From: wslee@almond-frost.ai.mit.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asean
Subject: Research in M'sia [long] (was: Partial explanation)
Date: 11 Dec 1992 19:42:49 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: almond-frost.ai.mit.edu

In article <92345.120929ASCKN@ASUACAD.BITNET>, C. Ng <ASCKN@ASUACAD.BITNET> writes:
|>    Has any Malaysian university's faculty member published any leading
	  ^^^						      ^^^
|> paper in any area, either physical sciences or social sciences? 
	    ^^^^
In article <92345.214423ASCKN@ASUACAD.BITNET>, Chee Ng <ASCKN@ASUACAD.BITNET> writes:
|> >        hmm ...  my housemate and his lecturer co-published
|> >a paper in EM theory just a few month ago .. related to his undergraduate
|> >thesis in UM , if I am not wrong .. I should ask him ....
|> >
|>    1/n equals zero when n tends to infinity.

	Please pardon my difficiency.  Based on the original post reproduced above,
I was under the impression that the author was either 

	(1) asking for a verifiable example 
or	(2) insinuating that NO faculty member from M'sia publishes in any area 
	    in any journal.

	It is my inclination to think that (2) is the case, but I shall not bet
anything on that intuition.  In anycase, I fail to see how the example given 
fails to :

	(1) provide a verifiable instance ( contact me if you want to talk to
	    the person I mentioned. )
	(2) contradict the insinuation.

One thing about the great tradition of s.c.a is that people have a tendency to say
"give me just one example of ..." , and when thus obliged, "1/n equals zero when 
n tends to infinity" .....   

Note that for any constant k,   k/n still tends to zero when n goes to infinity .... 
which means , using this line of argument, no matter how many verifiable examples 
are given,  those examples still don't count, according to the above argument.

Also, for the "1/n equals zero when n tends to infinity" premise to hold , 
one must first establish that  n  * DOES *    tend to infinity.
But I failed to find evidence in the post to support that.
(ie. that there are many-many Phd lecturers in M'sia)   On the other hand, 
there were still a fair number of non-Phd lecturer in the M'sian U's the last time
I was there. [ This info is 2.5 years old.  For more current statistics, 
contact the Dean, EE Dept, Eng. Faculty, UM, Lembah Pantai, 59100, KL. ]

I don't mean to be fussy, but as a scholar, one should be precise about one's
claims, lest one eats one's words.  Take for example, given a set X of integers, 
suppose person P claims that there are no prime numbers in X.   Then P
is proven to be gravely mistaken should * ANY * number in X is shown to be non-prime.
"1/n equals zero ..." type of arguments do not hold.   If one *means* to say
*most* numbers in X are prime, then perhaps one *should* say it as such ...
 
|> >        Harvard is currently cooperating with the universities in Malaysia
|> >doing a research on the Malaysia economy .. I talked to the professor
|> >in charge personally for two hours over the summer, it's a two year project,
|> >and will result in a 3 volume report.  A friend of mine at MIT interned for   t
|> >tha
|> >project over the summe while he was back in KL ...
|> >
|>   Can we differentiate report from original academic writing here?
|> One is absolutely different from the other.

	My personal feeling is that if a studies contributes new insights and
ideas, then it is good research, regardless of the form in which it is presented.

	To me, a published paper does not carry the same meaning as "original
idea".  If we do review the social science papers (for example), many seem to contain
day-to-day common sense, but "polished" into a "lemma" or "theory".  
Like the "misery index" for example, it seems that what it says is intuitively 
common sense.  But the merit of the person who introduced it was to bring insight 
into it, and to formalize it into a precise statement, on which other studies could
be built. ... That I think is good research, as good as a report containing 
analysis that may give insight to ways of improving the economy. 

	On the other hand, a scan through the literature will easily expose
a number of papers that are basically "search-and-replace-word" type
papers, ie, simply a re-write of existing papers with minute further 
polishing..  Perhaps this is the down side of "publish or perish" ?  
I think this may be a good topic for another thread ..

|>   In finance, the leading journals are J of Finance, J of Financial
|> economics, Review of Financial Studies, J of Financial Reseach, and
|> J. of financial and quantitaive analysis.
|> 
|>   In  economiscs, the leading journals are AER, JPE, JTE, and
|> Economic Literature.
|> 
|>   Of course, the above lists are not exhaustive.  But, if a scholar
|> subscribes and reads thouse journals on a regular basis, he/she
|> should have kept him/herself up-to-date.  But, local universities
|> hardly subscribe to even those few mentioned above.

	that is a very impressive list.  You don't by any chance follow
the journals in electronics, electro-magnetism, civil engineering,
architecture, chemistry, pure/applied mathematics, computer
architecture, medicine, clinical psychology etc ? 
	
