Friday, October 28, 2011

Privatizing Education – There are many reasons to believe that the present strategy will fail

Posted by Colombo Telegraph ⋅ October 28, 2011 ⋅ Leave a Comment

Filed Under GDP and Education, Human Rights, international schools in Sri Lanka, Privatizing Education in Sri Lanka, Professor Vijaya Kumar, South Asia Institute of Technology and Medicine, US Universities

By Professor Vijaya Kumar -

Professor Vijaya Kumar

Sri Lanka is proud of its free education system but the system is not without problems. Wide disparities in quality make parents clamour for admission to the well-known national schools to ensure better opportunities for their children. This has led to both widespread corruption in admission at primary level and the development of a parallel unregulated education system in the form of “international” schools outside the national education system. Although students could theoretically move into better schools through the Year 5 examination, this is near impossible from rural schools. The failure of the secondary school system is shown by the fact that 50% of students sitting the O/L examination fail in Mathematics, blocking all avenues of decent employment. Although governments pays lip-service to the need for English, IT knowledge and science, most rural schools do not have competent staff and many are even without electricity connections.

It is generally accepted that private universities have helped improve education in developed countries like the United States. What is not often emphasized is that most of them are “not for profit” Universities

Although the enrolment rate in primary school in Sri Lanka is extremely high at 99.7%, tertiary enrolment at 4% places Sri Lanka in the world’s bottom 15. The benefits of education for the country’s workforce are therefore mixed. The average Sri Lankan would have three years of secondary education, but less than three months of tertiary education placing the country in the world’s top 30 and bottom 20 in these categories. This is not surprising as there is only space in the state Universities to accommodate 15% of those qualifying each year. The GCE (A/L) examination is therefore very competitive and admission to professional courses is biased towards the urban elite and rich students who have access to expensive tuition, making a mockery of “free” education. While the district quota system aims to correct this bias, it is only able to make a small dent to the injustice in the system as it favours provincial elites over the rural poor.
Sri Lanka has failed to invest adequately on education with public expenditure on education being slightly less than the 2.4% of GDP spent by Bangladesh and the 3.1% by India and much less than the 4.3% spent by Thailand and 7% spent by Malaysia. The problem is made even more acute because while most of these countries make in addition substantial private investments in education, Sri Lanka’s policy has been to discourage private investment in education.
Government should be urged to greatly increase its investment in education. It was encouraging to note that one of the demands during the recent University pay dispute was to increase investment in education to 6% of GDP. At primary and secondary levels, there must be a serious attempt to substantially improve schools catering to the needs of the rural poor and address imbalances in human resources by substantially increasing salaries and privileges of teachers willing to work in these difficult areas. There is no other way of improving access to Mathematics, English and IT training in the rural sector, although this may be resisted by the highly politicized largely incompetent educational system.
Having failed to invest in education, the government is now pointing to deficiencies in the sector to emphasize the need to promote private investment in education. Issues concerning the South Asia Institute of Technology and Medicine, a rather odd name for a private medical university highlight the problems many of our neighbours have had to face when opening up the field to private education. While agreeing that the introduction of private sector education may provide enhanced opportunities for Sri Lankan children in tertiary education, there are many reasons to believe that the present strategy will fail, simply because there is no mechanism in place to ensure quality, proper admission procedures and reasonable fees. It is always difficult to ensure fairness in private education. Strategies include providing a third of the places on scholarship by increasing fees by 50% and fairer systems of admission for both categories which rely exclusively on the A/L merit list have rarely succeeded.
It is generally accepted that private universities have helped improve education in developed countries like the United States. What is not often emphasized is that most of them are “not for profit” Universities which have become prestigious because all profits are used to improve the University, unlike the highly profitable business ventures masquerading as educational initiatives in Sri Lanka both at international school and tertiary education level. Although India has seen big business houses like Tata and Birla establishing research institutions and postgraduate Universities run by the state sector with minimum interference, we are yet to see similar initiatives in Sri Lanka.
The sad experience in our region has been that very few private Universities initiate courses other than in the highly profitable fields of medicine, information technology and business studies although national development strategies require investment in engineering and science. Many issues should be sorted out before initiating a pro-private education policy and before that it is vital for government to convince people that it is truly interested in improving education in the country by enhancing investment in the state sector and correcting the present injustice in the system.
*Vijaya Kumar is senior Professor of chemistry at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. He also a senior member of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. This article provided by Anik Pituwa , the left platform.

