese) immigrant parent every two and a half years to be an Intel Science Search finalist, not 10 in a year," wrote the report's author, NFAP director Stuart Anderson.

Finalists interviewed for the report attributed their interest in research to their parents' attitudes.

"Our parents brought us up with love of science as a value," David Kenneth Tang-Quan, whose parents emigrated from China to California, told Anderson, according to the report.

Still, children of immigrants face barriers outside of the education system. According to the Georgetown report, racial disparities in pay persist even within science fields. Whites with an undergraduate major in engineering out-earn Asians with the same degree by about $8,000 a year. African-American and Hispanic engineering graduates fare worse, making about $60,000 and $56,000 per year, respectively, compared with whites' $80,000.

Asians out-earn whites in the fields of health, law and public policy; psychology and social work; and biology and life sciences.

The fact that children of immigrants excel in science and math should be taken into account when making immigration policy, Anderson wrote: "The results should serve as a warning against new restrictions on legal immigration, both family and employment-based immigration, since such restrictions are likely to prevent many of the next generation of outstanding scientists and researcher from emerging in America."

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

• Top 5 Myths About Girls, Math and Science
• 10 Ways to Keep Your Mind Sharp
• Extreme Living: Scientists at the End of the Earth

 Newscribe : get free news in real time 

Get to know the auditors

Tweet

OPTIMISTICALLY CAUTIOUS By ERROL OH

There's a price to pay for taking audit quality for granted.

A LOT is being said about the audit profession these days. After all, why should the auditors be out of the line of sight in the frenzy of finger-pointing in the wake of the global financial crisis?

It's easy to assign blame on hindsight, but nevertheless, when large and seemingly invulnerable businesses have collapsed or have come close to oblivion as a result of large-scale mismanagement and fraud, it's safe to conclude that a lot of regulators and professionals have surely dropped the ball.

They have missed the warning signs and have failed to raise the alarm. There's no doubt that the auditors belong in this group.

In a consultation paper released last October, the European Commission (EC) observes: “While the role played (in the financial crisis) by banks, hedge funds, rating agencies, supervisors or central banks has been questioned and analysed in depth in many instances, limited attention has been given so far to how the audit function could be enhanced in order to contribute to increased financial stability.”

This so-called Green Paper, titled Audit Policy: Lessons from the Crisis, solicited responses to questions that were designed to help the EC figure out how to improve the European audit market. However, many of the issues raised are applicable in most other parts of the world.

Then, in January this year, the New York-based International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) came out with a thought piece called Audit Quality: An IAASB Perspective. This publication too sees a connection between the financial crisis and the auditors.

“The turbulent events of the global financial crisis have highlighted the critical importance of credible, high-quality financial reporting. They have also demonstrated the importance of considering the role of audit quality in the broader context of quality financial reporting.

Achieving quality financial reporting depends on the integrity of each of the links in the financial reporting supply chain,” wrote IAASB chairman Professor Arnold Schilder.

“As one of those links, the external audit plays a major role in supporting the quality of financial reporting around the world, whether in the context of the capital markets, the public sector or the private or non-public sector. It is an important part of the regulatory and supervisory infrastructure, and thus an activity of significant public interest.”



Naturally, the enforcement agencies sometimes have a more severe view on how the auditors have contributed to the crisis. Last December, the New York attorney general sued Ernst & Young, the longtime auditors of Lehman Brothers, whose application for bankruptcy protection in September 2008 is considered one of the triggers of the crisis. The lawsuit alleged that the Ernst & Young helped Lehman Brothers engage in a “massive accounting fraud”.

Another Big Four firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), also had to endure the harsh glare of publicity recently in the aftermath of a large corporation's downfall. In this case, the company is India's Satyam Computer Services, whose chairman confessed that the IT service provider's accounts had been falsified.
Last month, the United States' Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) announced a settled disciplinary order against five PricewaterhouseCoopers International firms based in India. Two of those firms were slapped with a US$1.5mil penalty.

This is in addition to a US$6mil penalty imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against the five firms. The combined $7.5mil penalty imposed in this matter is the largest that the SEC and PCAOB have assessed against any registered foreign accounting firm.

On May 16, the IAASB issued a consultation paper titled Enhancing the Value of Auditor Reporting: Exploring Options for Change. “The purpose of this international consultation is to determine whether there are common views among key users of audited financial statements and other parties to the financial reporting process about the usefulness of auditor reporting, and to explore possible options to enhance the quality, relevance and value of auditor reporting,” the board explains.

Clearly, now is as good a time as any to have discussions on the importance of the work of auditors. The question is, are Malaysian investors participating in this dialogue? Going by how shareholders are generally passive about the appointment of auditors of listed companies, the answer can only be no.

For that matter, when was the last time we hear minority shareholders openly and vigorously questioning the management and board's choice of auditors? It's standard for an AGM agenda to include the re-appointment of the auditors and the authorisation of the directors to fix the auditors' remuneration. Year in and year out, the shareholders at the AGM will dutifully pass such resolutions on the assumption that the directors and the auditors are doing what they're supposed to be doing when it comes to ensuring audit quality.
The average minority shareholder of a listed company probably doesn't even know which firm audits the company. There's this dangerous perception that all auditors are more or less the same, and that it's not up to the investors to demand for audit quality.

There are several questions that shareholders (and investors, in general) should be asking about the auditors and their selection by the management.

How were the auditors picked, and how did the board satisfy itself that it had found the best firm for the job? Who is the partner of the firm who will oversee the audit and how is he qualified to handle that role? Do the audit fees reflect the extent of work required? Bear in mind that in audit, a bargain is not always a good thing. If the same firm has been the auditors for a long time, is there a need to consider a change? How do the auditors ensure independence?

Yes, these are rather dull and procedural areas, but isn't it better to tackle these questions now than after the breakdown of a company?

Executive editor Errol Oh has said this before and he'll say it again many people don't understand what is it that auditors really do.

Electrons Are Near-Perfect Spheres

Tweet

By Wired UK

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK

A 10-year study has revealed that the electron is very spherical indeed.

To be precise, the electron differs from being perfectly round by less than 0.000000000000000000000000001 cm. To put that in context; if an electron was the size of the solar system, it would be out from being perfectly round by less than the width of a human hair.

The Imperial College team behind the research, which was conducted on molecules of ytterbium flouride, used a laser to make measurements of the motion of electrons, and in particular the wobble they exhibit when spinning. They observed no such wobble, implying that the electron is perfectly round at the levels of precision available, reflected in the figure above.



The co-author of the report describing the research, Jony Hudson, said: “We’re really pleased that we’ve been able to improve our knowledge of one of the basic building blocks of matter. It’s been a very difficult measurement to make, but this knowledge will let us improve our theories of fundamental physics. People are often surprised to hear that our theories of physics aren’t ‘finished’, but in truth they get constantly refined and improved by making ever more accurate measurements like this one.”

The next step is to up that precision level even further, using new methods to cool the molecules to extremely low temperatures and control their motion. The results are important in the study of antimatter, and particularly the positron — which should behave identically to the electron but with an opposite electrical charge. If more differences can be found, it could help to explain why far less antimatter has been discovered in the universe than predicted by theory.

Image: Lawrence Rayner/Flickr
Source: Wired.co.uk 

Newscribe : get free news in real time