Another Important Ranking

Another ranking that should be looked at very carefully is the International Mathematical Olympiad, designed for pre-university students, the first of which was held in Romania in 1959. The competition includes problems in algebra, pre-calculus, complex geometry and functional equations.

Twenty years ago the Olympiad was dominated by ex-communist Eastern Europe. In 1996, first place was taken by Romania while Hungary was third and  Russia fourth. Now, East Asia and the Chinese diaspora are dominant: South Korea second, China third, Singapore fourth, Taiwan fifth, North Korea sixth, Hong Kong ninth, Japan tenth.

The USA is first this year, as it was in 2015, with an all-male team whose members have three South Asian and three Chinese surnames.

The rankings look pretty much like the PISA and TIMSS test scores. Combined with the recent coding competition and the Top500 supercomputing ranking, they suggest the intellectual and economic leaders of this century will be in East Asia and Eastern Europe including Russia.

The USA and the UK might do fairly well if they can introduce and maintain sensible immigration and educational selection policies.

The American success, unfortunately, is not good enough for the conventional education media. The team is not diverse enough: no women, no historically underrepresented minorities. So far nobody has protested about the absence of transgender or openly gay students but perhaps their time will eventually come.

Education Week reports that:

"According to Mark Saul, the director of competitions for the Mathematical Association of America, not a single African-American or Hispanic student—and only a handful of girls—has ever made it to the Math Olympiad team in its 50 years of existence."

To overcome this problem, participants in the events leading up to the Olympiad have competitions that test creativity and collaboration and are judged subjectively.   

"In the past few years, MathCounts added two new middle school programs to try to diversify its participant pool—National Math Club and the Math Video Challenge.

"Schools or teachers who sign up for the National Math Club receive a kit full of activities and resources, but there's no special teacher training and no competition attached.

The Math Video Challenge is a competition, but a collaborative one. Teams of four students make a video illustrating a math problem and its real-world application.

After the high-pressure Countdown round at this year's national MathCounts competition, in which the top 12 students went head to head solving complex problems in rapid fire, the finalists for the Math Video Challenge took the stage to show their videos. The demographics of that group looked quite different from those in the competition round—of the 16 video finalists, 13 were girls and eight were African-American students. The video challenge does not put individual students on the hot seat—so it's less intimidating by design. It also adds the element of artistic creativity to attract a new pool of students who may not see themselves as "math people."

An 8th grade team from the Ron Clark Academy, an independent middle school in Atlanta that serves low-income students, was among the finalists. The students illustrated a complicated multistep problem entirely through rap. None had ever been involved in a math competition before."

In other words, the competitions will be less and less about mathematics and more and more about making rap videos and the like. No doubt Russia, China and Korea will be flocking to the US to see how its done. Much the same thing has been happening with national competitive debating.

Here are this year's results and those for 2015 and 1996.

