Slashdot Mirror
MIT Leads in Revolutionary Science, Harvard Declines
Bruce G Charlton writes "In three studies looking at the best institutions for 'revolutionary' science, MIT emerged as best in the world.
This contrasts with 'normal science' which incrementally-extends science in pre established directions." If you're interested in reading more about how this was determined, read more below.
"My approach has been to look at trends in the award of science Nobel prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine/ Physiology and Economics — the Nobel metric) — then to expand this Nobel metric by including some similar awards. The NFLT metric adds-in Fields medal (mathematics), Lasker award for clinical medicine and the Turing award for computing science. The NLG metric is specifically aimed at measuring revolutionary biomedical science and uses the Nobel medicine, the Lasker clinical medicine and the Gairdner International award for biomedicine. MIT currently tops the tables for all three metrics: the Nobel prizes, the NFLT and the NLG. There seems little doubt it has been the premier institution of revolutionary science in the world over recent years. Also very highly ranked are Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton and — in biomedicine — University of Washington at Seattle and UCSF. The big surprise is that Harvard has declined from being the top Nobel prizewinners from 1947-1986, to sixth place for Nobels; seventh for NFLT, and Harvard doesn't even reach the threshold of three awards for the biomedical NLG metric! This is despite Harvard massively dominating most of the 'normal science' research metrics (eg. number of publications and number of citations per year) — and probably implies that Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end."
"My approach has been to look at trends in the award of science Nobel prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine/ Physiology and Economics — the Nobel metric) — then to expand this Nobel metric by including some similar awards. The NFLT metric adds-in Fields medal (mathematics), Lasker award for clinical medicine and the Turing award for computing science. The NLG metric is specifically aimed at measuring revolutionary biomedical science and uses the Nobel medicine, the Lasker clinical medicine and the Gairdner International award for biomedicine. MIT currently tops the tables for all three metrics: the Nobel prizes, the NFLT and the NLG. There seems little doubt it has been the premier institution of revolutionary science in the world over recent years. Also very highly ranked are Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton and — in biomedicine — University of Washington at Seattle and UCSF. The big surprise is that Harvard has declined from being the top Nobel prizewinners from 1947-1986, to sixth place for Nobels; seventh for NFLT, and Harvard doesn't even reach the threshold of three awards for the biomedical NLG metric! This is despite Harvard massively dominating most of the 'normal science' research metrics (eg. number of publications and number of citations per year) — and probably implies that Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end."
From TFS:
I attended Harvard for Ph.D. work, and can say that there has been a feminization of science; which is characterized, above all, by a gatherer-mentality (quantity over quality).
My peers at MIT, I remember, were doing risky and testosterone-laden work; they are the hunters.
The Euro is getting stronger, but birthrates in Europe are declining. I wonder if Europe can be the first empire (Yeah, I am using that term very broadly) to continue to advance with a negative birthrate. I think that you will see the nationalization of Central and South America will reduce their long term scientific advances. I don't think the US is in as dire straights as people like to make out. MIT is very relevant, they still get many more applicants than they can take, and they are far from alone. The US higher education is still the best in the world, and the pendulum will swing back the other way with regards to the moral and scientific relativism.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
I remember an article in the NY Times about Tim Berners Lee:
...
Time Berner's Lee, a physicist at MIT who invented the world-wide-web
This is not a signature.
...go to MIT.
On the other hand, if you want to design a cannon that will destroy the moon, go to Caltech.
MIT is relevant as long as it produces results. Just because MIT has more peers now, and other countries have a somewhat more open attitude towards scientific research does not invalidate the work they do. As far as Harvard vs MIT, Harvard's medical, law, and business schools are still highly prestigious. I don't know of anybody who went to MIT to study those fields, although I'm sure they offer them (at least undergrad level equivalents). How much research money spend MIT get annually? How much does Harvard spend annually, and how much of that is in the same schools as MIT?
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I might also consider per capita - Caltech competes very favorably despite having a much smaller pool than many of these other institutions. They've had 3 Chemistry Nobel prizes since 1990 - pretty damned good for a department of about 30 full-time faculty.
This "study" is at best a crude approximation, and even then it isn't complete in terms of data. They left off my school, for example. I'm sure some others probably got stiffed too. Of course, I don't think you can fit a reliable trend to three data points anyway -- especially for something highly time delayed such as Nobel prizes.
