/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.4201342]

So, I'm in a top tier school of my country (Germany) but I'm wondering if any of you guys have ever even heard of it.

What prestigious universities do you associate with other countries?

The choices for the USA and the UK are kinda obvious but what about Germany, France, Spain, Finland, Norway etc?

pic slightly related

[Anonymous No.4201356]

France: Sorbonne Paris, université de Mont Pellier

[Anonymous No.4201368]

ETH-Zurich

Don't know a single one in Norway or Finland,

[Anonymous No.4201383]

bump because
>no gf
threads cluttering front page

[Anonymous No.4201388]

max planck institute maybe.

[Anonymous No.4201529]

Thanks for the picture OP. Now I think I'm going to learn German instead of Russian. That's the only reason I wanted to learn another language anyways, for science, philosophy and reading foreign books.

[Anonymous No.4201551]

Its in 10^6 on USA and Germany equal to the number of ppl.

[Anonymous No.4201557]

Say, op, is getting into a high tier or better uni /MEng/ really hard, esp compared to uk?

Besides the requirement of german lang, it seems to be at least as good to study in germany or in austria, and financial viability is superior by far /piss-poor family/

[Anonymous No.4201561]

>das fühl wenn keine freundin

[Anonymous No.4201624]

Sorry to derail the thread slightly, but that graphic got me thinking...the language of scientific publications went from German to English after the fall of Germany in WWII. With China's great population, do you see Chinese ever replacing English as the language of scientific publications?

[Anonymous No.4201637]

>>4201624
No. Especially since they teach English in Chinese/Japanese schools.

[Anonymous No.4201638]

>>4201529

>implying German isn't the sexiest language anyways

[Anonymous No.4201649]

>>4201557

My friend got accepted to RWTH Aachen (best Meng school) with an average of 2.5 which translates roughly to right between A- and B+ in American grading system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_Point_Average#Germany ).

I don't think it's as hard overall, especially if you're aiming for "high" instead of "very top" tier schools.

[Anonymous No.4201776]

Okay so I have had my coffee and I love playing with these sort of statistics. The pic in the OP got me thinking, sure the US is producing the most papers, but are they producing as many as they should be? So I started off by thinking how many papers is the US producing per capita, of course you end up with a tiny fraction of a paper per person so i asked instead how many papers is the US producing per million people (makes the numbers look nicer).

Its interesting to note that there is no relationship between having a big population and having a strong academia, Switzerland is the resounding winner followed by the usual Scandinavian suspects, Then Singapore and Australia jump in at 6 and 7 with totally different populations. The US really drags the chain coming in 18th even though it has the largest population of the top 20, China manages only 146 papers per million people, and India which is renown for having some of the most competitive schools in the world manages only 76.

[Anonymous No.4201799]

>>4201776

>Denmark has got the highest papers per citizen of Scandinavia and therefor scores 2nd in the world

Feels good man

[Anonymous No.4201805]

>>4201799

By FAR the highest PPC.

[Anonymous No.4201806]

Wow, USA you suck.
Scandinavia ftw.

[Anonymous No.4201822]

>Britain top three
>Higher per capita than competitors

[Anonymous No.4201831]

>>4201822
Top 3 what? Maybe England is top 3 in Great Britain.

[Anonymous No.4201841]

>>4201776 (cont)
But I thought, that doesn't really prove anything, India is poor, Switzerland is rich, how efficient are these countries at producing academic papers? How many retards do they have to train to get a goldenboy? So I had a look at the Human Development statistics from the UN, which has mean years of schooling, which when multiplied by the population gives total years of schooling. So I looked for the number of papers published per year of schooling (again you have to multiply this by a million to make the numbers look nice).

The US has dropped out of the top 20, (its now at 22 behind Germany), Switzerland retains its lead on the rest of the world, but Singapore has jumped from 6th place to 2nd, even the UK manages to look a bit better moving from 13th to 8th. China and India still sit at the bottom of the list feeling sorry for themselves.