Rank 2016	Team	Rank 2015	Rank 1996
1	USA	1	2
2	South Korea	3	8
3	China	2	6
4	Singapore	10	25
5	Taiwan	18	20
6	North Korea	4	--
7=	Russia	8	4
7=	UK	22	5
9	Hong Kong	28	27
10	Japan	22	11
11	Vietnam	5	7
12=	Canada	9	16
12=	Thailand	12	47
14	Hungary	20	3
15=	Brazil	22	52
15=	Italy	29	25
17	Philippines	36	74
18	Bulgaria	29	11
19	Germany	27	10
20=	Romania	13	1
20=	Indonesia	29	70
22	Israel	40	15
23	Mexico	19	53
24	Iran	7	9
25=	Australia	6	23
25=	France	14	32
25=	Peru	16	--
28	Kazakhstan	28	25
29	Turkey	20	19
30=	Armenia	26	34
30=	Croatia	15	34
30=	Ukraine	11	18
33	Mongolia	35	44
34	India	34	37
35=	Bangladesh	33	--
35=	Belarus	39	21
37=	Czech Republic	45	28
37=	Sweden	60	40
39	Macau	35	48
40	Serbia	40	29
41	Saudi Arabia	41	--
42	Poland	17	13
43	Switzerland	45	62
44	Netherlands	43	59
45	Bosnia - Herzogovina	43	57
46	Austria	60	42
47	Portugal	52	13
48	Syria	54	--
49	Spain	72	48
50=	Lithuania	65	32
50=	Greece	51	22
52	Belgium	56	31
53	New Zealand	49	--
54	Azerbaijan	48	58
55	Slovakia	33	17
56	Malaysia	57	72
57	Argentina	52	29
58	South Africa	55	43
59=	Costa Rica	67	--
59=	Georgia	42	30
61	Estonia	70	55
62	Tajikistan	64	--
63=	Moldova	38	41
63=	Slovenia	73	44
63=	Cyprus	63	69
66=	Sri Lanka	70	53
66=	Colombia	49	46
68	El Salvador	95	--
69=	Albania	77	67
69=	Turkmenistan	58	72
71=	Finland	82	39
71=	Paraguay	67	--
73	Macedonia	74	46
74	Latvia	79	33
75	Ireland	77	61
76	Tunisia	75	--
77=	Kosovo	86	--
77=	Uzbekistan	58	--
79	Morocco	80	65
80	Nicaragua	82	--
81	Denmark	69	48
82	Algeria	62	--
83	Ecuador	80	--
84=	Kyrgyzstan	92	67
84=	Norway	65	37
86	Venezuela	96	--
87	Puerto Rico	90	--
88=	Montenegro	89
88=	Nigeria	88
90	Iceland	75	56
91=	Chile	97	71
91=	Pakistan	85	--
93	Uruguay	93	--
94	Trinidad & Tobago	82	60
95	Luxemburg	97	--
96=	Cambodia	86	--
96=	Myanmar	--	--
98	Uganda	100	--
99	Kenya	--	--
100=	Honduras	--	--
100=	Madagascar	--	--
102	Jamaica	102	--
103	Botswana	103	--
104=	Egypt
104=	Ghana	101	--
106	Tanzania	106	--
107=	Iraq	--	--
107=	Liechtenstein	90	--
109	Laos	--	--

I reported plagiarism in a PhD, but my university ignored it

From the Guardian 8th July by Anonymous. The PhD thesis consists of some poems and a long essay. I'm not sure which is worse: awarding a PhD for something with what appears to be such a slender amount of research, the unchecked plagiarism or the author's need to be anonymous.

"I vetted the thesis and found that it had 75 pages with uncredited verbatim sentences, often more than one per page. Sometimes they were from items cited in the bibliography, suggesting amateur citation skills – cut and paste instead of paraphrase (even though the candidate knew full well to use quote marks when quoting elsewhere in the thesis). On at least 10 occasions sentences were from items not cited in the bibliography at all, but from academic articles and reviews."..."This PhD sets a precedent that suggests other candidates would not have their doctorates stripped from them for using multiple uncredited texts in their creative writing. This also sets a precedent that a PhD with nearly a 100 verbatim borrowings in its critical writing does not lead to the removal of the doctorate from the doctor. Once it’s passed, it’s passed."

This could be the most important ranking of all

TOP500 has announced its latest list of supercomputers. First place goes to China, which now has 167 systems in the top 500 compared to 165 for the USA.

"A new Chinese supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight, captured the number one spot on the latest TOP500 list of supercomputers released on Monday morning at the ISC High Performance conference (ISC) being held in Frankfurt, Germany.  With a Linpack mark of 93 petaflops, the system outperforms the former TOP500 champ, Tianhe-2, by a factor of three. The machine is powered by a new ShenWei processor and custom interconnect, both of which were developed locally, ending any remaining speculation that China would have to rely on Western technology to compete effectively in the upper echelons of supercomputing."

