Don’t dismiss academic research because of a crazy title

Don’t judge the worth of a research paper by its title, warns top university official.

Lloyd Shapley, joint winner of the 2012 Nobel prize in Economics

In today’s Higher Ed Daily Brief: Don’t judge a book by its cover, new connections

Hasty judgment

Don’t judge research project applications by their titles, warns Group of Eight universities chief executive Vicki Thomson, with a pointed reference to this week’s storm over grants recommended by the Australian Research Council that were blocked at ministerial level.

Ms Thomson points to a 1962 paper titled “College admissions and the stability of marriage” by US mathematicians David Gale and Lloyd Shapley. It was a seminal paper offering a solution to the “stable marriage problem” problem. That is, if there are two equally sized groups of heterosexual men and women who are paired off in marriages, can they be matched so that there is no marriage in which both partners would rather be married to someone other than their existing partner. Dr Gale and Dr Shapley proved that such a “stable” configuration could be found, no matter how many couples there were.

The theory had applications to many other problems including matching students to college places, matching medical interns to hospital places, and matching available donor kidneys to patients. It led to Lloyd Shapley and another collaborator in the field, Alvin Roth, winning the 2012 Nobel prize in Economics “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design”.

Construction underway

The University of Melbourne has started work on Melbourne Connect, an ambitious $425 million project located over the road from the main university campus in Parkville, which it says will be Australia’s leading innovation precinct. It will bring together many partners including the university’s School of Engineering, the Melbourne Entrepreneurial Centre (with its researchers and start-up companies), and new Science Gallery (billed as a place where art and science collide).

“Melbourne Connect is a project that will make a significant contribution to the city’s reputation as an international research and innovation leader,” said vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell.