Points and vectors

S

SFJoe

Joe Dougherty
Malcom Gladwell's article on USNWR college rankings in the latest New Yorker is a pretty good summary of what doesn't work about scalar point systems and is quite applicable to wine, not that any of you need convincing.
 
went through that with high schools last year, as you know - i.e. lots of opportunity to juxtapose various rankings with extensive hands-on research.

at the end of the day, the lastest and greatest #1 was by no means a Numanthia; perhaps more of a GC from Bouchard. Still, my kid took off faster from there than Cristiano Ronaldo at the sight of something round and bouncy.
 
originally posted by Florida Jim:
originally posted by SFJoe:
It's behind a pay wall.
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Care to boil it down?
Best, Jim
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It is Malcom Gladwell, so you miss quite a bit when you boil.

But the notion is that there are many factors that get distilled into the final ranking, and that the relative weights you assign them have a huge impact on the result. And that reasonable people could very easily disagree about the best relative weights.

There is an amusing analogy to Car and Driver using the same scale to compare a Porsche to a Lotus to a Corvette that they use to compare SUV's to each other, and that sports car drivers might value things differently than SUV drivers.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
But the notion is that there are many factors that get distilled into the final ranking, and that the relative weights you assign them have a huge impact on the result. And that reasonable people could very easily disagree about the best relative weights.
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And then there's the question of whether the factors are meaningful. We started a new program not long ago. Before any students had been admitted, the program ended up highly ranked in its category. That really confirmed my doubts about the whole USNWR enterprise.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Speaking of vectors, is there a Dive report undergoing gestation?
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Not from me, I couldn't stay for the Dive.

I have some other notes from earlier events, but have had work writing that is taking up all my finger time.

A sadly abbreviated visit to the Loire this year.
 
As if any more data were needed on the subject, there is also the latest NRC rankings of graduate programs in the sciences. Whereas in the past they had gone with simple ordinal rankings, in the latest they refused to do so, instead identifying three separate categories which they then compiled statistics on. Still a flawed analysis IMO, but much, much more nuanced than before.

Mark Lipton
 
“Some years ago a former chief justice of the Michigan supreme court, Thomas Brennan, sent a questionnaire to a hundred or so of his fellow lawyers, asking them to rank a list of ten law schools in order of quality. “They included a good sample of the big names. Harvard. Yale. University of Michigan. And some lesser-known schools. John Marshall. Thomas Cooley. As I recall, they ranked Penn State’s law school right about in the middle of the pack. Maybe fifth among the ten schools listed. Of course Penn State didn’t have a law school”
 
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