About a month ago, I wrote about patterns I found comparing Yale and Harvard in Google searches through Google Trends. Well, just today, Facebook released a simply fascinating tool called “Lexicon” which is the same thing, but for wall posts. Computers (not humans!) track the content of every wallpost for words and phrases, and […]

• 2 Comments

Thinking about schools as possible tourist attractions seems to be in line with the marketing and school “branding” talk that I try to discourage. However, any Harvard student would counter that it’s just a fair description of their state of affairs: sit down in a lawn chair with a notepad and a sharp eye for […]

• 0 Comments

I discovered an interesting pattern while playing around with Google Trends: if you compare ‘Yale University’ and ‘Harvard University’ with the tool, there is an eerie similarity in their trend lines. Even minor up and down ticks are mirrored across search terms. See for yourself: trends chart below, Harvard in red, Yale in blue.

The trend […]

• 7 Comments

Yale doesn’t have publicly available admissions OR student blogs, but it does have student-written “Bulldog Blogs” accessible to admitted students. Last year, when I was an admitted student, I discovered that these were actually just ripped from the particular students’ personal blogs and reposted on the admitted students website. I thought about publishing all […]

• 7 Comments

There were a fair number of Yale Daily News stories last semester about various incidents of news-worthy intolerance; this sad trend seems to have continued this term with the “We Love Yale Sluts” debacle where, for those unfamiliar, a group of Zeta Psi fraternity pledges posted photos on Facebook of themselves holding a sign with […]

• 5 Comments