The World´s 15 Universities, 2012.

               QS rank institutions based on an overall
score calculated following six criteria: academic
reputation, employer reputation, citations per 
faculty, faculty-to-student ratio, international 
proportion of faculty and international proportion 

of students. All scores are out of 100.

                                                                                                                         

2012 Rank	University (links)	Country	Overall Score	2011 Rank	2010 Rank	2009 Rank	2008
1	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	United States	100	3	5	9	9
2	University of Cambridge	United Kingdom	99.8	1	1	2	3
3	Harvard University	United States	99.2	2	2	1	1
4	UCL (University College London)	United Kingdom	98.7	7	4	4	7
5	University of Oxford	United Kingdom	98.6	5	6	5	4
6	Imperial College London	United Kingdom	98.3	6	7	5	6
7	Yale University	United States	97.5	4	3	3	2
8	University of Chicago	United States	96.3	8	8	7	8
9	Princeton University	United States	95.4	13	10	8	12
10	California Institute of Technology (Caltech)	United States	95.1	12	9	10	5
11	Columbia University	United States	94.7	10	11	11	10
12	University of Pennsylvania	United States	94.5	9	12	12	11
13	ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)	Switzerland	92.8	18	18	20	24
14	Cornell University	United States	92.1	15	16	15	15
15	Stanford University	United States	91.7	11	13	16	17

BOXING DAY

             Boxing Day in the United Kingdom is the day after Christmas Day.  It is a day when Post-Christmas sales start, a time to recover from the excesses of Christmas Day and an opportunity to spend time with family, friends and neighbours.
            Some people choose to go for a walk in the countryside, while other flock to the Post-Christmas Sales in large stores. Some people even spend part of the night and early morning queuing to get into the stores when the best bargains are still available. This makes December 26 a very important day for many retailers.
              It is a bank holiday. All schools and many organizations are closed. Some may close for the whole week between Christmas and New Year.
              There are a number of possible stories behind the origin of the term "Boxing Day". One of them is that the Day after Christmas was the traditional Day on which aristocracy distributed presents (boxes) to servants and employees. The servants returned home, opened their boxes and had a second Christmas on what became known as Boxing Day.
             Today´s Boxing Day festivities have very little to do with servants. Instead, they revolve around football, horse races, fox hunt, visits from friends, food and drinking at the pubs.

The invention of the marine chronometer

            Latitude was determined by measuring the sun's angle at noon with the aid of a table giving the sun's declination for that day.

           Calculating LONGITUDE required an extensive knowledge of the moon's motion, and the moon was not visible every night, so this presented navigators with a major problem.

            In 1714, the British Parliament established the Longitude Board and huge prizes were offered for a practical solution to find longitude at sea.

           John Harrison—a humble British carpenter—invented an ingenious clock that could keep time accurately on a ship and therefore solve the longitude problem.

John Harrison (1693-1776), inventor of the marine chronometer.

John Harrison's final masterpiece, made around 1760, was a hand held marine chronometer.

        John Harrison—like all great inventors—had to battle years of apathy and ignorance before his invention was accepted by the Royal Navy....His invention would have GUARANTEED that BRITANNIA ruled the waves for centuries, yet he received absolutely no funding from the government.

        For over 30 years, with only his son William as his helper, he worked to perfect his masterpiece—the marine chronometer....By that time, the Royal Society, and the top levels of the Royal Navy, were secretly controlled by Jesuits, so the last thing they wanted was an accurate way of guiding British ships at sea.