What does this mean? I'm not sure, but it seems that this would have to be the most fair way of gauging the success of academics in any given country since I'm comparing academic papers to actual educating done. It seems to me that if a country were to look to improve its education system, it would look to singapore to find out how they manage to be so efficient at producing academic papers.

[Anonymous No.4201846]

Austrian, currently working in Germany-anon here.

I'd like to study in Munich or France one day.

(Then of course the good universities in england sound nice too, because they speak englisch. And Even I guess there are some very very good people in USA too, so I'd also like to study there)

[Anonymous No.4201856]

>>4201799
How does it feel Denmark to get kicked out of second place by Singapore?

[Anonymous No.4201868]

Ill make the .xls available if anyone wants to play with it and can recommend a good place to upload it.

[Anonymous No.4201871]

>>4201856

It feels bad man.

[Anonymous No.4201880]

>>4201846
if you are austrian then why do you obsess over a jew?

[Anonymous No.4201890]

>>4201557
>>4201649

In Germany you only need good grades if you want to do medicine or psychology.

[Anonymous No.4201899]

>>4201841
Well, imho if you consider how many people they have to train to get a "golden boy", then you must also consider the huge amount of foreigners in USA academia.

>>4201880
because I'm neither a racist, nor obsessed

Going further, you'd have to check and weight by the impact factor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

on all of these.

Anyway, the paper-system is like capitalism. In a direct way, but also in a methaphorical sense, in that it's pretty much terrible but, of course, better then the other options.

[Anonymous No.4201900]

>>4201776
>>4201841
Have another coffee, I want to see what you do next.

[Anonymous No.4201909]

>>4201841

Butthurt danishfag here, your grading system is flawed.

You could be at the very top of your list if you just wait for 1 super-genius and then educate him a little and let him publish some biology paper.

And maybe that's what Singapore is doing, they are only educating the very top (at least compared to the Scandinavian countries). So of course they are at the top of the list now, but isn't it better to educate more people, having more people publish papers (and the rest are still in demand for a lot of other jobs)?

You're just twisting the data without looking at what you're actually saying something about. You're implying there's a direct correlation between effectiveness of education and papers published.

[Anonymous No.4201911]

>>4201342
Regarding the picture, can science explain why there's a disproportionate amount of research papers published in the U.S., yet at the same time, there's also a disproportionate amount of stupid Americans?

[Anonymous No.4201919]

>>4201899
I dont have those figures (or the million manhours to collect them for 1,345,046 papers), if you want to go ahead.

[Anonymous No.4201939]

>>4201909
>OMG DENMARK IS 3RD, CLEARLY THIS SYSTEM IS RIGGED AGAINST DENMARK
I'm actually Australian and we lost out in a much bigger way than you did.

Yes it stands to reason that singapore is more competitive in who gets education, and perhaps thats not a good thing, but in terms of academic output, singapore is clearly more efficient.

Brb, calculating academic output per unit of GDP (and getting another coffee.

[Anonymous No.4201947]

>>4201911
Science did, read the thread. >>4201776 >>4201841, the US just has a big population.

[Anonymous No.4201949]

OP here, i got the pic from here:
http://www.science20.com/curious_cub/top_countries_2011_scientific_publications-85744

[Anonymous No.4201960]

>>4201939

Well I'm not actually mad about it, I'm just extremely subjectively criticizing your method of calculation.

Just for the fun of it. I guess it's hard to see through my writing then.

[Anonymous No.4201975]

>>4201949

Oh god, why did I have to read the comments?!

>Come on, Europe with a population of 2.5 billion!. 1.4 billion in Russia!!. And what happened to Latin America?
As Wolfgang Pauli would have said, this analysis is not even wrong!

Russia barely has barely got 140 million inhabitans.

[Anonymous No.4201988]

I donno, it's kind of strange to me that there is such a big difference in education in such a globalized world.

In the german speaking countries, maybe the universities don't have such big names, but it's faily easy to get in. The people studying the natural sciences are therefore not even that motivated as I expect people from the other countries to be.
In austria and many parts of germany university is free. In the natural sciences there is typically no competition in the sense I get from reading /sci/.

