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.