American Universities Ranked by Research

Surprising positions of American Universities ranked at http://mup.asu.edu/research.html

Columbia at the top, UCLA way down at 12. For the rationale see the Center for Measuring University Performance's website.

Top American Research Universities (1-25)

1. Columbia University
2. Harvard University
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4. University of Pennsylvania
5. Johns Hopkins University
6. Duke University
7. University of California - Berkeley
8. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
9. Yale University
10. University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
11. University of Washington - Seattle
12. University of California - Los Angeles
13. Cornell University
14. Washington University in St. Louis
15. University of Wisconsin - Madison
16. University of California - San Francisco
17. University of Chicago
18. Univ of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
19. University of California - San Diego
20. Univ of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
21. Princeton University
22. Northwestern University
23. University of Southern California
24. Ohio State University - Columbus
25. University of Pittsburgh - Pittsburgh
26. Vanderbilt University
27. California Institute of Technology
28. University of Florida
29. University of Texas - Austin
30. Penn State University - Univ Park
31. Texas A&M University
32. Brown University
33. Emory University
34. University of Arizona
35. University of California - Davis
36. University of Virginia
37. New York University
38. Purdue University - West Lafayette
39. Baylor College of Medicine
40. Dartmouth College
41. Rice University
42. Univ of Texas SW Medical Ctr - Dallas
43. University of Maryland - College Park
44. Michigan State University
45. University of Colorado - Boulder
46. Rockefeller University
47. University of California - Irvine
48. University of California - Santa Barbara
49. University of Notre Dame
50. Univ of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Ctr

Wikipedia: my contributions

I rely a lot on the wikipedia, and I am careful in doing so.
Making contributions to the wiki is really as close you can get to volunteering in an intellectual manner. Share your knowledge, money can come in by other means.

Wikipedia and trustworthiness

Colour-coding wikipedia articles for reliability

The problem with Wikipedia, as most scholars see it, isn’t that the site lacks credible
information. There’s plenty of good stuff in the encyclopedia; it’s just that there’s no easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz are trying to make that process simpler. They’ve designed software that color-codes Wikipedia entries, identifying those portions deemed trustworthy and those that might be taken with a grain of salt.

To determine which passages make the grade, the researchers analyzed Wikipedia’s editing history, tracking material that has remained on the site for a long time and edits that have been quickly overruled. A Wikipedian with a distinguished record of unchanged edits is declared trustworthy, and his or her contributions are left untouched on the Santa Cruz team’s color-coded pages. But a contributor whose posts have frequently been changed or deleted is considered suspect, and his or her content is highlighted in orange. (The darker the orange, the more spurious the content is thought to be.)

The researchers, led by Luca de Alfaro, an associate professor of computer engineering, have posted 1,000 demonstration pages on their Web site, and the samples show that the sorting process is pretty acute. Some articles, like a lengthy entry on the Curtiss P-40, a World War II-era fighter plane, get a nearly clean bill of health. Others, like an article on crochet, fare pretty well. And then there are entries, like a write-up on Polish Christmas traditions, that are drenched in orange.

Because the software assesses the histories of Wikipedia posters without actually fact-checking, it won’t necessarily direct people to Wikipedia’s best, most academically rigorous articles. But the program might be a useful tool for professors who want their students to examine closely how Wikipedia works rather than take it as gospel.

Marine research disaster

Container ship rams research vessel

Researcher killed as Italian ship sinks in minutes.

Vincenzo di Stefano and Giusy Buscaino, left, were two of the researchers who escaped from the Thetis. AP Photo/Alessandro Fucarini

A Russian marine biologist was drowned, and an Italian badly hurt, when the research vessel on which they were working was rammed by a cargo ship and sank off the coast of Sicily on 3 August.

The ship, Thetis, was measuring marine biomass around seven kilometres off the island's coast when it was struck by the Heleni, a 55,000-tonne Panamanian container ship. It was morning, and the weather was foggy.

"The scientists on board say it was like an apocalypse when the container ship came at them out of the blue," says Ennio Marsella, head of the CNR Institute for Coastal Marine Environment in Naples, whose scientists were in charge of the project.

