@ Brian J Goggin,

Yep, you nailed it. I agree. That is the big dilemma.

Lucey, Whelan, just about all economists, journalists and politicians I have read/listened to in the past 12 months are under developed thinkers, and some of them quite possibly even dangerous. I don’t agree with half of what they prescribe.

What encouraged me to take some notice of what the ‘Irish economists’ were up to, what gave me some confidence, was they are imperfect individuals working in roughly the right domain at the moment. I don’t expect all of them to be trustworthy, brilliant or even right. But some medicine roughly aimed at the right ballpark - might have better luck than the perfect medicine aimed at completely the wrong ball park.

What I have seen in this country - throughout the Bertie Ahern years - has been some great ability and some genuine talent, from both this soil and others - thrown into the action, and mis-direct-ed and therefore wasted. That is tragic and that is pointless.

At least these economists have a shot at making some small difference. Even if they do ’something’ and it isn’t quite right, at least it is in the right ball park. There is some chance.

I could rise to the height of excellence in construction and project management, but it can never do much good, my hands are tied behind my back. I have learned that much.

And there may be different views about who “we” are and what “we” want.

bjg

http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2010/01/irish-architects-and-world-war-two.html

We should not ignore the interplay of WWII and the United States, as far as influences go in Irish academic development during the 20th century.

Its a treat to listen to.

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail454.html

I like very much the trouble you have gone to, to distinguish the humanities Nobel successes in Ireland, compared with research and science etc.

If you get an opportunity sometime, it is worth looking at that whole period in European history when the Bauhaus in the Weimar republic was broken up by the new national party in Germany. Many of the experts in the arts, applied arts, design and everything ‘modern’ ended up in the United States. People like Johannes Itten (colour, visual), Breuer, Gropius, van der Rohe, (architecture) and a whole raft of movements in high art took root on the other side of the Atlantic.

It was quite funny actually. For a finish up, many young designers and artists from Ireland ended up travelling over to the United States, in order to benefit from teaching and experience working with European masters who had moved over there.

Yeah, Europe lost out big time around then. That is before we even begin to talk about rocket scientists, mathematians. Karl Popper, Einstein, that whole group who hung around Vienna in the early 20th c.

But my point is this. I have read extensively about the various people in the US, involved at research level in much of science and technology developments in the 20th century. The distinct impression I do get, is they were very philosophical kinds of people. Even though they were hard nosed scientists and mathematicians often - they are referred to today, a lot in terms one might apply to artists or designers.

It is funny, when you get to the highest level in either science or humanities, the distinction begins to blur. What I mean is, the distinction becomes less useful as one reaches the pinnacles of achievement in either.

“The ranking perfectly mirrors the Chinese preoccupation with the technological prowess of their universities (rather than with any wishy washy humanities stuff! ).”

Fair observation.

I know that China produced zero architectural designers of its own until recently - they imported them. Even though China embarked on a monster building binge (that made Ireland’s look like a snack bar) China still had some problem, in being able to have a faculty for architecture.

Interestingly, from my study of the Manhattan skyscraper building booms, it appears as though the young nation of the United States had exactly the same kind of problem. The first school of architecture in the US was only established in 1860. But fifty years later, the only real architects they benefitted from had trained at the Beaux Arts at Paris, France.

The result is today, the construction industry still dominates vastly over the design professions in the US.

@ Brian Lucey,

Some of the county council offices built in the last decade in Ireland. Some noteable ones built by very talented and forward thinking ex. graduates of schools of architecture in the US.

Funny thing is though, had those professions remained in the US, they might not have had opportunities to obtain their own commissions until much later in life. Ask Frank Gehry or Peter Eisenmann, who reckon, one has to be an old man in the US before anyone will trust you with a construction budget.

All these rankings are in some ways helpful and in some ways silly. But I prefer the French approach of saying “we have a major problem, let’s fix it” than the TCD/UCD approach of glorying in the Times rankings which no-one can take particularly seriously.

Your ranking is correct. This is for all disciplines, of course. The ranking is different for economists.

Im probably wrong in this analysis, but if I read it right one should (allowing for the fact that the world and euro analyses seem to be over overlapping but different periods) be able to roughly compare the world and european 250 datasets on the basis of the CPP/FSCm metric. If one does that, and eliminates duplicates on the basis of their lower score, then we seem to find the following “ranking”

43 UNIV DUBLIN TRINITY COLL 1.59
158 UNIV COLL CORK, NATL UNIV IRELAND 1.23
267 UNIV COLL DUBLIN, NATL UNIV IRELAND 1.06

which I take with a pinch of salt, and some schadenfreud….:)

Spreadsheet available from me if anyone cares. Its probably wrong in detail but right-ish in trend.

Trinity is not big enough to be in the top 100, but big enough to be 4th in the top 250.

The quality of indicators indeed varies with purpose. Leiden focusses on research quality, while Shanghai focusses on prestige, and the Times on education quality.

I’m most interested in research, which is why I think Leiden is best.

The Leiden ranking is best in terms of data quality, pedigree, and methodology (e.g., Shangai confuse quantity and quality). Needless to say, the Leiden ranking is widely ignored except by connaisseurs.

http://www.cwts.nl/ranking/LeidenRankingWebSite.html

BPW

Tenured and non-tenured third-level academic personnel are appointed/promoted on the basis of PhD research + pubs. Yet the same individuals do some undergrad teaching (without any qualification to undertake same) + some admin work (experience for same ???). Bit odd, in’tit. Same goes for tutors taking undergrad tutorials. Think this might be a little problematic?

The third-level research => quality nexus is a load of academic cobblers - in the best of taste of course. There are other metrics that might be applied to quantify - or should that be to rank? - third-level institutions. Unfortunately these metrics are cumbersome and open to partiality.

