Posts by richard
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With regard to the comments in this thread about GREs -- American graduate schools do require you to sit them, but they are not the *primary* factor that determines whether you will admitted. (The letters of recommendation probably carry the most weight, along with your transcript).
My experience is that the GREs mainly serve as a "consistency check" -- if you have great letters and straight As in your classes but lousy GREs, the admissions committee would be reading your packet very carefully. And on the other side of the coin, a really stellar set of scores in the GREs never hurts, especially if you not at a place whose quality is known to the people reading your application.
It is biased towards the sciences, but people contemplating graduate study in the US (and elsewhere, but the advice is certainly American-o-centric) might get a lot from this set of posts to the Cosmic Variance blog:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/09/26/unsolicited-advice-iv-how-to-be-a-good-graduate-student/
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Richard, in NZ we already have the system where a random selection of the papers goes to another university to get remarked. We have reasonable quality control and I was just saying the quality control would have to be very carefully audited if we brought in a system of fully funding our brightest student.
I am actually a New Zealander. I was educated in New Zealand, and was among those who railed against higher student fees and loans.
The irony is that all this talk of quality control and cross-marking is simply absent at top-drawer American places. One could be truly cynical, and suggest that an emphasis on the external validation of your procedures is effectively an admission of your second-tier status: elite institutions don't need to be reassured they are getting it right. (I am not actively advocating this position, but I think there is an element of truth in it. I recall a story that final exams from the University of New Zealand were routinely sent back to the mother country to be marked by genuine English Dons. However, when the ship carrying one year's exams was torpedoed during WWII they decided to keep the reviews internal to New Zealand. I don't know if this true, but this cross-marking has been going on for a long time, and may well have its historical roots in this sort of colonial insecurity, for all that it resonates with modern ideas about quality control and the external validation of academic assessments.)
Moreover, ANY system that awards money or slots at elite schools preferentially to some students will be "gamed". In some countries, access to elite universities is determined by brutally competitive examinations -- and you get students who are very good at sitting tests. In the United States, elite schools tend to put a premium on "breadth" so you get kids who are not just smart, but who have all sorts of eye-popping extra-curricular activities -- and there is a lot of pressure on high school students to be ostentatiously involved with community service in order to help get admission to top drawer schools. I am not sure which system works better, but both systems modify the behavior of students who are attempting to "win" at the game they are required to play.
The New Zealand education system is much more of a level playing field than that in the US -- it is not the cost of attending college that makes the system different (since that is subsidized in a variety of baroque ways), but the presence of a cohort of "top" schools which can turn away 90% or more of their applicants. It is worth reflecting that this group probably amounts to about 20 places (at a generous guess) -- often with comparatively small student populations. If you map this into the New Zealand scene, that would about to about 1/4 of a university -- since the US population is about 75 times larger. And 1/4 of a Harvard is not a Harvard at all, so this system will *never* take root in New Zealand, but it dramatically changes the "market" in the US.
In the long run the real issue may be average debt, rather than high-fliers somehow being discouraged by fees -- there are plenty of vital jobs that do not pay stellar salaries, and if a big chunk of your middle class is laboring to pay off student loans that cannot be good for your economy. (While it looked a lolly scramble at the time, my guess is that dropping the student loan interest may have eased a lot of the pain I was starting to see when I left New Zealand a dozen years ago.)
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This debate is interesting to me -- my experience is that "elite" American universities rely *less* on outside assessments of teaching and marking standards than New Zealand universities already do.
For instance, a New Zealand PhD will typically be read by two examiners -- one from another New Zealand university, and a second from overseas. Conversely, an American PhD will sometimes be sent to an external reader, but the student is effectively examined by a committee of academics from his/her own institution -- and usually some or all of these people will have helped supervise the student's research.
Likewise, as a faculty member in charge of an undergraduate course I have a great deal of autonomy in setting grades and curricula. You might occasionally ask a colleague to look over a final exam, but there is never (in my experience) any cross-marking, or outside assessment of the grades you have awarded.
My guess is that many top North American places would take the attitude that they have no equals, and that they know quality when they see it :-)
And from my perspective, the idea of having a bundle of exams and assignments from (say) Auckland land on my desk for the purposes of checking whether that B+ should really have been an A- is profoundly abhorrent: there are many, many more things I would prefer to be doing with my time. (Posting to Public Address, for instance.)
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Jolisa's tech. support guy here -- we were using the latest Real Audio plugin, and it crashed at the same point when we listened with both Firefox and Safari.
We were trying this on Intel based Macbook -- it is possible that works better on a PowerPC system.
Either way, I am looking forward to listening to it sooner or later...
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The new iMacs do look rather cute, but I was also pleased to see the Mini get an upgrade. Its demise has been rumored for a while, so it is good to see it live on. I am about to buy one and set it up as a little server in a corner of my office...
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Salinger's comments seem entirely uncontroversial to me. I am not a meteorologist, but I am a physicist...
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/cld/dvlp/rh.rxml
Warm air is not *required* to hold more water vapor than cold air, but it *can* hold more water vapor than cold air.
Auer's comment about deserts is a complete red herring, and if I didn't have better things to do with my time, I could probably amuse myself with a thorough fisking of his published utterances.
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Personally, I would like a see a mash-up covering health board conflicts of interest based on this E-Trade ad...