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Wow, this sounds like a nice university...

University of Toronto is an internationally regarded research university, the "Higher Education Ranking" by The Times (UK) ranks UoT at 20th in 2015 in "World University Ranking", and 16th in "World Reputation Ranking",

That's why the issue of the complaints, and the report are indeed newsworthy. It is not some obscure backwater university, but a school of medicine with a history of Nobel Laureates including Frederick Banting and J.J.R. Macleod who were the first Canadians to win a Nobel prize; for their isolation of insulin.

My life belongs to me, and if it sucks, I want to end it without any interference from religious morons and brainless public administrators like Ms. Barber. Removing the means of suicide does not solve or prevent the real problem: people have less and less reasons to live.

Why should I live and get education when engineering is off-shored to brainless indians and chinese?
Why should I live and contribute to knowledge if science and research is constantly mocked, ridiculed and deprived of funding?
Why should I live when I've been treated as a insignificant cog in a corporation (which is now true for everything - even universities are run like a business)?
Why should I live when some female bitch, whose mental capacity was enough only to graduate from an obscure secondary school in a german village, is sitting in EuroParliament and blathering about shutting down nuclear fission and fusion research?
Why should I live when postdocs are lasting months? What useful science could possibly be done in couple of months?!
Why should I live when even art and music became a commodity, and are forced to cater to lowest form of human waste?
Why should I live when imbecile politicians want to turn the whole country into a large maximum security prison?!

I want to kill myself not because I cannot cope with pressures and competition, but because stupid MBA morons hijacked the system and gained power over creative and talented people. Remember those socialized schmucks who bullied and ridiculed you in high school and universities? Now they are MPAs, MBAs and your bosses - they hate you and want to crush you, because deep inside they realize that they are worthless earthworms compared to creative people. I worked hard to solve difficult problems and hence earn my Ph.D. in electrical engineering, but thanks to banksters and businessdicks, the long-term postdoc positions have vanished and even short-term postodcs are nearly impossible to find anywhere in the world.

My life belongs to me - not to a district attorney or moronic MPA. And when I want to end my life, I want my decision to be respected. It is not difficult to implement: farmers already use Controlled atmosphere killing for animals slaughter - inhaling inert gas guarantees a painless and quick death within minutes. You don't even have to build any new buildings or suicide booths - morgues are perfectly fine and can easily cope with those who want to voluntary end their lives.

Instead of stupid regulations, how about giving more reasons to live and removing the reasons for suicide? Or at least simplifying the whole process of ending one's own life? It is harder than writing useless regulations, for sure, and requires substantially more brainpower than a typical MPA possesses, but we still have some smart, educated, thinking people on this planet, aren't we?!

Science in the US get's low grades? University in general in the US gets low grades. Why? It's not about education, it's all about money. And football, don't forget the football.

You, sir, have no idea what you are talking about. The US secondary education system may be in shambles, but Higher Ed in the US is easily the best in the world, and it's not even close. Even the mid-tier universities in the US are generally as good as or better than the premiere institutions in most countries.

Even counting JUST engineering technology, the US, with less than 4.5% of the world's population, has over 1/3 of the world's top universities, 3 times as many as the runner up, the United Kingdom (where the rankings originate, but the way). Count other subjects, and the US share gets even higher.

Save it for real people doing real things, California can just fall into the ocean for all I care. It would effectively end the MPAA and RIAA, and the world would be much better off for it.

Are you aware that CALTECH is in California? (and it's not just this ranking who says this, any real scientist knows that Caltech is better than MIT and the Ivy League colleges, regarding science). http://www.timeshighereducatio...

Here's an article talking about the same from 2002. Apparently there's rather low tech mechanical solutions that work quite well. Kinda like the laser potato peeler, still waiting for that and my flying car.

Except that the stripy particles used here are not real. Stellacci has been claiming to make these, but there are big doubts over the evidence:
http://www.timeshighereducatio...

Depends on the school. The top research universities are apparently still the best in the world in terms of the quality of the work they churn out. At least some of the rankings say so.

http://www.timeshighereducatio...

Lower tier and the for-profits not so much. These have mediocre instruction and lots of students that fail to graduate and lots of students in majors that don't qualify them for meaningful employment.

Berkeley is, if the (UK) Times Higher Education Supplement Rankings are to be believed, one of the top 10 universities in the world - and top three in engineering and technology. I'm pretty sure that constitutes "elite" standing. But in this article, it's treated as a "top-tier public university." Is it both?

Berkeley is, if the (UK) Times Higher Education Supplement Rankings are to be believed, one of the top 10 universities in the world - and top three in engineering and technology. I'm pretty sure that constitutes "elite" standing. But in this article, it's treated as a "top-tier public university." Is it both?