In vienna, I think more than 50% of the people who start physics drop it by the 4th semester. I think there are 200 people signing in each year and about 20 who get the masters degree.

Politically, how could it happen, that you have to get dept for an education in the USA, when after they complete, they apply for the same jobs in the world marked?

[Anonymous No.4201995]

>>4201988
fairly easy*

[Anonymous No.4202028]

In Finland the University of Helsinki is the only moderately known but after that remaining Universities are pretty good and even. You don't have to pay for the education even up to Ph.D and you can easily get student loan and support money if you're not a complete tool. Education is something the finnish goverment has always cheered on. There's huge amount of different paths you can take and re-educating yourself is also easy.

Maybe it's more about averages than having top elite unis educating the top elite guys in the world. Pic related, the only Finn who has won the nobel prize ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artturi_Ilmari_Virtanen

[Anonymous No.4202030]

>>4201342
I heard heidelberg (?) was good.

[Anonymous No.4202032]

Btw Most interesting topic here in a long time. Bumbing

[Psistar !!bRma1Ao62vX No.4202042]

>>4201356
>Sorbonne
>université de montpellier
>not polytechnique or ENS

[Anonymous No.4202052]

>>4202032

Agreed (bumping), why do I keep seeing 0/10 religion threads and >dat feel no girlfriend? are we getting raided constantly?

[Anonymous No.4202055]

I just realized Erdos was probably pumping out more papers than a country in the bottom half does

[Anonymous No.4202057]

>>4202028
>nobel prize
I heard that over 90% of people who got the prize did at one point collaborate with someone who had already won it. So to me that's not such a good or important indicator anyway.

[Anonymous No.4202067]

>>4202028
We have enough top tier departments to Fill exactly one university in Finland, but they are all spread out over the entire vast country over different universities, so the average turns out fairly meager.

For example, University of Jyväskylä pwns university of Helsinki any day in quality of Physics education, but their department of Chemistry sucks hairy monkey balls etc.

[Anonymous No.4202080]

>>4201841
that's not strictly fair though. I mean if you have 1 billion people and give them all 9 years of basic education, that's 9 billion years that doesn't have anything to do with academia counting against the academic standards of the academia that you DO produce.


Furthermore there is the case of demographics, singapore consists of 3.8 million citizens and 1.6 million non-resident foreigners. If you import a large amount of highly educated researches etc. into your small country, your average will skyrocket. The paper publishing count doesn't really say anything about the singaporean education system at all because singapore is such a deviating country.


Either way, with today's technology professional relationships can be made across the oceans, so my personal judgement is to a large degree that how much you get out of your time at university depends on how "go-getting" you are.


This is a pretty difficult topic to get any proper insight in, I remember looking into it when they released the worldwide university rankings, and the same sort of problems prop up. How are the rankings done, how are they weighted, how do you get proper data, etc.

[Anonymous No.4202084]

>>4202055
A comathematician is a machine for turning cotheorems into ffee.

[Anonymous No.4202087]

>>4202067
Continuing from my previous trail of though: If any of you foreigners plans on getting some of that sweet Scandinavian education from Finland be vary careful about this. Most Finnish oniversities have one or two good departments and when coming here to study you should be careful about finding the university that has the main focus on your field of interest.

Also, polytechnic universities are not universities but vocational schools that you got to in order to get a profession (and are really fucking awesome at filling that role). They do not qualify you for academic work and a BSc or some other degree from one is unlikely to get you even near a MSc or PhD prgram in a real university. Many foreigners get confused about this, get a bachelors degree from a polytechnic university, and then throw a hissy fit when they are rejected from education that would lead to a masters degree.

[Anonymous No.4202090]

>>4201988
Because american universities are mostly a joke, and unless you make it through to the top universities and work hard, you won't be competing internationally for the same jobs. Furthermore you can get a job in many different non-scientific positions with a non-specific "degree", so instead of having people change degrees, you end up with useless degrees except for those from specific well-known universities.

In europe, when someone has a degree in something, that's what they do, and what they're going to work with, and not something else. It's less flexible like that.