Carnegie Mellon University
1947-1966: 0
1967-1986: 3
1987-2006: 7
A blog? And I thought it was going to be a credible article.
Is it really fair to compare, say, MIT and Caltech, given that the former has 1,554* faculty members and the latter has 300*? I'll grant that if you're trying to compare the amount of revolutionary work going on at a given school, the fact that one school is larger is a legitimate reason for them to do a larger amount of work. However, comparing the fraction of the school doing revolutionary work seems to be more useful when, for example, considering where to go for undergrad, grad, or postdoc, since it's more likely you'll get to work with one of those individuals conducting revolutionary work.
* Data from USNews Best Colleges 2007 listings for number of instructional faculty at both schools.
...neither am I an expert, I have spoken with people who have both visited and attended MIT and when I speak with them about what goes on there, I always hear tales of really cutting edge stuff. Most of it is medical and scientific in nature, but nonetheless, the place is always spoken of highly by the people I hear speak of it.
Of course, I also hear about amazing things that are being done that are just as cutting edge and just as important in places such as The Cleveland Clinic.
I guess what it comes down to is the fact that, while you may hear about someone at a renowned hospitol getting the first artificial heart, or using his brain to control a computer, MIT will one up them with something a lot less obvious, like taking away the need for a heart, or *replacing* the brain with a computer.
At the heart of it, science and medicine are the two areas that I think are ultimately the most important to progress in, but the point is that it doesn't matter where or how it gets done, just as long as progress is made. I find it nice (being an American) that scientific revolution is a home grown product for me, but then again, revolution is, of course, in our roots.
It's to be expected, eh?
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
A few years ago, a buddy of mine, at Cal Tech, had come up with a revolutionary approach to a mathmatical issue. I won't go into it, because I didn't know enough, even then, to know why it was revolutionary.
He published, was hailed as a revolutionary thinker, and as it was said, if his discovery proved out, would blow the doors off of some sort of area of math.
Anyway, 6 months later, his revolutionary approach was reclassified as wrong. He couldn't continue. He said something about CT not being open enough.
I think if a school is hailed as more revolutionary, it basically means that they are tolerant of being wrong on occassion, thus opening the door to more truly revolutionary discoveries.
Oh, he's applying his skills at Intel. Layouts, routings, and stuff if I understood him.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
> As far as Harvard vs MIT, Harvard's medical, law, and business schools are still highly prestigious. I don't know of anybody who went to MIT to study those fields, although I'm sure they offer them (at least undergrad level equivalents).
MIT's Sloan is the 4th ranked business school in the nation...
MIT has a top-five business school (Sloan) but no med or law school. It's a poor choice for pre-law due to the lack of humanities classes and majors, and an excessively difficult pre-med route. (You don't need that much math and physics for the MCAT.)
Incidentally, the GP's notion that MIT faces a threat from Hugo Chavez and company seems a bit -- stretched.
There is a time lag between the time a scientist publishes ground breaking work and when the Nobel Prize is awarded. The institute where the scientist worked when the prize was awarded gets to claim bragging rights. While MIT is indeed an awesome place, their results are probably somewhat overstated because of scientists who won the prize for work they did elsewhere.
Even if MIT's results are somewhat overstated, they do speak to commitment to ground breaking basic research. In an era when most other institutions are worried about monetizing their intellectual property, that makes them unique.
It's a social science. Similar to how Psychology is categorized.
The Sloan School at MIT is ranked as one of the best business schools in the country: http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/national_rankings. php
and offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees.
Mind you, as an engineering alum, I don't give it much credit.
chiefthe
This was a quote of Kurt Vonnegut that didn't fit.
In three studies looking at the best institutions for 'revolutionary' science
But revolution is a theory, not a fact!
Er, wait...
i'm a tad skeptical about the accuracy of this article, given that it makes multiple references to some unknown 'Chicago University.'
http://www.caretoicedance.com
Uh-oh, looks like you hurt somebody's feelings.
Go to Malaspina....
The combination of a steep hill, seemingly random classroom scheduling, and a temperate climate leads to lots of young women with great legs wearing short skirts.