Ok, then explain the thugs who tried to destroy the GE wheat trial at Rothamsted, or the ones who did destroy the GE potatoes at the University of Leeds.

The anti-Monsanto is just a convenient attempt to justify anti-science bullshit (and even that card is factually weak). That's why there's opposition to Golden Rice, the Rainbow papaya, The Arctic apple, and every other non-Monsanto GMO. If it was just about Monsanto, that wouldn't happen, but it does.

I agree, a vast number of failures is to be expected from an online course that requires no monetary input - this is education based PURELY out of self-motivation. Even those who do have the motivation of "I spent money on this therefore I should complete it" still fail due to lack of effort, even those who have little money to throw around. One can only assume that in a forum where you don't pay for the education nor have devoted educators to "hanker" students (even to the a minor extent) is going to be a higher failure rate.

This article http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/mooc-completion-rates-below-7/2003710.article reported, in a study of 29 MOOCs that the worst course studied had a recruitment of 83,000 students with just 0.8% reaching the end - this is still 664 educated people.

Encouragingly, the best course had a completion rate of 19.2% out of 50,000. This gives us 9600 educated people, not a bad number I say.

We cannot forget that MOOCs aren't just used in order to pass them. Someone might be after a particular piece of information or in more extreme cases, educators might encourage students to join these type of courses to help the course that they are studying. This would increased the course numbers but would also increase the failure rate.

It would be interesting to see whether there are trends between failures in courses, how long people stuck with the course and what uses these online course materials are being put to.

Ahem. Nixon did not do everything that LBJ did.

During a road trip to Vietnam

On one occasion, some reporters asked Johnson in an off-the-record gathering to explain America's participation in Vietnam. There was no satisfactory answer to that question in LBJ's brain, so he unzipped, revealed his not-so private member, and stated: "This is why!" Like other presidents before and since, Johnson found that his libidinous behaviour could be a cause of political weakness.

In general, LBJ was quite proud of his endowment.

Lyndon B. Johnson nicknamed his penis 'Jumbo' and showed it to his colleagues at the US Capitol!

Actually, according to this: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/top-400.html you have 3 of the top 10. The US has the other 7. Still a damn good showing though.

Unfortunately this is more of a case of the government facilitating matters for the publishers. It is frustrating to see well-intentioned people (with sufficient knowledge ONLY to see that something called "Open Access" would be a good idea) rejoicing over this. The Finch report has completely discounted the Green OA strategy in favour of Gold OA. Rather than allowing publishers to adjust to modern reality by reducing their role in the dissemination of research, they are instead going to be paid big stacks of public money to carry on with their exorbitantly-priced open access options .

Finch's open-access cure may be 'worse than the disease' - Times Higher Education http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420392&c=1

Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report - Stevan Harnad http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/04/why-the-uk-should-not-heed-the-finch-report/

Posted anonymously as a simple google of my Slashdot username would turn up my webpage which would tell you who I am, and what I do for the society (and I'd rather speak cowardly but frankly here).

I'm a chartered member of the BCS (MBCS CITP - I will admit to having been grandfathered into the CITP as an "old" non-chartered but full MBCS when they changed the rules) and undertake some voluntary work for them (arguably I can be seen as "part of the problem" as it is for one of their "products"), trying to make things better from the inside. This post should be taken as my own personal views and not those of the Society etc. etc. yadda, yadda. I also abstained on all the motions, as - whilst I don't agree with the key motions raised by the petitioners - I do see some things happening within the Society that I am not keen on.

Yesterday I received the paperwork from the society putting both sides of the argument across. I don't understand quite why I should be written to twice on the matter (once of these was with a glossy cardboard leaflet despite the paperwork being about 4 pages of A4 or so - why was is in the interest of the Society?).

Whilst I'm not too happy with the upper echelons of the Society deciding the scope of their rebranding and the new focuses without decent consultation from the membership (and I was insulted to discover that the Society was calling itself the Chartered Institute for IT via a third party rather than having been informed by the society itself), I'm still of the opinion that the Society urgently needs to modernise itself.

There's too many fossils in the membership opposed to change of any kind (this isn't purely an aspect of age, it's one of outlook), and it is (perhaps rightly) perceived by non-members as being irrelevant in the modern world (and that's to those who even know what it is - typically there's more of the education sector involved in the Society than people from the Real World(tm)). Granted, some in the society view the Society as becoming too commercial, or putting the money-making areas of the Society ahead of other aspects - and they might have a point. I'm also not quite sure why the Society caters so much for middle management when it could easily cater for a much broader range of people in the Industry.

I do find it a bit bizarre that a vote of no confidence has been called by a petition of 52 members out of a professional membership of around 50,000, though.