Faster-than-light neutrino experiment to be run again

By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website

The neutrinos are fired deep under the Italian Apennines to the Gran Sasso lab

Scientists who announced that sub-atomic particles might be able to travel faster than light are to rerun their experiment in a different way.

This will address criticisms and allow the physicists to shore up their analysis as much as possible before submitting it for publication.
Dr Sergio Bertolucci said it was vital not to "fool around" given the staggering implications of the result.
So they are doing all they can to rule out more pedestrian explanations.
Physicists working on the Opera experiment announced the perplexing findings last month.
Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern (the home of the Large Hadron Collider) in Geneva toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away in Italy seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second earlier than light would have.

“Start Quote

It's like sending a series of loud and isolated clicks instead of a long blast on a horn”

Prof Matt Strassler Rutgers University

The speed of light is widely regarded as the Universe's ultimate velocity limit. Outlined first by James Clerk Maxwell and then by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity, much of modern physics relies on the idea that nothing can travel faster than light.

For many, the most comforting explanation is that some repeated "systematic error" has so far eluded the experimenters.
Since September, more than 80 scientific papers about the finding have been posted to the arXiv pre-print server. Most propose theoretical solutions for the observation; a few claim to find problems.
Dr Bertolucci, the director of research at Cern, told BBC News: "In the last few days we have started to send a different time structure of the beam to Gran Sasso.
"This will allow Opera to repeat the measurement, removing some of the possible systematics."
The neutrinos that emerge at Gran Sasso start off as a beam of proton particles at Cern. Through a series of complex interactions, neutrino particles are generated from this beam and stream through the Earth's crust to Italy.

Originally, Cern fired the protons in a long pulse lasting 10 microseconds (10 millionths of a second).
The neutrinos showed up 60 nanoseconds (60 billionths of a second) earlier than light would have over the same distance.
However, the time measurement is not direct; the researchers cannot know how long it took an individual neutrino to travel from Switzerland to Italy.

Cern's director of research says the new experimental design will be more efficient

Instead, the measurement must be performed statistically: the scientists superimpose the neutrinos' "arrival times" on the protons' "departure times", over and over again and taking an average.
But some physicists say that any wrong assumptions made when relating these data sets could produce a misleading result.
This should be addressed by the new measurements, in which protons are sent in a series of short bursts - lasting just one or two nanoseconds, thousands of times shorter - with a large gap (roughly 500 nanoseconds) in between each burst.
This system, says Dr Bertolucci, is more efficient: "For every neutrino event at Gran Sasso, you can connect it unambiguously with the batch of protons at Cern," he explained.
Clicking in Physicist Matt Strassler, who raised concerns about the original methods, welcomed the new experimental design.
Writing on his blog, Prof Strassler, from Rutgers University in New Jersey, said: "It's like sending a series of loud and isolated clicks instead of a long blast on a horn; in the latter case you have to figure out exactly when the horn starts and stops, but in the former you just hear each click and then it's already over."

Albert Einstein in Pittsburgh on 28 December 1934

Einstein's relativity theory holds that nothing can exceed the speed of light

The re-jigged neutrino run will end in November, when Cern has to switch from accelerating protons to accelerating lead ions. Opera scientists hope to include these measurements in the manuscript they will submit for publication in a scientific journal.
One of the main challenges to the collaboration's work comes from Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow and his Boston University colleague Andrew Cohen.
In a recent paper, the physicists argue that if neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light, they would rapidly lose energy, depleting the beam of more energetic particles. This phenomenon was not seen by the Opera experiment.
Cross checks Dr Bertolucci called this study "elegant", but added: "An experimentalist has to prove that a measurement is either right or wrong. If you interpret every new measurement with older theories, you will never get a new theory.
"More than a century ago, Michelson and Morley measured the speed of light in the direction Earth was moving and in the opposite direction. They found the speed was equal in both directions."
This result helped to spur the development of the radical new theory of special relativity.
"If they had interpreted it using classical, Newtonian theory they would never have published," said Dr Bertolucci.
Next year, teams working on two other Gran Sasso experiments - Borexino and Icarus - will begin independent cross-checks of Opera's results.
The US Minos experiment and Japan's T2K experiment will also test the observations. It is likely to be several months before they report back.
Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

GMOA to work out its own protocol for doctors

The Government Medical Officers Association (GMOA) said yesterday it would compile its own report on the controversial private medical college in Malabe and would introduce a protocol on the minimum standards required to practice medicine in Sri Lanka.GMOA spokesman Dr. Upul Gunasekara said the protocol would be based on guidelines established by the World Health Organisation and Indian medical standards. He said the GMOA report would be out before the Health Ministry’s five member committee report which was due next month.

