Diploma Names in Alternate Alphabets
In case you have not read this, I strongly encourage you to do so. We were asked by the students about the possibility of having their names printed in a language other than English, we agreed to explore and got it done. As is the case with everything, it is not trivial. We quickly developed an app where the students could copy and paste their name composed using a tool like Google Input Tools . We had them reviewed by faculty members and in a few cases volunteers from outside and then found a very cooperative printer in Scrip Safe who was willing to print them for us. We needed to purchase the fonts we needed. 32 students participated in the pilot and the names were in 9 languages, with Mandarin Chinese topping the list at 20. The diplomas will have their name in English as well as the alternate alphabet. We will be handing them over tomorrow after the commencement!
We collaborate with the Registrar’s Office, Student Life and the Provost’s Office on various things leading up to the commencement. The last couple of weeks leading to the commencement are pretty intense, mainly because of the compression of schedules and other complications. But everyone at the College put in enormous efforts to make sure that everything goes well.
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I am enrolled in a course being offered by Worldview in Stanford called “Behind and Beyond Big Data“. As a part of this I am learning a lot about how the big data is being used in various interesting ways. In addition, a couple of other things that I saw on TV or heard in the social media also has captured my interest.
Tweets predicting rates of heart attacks. https://goo.gl/2iInWM%5B/caption%5D
Predictive Modeling based on Facebook Likes
Michal Kosinskia, David Stillwella, and Thore Graepelb from the University of Cambridge and Microsoft designed an experiment to see if the Facebook Likes of a person is a predictor of “private traits and attributes” of a person such as age, intelligence and sexual orientation. They describe their research here. A very large sample of facebook users contributed voluntarily to the research by participating in myPersonality initiative. They also manually inspected the volunteers’ facebook profiles in some cases to infer additional information such as the ethnic origin. It is a fascinating experiment. If you are interested in checking how well the system predicts your traits and attributes, try it out at Apply Magic Sauce.
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With the easy access to data, metrics of all sorts have become common place. Similarly, valuation is something we hear constantly about and we ourselves live and breathe. I am writing about both of these now because, I am looking at staffing data for the members of Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges and also having to deal with annoying pricing issues with Adobe and SPSS software licensing.
Benchmarking is a very useful exercise in that it provides a first level comparison with those that we would consider peers. For example, we can use staffing metrics to justify additional positions (which has become a rare event in Higher Ed recently) or more importantly, we can use this to justify reallocation of existing staff. Of course, during difficult budget discussions, this can be used to reduce positions. The issue with data is that, even if it is done scientifically, the results tend to be in the eyes of the beholder. However, it is very important to treat these data for first level comparisons and not read too much into them for reasons I explain below.
Valuation is another problem. We hear that the cost of higher education is too high or that we argue that the cost of a software is ridiculously high. In most of these cases, the argument is based on how fast it is growing relative to CPI. As painful a question as it is, is this the right comparison to go by?
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