Well it has helluva lot of math :) I know its not a scientific criteria , but for a commoner it is all the same
The SAT is a proxy IQ test. It's good enough that most high IQ societies will accept sufficient SAT scores in lieu of an IQ test. The only place IQ has been discredited is in the popular mind. The military and education system are still firm practitioners, simply because the concept works.
The SAT is taken in high school, way before any of these colleges can "work their magic".
Caltech has the pick of the high IQ (but smaller numbers of students), MIT follows, and then come the other Ivy League schools not far behind. See the attached link.
If you notice that IQ is roughly normally distributed (especially in a genetically similar population), look at the population of high IQ college age kids in the USA, and then compare to the populations of the elite US schools, you will see that they are very similar. It did not happen that way by accident.
Hell, put the student population of Caltech in your local community college and you'd find all sorts of revolutionary science suddenly springing from there too.
The US government prevents the corporate world nabbing the A-list by banning IQ tests in job interviews. Thus corporations use the proxy of school (or in the case of companies like M$, they ask questions that serve as a proxy IQ test). In the popular mind, the cause and effect gets confused between the brand (MIT/Harvard/Yale etc.) and the student body (high IQ/SAT scoring individuals). Universities don't exactly have a huge financial incentive to dissuade people either.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V111/N41/usnews.41n.html
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
From my own personal and subjective experience, MIT has the best designed site from a usability perspective out of all the American university sites I have ever visited. I think it is seconded only by Berkeley.
If this guy really wans to study something like this, he needs to sit down and read some friggin' articles and come up with a metric to say whether an article is revolutionary. For example, Field's medals only honor Mathematicians younger than 40, and are only awards to one person ever some odd years, so that if two "revolutionary" papers are written in the same period, one gets nothing. In general the sample size of this "study", namely thee dozen prestigious awards of the past decade or two, is laughably small, and the only real result of his work is the suggestion that their should be more awards like the Nobels. To say that any one university tops any other from the information presented is foolish at best.
MIT does not have a medical school -- just a "division of health sciences and technology", where some cross-training with Harvard occurs. MIT does not have various departments related to medicine, such as pharmacology, epidemiology, biostatistics, or public health. It does not have a statistics department, or an independent astronomy department. Nor does it have independent departments for various branches of biology such as microbiology, genetics, or immunology; everything is just lumped together in a "biology department", reflecting its history of mediocre accomplishments in biology. Until recently, MIT was almost entirely focused on physics and engineering; in the past decade, they realized the declining importance of these fields relative to biology, so they are playing catch-up now. However, biology is highly specialized and plenty of other schools have spent decades building up particular departments.
I'm currently a (male) course 8 grad student at MIT, working in the Media Lab. My group is very much a counterexample to this theory. We're roughly 50% women, and we're doing bleeding edge stuff that will either fall on its face or change the world. One interesting thing to note is that the women in the group aren't testosterone-laden, cut-throat man-wannabe's, either. They're intelligent women with the courage to try something that might fail. I watched a lot of men walk away from this incredible opportunity out of fear for their future.
Now, all this (Harvard and MIT women in general) is not where the issue starts. It may well be that female grad students tend to shy away from the scariest projects, but that possible tendency could be purely due to social norms. I can't be sure and neither can anybody else, because no woman or man has ever grown up without social norms.
What I do know is that in any research lab I've been in, the women there have pulled their weight and done good work. Also--and I think this is a point that often gets overlooked--I find the atmosphere and social interactions to be much better than a sausage fest. Obviously, a more cohesive working environment makes for better work output.
A couple other things about MIT and Harvard: MIT doesn't have a med school, but it does have two brain institutes, a genomics institute, a health science and technology program, various types of bioengineering... It does a lot of medical things in partnership with Harvard's med school. Med students' research isn't usually going to change the world. It's the MD-PhDs that want to do research foremost that will do that, and they very often get the PhD end of that from MIT.
Harvard *definitely* does science of all kinds. They are all things to all people. Well, the people who can't get into MIT anyway.
Definition of IQ: Something an IQ test measures!
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
This is far from the truth. They are literally just down the street from one another. There is a lot of cross-registration between schools, since they are very coupled academically. And lots of the faculty are neighbors and buddies.
Faculty have no reason to "compete harder" with one another any more than faculty compete with one another within a single institution. In fact, one sees less faculty competition between the institutions, as there simply isn't any inter-institutional fighting over individual faculty positions.