GMOA Assistant Secretary Dr. Sankalpa Marasinghe said the South Asian Institute of Technology and Medicine (SAITM) had not adhered to the conditions in the gazette notification issued in August this year and that the gazette notification did not directly stipulate the exact time duration by which some of the conditions needed to be fulfilled.

He said one month after the gazette notice was issued SAITM was expected to submit information on the recruitment of appropriate academic and administrative staff, information on the corporate plan for the next five years as well as the deed of trust relating to the establishment of SAITM.

“We have reason to believe that none of these requirements have been fulfilled by the institution,” Dr. Marasinghe said.

Dr. Gunesekara said several parents had made complaints to the GMOA and that all doctors who had enrolled their children at SAITM had taken them out of the private institution.

Dr. Marasinghe alleged that the institution was not affiliated to the Russian Nizhny Novgorod State Medical Academy and that two institutions instead have shared an agreement and alleged that based on the agreement students will be transferred to Russia through a student exchange programme. He said that the parents have not received receipts for the payments made to the institution.“We tried contacting the Russian university over the phone, by email and every other way possible but that have not been reachable,” he said and added that the Education Ministry, Higher Education Ministry, Justice Ministry, Defence Ministry and Finance Ministry should investigate the matter. (By Olindhi Jayasundere)

Published online 20 October 2011 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2011.607

News: Explainer

Different method, same result: global warming is real

Independent analysis confirms earlier results but aims for greater transparency.

Jeff Tollefson

Richard Muller led the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Group's review of global climate data.Dan Tuffs/Getty Images

After generating considerable attention with a preview on Capitol Hill last spring, an independent team of scientists has formally released their analysis of the land surface temperature record. Led by Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study takes a different and more comprehensive approach than earlier assessments, but reaches the same basic conclusion: global warming is happening. Nature examines how the new study differs from its predecessors.
What is the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study?
Until now, instrumental temperature records dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century have been compiled by three main research groups: NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Greenbelt, Maryland; the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington DC; and a collaboration between Britain's Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. All three records were developed in different ways, using separate, but overlapping, sets of data. By and large, all three studies line up fairly well as they document rising temperatures, particularly the sharp spike in recent decades, but that hasn't halted criticism from climate sceptics regarding the quality of the data and the rigor of the analysis.
What was the research team's goal, and did they achieve it?
Muller says he listened to the sceptics and decided that an independent analysis was in order. He and his team decided to tackle the temperature record independently, on the basis of first principles. They say their results line up with previously published studies and suggest that the average global land temperature has risen by roughly 0.9 °C since the 1950s.
Muller says he is surprised at how well the findings line up with previous analyses, which he takes as evidence that the various scientific teams working on these data did indeed go about their work "in a truly unbiased manner".
What did the team do differently?
The Berkeley researchers developed their own statistical methods so that they could use data from virtually all of the temperature stations on land — some 39,000 in all — whereas the other research groups relied on subsets of data from several thousand sites to build their records. This meant that they also had to figure out ways to handle shorter temperature records from instruments or stations where the record was interrupted.
Muller and his team also used a different approach to analysing the data. Scientists working on the earlier studies adjusted raw data to account for differences in the time of day when readings were made, for example, or for higher temperatures caused by the urban heat island effect, in which cities tend to be warmer than natural landscapes. Muller says his team included the raw data in its analysis and then applied standard statistical techniques to remove outliers.
Is there an advantage to tackling the problem this way?
The team claims that this method is more transparent than those used by the other groups. And it may be true that this kind of analysis could make it easier for outside groups to reproduce and analyse the study.
Has the study been peer-reviewed?
Not yet, which is a common criticism among many scientists who were already convinced that the earlier analyses were solid. The Berkeley team is preparing to submit four papers to the Journal of Geophysical Research for peer review. One paper describes the method and how it was applied to the larger temperature record. Another discusses the various methods for dealing with known problems and biases in the temperature record. A third focuses on the urban heat island effect and a fourth looks specifically at temperature stations that have been labelled as problematic by sceptics.

