[geeks] Q: Regarding Linux in K-12 education

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 11:29:35PM +0000, Mike Meredith wrote:
>None of which have a top 20 university. According to another ranking
>(by Shanghai University), the UK has 2 in the top 10. The
>Hebrew University of Jerusalem is ranked 64th; the UK has at least 5
>Universities with a higher ranking than that - the lowest (Manchester
>University) is 40th.

I can't comment about other countries but I can comment about the rankings
and Israel. Hebrew U was founded in the 1920's to be the first university
that taught in Hebrew for possibly 2000 years. Although it does have
a science campus, and an AMA accredited medical school, it is really a
liberal arts school. 

In Haifa there is the Technion, an engineering school. Weitzmann University
in Rechovot is a hard science, graduate only school. Tel Aviv univeristy is
the closest thing we have in this country to a real university. Bar-Ilan
is a science/technology/liberal arts school with a religeous focus.

The IDC in Herzilia focuses on international relations. I'm not sure what
Ben-Gurion in the south focuses on, but it is mostly related to the desert.

If you look at Israel, it is small (smaller than the state of New Jersey), and
has less people in it than London. 

University education is highly subsidized and in many ways controlled or
rationed. A program at Hebrew U for example, will not be duplicated
elsewhere. Both Hebrew U and the Technion have computer science schools,
but they teach very different things. 

Together their CS progams equal a combined hardware/software, operating system
and applications program similar to any US university, e.g. Stanford, UofP,
MIT, etc.

If you rank state wide universites as one entitiy, such as Rutger's, 
Pennsylvania State, the University of California, and so on as one university,
then to be fair you would have to rank ALL of Israel's colleges and universities
together. In that case, you would find that it ranks far higher using the 
Chinese criteria than they do individually.

Note that in Israel students start college in their 20's, not right out
of high school. They go into the army first (boys 3 years, girls 2), and then
most spend a year wandering around the world or working to make some money
to live on while they are in college.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation. 
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.