Harvard and MIT once agreed to combine into a single institution, but retracted once the state legislature concluded that they'd rather see them as two institutions.
US higher education has some fantastic examples of greatness (MIT, Harvard, etc), but for every one of these there are hundreds of diploma mills, jock colleges, and party schools that basically teach networking skills and how to drink beer.
But, the much larger problem in the US is now that the public K-12 system is hopelessly mired in bureaucracy and political thinking (come on... a cabinet level post for education?), so the feedstock for the higher education system is drying up. Schools are able to attract smart, rich, foreign kids for a generation or so, but only until they begin teaching at home. It only takes a one shift in thinking (such as changing the imagration system) to keep the smart foreign kids home, and that's it. Professors will go into industry instead of teaching when there's no challenge, or kids who are capable of great things (because they lack the base knowledge). I think I will see the day when US kids go to the far east to get an education.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
What was slightly interesting was how they appeared to be well adjusted and sociable people, but their underlying personalities had very peculiar problems. Ie. - they were all slightly neurotic underneath, and being a high achiever was really a kind of psychological compensation. If they had to peck their way to the top through whining and argument, they would just as well do that rather than produce any new volume of impressive material worth grading.
I suggest you read Slashdot
It's the old Yin/Yang thing. Once you break the stereotypes, you realise that much of what is "male" or "female" is learnt. Using terms such as Yin and Yang, rather than feminine and masculine could reasonably be used to reference the qualities without referring to sex.
It is of course an irony that promoting "Yin" over "Yang" has become part of the agenda of many who wish to strengthen the role of women, and this appears to have come at the expense of science, and other beneficial risk-taking throughout society. What happened to the promotion of strong, creative women?
I suspect that the real force at work here isn't feminism, but Marxism. The many are promoted above the few, and disruptive thinkers are discouraged. The blending with Womens' rights, according to this theory, would be an accident of history. Those promoting the underdog form a synthesis of the underdogs' interests, so as to present a single alternative to the evils of "capitalism".
Wikileaks, no DNS
Err, there's a a whole school of humanities (alongside science, engineering and architecture; the departments are aggregated into schools). All MIT students take a bunch of humanities; it's just that MIT humanities majors also take Mechanics, E&M, diffeq, etc. After all, even unemployed English majors need might need to machine a replacement part for their car, you know!
Remember MIT's announcement early in 2006 about working on supercapacitors based on carbon nanotubes? That new technology could go a LONG way in making power generation by wind turbines and solar panels much more viable, and could make it possible for a truly practical electric car with long range and reasonable carrying capacity.
Wait till one IITian win a Nobel. Then he/she will reveal the inner special secret hand shake to his classmates, and they will tell their juniors, and then the knowledge will spread and IITians will be winning the Nobels like gangbusters :-)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Ironic what you say about MIT and biology, considering that MIT has one of the top 3 genome sequencing centers in the country, the Broad Institute.
Ungh
Larry Summers proposed a new curriculum for Harvard undergraduates with at least one mandatory science course. They dont have to take even on e science or math course now. But I think that is on hold after his firing(*) (technically he was pushed aside to some high level professorship). Both Larry and I attended MIT (he was in my 8.012 section) where there are six(**) required math and science courses to graduate, even if you are a literature major. It is felt you cannot understand the modern world unless you know a bit of science.
(*) He wasn't fired for this reform, but for riling up the faculty in other ways. Shot off tongue too fast without always being "politically correct".
(**) A new plan raises this to seven, but with more flexibility than now. Some version of computer science becomes a required course.
Definition of pH: the difference in voltage between a reference solution and a solution with Na+ concentration changing depending on what solution the probe is in
Frosty piss posts are worthless, GNAA posts are worthless and hurtful, but they are the least of this site's neuroses.
Caltech has had roughly 25,000 alumni. Caltech alumni have received roughly 25 Nobel prizes. It that 0.1% Nobel Prizes per Alumnus the best in the world, or not? Do I still have that chance?
These numbers are fairly objective. The subjective aspect is in the definition of revolutionary. Really, isn't that determined by History? If a diswcovery turns out to influence an actual revolution, even much later, than in retrospect it was revolutionary.
