Formation of startups and new companies
Commercial exploitation of science, technology, and novelty
System of laws, regulations, strategies, and funding priorities
Discovery and creation of new knowledge of the natural world
Technological Advancements in the world.
By: Riaz Hassan
The Jakarta Post (Published on November 4, 2006)
Is the Islamic world intellectually stagnating? One way to answer this is to ask how many world-class universities there are in Muslim countries. Riaz Hassan discusses the 2006 rankings of the world’s top 200 universities by the Times Higher Education Supplement
(THES), announced last week, show the poor state of academic institutions in Muslim countries. The US , with 5 per cent of the world’s population, has 54, or 27 per cent, of the top 200 universities. Forty-six Muslim countries on the other hand, with 16 per cent of the world’s population, have only one or two per cent of the universities on the THES list. The two universities are Malaysia ‘s Universiti Kabangsaan and University of Malaya , which rank 185th and 192nd with overall scores of 29.2 and 28.6 respectively from a possible 100. On the important measure of faculty citation, an indicator of intellectual creativity and impact, they scored lowest.
The THES rankings were based on the assessment of more than 1,000 higher education institutions using five key indicators. These included asking 3,700 research-active academics globally to name the top 30 research universities in their field of expertise as well as counting the citations per published paper by researchers at each institution. The other indicators were the number of foreign students enrolled, staff-student ratios and top companies’ assessment of the quality of an institution’ s graduates. For Islamic countries, notwithstanding some isolated centres of excellence, these rankings confirmed the findings of other studies.
By Dr. Athar Osama
On 12 April 1961, Russia’s Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit around the earth in Space. Soon after, United States launched its own quest to conquer space. Kennedy’s vow to send a man to the moon before the end of the 1960s, unleashed an unprecedented race to gain and demonstrate scientific knowledge and technological knowledge between the two super powers.
Soon enough, American Neil Armstrong took the ‘one small step for a man,’ that became ‘a giant leap for mankind’ and rest, as they say, is history. The 1970s became a decade, when man dreamt of venturing farther and farther, into the exciting corners of the galaxy and creating co...
By the Editors of Muslim-Science.com
Dr. Rana Dajani obtained a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Iowa, USA; a Fulbright alumnus, she is currently Assistant Professor and Former Director of the Center of Studies at the Hashemite University, Jordan. Her research focuses on genome-wide association studies concerning diabetes and cancer in ethnic populations in Jordan. Other research includes signaling transduction, stem cells, and bioinformatics.
She is a strong advocate of the theory of biological evolution and of its compatibility with Islam. On the broader horizon, Dr. Dajani has developed a community-based model and philosophy, “We Love Reading (WLR)...
By: Tan Sri Dr. Omar Abdul Rahman
At the 34th convocation of UPM in October 2010 in my “ucapan balas” for the conferment of emeritus professorship of the university, I had suggested a defined new role for our public universities in line with current emphasis in national development. Because they are expected to, and in the position of contributing to the government’s socio-economic transformation program, I had suggested they be called transformational universities (TUs). What prompted me to do so was also the active discourse on the changing role of universities that has been going on for a number of years in academic circles in the West.
For example, during a...
By:Athar Osama
Published on SciDev.Net on 18 May 2012
Building a knowledge society in the Islamic World requires structural change — not fads and symbolism, argues Athar Osama.
Last month, a special report by The Economist magazine announced the dawn of the third industrial revolution, built on the idea of individualised production powered by 3D printers and nano devices that create objects atom by atom. [1]
It talked of a not-so-distant age when the global centre of gravity of production — which in the 1970s moved to developing countries like China, Malaysia, Taiwan — will revert to the developed world, in order to be nearest to the ‘brains’....
The Islamic world’s current science effort is on life support and without major ‘surgery’ could be yet another policy failure, says Athar Osama.
In 2007, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) created the Science, Technology and Innovation Organisation (STIO) to jumpstart science cooperation among its 57 member countries. Three years later, a founding meeting approved an annual budget of US$70 million, with four founding members — Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and and Syria — committing US$5 million each to the budget.
To date, 20 countries have joined STIO — but none has honoured its financial commitment, according to the organisatio...
By Zakri Abdul Hamid –
Science Adviser to the Prime Minister of Malaysia
For Malaysia, the past three decades have been a period of rapid and sustained growth. Measuring growth with the traditional Gross Domestic Product yardstick, Malaysia’s economy has increased more than a hundredfold. Over the past four decades, we have averaged nearly 7% annual growth. Poverty rates have fallen from 49%, to less than 4%. Per-capita GDP has risen from US$370, to more than US$9,000.
This growth has been matched by a fundamental change in the structure of our economy. Like many Asian countries, we have moved from a basis of agriculture and raw commodities to a multi-sector eco...
By: Dr. Athar Osama
Muslim-Science.Com met with Tan Sri Dr. Omar Abdur Rahman, Mahathir’s Science Advisor for over a decade and half and, the “prime mover” behind Mahathir Mohammed’s vision of a Knowledge-driven Malaysia. A deeply humble man, Tan Sri Omar insists that Mahathir was a science policymaker par excellence in his own right and that he would hardly have needed a science advisor. However, he played a critical role in providing scientific credibility to Mahathir’s plans and helping the Prime Minister reach out to the scientific community to build support for his policies.
As Malaysia’s first and longest serving Science Advisor – a position t...