Is the latest study likely to win over any sceptics?
It's too early to tell what kind of effect the report will have, but there are already signs of scepticism among the sceptics. Nonetheless, Steve McIntyre, who runs the sceptic blog Climate Audit, said in an interview that the team deserves credit for going back to the primary data and doing the work. Although he hasn't gone through the papers in detail, he is already questioning the results reported by the Berkeley team regarding the questionable research stations and the urban heat island effect. McIntyre, a statistician, says he has already run a preliminary analysis and was unable to reproduce the results reported by Muller and his crew.
What comes next?
Now we wait to see how the peer-review process plays out. Meanwhile, the Berkeley team will post a complete file of the temperature record on its website by the end of this week. "Previously, the data were spread over 15 different databases with almost as many different formats, and a great deal of overlap," Muller says. "I would like to think that we are opening this field up to a much larger community by reducing the barrier to entry."

Students leaving Malabe PMC – GMOA

It’s only a false rumour - Dr. Fernando

October 27, 2011, 10:32 pm

By Don Asoka Wijewardena

The Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA) yesterday accused the South Asian Institute of Technology and Management (SAITM) of cheating a large number of students and their parents.

GMOA Assistant Secretary Dr. Upul Gunasekera said some parents had sought the GMOA’s help to get refunds and the GMOA in turn had requested the Ministries of Health, Defence, Justice and Finance to help the disgruntled parents get their refunds.

Speaking to the media, at the GMOA head office yesterday, Dr. Gunasekera said that the gazette notification 1721/19 of 30. 8. 211 was questionable. Although a month had elapsed, the requirements stipulated had not been fulfilled. It was not clear whether the degree awarding status was provisional or permanent.

Dr. Gunasekera said though the Malabe medical school did not have clinical training facilities, it had announced that it had access to two private hospitals for clinical training. The SAITM management had not even informed the parents of the students where clinical training would be done.

It was the right of every patient, admitted either to a private hospital or State-run hospital, to be aware whether they were subject to examination by medical students and their informed consent should be obtained for that purpose, Dr. Gunasekera said claiming that no receipts had been issued to parents who had made payments to the Malabe private medical college.

GMOA Assistant Secretary Dr. Sankalpa Marasinghe said that it had been revealed in newspapers that some students who had enrolled at the Malabe medical school had not passed the GCE A/L. The GMOA would be compelled to request the UGC and all other relevant authorities to inquire into that matter urgently, he said.

Contacted for comment, Malabe Private Medical School Director Dr. Neville Fernando dismissed all allegations levelled by the GMOA as baseless. No parent had sought to withdraw students, he insisted. Parents were not supposed to pay direct to the school. They were advised to pay the school through a bank. Once parents made payments the Banks would issue them with receipts, he said.

Dr. Fernanado added that he had invited all GMOA office bearers to have a discussion on the issue, but there had been no positive response. It was not compulsory for any medical student to go to Russia to complete his or her final examination. Any student after successful completion of four years would be able to sit the final examination. The Malabe medical school would issue a recognized MBBS degree, Dr. Fernando said.

Several rival organisations had, Dr. Fernando said, launched a mud-slinging campaigns against the Malabe medical school. His medical school conducted its affairs in a very transparent manner, he said inviting the GMOA and other critics to have a dialogue without spreading false rumours.

‘UGC delaying our payments’– FUTA

There were far more pressing problems – UGC Chairman

October 27, 2011, 10:26 pm

by Dasun Edirisinghe

University teachers are likely to go on the warpath again after two months of silence on their salaries issue. The government’s delay ito increase the allowances for internal examinations, visiting lecturers, administrative work and postgraduate supervision has irked the teachers.

President of the Federation of University Teachers Associations (FUTA) Dr. Nirmal Ranjith Devasiri blamed the University Grants Commission (UGC) for the delay.

"Our demand is to have these allowances increased five fold as they had not been increased for a last 20 years," he said.

Dr. Devasiri said that the committee, appointed by the Higher Education Ministry, comprising representatives from the UGC, FUTA and the ministry also recommended that the allowances be increased.

But, the UGC was still delaying it, he said.

"At a recent meeting, the Treasury too agreed to increase those allowances, but UGC wants to appoint another committee to increase it," the FUTA Chairman said.

Citing some examples, Dr. Devasiris said that the visiting lecturer allowance was still Rs. 500 per lecture. If some teacher went to Anuradhapura for a lecture how could he/she afford the other costs? He asked

University teachers launched their trade union action by withdrawing from the volunteer posts they held three months ago and they suspended it following a ministry assurance to solve it immediately.

Dr. Devasiri warned that if the government did not take immediate action they could revive it at any time.

Contacted for comment, Chairman of the UGC Prof Gamini Samaranayake said that the issue at hand was not worthy of comment.

He added that there are many other issues in universities to be reported in newspapers rather than the salary and allowances issues of the teachers.