Top 20 Websites Every Scientist or engineer ought to know | Zangani

Via friendfeed, HT Berci Mesko: top 20 websites every scientist or engineer should know.

Econ Academics Blog

This is a large aggregator of economics blogs.

MediaCommons | a digital scholarly network

Further on the previous post, yet another site I should be consulting regularly: MediaCommons | a digital scholarly network.

Digital Campus

Just discovered this Digital Campus by following Amanda French (@amandafrench) on Twitter. She is currently attending this interesting conference: THATCamp. Evidently, there is still a ton of things for me to learn on the subject of teaching and scholarship on the Internet.

Rocket Bomber post: Rethinking the Box: The Seven Types of Customer

This blog post gives a good and fun breakdown of bookstore customers by type. HT Tyler Cowen on http://www.marginalrevolution.com. Like Tyler, I ask: Which type am I? Also, don’t miss the follow-up post. ADDED: one of the commenters on marginal revolution directs to this article by George Orwell on the topic of selling books.

Data as pollution

Here is a thought-provoking quote attributed to Bruce Schneier in a friendfeed post by Zee (editor in chief of thenextweb.com): “Data is the pollution of the information age. It’s a natural byproduct of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it’s disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after effects are toxic.”

College rankings corruption Part II

The topic that keeps giving this late Spring… Inside Higher Ed today has this story about the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. It appears that the college sprouted professors with impressive achievements out of thin air and US News & World Report didn’t check the data the college submitted. I would bet that the stories that are surfacing, such as this one, of manipulation and plain old misreporting of data to the magazine, are just the tip of a huge, very smelly iceberg of corruption. I should be careful about reading only stuff that tends to confirm my prejudices, but this story does give me a Ha! feeling about my own long-bred suspicion of university administrators. Generally, as one comment in the linked story says, how come US News & World Report has acquired all this power? Why can’t we have more decently produced rankings, since there seems to be a huge demand for such rankings? Naturally, all rankings of such multi-dimensional services as higher education provision are highly suspect oversimplifications, but can’t we at least minimize the lying that goes on in the process of tabulating the data? What I know about mechanism design suggests that a ranking system that never gives a university official the incentive to lie is probably a utopian dream, quite impossible in practice. But surely we can do better than with the system that has been winning the PR war so far.

College rankings as suspicious as ever

Or, rather, more:
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/clemson/?hp