For a Caltech example, Richard Feynman's being the great-grandfather of Nanotechnology, for his 1959 article "There's Plenty of Room ant the Bottom." Considered amusing in its day to a few people, it is now the object of study by historians who are trying to tell if Nanotechnology pioneers acknowledge Feynman as inspiration or not (roughly half do). Furthermore, Feynman was the greatgrandfather of Quantum Computing. So Feynman's Nobel Prize was in Quantum Electrodynamics. But can't the case be made that Nanotechnology and Quantum Computing were more revolutionary?
Einstein got his Nobel Prize for Photoelectric Effect. Yet Relatiivity was clearly revolutionary. In fact, the revolutionary nature of relativity inhbited the Nobel Prize folks for giving him another award, fo fear it might turn out to be false.
-- Prof. Jonathan Vos Post
Who would expect anything less from Dr. Waterhouse's Massachussetts Bay Colony Institute for the Technologickal Arts?
Except that the SATs can easily be gamed. My Math score went from 560 to 690 (from 65th percentile to 93rd) just by learning strategies and doing prep work!
Now, I'm not saying nobody can game a good IQ test, but it's certainly harder since there isn't a million-dollar industry dedicated to teaching you how to game IQ tests.
Or, to put things much more obviously, any test used to qualify people for anything will eventually be gamed.
Then you have kids and you realize that most of it was inate after all.
Luckily this doesn't matter. The point of abstraction is that one can look to desirable qualities for (eg.) science without approaching with the same prejudice when faced with a specific man or woman. Those who have skills in the realm of the "wrong sex" are no longer treated as being "unnatural", but rather simply as having more of the relevant qualities than is usual for their sex.Without the abstraction, the unusually skilled will have to deal with eg. "unfemininity", implying that a woman is less of a woman. To be more "Yang" takes the focus away from sex and onto the task in hand. It's far better to do this than to try making science more "Yin", IMO!
Wikileaks, no DNS
I thought this was kind of surprising, especially considering how often people tend to lament the state of US science:
In the past 20 years, the USA has sixteen institutions which have won three or more prizes, but elsewhere in the world (Table 3) only the College de France has achieved three Nobel prizes. Since 1986 the previously Nobel-successful UK research institutions (University of Cambridge, the MRC Molecular Biology Unit at Cambridge, University of Oxford and Imperial College, London) have declined from seventeen prizes 67-86 to only three.
Prize awards are only as good as their award criteria. Nobel prizes aren't awarded according to an objective criterion so using them in a metric like this is hazardous to say the least. Worse, the Nobel prize committee is subject to no feedback controls. If they start engaging in some sort of nepotism, there is nothing to stop them. Its not like there is a marketplace of comprehensive prize awards on the scale of the Nobel. Far better for lots of individuals to specify their own, objective, criteria for prize awards and back them with their own money, however small that amount might be.
Seastead this.
The man is clearly prone to gender essentialism, and is probably something like a "Men's Movement" member. He talks about the supposed bitterness of women raised by "castrai" - a code word for (presumably weak, pathetic) men who have failed to defend their machismo. I think he speaks very earnestly when discussing feminization, though neither humorlessly nor unintelligently.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
You are incorrect with the assumption that MIT does not have other strong departments such as business. MIT's business school for example is ranked 4th out of all schools for graduate study. For undergraduate study they are ranked 2nd to Wharton. Studying business is a viable option and it is one of the more popular majors here at MIT.
"but birthrates in Europe are declining." Not for Muslims they aren't. The European countries are homosexualised and the compensating Muslim males are just waiting to flush the toilet on them. Think the French are in in control France?
It's very hard to use awards as a judge of the scientific worth of an institution. For example, my school (UCI) has three Nobels in the last 15 years or so, but none of them for research done at UCI.
If you're a good enough scientist to get a Nobel (or Fields, and so on...), then chances are at some point some big, well known, well paying school is going to recruit you. It doesn't take a Nobel prize for other scientists to recognize a great researcher, but recruiting someone who has already done their life's great work doesn't make you a great scientific institution.
No matter how much loyalty you may have to a particular place, there are perks at big private schools that state schools like Berkely and Michigan just can't offer. Some well known scientists stick around in smaller incubation schools, but many find that being a big fish in a little pond is just more work and doesn't pay as well.
