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
Application of new knowledge towards useful social ends
By: Athar OsamaPublished on SciDev.Net on 12 January 2012
Some Muslim countries’ powerful financial incentives to make quick progress in research could backfire, cautions Athar Osama.
Over a decade ago, several governments in the Islamic world woke up from decades of slumber to begin investing heavily in science and innovation. A funding boost helped set up new universities, enhance research grants, and send thousands of students to do PhDs in the developed world.
The regulators and ministries that rolled out these ambitious efforts cautioned against judging their effectiveness and viability too soon, pointing to the limited scientific capacity in these countries. It was popular to say, ‘let’s build a critical mass (quantity) first and worry about raising the standard (quality) later’.
But there was clearly something amiss: some policies seemed either deficient or simply wrong-minded. And evidence of this is beginning to pile up.
Evidence of misguided priorities
The picture emerging is one of a mindless race to secure international publications and increase university rankings using ‘shopping sprees’ for highly cited academics, plagiarism and even outright academic fraud.
By: Amran Muhammad and Natalie Day
With all the extraordinary hype about phone hacking in the UK, you could be forgiven for missing the recent visit of the Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Tun Razak to the UK. Najib met with the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, the Queen as well as captains of industry. His message: consider Malaysia as the place to do high-value, high-tech knowledge-based innovation. This might seem a fairly common theme amongst leaders of developing countries trying to shift their economies from a traditional manufacturing focus to a knowledge-based economy, but this ambition in Malaysia has deep roots and is one which warrants greater attention.
T...
Published at: World Conference for Science Journalists 2011
A famed Egyptian-born scientist has challenged journalists in the Arab world to dispel what he called a widespread and biased idea that Islam is anti-science. Dr Ahmed Zewail, a 1999 Nobel laureate in chemistry, was speaking June 27 at the start of the three-day World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar.
“There is nothing fundamental in Islam against science. It is all part of the unfair perception about Islam and Arabs in general,” Zewail told about 700 listeners during a keynote lecture to kick off the conference. He said journalists in the region bear part of the responsibility to hel...
By: Athar Osama, Adil Najam, Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, Zulfikar Gilani and Christopher King
Published in Nature on Sept 3, 2009
In 2002, Pakistan began an ambitious overhaul of its higher-education system. The successes and failures of the experience hold lessons for other countries, say Athar Osama and co-authors.
After decades of neglect, in 2002 Pakistan set out to dramatically reform its higher-education system. The reforms were designed to reverse years of chronic underfunding, to invest in the academic workforce and to revitalize a moribund research enterprise.
The article is not available in full text except to subscribers and others with access to academic journals. H...
By: Athar Osama
Published on SciDev.Net on 12 January 2012
Some Muslim countries’ powerful financial incentives to make quick progress in research could backfire, cautions Athar Osama.
Over a decade ago, several governments in the Islamic world woke up from decades of slumber to begin investing heavily in science and innovation. A funding boost helped set up new universities, enhance research grants, and send thousands of students to do PhDs in the developed world.
The regulators and ministries that rolled out these ambitious efforts cautioned against judging their effectiveness and viability too soon, pointing to the limited scientific capacity in...
By: Frank Lehner
Published in Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy on 30 August 2011.
The idea of generating solar energy on a large scale in the sun-intensive countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to satisfy their own increasing energy demand and to export surplus energy to Europe as advocated in the DESERTEC concept1 has publicly received much attention in some countries, particularly in Germany, Morocco, Tunisia, and also substantial support from their governments. Besides the DESERTEC Foundation, an industrial consortium (Dii GmbH) was founded in 2009 which consists of major European and MENA companies to push this project further b...
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...
