the Sam Jackson College Experience

I have been making a few changes around the site in the last day or so and just wanted to alert you to them and ask if anyone is experiencing any strange bugs. First, I have installed a new archives page! I know that the archives page has been broken for some time, so I put in a pretty new one which should be great and helpful and generally all around wonderful. Please check it out.

Secondly, I have overhauled the way that the site displays advertising. Instead of hardcoding in ad code into widgets, I have put in some dynamic javascript (to be replaced with PHP later when I have time to work out bugs, likely this weekend) tied to an OpenX ad server I just installed. This means that I now have a better ability to track and analyze the clicks / impressions on the ads of our amazing current advertising partners, Campus Explorer and The University Review. In any event, I saw that this was displaying weirdly on some old versions of Internet Explorer but not too many of you use that so hopefully things should look OK. But let me know if there are problems.

Also, with the new OpenX installed I can now display advertising on a CPC or CPM basis… though I think I will just continue to offer monthly slots. As usual, let me know if you are interested, and check out my advertising page.

More tweaks to come in the near future! I am confident of this because I have a huge amount of work and tend to do wonderfully constructive web design and backend stuff when I really, really shouldn’t…

I was recently having a little debate with Diana over at the Digital Natives blog about how best to manage online identities as a teenager, inspired by Lifehacker’s recent post about managing digital reputations. My main point of agreement was about ‘becoming the source’ for information about yourself, and how important it is to maintain a high-profile place for positive information control. I do that very well with this website–google ’sam jackson’ and you’ll see I’m the fourth result–but right before I saw Diana’s post, I had decided I wanted to cover some other bases.

It’s midterms time here at Yale, and while some people like to go out and shop or buy things to de-stress some, I opted for another route: buying a few domain names. I went to gratuitous lengths to try to acquire a few I’ve been negotiating over for ages, with continued failure. But I did go ahead and buy www.SamuelAJackson.com and www.SamuelABJackson.com. I remain bitter that I don’t have the funds to acquire samjackson.com, or samueljackson.com, etc.

I wish I had been a little older–or a lot wiser–when I was younger, because I would be a lot richer now for my domain purchases if that had been the case. But, in case anyone is ever searching for my full name, I now have some good insurance. These wouldn’t really rank, of course, and I will just have them redirect back here for now. Still–pays to try to cover as many angles as possible, and it’s really pretty cheap. Certainly a much lower down payment now than there will be later, if you have to try to buy a domain off someone or do damage control from high-ranking bad PR.

For a good place to start investigating how to control your public identity online, check out both that lifehacker post and danah boyd’s musings on the subject last fall.

Reader Jay Collier recently contacted me and asked if I had ever considered publishing an OPML file of all my feed reader feeds. Feed Demon has such a feature, but I had never been able to really accurate gauge the ratio of reader-utility to pointless-egoism and had therefore refrained from posting one. But Jay inspired me to pose the question to all of you! So let me know and if there is any real interest I’ll clean up the output and share the long, long list of all the blogs I read.

I had a ‘real’ post that would have gone here, but I will run it in a day or so instead–answer the poll in the meanwhile, if you would be so kind!

Also, more people should follow Jay’s example and contact me and/or comment!

Update 11/30/07: OK, after a weeklong poll, an overwhelming response leads me to publish an OPML file of all the feeds I read. I’ll try to format something pretty and then post it next week. Thanks for voting!

Our good friends at IvyGate, through what I assume must be great cleverness and sneakery, posted the top 25 overall and top 25 Liberal Arts colleges in the U.S. News’ 2008 rankings earlier today. At first had ethical reservations about saying really anything on the topic since I felt I could be indirectly promoting the rankings which I criticize frequently for their negative impact on the college search and application process (as Thacker would say, for their commercializing of it).

