College Rankings!. College Rankings! Seems like everyone's talking about 'em. There's the good ole controversial US News & World Report rankings, but thanks to the the librarians at UIUC, this wonderful site has links to many, many, many different rankings, including ones that let you make your own rankings. There's also rankings of some of the more important non-academic features of colleges, too.

Does college rank really matter? [MetaFilter]

all rankings except the ones you personally construct and refuse to distribute are junk, once you make it for an audience other than yourself, and accept evidence and opinion from others without a proper critical eye based on your own personal perspective and desires, the enumeration of the value becomes worthless and uninterpretatable.

Study: Open source produces best results. I found the following link/article buried in my e-mail. It is a bit old, nevertheless the argument still stands. Study: Open source produces best results “A consulting group that scrutinizes the source code underlying several operating systems has found that a key networking component of Linux is of higher quality in several ways than that of competing closed-source software.”… [infosophy: socio-technological rendering of information]

Interesting study, i might be able to put it to some use….

Globalisation and Falling Inequality.

The Economist discusses a lecture by Stanley Fischer (ex-MIT,IMF and now with Citigroup) and summarises that “if you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly.” One of the reasons: “Two of the poorest countries in the world÷China and India÷have both (a) enormous populations and (b) rapid growth in incomes per head in the years in question.”

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

but maybe we should account for inflation and money transfer and illicit economies to see where that equality arises.