[geeks] Q: Regarding Linux in K-12 education

[Mike Meredith]

First of all I should say I've done a disservice to China ... reviewing
the QS (Times) "top university" list, I get the following totals
in the top 100 :-

UK:	18
US:	31
Israel:	 0 (3 in the top 200)
China:	 6

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:36:54 +0200, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> I can't comment about other countries but I can comment about the
> rankings and Israel. Hebrew U was founded in the 1920's to be the
> first university that taught in Hebrew for possibly 2000 years.
> Although it does have a science campus, and an AMA accredited medical
> school, it is really a liberal arts school. 

Rankings always do a disservice to Universities that specialise in
certain areas - for instance Cambridge gets marked down for Engineering
because it doesn't offer the engineering specialisations that other
Universities offer - merely an "engineering" degree that allows
specialisation within it.

Similarly, some of the London "Universities" (UCL, King's College,
LSE) are not strictly Universities as the degree awarding power rests
with the University of London rather than the more famous colleges.
Whether they would get higher or lower rankings combined into the
University of London, I'm not sure.

> If you look at Israel, it is small (smaller than the state of New
> Jersey), and has less people in it than London. 

Personally, I think the number of people (and their quality!) is more
important than the size of the patch of land they stand on. And I think
it's actually got a few more people than London (and no I'm not being
silly about the "City of London" with a population of less than 8,000).

Playing silly games with numbers, the 31 top 100 Universities that the
US has, gives 1 top 100 University for every 9.9million people (using
the estimated population of about 308 million for the US in 2010).

So Israel should have about 0.75 Universities in the top 100 to reach
parity with US standards - and with one at position 102 in the latest
list I looked at, are probably doing slightly better than parity.

And the UK should have about 6 in the top 100 ... so what are we doing
with 18?!?

> or rationed. A program at Hebrew U for example, will not be duplicated
> elsewhere. Both Hebrew U and the Technion have computer science
> schools, but they teach very different things. 

A bit of a mistake if you ask me ... at the very least an annoying
academic won't cause a brain drain if those he or she annoys can head
off to the "other" University down the road :)

> If you rank state wide universites as one entitiy, such as Rutger's, 
> Pennsylvania State, the University of California, and so on as one
> university, then to be fair you would have to rank ALL of Israel's
> colleges and universities together. In that case, you would find that
> it ranks far higher using the Chinese criteria than they do
> individually.

And possibly lower on some other lists! Actually the ratings game for
top Universities is pretty silly - something to argue about over coffee
at interdisciplinary academic conferences. A bit like the argument over
which UK university is the third oldest.



-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any 
   good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." Howard Aiken