Then I saw that some more of our good friends, this time at EphBlog, had reposted some of it (for the LACs) and so had some other blogs, so I said why not cover it myself! Those of you following logically should realize that that should do nothing to clear my conscience, but all the same I’m going to write about the rankings a little : )

I’ll relate the shocking news right now: The top 3 slots are the same as last year! Gasp! In the same order, no less–Princeton, Harvard, Yale. (For complete list, see the end of this post) While we’ve all become accustomed to the top 10 or so’s relative lack of volatility over the years, it’s worth remembering the way the methodology has been changed based more on editorial discretion than statistical or scientific merit. The methodology is explained on USNews.com; I will look through it and discuss the changes they made this year in another coming post.

Steve Hsu, who writes a totally awesome blog called Information Processing (he’s a physics professor at the U of Oregon), brought a Slate article to my attention back in July. It’s a fun read, centered around an explanation of the various ‘fudge factors’ that U.S. News uses to make sure the rankings maintain a certain… standard, shall we say.

The story of how the rankings were cooked goes back to 1987, when the magazine’s first attempt at a formula put a school in first that longtime editor Mel Elfin says he can’t even remember, except that it wasn’t HYP. So Elfin threw away that formula and brought in a statistician named Robert Morse who produced a new one. This one puts HYP on top, and Elfin frankly defends his use of this result to vindicate the process. He told me, “When you’re picking the most valuable player in baseball and a utility player hitting .220 comes up as the MVP, it’s not right.”

The article is from 2000, and I know there have been changes since then, but the points it makes are still entirely valid as they touch on the whole history of the rankings. In 1999 Caltech was #1 but the next year dropped to #4; the reason for this was the application of special ‘logarithmic adjusters,’ applied only in categories where Caltech had an edge on HYP. These ‘adjusters’ in place, Caltech dropped back down, HYP went to the top… problem solved, from U.S. News’ perspective.

…the credibility of rankings like these depends on two semiconflicting rules. First, the system must be complicated enough to seem scientific. And second, the results must match, more or less, people’s nonscientific prejudices. Last year’s rankings failed the second test. There aren’t many Techie graduates in the top ranks of U.S. News, and I’d be surprised if The New Yorker has published a story written by a Caltech grad, or even by someone married to one, in the last five years. Go out on the streets of Georgetown by the U.S. News offices and ask someone about the best college in the country. She probably won’t start to talk about those hallowed labs in Pasadena.

The fact that the formulas had to be rearranged to get HYP back on top doesn’t mean that those three aren’t the best schools in the country, whatever that means. After all, who knows whether last year’s methodology was better than this year’s? Is a school’s quality more accurately measured by multiplying its spending per student by 0.15 or by taking a logarithmic adjuster to that value? A case could also be made for taking the square root.

But the logical flaw in U.S. News’ methodology should be obvious—at least to any Caltech graduate. If the test of a mathematical formula’s validity is how closely the results it produces accord with pre-existing prejudices, then the formula adds nothing to the validity of the prejudice. It’s just for show. And if you fiddle constantly with the formula to produce the result you want, it’s not even good for that.

Caltech is #5 this year. Happy rankings everyone…

Here’s the Top 25, after the break:

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember how I wrote back in August that “Instant Messaging is Grammar Friendly” ? Well, it might be chummy with grammar but as I heard from Trend Hunter a few days ago, it’s creeping into essays and tainting middle school essays. Students Use Instant Messenger Lingo In Essays, Trend Hunter reports via CNN.

This “instant messaging-speak” or “IM-speak” emerged more than a decade ago. Used in e-mail and cell phone text messages, most teens are familiar with this tech talk and use it to flirt, plan dates and gossip.

But junior high and high school teachers nationwide say they see a troubling trend: The words have become so commonplace in children’s social lives that the techno spellings are finding their way into essays and other writing assignments.

“The IM-speak is so prevalent now,” said Austin, a language arts teacher at Stonewall Jackson Middle School in Orlando. “I’m always having to instruct my students against using it.”

I found this funny and thought some of you readers might as well. Hmmm, media fearmongering about the decay of language, probably not entirely unfounded! Thoughts?

: )