The 200-tonne Italian vessel sank in minutes, giving no time to use lifeboats or life jackets. "It was clear we had no way out," says Giusy Buscaino of the CNR, head of the mission, "so I ran towards the stern, then dived and swam away as fast as I could. It was so surreal to look back and find no noise, no vessel, the big cargo vessel going on like nothing happened."

The man killed, bioacoustics expert Petr Mikhejchik, 53, of the Russian Federal Research Institute of Fishery and Oceanography in Moscow, was probably trapped working in one of the labs below deck.

Divers recovered his body on Monday. The remaining seven scientists and six crew members survived.

Mikhejchik was "a very reserved person, but kind, and very competent", says Buscaino. They will not abandon their project, she adds. "I never thought it was possible to die doing science — but we all think we should go on because we owe it to Petr."

Warning

The causes of the accident are now being investigated. Port authorities in Sicily had repeatedly warned the Heleni that there were other vessels nearby. The authorities had also issued an order on 24 July for all ships to keep at least 1,000 metres from the Thetis, which had just left port.

The Thetis, launched in 2000, is equipped for biological, geological and chemical research, and has instruments worth more than 1 million (US$1.4 million). It is one of three marine-research vessels run by the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

Russian and Italian marine biologists have been working together for more than 20 years. "Their competence in marine biology and bathymetry [measurement of seafloor topography] complements ours," says Marsella.

First reports from divers say that the Thetis is badly damaged, but the CNR does not yet know whether it can be replaced. It lies only 40 metres below the surface, and scientists hope to recover some of its instruments.

Alexander owes victory to GEOLOGY

Sandbar led Alexander the Great to victory

DigitalGlobe 2006

Today, Tyre is connected to mainland Lebanon by an isthmus. Some 2,400 years ago, however, Tyre was an island, virtually impenetrable to conquerors such as Alexander the Great, who spent months trying to access the island. Eventually, the geology aligned and a sandbar became apparent — the sandbar was the island’s undoing.

More than any battering ram, catapult or sword, Alexander the Great may owe his success in seizing the island of Tyre to waves and sand. In 332 B.C., after an unsuccessful seven-month blockade of the impenetrable island, Alexander reached Tyre by constructing a 1,000-meter causeway from what is modern-day Lebanon to the island. New research shows a shallow sandbar may have made this engineering feat — and the infamous fall of Tyre — possible.

Today, Tyre is no longer an island; it is fully connected to Lebanon by a sand isthmus, or tombolo, which formed as sediments piled up due to the action of waves passing around the island. Based on aerial photographs and ancient documents, previous research suggested a sandbar might have existed at the time of Alexander the Great, say Nick Marriner and Christophe Morhange, geoarchaeologists at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Aix-en-Provence, France, who led the new study. But until now no geological evidence supported this idea.

Using sediment cores and computer models, Marriner and his colleagues reconstructed the area’s geological history over the past 8,000 years. A sandbar was indeed present at the time of Alexander’s military operations, they report in the May 29 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, making the water only 1 to 2 meters deep. “Prior to our research,” Marriner says, “there were no real estimates for water depth.” Alexander might have noticed the sandbar, suggests Jean-Daniel Stanley, a geoarchaeologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study, by spotting “wave breaks at the water surface above the underlying shallower area” of the water.

Marriner and the team also found that people played a role in the sandbar’s formation. Coastal erosion caused by farming and deforestation helped increase the rate of sedimentation between the island and the mainland. This rate of accumulation would have also increased after the construction of Alexander’s bridge, which, Stanley says, would have “served as a nucleus to trap more and more sediments.”

In addition to solving a historical question, this study demonstrates how “you can use nature to your advantage,” says Stanley, who says we often have negative views on what geological processes, such as erosion, do to coastal areas. But in this case, they were helpful — at least if you were Alexander the Great.

Climate change will cost us

Climate change will inflict additional costs to the economy in the coming decades, according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Dealing with the effects of climate change will cost both citizens and businesses, especially insurance companies, but will cost the U.S. government even more — and before its emergency coffers are bankrupted, the government needs to take action, the report says.

