RAE 2008 + Random

If (You are in the UK) And (Are Interested in Attending Graduate School Or (Are In Graduate School And are Interested in seeing how your School 'ranks' in your respective area of study) Then you may wish to check out the Reaserch Assesment Excersice 2008 results.

The goal of the exercise is to measure the quality of research output of universities across the UK. Of a course these results are just statistics and are just about as useful as using average height of people in City A to predict the height of the next person you see.

In Informatics + CS, top scorers are Edinburgh (towering over every one), Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Bristol, Imperial College London. In Pure Maths we have Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Warwick. An entry I was surprised to see there was the Open University. I wonder how it works if there is no real central location.

In other unrelated and random un-news

Quote:

In 1992, women [in Bulgaria] obtained 57 percent of all university degrees. In addition, they obtained half of the engineering degrees, 70 percent of the natural science degrees, and 73 percent of the mathematics and computer science degrees. These percentages have not changed since 1975 (Stretenova, 1994). (See "http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf96316/figs/txtfig12.gif")

I wonder what it says on the culture and views held of said people. If it shows cultural maturity or disdain of education and book learning amongst males.