China Touch

Archive for September, 2011

What are the top ten Australian Universities? There is no official government ranking of universities in Australia. However there is a number of university league tables produced every year by relevant bodies such as the Melbourne Institute, The Australian Newspaper, The Good Universities Guide, THES and Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s academic ranking of world universities.

The Melbourne Institute (operated by the University of Melbourne) has produced its own ranking of the international standing of Australian universities. This ranking is based on a number of performance indicators such as international standing of staff, views of Deans and CEOs, resources, undergraduate programs, undergraduate intake and graduate programs.

According to Melbourne Institute 2007 the top ten Australian Universities (in order of ranking) are: Australian National University (ANU), University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, University of Queensland, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Monash University, University of Western Australia (UWA), University of Adelaide, Macquarie University and Queensland University of Technology. From this ranking ANU was the number one Australian university in terms of international standing and reputation, followed by Melbourne and Sydney. Is this result representative? Here we will analyze and compare it with the other two famous international league tables – THES and Academic ranking of world universities (ARWU).

Ranking Comparison:

- The list of top four universities produced by the Melbourne Institute are the same in ranking order as THES and ARWU 2007. We are confident to say that they are the Best Four – ANU, Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland.

- Group of Eight (Go8) Universities are among the top 8 universities as ranked by the three different league tables. These include the Best Four and the rest of the group – UNSW, Monash, UWA and Adelaide.

- Macquarie and QUT are among the top ten list (after Go8) in the Melbourne Institute and THES league tables.

The Bengal Institute of Technology and Management (BITM) is located in Santiniketan – a place which can be rarely associated with an engineering college. Even the surroundings are far from what you might experience at Jadavpur University or BE College (Shivpur). Seven kilometeres from Bolpur situated as if far from the maddening crowd, BITM may look desolate but once you enter you are in a different world altogether. The 60 acre campus is comprised of canteens, laboratories, gardens, huge buildings and playgrounds.

In spite of its limitations BITM (Shantiniketan) has done quite well where as the infrastructure is concerned. The five computer laboratories and digital communication engineering laboratories, besides chemistry, physics and a host of other labs prove this rightly. According to the authority the best part of the institute is its highly qualified faculty. The quality of students has also improved over the last few years. Although initially under the Visva Bharati affiliation(2001) it had a humble beginning with just 250 students, now under the West Bengal University (2003) in last 4 years BITM has admitted around 900 students in 5 engineering streams.

To know more read : BITM (Shantiniketan)

Now the long term goal according to the director of the college is, to achieve autonomy. To cope with the changing sciences and a huge syllabus what is more necessary is flexibility. Nevertheless at present it is the placement issue which forms the talk of the campus. Interviews are already organised by well known companies like Dell, Wipro, GE Capital, Reliance Petrochemical, Cadbury India, Godrej and Eveready. Special grooming sessions are also conducted for students appearing for the interviews. Thus the present scenario at BITM Santinikatan is surely indicating to a steady growth not only of the Institute itself but also of its students’ careers.

This can be said to be the fruitful consequence of the gradual yet steady development of this engineering college which enduringly enhances its way to a very prosperous future.

Read more about the Visva Bharati University.

Information technology is affecting culture and society in many important domains.
Information technology means using computers and computer software to acquire, convert process, transmit, protect and retrieve data. Computer science includes many fields, such as programming languages, computer graphics, hardware, and networks.

In 2006, some magazines rated software engineering as the best job in US. This appreciations in made in terms of growth, stress level, pay, creativity, flexibility in hours, working environment. It is also easy to enter in advance in the software engineering field.

Information Technology include many subfields, one of the most important is networking. The most common is the LAN (Local Area Network). This network covers a local area. It is designated to be used in offices, group of buildings, office, college, home or libraries. Usually, LANs are using Ethernet or Wi-Fi technology. The TCP/IP protocol is universal, and switched Ethernet is the most common. The public knows the Internet connection, the largest public network.

A spectacular and easy to use network is the wireless LAN or WLAN (wireless local area network). Wireless means that two o more computers are linked without cables. Radio waves are making possible the communication between computers in a restricted area, named basic service set. A laptop or PDA user can change his location without loosing the network connection. An access point is facilitating the permanent connection. This type of network becomes more and more popular; it is really efficient to use laptops and PDAs without loosing the Internet connection and enjoying the mobility advantages in the same time.

But the most attractive part in the computers’ world is computer programming. This means writing a set of commands or instructions that can be interpreted or compiled, transformed into an executable file. This can be execute, giving or no the expected results. Programming requires logic, first of all. But important knowledge of mathematics, science, physics, engineering, and art are required. Why art? A well designed menu in a customer application is more attractive and easy to use than a ugly one, even everything is correct and logic. And what about web design? It means imaging, animations and presentations. Without a good taste in arts, a web site will never attract visitors, and it is its main function.

In software engineering, programming is only a phase in the custom application development process. A computer can execute only the machine language programs. At the Information Technology beginnings, programmers worked only in machine code. It was very difficult and it was rapidly replaced by p-code, for example, used in the popular Java programming language, from Sun. The well known Microsoft software producer is also using the byte-code in the .net language family.

There are many programming languages. Some are already history, like COBOL or FORTRAN. Some are intensively used, like C and its versions. C is a compiled programming language. It was designed to create Unix, a popular operating system. C++ is a compiled programming language too. As its name is indicating, it is based on C and is great advantage is the object oriented programming. Is developed by Bjarne Stroustrup and one of its major advantages is the use of anew paradigm, the classes. Java, popular, easy to learn and having the ability to be run on many platforms, such as Linux, Mac OS and Microsoft, is an object oriented interpreted programming language. Not as popular as the other programming language, but spectacular and often used in Artificial Intelligence domain, Lisp is many times scripted too. Very popular, easy to learn and almost perfect to design customer application, Visual Basic is designed and developed by Microsoft. Every new version is bringing more functions.

But only a professional programmer can design customer application only with a good knowledge of one or more programming languages? The answer is no. System analysts are establishing the projects main functions, its concepts and the completion and implementation phases. The project must remain in its intended course and within its budget, delivered in time. Also very important is to have a friendly interface for unprofessional users and have a good relation with the customers even after the project is implemented.

Customer relationships management, human resources management, fleet management, web based systems can be accessed from any Internet browser on any platform. Fully integrated web based applications are now specifically developed for small or big enterprises. A major advantage is to provide reliable and secure communications, a lower cost for the infrastructure, a shorter time to market and flexibility of operations. Custom applications are designing software for a specific function or need. The difference between customer applications and packaged applications is that a general set of features never can be customized to fulfill every function or requirement. Custom application can design any feature the client needs, at low costs. In our days, offshore programming is making custom application affordable and efficient. Time and money are not anymore limiting factors.