If you're going to use awards to determine scientific worth, you need to look at where the research which won the prize was done. Of course, this would put my school off the list with a grand total of 0 Nobels. I'm sure other small universities would start moving up the list.
There will always be outliers. Looks like you are one.
n ews_info/cbsenior/yr2006/national-report.pdf
The average increase in scores after retesting is a combined 30 points. That's not a lot.
And for all this supposed gaming of the SAT, the averages haven't gone up over time, and the distributions still seem rather normal at the far right of the curve. You'd expect a big bulge there if it was as easily gameable as you contend.
(The SAT was also re-centered twice, in 1995 and 2005.)
http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
By using terms that are one removed from gender, it becomes easier to achieve both ends. The term describes a trait (much as Aspergers does), and despite a strong tendency to asymetrical expression between the sexes, is not exclusive to the respective sex, so that describing science as a "Yang activity" (say), you are neither excluding women, nor are you opening it up to be "Yinified". This separation allows the best of both worlds, IMO.
Wikileaks, no DNS
But, the much larger problem in the US is now that the public K-12 system is hopelessly mired ... I think I will see the day when US kids go to the far east to get an education.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, is it? I suppose it is harsh to pick on one specific posting when the tendency is present in many. There is a natural impulse to suppose that things were better when one was younger and because this new generation just doesn't measure up that we must certainly be headed for disaster. I'm fairly certain there is a quote to this effect that is attributed to an ancient Greek philosopher. There have been ups and downs so some predictions of looming disaster were accurate (pessimistic Germans in the 1930's for example). But I think it is remarkable that so many are certain of worse times even as American universities go from strength to strength.
Part of the confusion is the idea that scentific advance is not an elite activity. More specifically that general scientific literacy as reflected by universally administered standardized tests is of much more than anecdotal interest. People as a whole don't cause scientific advances and they never did. In any case if anything there are more places today where cutting edge work is pursued than there were in the past.
At the risk of sounding Panglossian I think it would be a good thing if places like China (OK, I guess I really mean just China) were to develop some world class research universities. Having a greater variety of settings is bound to be healthier. So if the local peasantry grab their pitchforks and torches (e.g. the Cambridge City Council or some Berkeley activist group) and try to impose their inspired vision, there could still be an alternative with the needed infrastructure (colleagues, llibraries, students, technicians, technology companies, etc).
SATs, IQ scores, whatever euphemism you want to use for elitism, the key factor is usually socioeconomic resources one's born with. Of course, ALL those tests can improved by hard work. Unfortunately, many people think its genetic and don't try, and that's exactly how Harvard School for Gifted Bloodlines wants you to think. Numbers never lie, except when they do.
The thing in bold claims something with which the two quotations disagree. Don't ask me why.
There will always be outliers. Looks like you are one.
Yeah, I'm an outlier on nearly everything. Funny thing is, these are my sets of scores - Writing: 760, Critical Reading: 670, Math: 560; Writing: 690, Critical Reading: 780, Math: 690. More than a standard deviation's difference in every single subscore.
As to game-ability, there really is no way to "game" the test apart from knowing how to solve the problems given. But the problem-solving methods (such as adding "x = 2y" and "2x = y" to get "3x = 3y -> x = y") are non-obvious and aren't taught in schools (really, my example's not taught in school anymore). So you get a gap between people with the natural fluid reasoning to figure that kind of thing out "at run-time" and those without it. From thence comes the ability to game the test - learn the strategies ahead of time and you don't need high intelligence to score as well.
Call me an outlier, call it anecdotal evidence, but my math tutor has taught dozens of kids this stuff, and all of their scores go up by more than one sigma afterwards.
An open-ended question to the slashdot/scientific/tech communities:
Why the lovefest for MIT and the Ivy Leagues?
Sure, a lot of legitimately good science has come out of Harvard and MIT. However, there's a whole slew of great science being produced at any of the other instutions in the world that gets overlooked completely, while the world goes gaga over every poorly-conceived grad project that gets conducted at the MIT Media Lab.
There's some very awesome research going on at all sorts of public institutions around the country with results that are immediately released to the public domain.
Heck... we're working on several promising leads to finding a reliable cure to Cancer, and all I hear about on the news is the horribly impractical OLPC project (their hearts are in the right place, but the project itself isn't likely to get off the ground and make a noticable impact in people's lives).