[Anonymous No.4202098]

>>4202087
Dane here, it's the same thing in Denmark, just that there are fewer universities. Even within fields of study there are variances. Economics at my university was amazing for quantitative studies and mathematical economics as well as labour market studies, but not that great when it came to more qualitative stuff.


I would advise people to look at what research the department at the specific universities are doing. The researchers will be your professors, and the most prominent research area will have themost opportunities.

[Anonymous No.4202099]

>>4202090
Yup. One of the confusing things about american education is that you folks mix up vocational and academic education, leading into researchers and people trained for a professional qualification being educated in the same place in same ways, which is incredibly inefficient.

[Anonymous No.4202112]

OK so now it starts getting a little less scientific, the calculations for GDP comparisons differ from organization to organization and exchange rates are prone to being fucked with, however, assuming that the PPP calculations on the CIA World Factbook are correct, Denmark has reestablished itself as second and singapore has dropped to 19th. The US has dropped to 27 behind Iran (who interestingly enough top the list if sorted by official exchange rate).

Im not actually sure what this proves except possibly how much academic work is valued by a culture.

[Anonymous No.4202125]

>>4202112
My beautiful and lonely Belgium, still holding its worth. Brings a tear to mine eye.
Nice work, collegue. By far the best thread of this evening, but then, the only other active thread is that philosophy trollfest.

[Anonymous No.4202141]

>>4202125
Economics is awesome because it lets me discover things that noone has bother to discover before, so many low hanging fruit left that I think I ill explode if I try to grab them all. Things like this, a cheap analysis of academic output, which take an our with a computer and an internet connection but are so much more valuable than "a study of irregular gears in aquatic environments" or "the effect of low powered lasers on earthworms" is why I chose the field.

[Anonymous No.4202148]

HI I go to an elite university (Imperial College) it's pretty cool but the dropout rate from my course is 2/3rds by the 4th year (combined masters course). People drop to a 3 year course after encountering the rape and 1/3rd just leave the university after failing. I feel quite special to have survived to my 4th year. The intensity of the course has changed me though I cannot be satisfied without the intensity and rigor and as such am aiming for an academic career.

[Anonymous No.4202179]

>>4202141
Well, yes, economics is usually downplayed on this board, as it will incite quite a shitfest.
I had a similar idea as well, really, some time ago. I plotted charities, their used percentage of money and what percentage they used of it. Then, I assigned a value to them, depending how relatively important their work is (saving lives > curing diseases > sheltering animals).
Turned out, the most efficient charity (for my ranking of values) was Unicef.

[Anonymous No.4202186]

>>4202042
Seconded. And Paris Tech is still completely unknown to the average scientific joe.

[Anonymous No.4202204]

>>4201356
>>4202042
>>4202186
Sorry guys, but the only thing the rest of Europe knows about French schools is that the system they operate in is a confusing mess built around levels of elitism and social standing rather than academic education and research. I once tried to figure out which schools did what and what different degrees meant in comparison to Nordic and German equivalents and got both frustrated, confused and disappointed and all I learned was where to go if you want to be a part of the political elite.

[Anonymous No.4202217]

>>4201841

Interesting.

However, this doesn't take into account the quality of the papers. Perhaps Singapore is simply churning out mountains of garbage papers?

What if you could get the total times those papers are later cited into that calculation.

[Anonymous No.4202218]

>>4202125
I'm sorry to say but it's not particularly nice work.

To the guy who posted it, it's cool you go through the effort of looking it all up and finding the date. Quality (and quantity) of data is the most limiting and frustrating thing as an Economist. But equating PPP GDP with the number of papers published is useless, and penalizes countries which has a higher GDP by giving them a lower "paper published" ranking, and benefits countries with a smaller GDP on the ranking. This basically makes affluent countries who may have great universities rank lower than not-so-affluent countries that may have mediocre universities.


You need to consider what correlation you're trying to find, and why. Right now you're just comparing numbers for no reason and coming up with stuff afterwards.

[Anonymous No.4202232]

Singapore is the Switzerland of SouthEast Asia

[Anonymous No.4202236]

>>4202218

Yeah that was pointed out earlier...