Here are the number of systems located in various other countries:

Japan 34
Germany 26
France 20
India 15
UK 13
South Korea 10
Russia 7
Italy 5
Saudi Arabia 5
Sweden 5
Australia 5
Brazil 4
South Africa 1
Canada 1
Singapore 1

Apart from Saudi Arabia, there are no supercomputers in any Muslim country. There are none in Africa except for the single system in South Africa. There are none in Latin America outside Brazil.

China has reached parity with the US and is now heading for supremacy.

More on THE’s bespoke rankings

Times Higher Education (THE) have just announced another regional ranking, this time for Latin America, at another prestigious summit in Bogota, Colombia.

It seems that THE have entered a stage of imperial overreach, announcing new projects, publishing various indicators as stand-alone rankings and moving into previous unranked corners of the world. They have tried rankings for the BRICS Plus countries, Africa, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Asia and Latin America, and apparently have plans to enter the lucrative US college ranking business and the UK teaching-orientated market.

The venture into regional rankings has been accompanied by a noticeable tendency to tailor their rankings to the benefit of the hosts of their summit series, which is presumably what they mean by bespoke. 

The MENA universities summit in Qatar in February 2015 was introduced by a single indicator (citations) “snapshot” ranking which put Texas A and M University at Qatar, a branch campus that offered nothing but engineering courses, at the top. In case anyone is wondering, this was the result of a single faculty member with a joint appointment with the mother campus in Texas who was on the list of authors for a hugely cited physics paper. Qatar University was fourth.  If the Teaching or Research indicator cluster had been used  the ranking would have been rather different.

In this snapshot, United Arab Emirates University was 11th and the American American University of Sharjah 17th.

In January 2016 THE produced another ranking for the MENA summit held at the United Emirates University in Al Ain, UAE, in February. This time THE simply used all of the indicators in the world rankings, not just the citations indicator. The UAE University was fifth and the American University of Sharjah eighth. Texas A and M University was not included and Qatar University was sixth.

THE then went to Africa for a summit at the University of Johannesburg. Once again they produced a citations based ranking but this time they used fractional counting, dividing the citations to mega-papers among the contributing researchers and institutions. When the ranking was announced, the University of Johannesburg was in ninth place ahead of University of Marrakech Cadi Ayyad of Morocco, which was a participant in various large scale physics projects. If THE had calculated citations without using fractional counting, as it did in the 2014-15 world rankings, then Cadi Ayyad would have been second in Africa and if they had used the overall results of the world rankings it would have been fourth.

At the next African summit at the University of Ghana in April 2016 THE used all the indicators of their world rankings without further adjustment. The world ranking methodology had been changed in 2015 to dilute the distorting effects of the regional modification to the citations indicator and multi-author papers were not counted.

In these rankings Cadi Ayyad was outscored by the University of Ghana, the local flagship. Using the world ranking methodology the University of Ghana went from the twelfth place it was given at the Johannesburg summit to seventh.

Next we come to the recent Asian University Rankings announced by THE at a summit held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The big surprise of these rankings was the fall of the University of Tokyo (Todai) from first to seventh place behind the University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), rising from tenth, Peking University, the University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

The fall of Tokyo seems implausible. In the Shanghai research based ranking the University of Tokyo has always been in first place among Asian universities and last year the top six in Asia were all Japanese or Israeli institutions. There was no Hong Kong university in the top 150 and HKUST was behind at least 26 other Asian universities. Singaporean institutions also trailed behind the leading Japanese universities. Tokyo was also the top Asian university in the URAP and CWUR rankings.

In addition, Tokyo had been top of THE’s Asian rankings ever since they started. It seems hard to see how Tokyo could fall and NTU rise so quickly. Universities are big things often with tens of thousands of students, thousands of faculty, millions of dollars, thousands of papers, citations and patents. Changes like this are often associated with changes in methodology or occasionally with mergers or structural reorganisation.