MIT and Harvard have money. Lots of money. It's no secret that the Ivy League caters to students in the upper-income brackets (and admits a few low-income students each year to look good, completely cutting out the middle classes). Exeter and Andover (two insanely expensive private High Schools in New England) combined send over 50 kids each year to Harvard. MIT's not quite as bad, but it certainly employs similar tactics by hiring high-profile faculty members. What possible reason could they have for employing RMS? The amount of useful work he's completed has dropped off exponentially as time's gone on, and he's all but abandoned GNU for some suicidal quest of self-promition.
It pains me to see Harvard graduates being rushed into high-paying jobs, whereas students from my alma-mater have a tough time even getting interviews. Perpetuating the media hype around these institutions is only going to hurt the rest of us in the long-run.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
We're an ageing population in Europe, people aren't having kids. We need more immigration. Who's going to look after you when you're 85 and need nursing help?
There are multiple issues here as we both know.
_ population_density - behind Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, India (that was a surprise to me).. busy but not impossible.
c ommentaries/housing.asp
9 &Pos=&ColRank=1&Rank=342
>Britain for example has a population density that's almost unlivable
48th in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
I'd suggest *population distribution* is more of an issue -too many in south east of England, quite sparse in other areas. English average population density for example is 3.77 people per hectare (Office of National Statistics 2005).
Household density might also be an issue: in England and Wales the average number of people per household in 2.31 http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/
Maybe if more people shared we'd have more space. My understanding (no reference, sorry) is that the UK has been moving from multiple occupancy to single occupancy. Plus the average house size (and land round it is increasing).
>Most people can't even afford a house to live in
I agree with you on that one, I am in that situation myself. I'd suggest that's got as much to do with the economic model of the country as anything else. People paying 100,000+ for single room "studios" in the South East doesn't help.
>The roads are congested
Number of cars is not tied to a direct correlation with population. You have to factor in expectation of people for cars they own. New towns in the 60s were built with the expectation that family houses would have one, possibly two cars. These days a family of two parents and three over 18 yr old kids might expect space for 5 cars. Get out of your car, use public transport, pressurise the government to improve it. Length of one Routemaster bus (traditional London red bus) 8.38m, seats 64 people. I've stood waiting for buses in Islington (London) held up by car traffic and most of the cars have one person each in them. Length of a Ford Fiesta: 3.99metres. So 64 Ford Fiestas takes up 256m of road against the same people in a Routemaster - less than 9 metres. Do the maths, why are roads congested? Get people to use mass transit systems.
>there's hardly any countryside left, there's nowhere to build anything or do anything.
Very scientific. Care to be a little more precise?
I agree population is gradually rising, I understand your concerns but I think we've got to take a broader view of what is going on. I completely agree that house prices are unequal, I am thinking of moving to the north of the UK for that reason so I can buy somewhere to live. But I don't think it's as simple as being draconic on immigration. I'm arguing that if the birth rate from UK citizens is declining, maybe we need to encourage young people from elsewhere to move into the UK. I think you're suggesting we let population decline. I'd say that's fine in theory but in 50 years time there's going to be a lot of old people who can't get cared for, a really social problem.
The population of Europe is definitely ageing, we have a problem with supporting pensions and health services in less than 50 years time, more people will be trying to claim than paying in: "The proportion of population at working ages is set to fall as the baby boomers move into retirement and are replaced by the smaller numbers of people born in each year since the 1960s." http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=94
I welcome your proposed solutions. You've heard some of mine.
Europe has let in enough muslims now to be returned to the 11th century. Along with their socialist ideology which pushes them towards the 17th century. If I could believe that capitalists could think and act on the 30+year time frame, I'd join the conspiracy theorists in believing that socialism and communism were devices created by capitalism to sabotage potential foreign competition. Central and south america is well on its way to the deep freeze of total stagnation.
The US is dire straights because we are universally hated for our success. We are also vulnerable to the massive influx of whomever, which includes revolutionaries as well as gangs and terrorists. We are vulnerable to the politicians who think we should be merged with other countries - so we can all become equally poor - giving more meaning to being a rich politico and saving the planet by reduced consumption and perhaps reduced population.
