Latest Webometrics Rankings

Webometrics have just released their latest rankings. These are based on the web-related activities of universities as measured by:

• the number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead
• the total number of unique external links received (inlinks)
• rich files in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt).
• data were extracted using Google results from the Scholar database representing papers, reports and other academic items

The Webometrics ranking might be considered a crude instrument but nonetheless it does measure something that, while not synonymous with quality, is still a necessary precondition.

Here are the top three in each region:

USA and Canada
1. MIT
2. Harvard
3. Stanford

Latin America
1.  Sao Paulo
2.  National Autonmous University of Mexico
3.  Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Europe
1.  Cambridge
2.  Oxford
3.  Southampton

Central and Eastern Europe
1.  Charles University in Prague
2.  Masaryk University in Brno
3.  Ljubljana, Slovenia

Asia
1.  National Taiwan University
2.  Tokyo
3.  Kyoto

South East Asia
1.  National University of Singapore
2.  Kasetsart, Thailand
3.  Chulalongkorn, Thailand

South Asia
1.  IIT Bombay
2.  IIS Bangalore
3.  IIT Kanpur

Arab World
1.  King Saud University
2.  King Fahd University of Petroleum and minerals
3.  Kng Abdul Aziz University

Oceania
1.  Australian National University
2.   Melbourne
3.  Queensland

Africa
1.  Cape Town
2.  Pretoria
3.  Stellenbosch

Rankings as Imperialism

A conference was held in Malaysia recently, ostensibly to "challenge Western stereotypes of knowledge."

There was a comment on international university rankings by James Campbell of Universiti Sains Malaysia.

"Others warn of the threats of new colonialism practices such as rankings exercises.

“This is another form of imperialism as universities have to conform with publishing in ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) journals in order to be ranked among the best in the world,” says Campbell."

There are many things wrong with rankings but this is not a valid criticism. The Shanghai rankings have shown the steady advance of Chinese and Korean and to a lesser extent Latin American and Southwest Asian universities. The QS rankings (formerly THE -QS) were notoriously biased towards Southeast  Asia with a heavy weighting being given to a survey originally based largely on the mailing lists of a Singapore based publishing company (that may no longer be the case) .

As for the the current THE - Thomson Reuters rankings, they have declared an Egyptian university to be the fourth best in the world for research impact.

The inadequacies of current rankings have been discussed here and elsewhere. But whether it is helpful to anyone to reject them altogether is very debatable.

Most of the conference was devoted not to rankings per se. but to supposed critiques of western science. Readers may judge these for themselves.

Pseudo-science in the academy

A comment by Ameen Amjad Khan in University World News draws attention to the continuing problem of pseudo-science in universities. He lists creationism. anti-evolutionism, magnetic healing, perpetual motion, quantum mysticisms, New Age physics, parapsychology, repressed memory, homeopathy and fake self-help schemes.

To which we could add some products of pseudo-social science such as multiple intelligences, emotional and spiritual quotient, Outcomes Based Education and just about anything related to management studies.

Off topic a bit
The Independent has an article by Alex Duval Smith, "the man who proved that everyone is good at maths"

It describes a French academician, Marc Chemillier, who has written a book , "Les Mathematiques Naturelles" that claims that maths is simple and rooted in human sensory intuition. He has travelled to Madagascar because "he believes that Madagascar's population, which remains relatively untouched by outside influences, can help him to prove this".

Smith quotes Chemillier as saying: "There is a strong link between counting and the number of fingers on our hands. Maths becomes complicated only when you abandon basic measures in nature, like the foot or the inch, or even the acre, which is the area that two bulls can plough in a day."

Ploughing a field with bulls is natural? Isn't that a little ethnocentric and chronocentric?

Smith goes on:

"To make his point, Mr Chemillier chose to charge up his laptop computer, leave Paris and do the rounds of fortune tellers on the Indian Ocean island [Madagascar] because its uninfluenced natural biodiversity also extends to its human population. Divinatory geomancy – reading random patterns, or sikidy to use the local word – is what Raoke does, when not smoking cigarettes rolled with paper from a school exercise book."

The idea that the population of Madagascar is untouched, even relatively,  by outside influences is rather odd. The ancestors of the Malagasy travelled across the Indian Ocean from Borneo, a voyage more arduous than those of Columbus. Since then, the island has received immigrants and ideas from and traded with East Africa, Arabia, Persia, India and Europe. Sikidy itself is a local adoption of the medieval Muslim art of divination, adapted to local conditions.

It is difficult to see how Raoke's abilty to recall complex patterns created by removing seeds in ones or twos from piles proves that everybody is good at maths. He has probably been divining for half a century and it is a safe bet that he has put in the ten thousand hours that Malcolm Gladwell thinks is necessary to turn anyone into a genius.

I suspect, however, that we are going to hear  more about the diviners of Madagascar as universities and schools throughout the world are relentlessly dumbed down. No need to study the needless complexities of calculus: a pile of seeds and illiterate intuition is all you need.