All posts by Richard

Grades

College Search

My previous post, Colleges Don’t Like Being Graded, has generated some good comments from two individuals I highly respect, Stephen Downes and John Hunter. Here are some additional comments about the conflict between the Annapolis Group of College and US News & World Report.

  • The Annapolis Group desires to use a ranking system developed and run by Academia. It is difficult (not impossible) to run a self-ranking / grading system and be truly objective.
  • US News can provide a benchmark for helping families select schools to visit. For example, my family first became aware of Wartburg College via their US News & World Report’s positive rankings. Thus, while driving home to Minnesota after a visit to Valparaiso University in Indiana, my middle child and I decided to route through Iowa and see Wartburg (link to their admissions page … with rankings). Carl now attends Wartburg.  Everyone in the family is happy with the Wartburg choice, but most importantly Carl!  In my case, I feel the US News rankings were accurate.

As we head into the home stretch this Fall with my youngest child’s follow-up college visits, here are the schools we have chosen … and a few of the reasons why they are on the final list. In Erik’s case, all the schools had to have good engineering programs (listed in alpha order):

  • Michigan Tech University (location: Lake Superior and X-Country Skiing)
  • Olin School of Engineering (email from an Olin student who read my blog)
  • Purdue University (US News Ranking)
  • Rose Holman Institute of Technology (US News Ranking)
  • Valparaiso University (Christian School, US News Ranking)
  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute (new robotics program)

Right now Erik’s preference is towards the schools in this list whose highest degree is an engineering masters, but that could change!

Finally, we all use grades (see Wikipedia’s rather long winded entry). You could get a "00" in Denmark, which would mean completely unacceptable performance. How many of us bloggers use grades? … page hits, Technorati rankings, number of subscribers, recent readers, Google rankings for keywords, etc …

Colleges Don’t Like Being Graded!

College Search

I give the Annapolis Group of colleges an F. This fairly prestigious group of schools doesn’t like the US News and World Report College Rankings. It’s one thing to give grades; it’s another thing, apparently, to be graded!

As my youngest child prepares to finish the college admissions process, I’ll just note that I have always found US News rankings helpful. If you’re curious, read more …

William Shakespeare and Dinner! (+ Web 2.0)

Uncategorized

My wife just said, "What a Nerd!" Yup, that’s me!  I am sitting at my computer, eating a frozen pizza, and looking at a cool new software application (Shared Word Diagrams). Okay … why do I think this is neat? Let’s examine the data:

  • I was not an English major (I do like to read)
  • Researching document differences visually is intriguing
  • Expand the thumbnail to see my example

I compared:

I thought … what better way to try out this application than by comparing a Web 2.0 application with it’s Web 1.0 counterpart, and the resulting overview of the original bard himself? Seriously, if you had never thought of graphically comparing documents, you must spend some time on Neoformix Blog. In addition, link to the Neoformix Document Arc Diagrams to view examples of Alice in Wonderland, The 2007 State of the Union Address, and  a Hard Rain  is  Gonna Fall (Bob Dylan).

Quite frankly, I haven’t quite yet figured this application out. If you try an example, be patient. It can take a while for the results to appear. Once you create a comparison, while connected to Neoformix you can click upon words to further explore the relationships.  It’s interactive.
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Wordcompare

The Bourne Report

Uncategorized

Earlier today while doing a search on my company’s internal Connectbeam / Google search engine, I discovered a cool external web site! Let me repeat that … while doing an internal search, I found an external web site.  Sort of sounds like a contradiction, but because another employee had tagged the Bourne Report, even though I wasn’t searching for the site, I found the podcast series. Pretty cool.

Oh yes, the Bourne Report is a podcast series that describes itself in this manner: "Discussing Real Ways Nanotechnology, MEMS and Other Emerging Technologies are Changing How We Live, Work and Play". In addition, I’ve added this engineering podcast to my specialized podcast search engine.

The CBC, Roswell and Wikipedia!

Uncategorized

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation must be an unusual place. Apparently their employees like to edit the Wikipedia Roswell entry! Seriously, the blog … the Inside CBC.Com has a posting on what their employees edit on Wikipedia. Please note that because the CBC firewall presents only one I.P. number to the outside world, one may only see a collective list of edits, not individual employees. Given the CBC is a major news organization, viewing the collective lists of edits is intriguing:

Someone out there is watching you!
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Wikipedia