Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!sce!karam
From: karam@sce.carleton.ca (Gerald Karam)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: More on advanced degrees
Message-ID: <524@sce.carleton.ca>
Date: 15 Jan 89 02:46:06 GMT
Article-I.D.: sce.524
References: <388@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu>
Reply-To: karam@sce.UUCP (Gerald Karam)
Organization: Systems Eng., Carleton Univ., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 51

In article <388@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu> pjd@alpha.ces.cwru.edu (dr. funk) writes:
>> If you have good research it doesn't really matter where you get your
>> degree --- quality results get published (with rejections it's easier on the
>> ego to assume that reviewers are prejudiced in some way; if you are truly 
>> afraid of this, then ask for a blind review).  
>
>No disagreement here WRT journal publication. In fact, journals probably
>are the only place you can get a good quality review these days! I'm appalled
>at the poor quality of conference reviews (both rejects and ACCEPTANCES!)
>Conference committees tend to be more personality-driven.

conferences are a bit more of a problem because: (1) there is less prestige
in conference publication, and (2) the process feels a little less anonymous.

In Canada, NSERC (roughly equiv. to NSF), which is the major
gov't funding agency (almost everybody does research at the pleasure of
NSERC in sci. and eng. in Canada), attributes very little value to
conference publications because of the variations in quality --- it's journals
or nothing (that's a bit extreme but captures the sense of their direction).

>Where I disagree is in the production of the good research. If you are a
>theoretician who only needs a pad of paper and a pencil (:-), you can crank
>out very good research and get into print as an unknown. Experimental people
>need resources and must jump across the funding hurdle much sooner. In the
>design environment/hardware CAD world these days, it's tough. You must
>compete against "centers of excellence" (read that "big name") who have
>more resources for implementation. A single investigator and a handful of
>students is severely disadvantaged.

Being in the applied boat myself, I have to agree to a certain extent: again
in Canada the funding in NSERC is much more widespread (this was confirmed
by some comparison conversations with my US collegues).  There are several
reasons for this:

(1) there are almost no private universities with huge endowments and "all
the big names", thus talent and resources are somewhat more distributed.
Also with only public institutions, there is less competition.

(2) Federal Gov't policy also tends to distribute public wealth more evenly.

(3) the country is smaller.

(4) NSERC runs completely by peer review, and committees change every year,
    constantly using different faculty from schools, large and small from 
    across the country.

I agree with the centres of excellence comment, but again with our smaller
scale, who isn't in one? :-)


gerald