MIT and CalTech are perhaps the best overall in the world and perhaps have the most top flight people there. However, when one goes for a phd, it's a specialization rather than a generalization so for their education, all that really matters is the specific subtopic in their discipline, not what someone is doing there in other fields. As such, one would not gain anything to study astrophysics at MIT by the departments that do dna medicine or oceanography.
Top notch people in particular areas are spread around quite a bit, not just at first or second tier establishments. To study room temperature superconductivity, one might find that the university of houston (alias cougar high) has the foremost reasearch effort in the world. (Or at least did at one time).
The advent of the internet has probably done even more to reduce concentrations of brain power and spread them out across the plains. One can have collaborative meetings with A/V across the world now. The notion of a class room as a single physical place is mostly just a holdover from the pre-net era, held on to by the higher education establishment. The ability of researchers to collaborate across the world is unprecedented.
And, amusing enough as it is, academia cannot control their costs and are continuing to pass it along to their customers. Bureaucracy has made advancements in bloat that are truly incredible - although it should not be considered an advancement.
His lexical choices are highly evocative of "Men's Movement" type speech, and my experience is that members of the misogynist wing* thereof - if they're halfway intelligent, and the guy seems so to me - learn to use ambiguity so that they can later redeploy it as a defense. "That's not what I was saying at all!" they self-exculpate when subject to criticism, in a technique learned from the Postmodernists. Sadly, they can have their tongue in cheek even while they're promulgating ideas that they in some sense believe.
But that said, my intuitions are heavily informed by the bitter lessons of my purely anecdotal experiences. Basic decency obliges that one give the benefit of the doubt and so perhaps should have done so in this case.
*I'm not certain if this is a wing or the body, but I shouldn't paint the whole movement with that one brush, having an insufficiently deep acquaintance.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Your restatement is more clearly that against which I'd wanted to argue. Not because it's a worse argument, but rather because it's a good argument that I think gets abused unless it's treated carefully.
Humans invariably characterize categories using metrics less complicated and varied than the real phenomenology of that being categorized - something of a truism, since otherwise categories fill no conceptual role except enumeration. Humans also have strong inborn desires to gender identify* - perhaps one of the most complex psychological behaviors that has in itself so little social component in its inception that we could fairly call it biological programming. The confluence of the two seems likely to generate socially constructed gender categories harder and less amenable to conquest through self-study than our other prejudices (such as tribalism). To sketch the argument, if a person is born into a world in which genders are given certain categorical features, their gender identification process would be somewhat linked to obtaining or conforming to those implicit norms. This isn't parents approving or disapproving certain toys or activities - it's looking for signals of genderedness to emulate and internalize.
Say women are, statistically speaking, 1% more intersubjectively "passive"** than males in a theoretical population containing no explicit or implicit gender norms with a standard deviation of 10%. This variation is so small that almost no one would notice unless they conducted a sufficiently large study. If the same population over time begins to establish communal gender norms regarding passivity, then the stochastic masking would begin to fall away as slightly more people labeled passivity as a female trait than male. Successive generations, using prior choices (norms) amongst their contacts as their template, would continue to amplify the 1% bias until all members of society associated passivity with females. This is not to say that all people would believe all females are passive, just that the subtext of any wider social interaction is going to identify women as (generally) more passive.
If the gender identification effect is at all strong, then it would swamp the inborn proclivity and be widespread enough to make for huge developmental differences even if the genetic differences are mostly ambiguous. We may at this point have no way of telling which gender differences are strongly biologically determined and which are cultural amplifications.
I do agree that in the end we will find some differences are more or less essential and large enough to have real and enduring relevance***. Others, I think, are noticeable only because we believe them significant. As we discard the belief (far easier said than done, of course), the statistical bias may drop below the noise floor for non-sociobiologists and no longer inform the self-identification process.
I have no idea if this would reduce the number of transsexuals by allowing more people to feel like they "fit" the gender for their sex well enough to self-identify with it.
*I use this to refer to one's self-identification, but I think it's arguable that the strong tendency to evaluate the gender of others springs from this.
**Activity/passivity measurements being similarly basic and critical, especially for social agents, sex-passivity mapping may be close to inevitable.
***These differences could still be fairly small compared to the standard deviation, but be large enough not to need amplification to be identifiable to youths. Thus "dispelling" the cultural norms becomes a futile exercise in political correctness.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.