Finally, with regards to course accreditation - what a strange beast that is! I have a bachelor's degree in what is now called Computer Science (but wasn't back in the day) from an institution listed in the top 4 in the Times Higher Education's 2008 world listings (for what that was worth), and was informed when I applied that - because it was non-BCS-accredited - it was worth the same as any other degree (that has a fair bit of IT in the curriculum) from any old institution; i.e. the equivalent of 3 years experience towards the 10 years that was required at the time to qualify. Getting a third class honours on an accreditated course (e.g. BSc Computing from London South Bank University) would count for the equivalent of two additional year's experience.

Do they have any reputable universities ?

Ummm, well, yes. Only problem is that they teach in Japanese - so they can't really be teaching anything important, could they?

Ummm, well, universities in Japan do have courses taught in English. Only problem is that they generally suck. Of the world top 20 universities, 13 are from US and none are from Japan.

Do they have cutting edge biotech, nano or healthcare facilities ?

Don't you keep up with tech news?

If you did, you will realize US leads the world (linked PDF is in Japanese but you being such a cosmopolitan I'm sure you won't have a problem with it).

Do they walked on the moon or have significant space presence ?

Well, yes actually, they do have quite a significant space presence.

Are you seriously suggesting JAXA is somehow on par with NASA? If presence of Wikipedia article makes it true: Bangladesh has a significant space presence.

You're an idiot.

CSIRO's patent which netted it 200 million is not a software patent. It's a hardware patent. Read the patent itself (from way back in 1993) if you don't believe me. The word "software" doesn't even appear in it.

This is exactly the way the patent system is supposed to work. It's supposed to encourage innovation and protect investment. What CSIRO is doing is improving the world. Can you imagine the world today if they hadn't done the research and developed the WIFI technology that everyone takes for granted?

It on the public record that they licensed the technology and expected to receive payments. As the court cases showed, the big tech companies just tried to weasel their way out of actually coughing up the cash after taking the technology and incorporating it into their products.

How can you be mad that this cash is going into cutting edge research projects rather than hookers and coke for some executive's next mediterranean cruise?

Coincidently, Ben Goldacre was presenting at the Royal Institution today on "Bad Science" - poor media reporting of science. You can view the stream from tomorrow afternoon at The Times Higher Education website: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/webcast.html . Event details for the RI debate here: http://www.rigb.org/contentControl?action=displayEvent&id=948

Here's the patent. And it's pretty damn comprehensive. The patent was filed for in 1993, and granted in 1996.

As in the report here (2000), CSIRO attempted to license the tech and recieve royalties but then in 2005, big tech companies didn't want to play ball anymore.

I say, good work CSIRO - screw these guys for every penny and keep on conducting your groundbreaking research.

That's one of the biggest arguments I've heard. That Microsoft products are a standard in the United States and schools are obliged to teach kids how to use the products that they will encounter in daily life rather than teach about outliers. Microsoft of course donates a lot to get schools and kids "hooked" on their products. See for example this older article: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=108319&sectioncode=26 At home, I make it a point to use Open Office but I can't see arguing with the school system to include OO in the curriculum even though I hate the thought of mandatory "Microsoft Word" classes that my kids take. I really agree that the change has to come from home and business down to the schools but boy does Linux have some problems to overcome there too. Trying to help Linux acceptance, I have tried to move to Linux in my small business. Trying to buy Linux configured desktops however is still painful and seems to be slightly more expensive. We still have proprietary Windows based software. We may be able to move to a Windows remote desktop for the apps we can't bypass and move to Linux on the desktop. I keep on saying that the next batch of desktops I get will be Linux but it still has not happened. If XP becomes unavailable, that choice will be easier though :)

I do not know how randy Archimedes himself was, but:
ancient Greek sexuality is disturbing.

I really wonder if the book in the last link can really be legal.

...at least for the growing number of UK 'universities' offering Homeopathy etc. BSc courses. Not an easy sell to students equipped with a basic knowledge of chemistry.

http://dcscience.net/?p=454
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403123&c=1
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=404104&c=2
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/dcpubs.html#fun1 [DC's Nature article, "Science degrees without the science" available here]

Make sure you don't send your kids (or yourselves) to any of these disreputable UK establishments:

http://www.thinkhumanism.com/files/UCAS%20Courses%20on%20quackery.xls [List of UK universities offering fraudulent 'science' degree courses]

...at least for the growing number of UK 'universities' offering Homeopathy etc. BSc courses. Not an easy sell to students equipped with a basic knowledge of chemistry.

http://dcscience.net/?p=454
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403123&c=1
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=404104&c=2
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/dcpubs.html#fun1 [DC's Nature article, "Science degrees without the science" available here]

Make sure you don't send your kids (or yourselves) to any of these disreputable UK establishments:

http://www.thinkhumanism.com/files/UCAS%20Courses%20on%20quackery.xls [List of UK universities offering fraudulent 'science' degree courses]

This kind of policing isn't only done by "controlling third world governments".