19 November 2014

NYT: Number of Academic Refugees Grows

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/world/middleeast/number-of-academic-refugees-grows.html?_r=1

Intellectual dissidents have long faced political persecution and violence. But in recent years, the dangers facing them and universities in troubled regions have reached a crisis point. According to the Institute of International Education, which has been helping imperiled scholars since 1919, academics and students are being forced to flee their homes and homelands at a level not seen since World War II, when thousands of professors and scientists escaped Nazi-controlled Europe.

UWN: Minimising brain drain – The pros and cons

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20141112172102896

National governments that sponsor international scholarship programmes assume that attending a higher education institution outside the home nation creates benefits that are different from those created by attending a domestic institution.

By enabling students to attend high quality educational offerings in other nations, a government-sponsored international scholarship programme may generate numerous benefits not only for individual participants but also for the home nation more generally.

The extent to which a nation realises the societal benefits of international study depends on whether scholarship recipients return to live and work in the home nation after they complete the educational programme.

Creating mechanisms to minimise brain drain may be especially important in countries with transitioning economies, as these nations may be likely to both benefit from the human capital created through foreign study, as well as be likely to have scholarship recipients who are inclined to remain in the host nation after completing their educational programme.

05 November 2014

NATURE: Top 100 papers

http://www.nature.com/news/the-top-100-papers-1.16224?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20141104

The most cited work in history is a 1951 paper describing an assay to determine the amount of protein in a solution. It has now gathered more than 305,000 citations — a recognition that always puzzled its lead author, the late US biochemist Oliver Lowry. “Although I really know it is not a great paper … I secretly get a kick out of the response,” he wrote in 1977.
The colossal size of the scholarly literature means that the top-100 papers are extreme outliers. Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science holds some 58 million items. Only 14,499 papers have more than 1,000 citations. Meanwhile, works that have been cited only once, if at all — a group that encompasses roughly half of the items.

03 November 2014

Best Global Universities Ranking 2014


US News and World Report just released the Best Global Universities ranking on 28 Oct 2014. 

Top 500:
1) Harvard University
2) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3) University of California, Berkeley
4) Stanford University
5) University of Oxford
55) National University of Singapore
423) University of Malaya

Top in Asia:
1) University of Tokyo
2) Peking University
3) University of Hong Kong
4) National University of Singapore
5) Kyoto University
67) University of Malaya

Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators

Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators


http://www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm