-
- December 16th, 2009
- 2 Comments »
- linkfest
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. My biggest gripe is they rarely show the distribution – some things are love/hate in nature. I might see a film or read a book that was highly polarized, but had a 3 average.
- NYC subway filled with apples - Amazing little video for a good cause. Don’t miss the making of video below ( read the comments for a very funny, and impressive, complaint).
- 33 selected blogs about project management and innovation – I’m on the list somewhere, and you can vote for your favorites.
- IDEAS and STEMs – interesting little graphic/acronym combo for comparing/contrasting different kinds of thinking.
- Disney’s Org chart – Interesting piece of flow/hierarchy design, circa 1940s Disney.
2 Responses
- Scott Berkun - December 19, 2009 at 7:25 pm #
-
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.
SCOTT'S NEW BOOK
A provocative collection of behind-the-scenes tales from the life of a successful public speaker, bestselling business author Scott Berkun offers a unique insider's take on what public speakers do, how they do it, and how anyone can do it well. Book Details
OTHER BESTSELLERS
Don't miss anything - Free Newsletter
Receive short, near-monthly emails with new essays, most popular posts, and occasional big announcements. Not cheezy - it's good, funny and concise. (privacy policy here)
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!