the Sam Jackson College Experience

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?

: )

Sorry about the downtime today–or did no one notice? I have no idea what caused it to happen, but an important Wordpress file disappeared off the server entirely and so nothing was working properly until I discovered what was missing and solved it. Really, really strange since I wasn’t FTPing anywhere near there and it only happened an hour after I had last SSH’d in.

Seymour Hersh is coming to give a nice talk and take questions this evening, P.E.A. paid a good deal of money for him to come. Not sure what exactly he’s talking about, maybe Iran? It wasn’t made very clear. Should be interesting.

I’m writing this post from the past but I should be heading back into school right about now… classes start on the 3rd and I need to unpack and catch up with friends. I have some other writing I have to attend to in the short term getting ready for the MLK Day assembly and various miscellaneous academic concerns. However, I should have a nice treat up no later than this weekend. I don’t know my schedule, so maybe much sooner. We’ll see. However…

I just thought I’d take this opportunity to thank / showcase all my wonderful readers because December was the best month yet! Google and Awstats are feuding over the actual number, but there were somewhere between 3000 and 3500 unique visitors to the site, not counting the many people who find their way here through the RSS feed! That’s more than 50,000 page views (for humans alone)! And it would have been many more if everyone hadn’t slacked off and left the internet around Christmastime, so make up for it in January with more obsessive reading. Try the archives.

The best part of blogging is having you readers who keep me on my toes. I know that some of my friends’ moms read religiously, as does apparently Keone Hon’s dog. The school librarian, admissions officers, higher ed marketers, my mom (but probably not my dog)–it’s a good group.

So thank you all for reading, thanks for coming, and thanks for your continued readership. As always I’m more than happy to hear from you by email or as a part of the discussion in the comment sections.

p.s. AdSense click revenue this month was enough to cover hosting and registration expenses for the site, plus it left enough left over to buy (optimistically) a slice of pizza! Too bad I need a $100 balance before Google will send me a check.

For very sad reasons, I don’t get to do very much art here at Exeter (my first and only course will be next term, Painting 204) but that doesn’t mean I’m not an artistic person! Even my creativity is more generally expressed through words, I’m not completely hopeless when it comes to graphic arts. I have to know my way around Photoshop to do you know, normal-life stuff, and I saw a neat little inspiration the other day from this tutorial at Lifehacker.

I quickly whipped up this fake ad for Julbo sunglasses, the brand I am wearing in this photo–it’s from Academy Life Day at the beach. I thought some of my readers might be interested in having a vague approximation of what I look like, since not everyone has gone and visited the extensive photo gallery I have hosted which better answers the question. Flickr be damned.

Click on the photo to go to the other site and a bigger version of this picture. 5 minutes in photoshop produced a good new Facebook profile picture, so I’m satisfied (and cropped!).

[Original photo]