The U.S. government acts as the insurer of last resort. Various government programs, such as flood insurance, pay out when the weather damages personal property beyond what is covered by private insurance. From 1980 through 2005, private and federal insurers together paid more than $320 billion in claims from weather-related losses, according to the GAO report, released May 3. Such losses vary from drought-related crop losses to storm-related floods to hurricane-related damages. Whatever the cause, the government has paid out record amounts in recent years and those numbers are increasing, especially as more people move into hazard-prone areas, the report says. Furthermore, “rising temperatures are expected to increase the frequency and severity of damaging weather-related events, such as flooding or drought,” the report says. Private and federal insurers will both bear the costs of climate change-related damages over the coming decades.

Unlike private insurers, the U.S. government does not have the funding to support such increases in insurance expenses, says Richard Murnane, program manager for the Risk Prediction Initiative and a senior research scientist at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences. “They’re setting themselves up for enormous problems,” he says. The government “needs to decide whether it wants to operate in a self-sufficient manner and charge adequate premium for its exposure, or whether it wants to operate in a reactionary manner and appropriate the additional funds required to pay for losses as they occur,” he says.

“It’s really the unusual events, the low-probability, high-impact events, that drive the costs,” says Gregory van der Vink, a geologist at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. Thus, he says, the question the government and private insurers need to ask is “how do you amortize the low-probability, high-impact event?” In 2004 and 2005, record numbers of hurricanes struck the United States, in record strengths. In 2006, despite contrary predictions, none struck the mainland. The combined impacts of shifting climactic zones, sea-level rise and development means that there will be more variability in recurrence intervals of low-probability, high-impact events, so the usefulness of past experience for projecting future losses is limited, van der Vink says. “We need improved, open modeling that will maintain public awareness and help insurance companies prepare” for these events. Although “rare for any specific town or city, when integrated across a nation for which large insurance companies and the federal government have responsibility, [low-probability, high-impact] events occur regularly and dominate the costs,” he says.

It’s important that the government and private insurers examine climate’s effect on their costs, and thus the costs to consumers, van der Vink says, but unless people stop moving into hazard-prone environments, costs are only going to increase. And stopping developments in highly vulnerable areas is something that no one has come to terms with yet, he adds.

Meanwhile, per the GAO recommendations, the departments of Agriculture and Homeland Security (which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency) will be further analyzing the long-term fiscal implications of climate change on the government’s insurance programs.

Sethu Samudram project

'Adam's Bridge a man-made structure'

In our series on Ram Sethu and the Sethu Samudram Canal project, we had earlier interviewed world-renowned tsunami expert Dr Tad S Murty and Dr Kalyanaraman, a researcher on the subject.

This time, we discuss the feasibility of the project with Geologist Dr Badrinarayanan.

Dr Badrinarayanan was former director of the Geological Survey of India. He was also former coordinator of the survey division of the National Institute of Ocean Technology, Ministry of Earth Science, in Chennai.

As a geologist who has done studies on the geological aspects of the area where Sethu Samudram Canal Project is being undertaken, Dr.Badrinarayanan puts forth some interesting findings on the area in an interview to Shobha Warrier.

As a geologist, how do you describe Ram Sethu? Is it a man-made structure or natural formation?

It is not a natural formation; the top portion of it appears to be a man-made structure. To understand what I am saying from the geological point of view, you have to get to know several things.

What is known as Adam's Bridge is originally a natural grade divide separating the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean to the south. So, the geological aspects are different on either side.

About 18,000 years ago, we had Ice age when the sea level was lower by 130 metres than what it is now. Due to de-glaciation, the sea level rose.

Around 7,300 years back, there was major flooding and the sea level rose to 4 metres more than what it is today. This has been verified by several researchers throughout the world. But the bridge that connects India and Sri Lanka is different; it is not just a sand dune.

Have studies been done on this particular phenomenon?

We (Geological Survey of India) were asked to carry out surveys for locating the Sethu Samudram Canal project by the project authorities in 2004-05.

Any startling revelations?

When we reached near Adam's Bridge, there was sudden rise in the land level. From about 10-12 metre, it rose one metre to half a metre. So, our vessel could not go and survey the area. In some areas, we did survey using small boats.

The northern side of Adam's Bridge is the rough Palk Bay, which is prone to periodic cyclonic storms, and the tranquil southern side is the Gulf of Mannar, which is unpolluted and pristine.

