Monday, June 07, 2010

Links ...


Busy week ahead, so all I can do is link. Interviews started today to select PhD students for the Fall semester. We -- basically, all the faculty in our Department -- interviewed nearly 40 candidates today. If this trend holds, we'll end up talking to over 150 aspirants (out of some 300+ candidates we invited) by Friday afternoon.

The interview attendance rate of over 50% is unusually high for our Department; it's probably indicative of the sorry state of the job market -- in good years, the strike rate has been as low as 20%.

Now, the links:

  1. Rahul Siddharthan continues the discussion on gated communities of the academic kind.

  2. Luis von Ahn: Startups and Carnegie Mellon: "If I were to start another company, I would do it out of CMU."

  3. Rahul Choudaha at Dr. Education: Why Indian Students will Continue to Study Abroad: "... "[T]here will a segment which would continue to go abroad for several reasons including ability to pay, quality of education, social prestige or experience."

  4. Talking about social prestige, here's a Mint column by Radha Chadha on American education: our biggest luxe brand: "Forget Louis Vuitton bags, Rolex watches and Mont Blanc pens—for that matter, forget bigger-ticket Mercedes and BMWs—American education is the luxury product that Indians are blowing serious dollars on."

  5. Interesting find of the week: You Are Not So Smart -- A blog 'devoted to self delusion and irrational thinking.' [Via Jason Kottke].

    Here's one on the Dunning-Kruger effect:

    The Misconception: You can predict how well you would perform in any situation.

    The Truth: You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks.

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