Wednesday linkfest
Here are this week’s links:
- College student brings typewriter to lecture hall – Seems legit and not staged – the professor eventually asks him to stop.
- A better rating system – 5 point scales are the standard on yelp, amazon and elsewhere. Interesting to think if there’s a better way to do this.
NIH used to use–I kid you not–a 40 point scale for peer review rating of grant application: from 1.0 to 5.0 in increments of 0.1 (with 1.0 the best). Not surprisingly, given the cognitive impossibility of discriminating that many levels of merit, reviewers basically only used 9 levels at the top, from 1.1-1.9, with anything scored worse than 1.9 being considered undifferentiated horrible crap and 1.0 being considered unattainable perfection.
After years of exhorting peer reviewers to “spread your scores” outside this narrow fraction of the full scoring range, NIH spent a fuckton of money on a revamping of the peer review scoring system. One of the major innovations was to adopt a 1-9 scoring system with only whole numbers allowed. BRILLIANT!
Mike: Great story. Thanks for sharing.
It could have been worse I suppose. They could have argued the solution was a 90 point scale :)
And also, kudos for defining a new unit of measure – the fuckton.