Corals grew in the tranquil Gulf of Mannar but not in the turbulent Palk Bay as they grow only in tranquil waters. There are about 21 islands full of corals in the Gulf of Mannar side but not even a single coral on the northern side of Adam's Bridge.

I would say no proper geological survey was done in the area. Normally before any major engineering project, GSI conducts engineering geological study, geological study, geo tectonic study, seismic study, etc so that we will know whether the project is safe or not.

You mean no such studies were done before this project?

Earlier, GSI had done some drilling but only at the deeper level of about 180-200 metres, but they have not mentioned anything about what was happening at the top portion.

We did a study from NIOT on our own connecting between Rameswaram and the international waters. We did around 10 bore holes along the Adam's Bridge alignment. Four of the bore holes were along the islands (where sands go on shifting) and six in the water.

Everywhere, after top 6 metres, we found marine sands on top and below that was a mixed assemblage of corals, calcareous sand stones, and boulder like materials. Surprisingly below that up to 4-5 metres, again we found loose sand and after that, hard formations were there.

How do you explain the presence of loose sand?

It shows the structure is not natural. I will explain. Corals are found only on rocks and such hard surfaces. Here, below the corals and boulders, we are getting loose sand, which means it is not natural.

And, on top of the loose sand, which was formed when the sea level was low, our divers found boulders. Boulders normally occur on land and they are a typical riverine character.

It is also quite obvious that the boulders were used to cross over because in all the bore holes we made in the entire stretch of Adam's Bridge, we saw the same material. It appears like a rock-filled structure.

If it is a geological phenomenon, you will find the oldest formation below and the newer ones on top. I would rather call it an anthropogenic (pertaining to the effect of human beings on the natural world) causeway rather than a bridge.

What else have you learnt from the studies you have conducted along Ram Sethu?

We have found that geologically and geotectonically, this area is very sensitive. Many people are not aware of it. All around the north, there are spots where there is very high temperature below. When we drilled, we encountered hot springs of 60 to 70 degrees Celsius.

Whenever there are earthquakes in Sri Lanka, we get the vibrations in the Indian side also. That means a major fault is running there and it is very sensitive. This area is also known to have earth quakes and they had happened one or two centuries back. To the north and the south, there are indications of old volcanoes.

Because of these hot springs and presence of volcanic zones, do you feel if disturbed, it will affect the equilibrium of the entire area?

What you said is correct. That is why, before venturing into anything, you have to make a comprehensive study. This area has attained some sort of equilibrium over many centuries, and all the drilling and blasting of rocks may activate the fault and may trigger seismic activity or earth quakes.

It may also trigger other events, which may be very detrimental. That is because the hot water from the north, which is blocked by the Adam's Bridge, will come to the south and will disturb the coral islands. The result will be the destruction of the corals.

Not only that, whenever there is a major tsunami or cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, it is blocked by the so called bridge. Out of 18 depressions in the Bay of Bengal at least six turn into cyclones.

When we interviewed the tsunami expert Dr Tad S Murty, he said if not for the bridge, the entire southern part of Kerala would have been affected badly.

Yes, it would have completely affected the entire south India. We were the people who suggested it. We had done a study, of course not knowing tsunami is coming, and felt the structure will prevent the Tuticorin area, the southern part of Kerala and all the coral islands from getting affected.

The calm tranquil water in the Gulf of Mannar full of coral islands is because it is protected all around. Why do you want to destroy it when nature has blessed you with something so beautiful? This is the first declared marine national park in the country.

Another point I want to make is, some dams trigger earth quakes. There is a possibility it can happen here also. So, it is prudent on part of the government to study all these aspects before taking a major decision.

Do you feel the construction of Sethu Samudram project was initiated in a hurry without conducting proper study?

I think so. This portion is not like any sand dune. This is a very sensitive heat flowing area. I feel the Geological Survey of India should be asked to do a survey.

Was the Geological Survey of India not asked to do a study on this project?

No. Nobody has carried out any survey at all. We only did a survey to locate the alignment. So, but what is needed is a comprehensive study.

What has been formed over centuries by nature cannot be disturbed. In foreign countries, even a hundred-year-old structure is preserved and this looks like it is thousands of years old. No doubt such a canal is essential but not at the cost of nature. We are definitely for progress but our progress should be sustainable.