Early this year there was an important seminar at Ural Federal University in Ekaterinberg that discussed the consequences of changes in rankings methodology. With the  latest edition of the THE Asian university rankings we have a perfect example of the damage that such changes can do to some universities and the benefits they might confer on others.

THE has informed the University of Tokyo and other Japanese universities that the reason why they are falling in the rankings is that they are not international enough and that they arenot funded well enough. THE is not being entirely disinterested here. Their world rankings have three indicators that measure income and three that measure international orientation in various ways.

And it does seem strange that after cruising along for a few years at the top of the Asian charts Todai should suddenly plunge to seventh place, overtaken by two Chinese, two Singaporean and two Hong Kong Universities, one of  which was summit host HKUST. 

What happened was that in 2015 and 2016 THE made a number of methodological decisions that worked to the advantages of universities in Hong Kong and Singapore and to the disadvantage of those in Japan, especially the University of Tokyo.

First, there were several methodological changes to the 2015 world rankings. The first of these was not counting  multinational papers with more than 1,000 authors. This had been a major problem of the THE rankings and in combination with some other features of their citation indicator, meant that, a university with a few hyper-papers and a low number of total papers, could soar to the top of the citations chart. Over the years a succession of unlikely institutions have been proclaimed as world or regional leaders for research impact: Alexandria University, Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute, Rice University, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Federico Santa Maria Technical University, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

It was a good idea for THE to do something about the multi-author problem but the obvious thing to do was to introduce fractional counting of citations so that if a university contributed one out of 100 authors to a paper then it would get 1/100^th of the total citation count. This is a perfectly feasible option. It has been done by the Leiden Ranking and recently by the US News subject rankings and by THE for the 2015 Africa ranking

The solution chosen by THE worked to the disadvantage of some Japanese universities that had contributed to such mega-projects, especially  Tokyo Metropolitan University which had a perfect score for research impact in 2014, something that it liked to brag about in adverts. In contrast, universities in Hong Kong and Singapore did better for citations in 2015 because they were not involved in such projects.

Something else that helped universities in Hong Kong was that in 2015 THE started counting students and faculty from mainland China as international when they went to Hong Kong, which boosted the international outlook scores for Hong Kong universities. Peter Mathieson of the University of Hong Kong noticed and warned everybody not to get too excited.

In addition to this, THE has, as noted in a earlier post, recalibrated its world ranking indicators, reducing the weighting for the research and teaching reputation survey, where Todai does very well, and increasing that for industry income where Peking and Tsinghua have perfect scores of 100, and NTU, HKUST and the University of Hong Kong do better than the University of Tokyo.

By the way, the speakers at the Asian summit included the heads of the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, but nobody from Japan. 

And getting back to the Latin American summit in Colombia, THE did another bit of recalibration, lopping off 10% from the citations indicator and giving it to the research and teaching indicators. The result was that Federico Santa Maria University, Valparaiso, third in Latin America and best in Chile in the world rankings, was demoted to 13th place. The University of the Andes, Bogota, was, as one would now expect, tenth.

08/10/16 Updated to include a reference to the 2016 MENA summit.

Has someone been upgrading the simulation?

An article in the Independent by Matthew Norman suggests that we have slipped into a parallel universe, propelled through hyper-space into another reality. The evidence is Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Opposition, Leicester City top of the English Premier League, Brexit, Novak Djokovich losing at Wimbledon and so on.

My suspicion is that we haven't landed in a parallel universe. It is more likely that that we living in a computer simulation which from time to time needs to be updated, leading to temporary anomalies like neutrinos going backwards in time or Wales advancing to the Euro 2016 semi-finals.

Perhaps we will wake up tomorrow and find that something even more improbable has occurred, the inauguration of President Trump, Pete Best joining Paul McCartney for a reunion tour or Boris Johnson going into a monastery.

Or Google Inc. as number five research institution in the world, up from 195th two years ago, ahead of Yale and Princeton. That might actually give us a clue as to who is running the simulation.