	I am * NOT * trying to be sacarstic, but rather pointing out that the
collection you do follow is a small sample of one fraction of all the literature
out there, and I failed to see how you could justify deducing from this small
sample that "Has any Malaysian university's faculty member published any leading
paper in any area, either physical sciences or social sciences? " ...

	now while "Has any Malaysian university's faculty member published 
any leading paper in any area, either physical sciences or social sciences?" 
may indeed be a fact, we would still have expected a scholar to be more
critical on himself/herself, as to not make speculative claims before
he/she can produce verifiable evidence ..  [ still, I may be wrong on this
issue .. ]

|>    Expectation comes with proper compensation.  We can expect the PhD's to
|> engage in research if we structure our compensation package to reward
|> those who do pioneering research.  We are not forcing them to do it, but
|> we can make it a publish or perish type of job for them.  Most top US
|> research-oriented universities are doing it now.  I assume you are
|> aware of this.  Can we do it in M'sia?  Yes, we can if we can separate
|> politics from academics, or simply by not rewarding those who refuse to
|> do reseach and instead choose to suck up to the politicians.

	When comparing M'sia with other countries, people tend to forget that
M'sia is still a developing country, and the infrastruture is simply not on
par with USA/German etc.

	while in the US, you have access to ample number-crunching compuatation
power needed  to fit your banking statiscs curve, or what have you, they are 
still using the 80286 or even the 8088.  The "minicomputer" in EE of UM has less 
total computation than the desktop computer I am using now .. you have e-mail to 
communicate/discuss your finding/quories with your colleagues within seconds ...
but e-mail is still not freely accessible in M'sia ... we have grants from NSF and DARPA 
to do our research ... what have they ?

Here, you have five to ten times higher teacher/student ratio such that you have enough 
time to do resarch ... you have extra funding to hire TA's and RA's to do 
the dirty work for you ...

[ BTW, the word "you" does NOT refer to C. Ng or any specific person,
 just a figurative speech ]

In US, there are electron-microscopes for medical studies, electron- spectrometer 
for molecular biology, Cray to crunch your economic data, Lasers for
optics research, clean-rooms for VLSI research ... level 3 security labs for
toxicology research ... [ out of breadth already ]

	Even in the case of reference handbooks.  In US, various handbooks
are readily available, but M'sian book stores can't afford to keep them
in stock due to the small market ..

	and even the social environment is different. Here if you want to
spend all your time doing research, you can comfortably send your 80-year
old mother to a 'home' and have her social security pay for it ...
here when people enourage you to do a Phd, the average folks in M'sia
tell you "Phd? what for ?" ...

	Now don't get me wrong, I do agree that research is a good thing.
All I am saying is that US and M'sia are not comparable ....... and people
just can't expect them to do the same thing .. given that M'sia does not
have as "friendly" an environment for "pioneering research" .... 

	Politics is not separable from life.  for example, if you survey 
the history of "insulin", you will see the politics involved in the competition
between Harvard and Stanford during the development of insulin ...
If you scrutinize the economists of Harvard/MIT and Stanford, you should
realize how each tries to get the government to implement the school
of economic thoughts each susbcribes to ...  I agree that scholars should
not "suck up" to policitians,  but I don't think people can completely
"separate politics from academics"  ... 

	Also, I am curious if you have been to any of the M'sian U's
to investigate if they actually do any research ....  While I was in UM,
I saw several, and I shall describe two here:

	1.  using electronics, one lecturers developed a device to measure
	    the humidity (content of water) in grains (rice, barli etc),
	    and the data is used to control humidity in silo's so that
	    grains could be kept longer without getting rotten.

	2.  Using themodynamic theories, one lecturer designed a solar-energy
	    powered grain dryer, with very high efficiency ...

	people may say that "hack, that's child's play ... what research ?!!".
But I personally think that those are the *kind* of studies that would benefit
the M'sian society directly. [ people may not agree ... but this is just my 
opinion ]   ....

Frankly, I do agree with you that the M'sian U's should/could do a lot 
better if they put their efforts to it ... but I think your points could be
made many times more convincing if you resorted to less-sweeping statements,
and actually do your homework before producing a claim ... 
Also, I personally think that criticisms are more valuable when they
are accompanied with recommended solutions for discussion.  

I personally find this discussion educational, and hope that
it will keep on being this way and not fall into the 'great
traditon" of s.c.a ...


whay.