Comment More top-down management (Score 1) 176

by doomsdaywire on Saturday May 02, 2009 @07:54PM (#27801791) Attached to: Chicago Tribune Reporters Don't Want Readers' Pre-Approval

I'm sick of upper management and marketing/advertising sticking their noses where it doesn't belong. This isn't the first time I've heard something like this proposed. It's the entire reason there are comment boxes and ratings (on some news sties) on stories. This is NOT the way to go. Write a goddamn letter to the editor.

Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings 161

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @05:00PM from the deep-springs-college dept.

An anonymous reader writes "US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all likely to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to compute the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News's data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn State, which is #48 using US News's methodology, could be the best university in the country, by other standards."

Spammer Perjury is Worth Prosecuting 161

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @12:01PM from the love-a-little-alliteration dept.

Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton summarizes his essay by saying "Spammers really do lie more often under oath than other parties in court (surprise). Judges and prosecutors could promote respect for the law by cracking down on it, and maybe make a dent in spam in the process." Read on to learn of his experiences with (shocking!) spammers who lie in court.

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