Better to print the mythical legend, rather than the prosaic truth. As Morgan Kelly say about stats - “You consume them at your peril”.

B Peter

your comment made me remember something. I once read an entertaining book by Michael Lewis called The New New Thing. It is about Jim Clark, founder of Netscape and a couple of other companies. Silicon Graphics was his first company, in which he employed a range of noteable computer scientists who had come up through the education system in India. The Michael Lewis book contains a very nice description of that system at some point in the story I recall. Basically, Lewis was trying to flesh out some of the sub-characters in the story, to indicate how/where Clark obtained his finest human resources.

Funny thing also, Clark got into medical science most recently and I heard from an architect who worked with Clark on a Stanford university new building, how Clark was very willing to cut through normal bureaucracy and channels at Stanford in order to get his building for medical sciences built, which he paid for. Years earlier of course, Clark, a man from a very poor background at Texas had been lucky enough to attend tuition at Stanford and work up some prototype silicon chips which became the basis for his young company SGi.

I think this is called karma.

Divide 6 billion by 6 million …………. what do you get?

Step 1: Get into the World Top Thousand ………

The real test of the quality of a region’s education system is the level of general welfare in its citizenry. The present system (at all levels) remains largely class-based and regressive - Digital Literacy is particularly poor at 1st and 2nd levels - broadband in many areas is a joke - adult education lags other EU states - Take a look at developments in India and Korea ……….. time to take investing in ‘brains’, as distinct from bricks, as the real economic imperative ………..

BackStep: Are we smart enough to get out of the present mess? No choice.
Were we stupid enough to get into it in the first place? Sure we were - hence the urgency to seriously inquire into HOW we got in to it. So lets get on with it - declare UDI on brains - and stop waiting for tribunals, or Dail committees etc ……………. Pool the evidence and resources ………. and present it in language that Joe and Joan can understand. This is the real test for quality …………… DELIVER.

http://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings

Something else? I’m just wondering regarding your US/UK comment - I missed the discrepancies you alluded to…

But the two go together! A poly technic is a place to raise standards and train students in practical skills.

A university is a centre for excellence. There has long been a confusion of the two, as a uni is crammed in order to lever out put upwards but standards are necessarily lowered. All Souls has no undergrads. Ratios of staff to student are important as research is a skill in itself. Nowadays as goivernments reveal themselves to be somewhat ponzi like, they want unis to produce profit centres for “all that techno whatsit” that another uni managed around the world.

In one way this blog is a remote uni. No degree is awarded but one’s work is evident. No need for certification by a stressed lecturer. It is all set out, sp. mistakes and all. At the end there is a product a realization of breadth and depth of issues and more light amidst some heat. Free flow of ideas. Work undertaken for little material reward.

Poly technics dumb down material so it can be crammed. Product is fodder for industry. Smart economy should mean a new response from unis? Obsession with rankings just betrays bureaucratic fear of failure? A uni can only fail, by dropping standards to fit. Aiming too low.

They’re probably building an ark in case Inishcarra overflows again.

It would probably get a grant as a model of a small closed agricultural economy. Rather like deValera’s Ireland, but without the bishops, beer and biscuits.

bjg

Colm Harmons statement interests me:
“One way forward for Irish institutions and their budget problems is to stop pretending all academics are equal!”
What then?

Good night
Al

“Halfway through John Cassidy’s new book, How Markets Fail, there is a revealing anecdote about Morgan Stanley. Back in the mid-1990s, Cassidy asked officials at this once-mighty US bank how they recruited economists, only to be told that Morgan Stanley avoided hiring anybody straight from university.

“We insist on at least a three-to-four-year cleansing process to neutralise the brainwashing that takes place on those graduate programmes,” Stephen Roach, the firm’s chief economist is quoted as saying, noting that academic economists appeared to have become dangerously divorced from reality.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/60326096-e065-11de-8494-00144feab49a.html
Roach has a Ph.d from NYU.

Dem Cork lads must have better things to be doing than blogging.

“Academics can play it safe and stay in the herd researching what will get published and research becomes socialised to a degree. As I have had it explained to me, UK academics work to reach their quota of publications, research success then becoming more presentation skills than exploration.”

At the risk of basing the discussion upon the experience of all economists in universities, I attempted in places above to broaden the discussion somewhat, to faculties such as construction, property, agriculture, medical science and so on.

But what about computer science?

What Al talks about there, social-isation of research. When I think about it, computer science history is something I have read a lot about. Everything and anything to do with computer science is social-ise to a high degree. It has something to do with the division of labour, required with programming, software etc. Lets face it, some of the most prestiguous universities in the world I have heard about, have made their reputations in the area of technology etc.

The Open Source software movement practically depends on the efforts of tenured university professors worldwide. People say, what happened with Linux would probably have happened earlier with Unix in the 1970s, if the bandwidth had been available. A similar sort of community would have formed. The history of Linux is quite interesting and well documented.

But even read a book such as Steven Levy’s Hackers and one will notice a very strong communal kind of culture. The famous nineth floor of the computer science building at MIT. That was a kind of herd culture for sure, but produced the basis for computer science as we know it today. Maybe the herd is the way to go in something as new and fresh as computer science is. Say, compared to something very well established such as mathematics or economics even.

Build? As in pay someone to construct something? I’d have thought they could find lots of empty buildings that NAMA would pay to have taken off its hands.

Although some might be on the north side.

bjg

Your top-journal-fetishism is outdated. It used to be that the only pragmatic way to judge a paper was to look at its cover. Nowadays, one can count citations of individual papers. It used to be that one would get papers by journal, but nowadays one gets papers by search term.