[Anonymous No.4202250]

>>4202218
>You need to consider what correlation you're trying to find
I can just play with the numbers to see what shows up, and yeah, the point is to penalize high gdp countries so to find which countries are producing the most papers per unit of GDP.

Finding most citations per x isnt necessarily accurate either since it will favor english speaking countries.

[Anonymous No.4202272]

>>4202250
but production of papers per unit of GDP doesn't mean anything. because GDP can come from sources completely unrelated to scientific work, and the countries with, for an example a lot of natural resources, will show up as being very poor "scientific" countries on your scale, even though the two are unrelated.

I suppoe you could look up the composition of their GDP and sort the countries in different categories then find the top scorers for each category, or create model with dummy variables indicating differnet types of economic indicators then run a cross-sectional analysis of some sort.

[Anonymous No.4202273]

>>4202272

I know that Denmark's biggest export is knowledge, so they're gonna take a hit.

[Anonymous No.4202312]

>>4202087

Swissfag here, the polythecnics in Switzerland are the only thing that gives us the top spot. IMHO any student at EPFL and ETHZ work more than Ivy students etc. (+ you have a shitload of practical work to do, so you gather a lot of experience)

[Anonymous No.4202349]

>>4202312

REALLY?!?! If that's true then my country takes the top spo!!!!

[Anonymous No.4202353]

>>4202272
>GDP can come from sources completely unrelated to scientific work, and the countries with, for an example a lot of natural resources, will show up as being very poor "scientific" countries on your scale
That's correct. Countries with High GDP and low academic output will show up as countries with high GDP and low academic output.

Anyways, I prefer the Papers per Educational hour >>4201841

[Anonymous No.4202360]

>>4202353

It is still a very flawed comparison.

[Anonymous No.4202371]

U JELLY, NON-AMERICANS?

[M No.4202374]

>>4202312
Well, the issue with ETH is that you're required and expected to take very few courses. I was given an offer to do my PhD there in biogeochemistry. I understand that research is the main focus, but I wanted to take a range of courses too.

At my current university, students aren't expected to get much research done in their first year since they are focusing on classes. So, we wouldn't do as much research as people at ETH but we'd get the same amount of work done when our 2nd year begins. The PhD also takes less time at ETH in that major.

[Anonymous No.4202377]

>>4202371

LOL read the thread first, America is not even in the top 15.

[Anonymous No.4202379]

>>4202186
I go to the University of llinois at Urbana Champaign. The average person on the street has never heard of it.

[Anonymous No.4202407]

Go to UCSC as a grad student

3rd university in the world in research impact

feelsgoodman.jpg

http://news.ucsc.edu/2011/10/world-university-rankings.html

[Anonymous No.4202414]

>>4202360
Not really, if you wanted to know if rich countries have proportionately more academic output then you would compare academic output to GDP, what you find is that the expected result of the US and the UK having the highest academic output in comparison to wealth is not true, if I could be stuffed I would work out proportion of global academic output compared to proportion of global GDP, that would tell me if the rich countries are pulling their weight. But i dont have the figures in easy to use .xls format for the academic output of 200 odd countries, if you think the figures of such a comparison would be more revealing then check it yourself.

In the meantime it seems you are butthurt because your country did not rank very highly.

[Anonymous No.4202415]

ITT: murricans get mad and jelly

[Anonymous No.4202749]

>>4201649
Yay in February I'm going to RWTH Aachen to study medicine. I hate being born in a wrong country but I'm going to amend that.

[Anonymous No.4202763]

>>4202379

why do Illinois fags say that as the name? it would be like me saying The Ohio State University at Columbus. People that go to the shitty satellite schools at the @.

[Anonymous No.4202765]

>>4202763
i'm willing to bet my left nut that california's "shitty satellite schools at the @" are ranked higher than whatever shithole you go to.

[Anonymous No.4202772]

>>4202765
the UC system is not the University of Illinois system. And yes Berkley would be a much better computer science school

[Anonymous No.4202782]

>>4202765
Calm down.

Everybody has to pretend they're from CalTech or something now, Christ.