Posts Tagged With: UPenn

Correlation Does Not Mean Causation. Correlation Does Not Mean Causation. Correlation Does Not Mean Causation.

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Apparently a degree does not bestow logical thought to the people pursuing it, as this article from today's Daily Pennsylvanian shows. This writing is unacceptable, not only because it's biased but because the main argument has no basis. The number of swimming pools people own is also positively correlated with longer life, more community service, more political involvement, and less smoking. We should all build more swimming pools, and wait for the benefits to come in.

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10% Off at the Penn Bookstore

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To get 10% off all purchases at the Penn Bookstore, simply tell the cashier you are a Barnes & Noble club member. They don't ask for your phone number or anything. Update: Unfortunately I think this was one nice cashier before school started, who gave me a discount. You can always ask for a discount; sometimes people are nice and they give you one. I'll be buying my books either at BetterThanTheBookstore or at Amazon.

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Other Penn Blogs

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Some blogs run by Penn students (or faculty): Martin Gordon's Blog - Miami Beach senior's blog. curiousgirl's playground - Jing Chen's senior blog. 3000 Miles of Virtual Insanity - Ravi Mishra's blog. He'd prefer you didn't read it, though. Cool New Web - Anton Bernstein's Wharton blog. Progressive Dispatches - Liberal Canadian perspective on Penn. The Un-Wharton - Stuart Stein's labor of love about Wharton. Akkam's Razor - Daily links from a Penn grad student. I don't know who writes this one but the pictures are cool. Jeff Weintraub - Social Science Professor's out-of-classroom takes. Metadatta - Sujit Datta's Physics blog. AlbertGate - Albert Sun's freshman blog. (Updated) I'm Not Even Hungry - Tim and Jim, two seniors, offer a critical take on Penn life. The Spin/The Buzz - Blogs from the Daily Pennsylvanian. The Sphinx - Plenty of name-checks of other Penn students, but not any with the author's name. Scents - Grad psych student (and a TA from my Psych 1 class last semester) writes here. Oikono - Wharton student working in China this summer. (more updates, thanks Albert Sun) Nat Turner Wharton junior/entrepreneur/Houston-based Cavs fan is starting a new company this summer. Sounds intriguing. Earning My Turns - Fernando Pereira, Computer Science department chair (and my professor next fall), sounds off. Werblog - Kevin Werbach is a professor of Legal Studies at Wharton, and writes here. Language Log - Mark Liberman, linguistics professor, and a few other bloggers play language police. This site kills all of ours in terms of popularity. Mr. Swyx - Singapore freshman's technology blog. The Appletonian - Justin Sykes W '08, from Appleton, Wisconsin, with conservative/personal opinion And on the fringe (either not quite blogs, or not quite Penn students): lost the reflex to resist - Really, you should come here. It's not as bad as you're making out. Overheard At College (UPenn Chapter) Penn Press Log Leighcia (.) - Former Penn student wondering if finance consulting is the way to go. Caveat Lector If you know any more, or blog at Penn and aren't listed here, or want to change your description, let me know in the comments. We should unionize. And yes, you are all in my feed reader. Listening To: "Here I Come" by The Roots, ft. Dice Raw & Malik B.

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Refs Can’t Help It

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referee More good stuff from Justin Wolfers, economics professor here at Penn. Wolfers, who last made sports headlines with a paper on point shaving in college basketball, has come back with a new paper on racial bias in refereeing decisions. The New York Times has an excellent review; not just a summary but an analysis of the paper, explanation of the technique, and even a peer review process.

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Advice For Prospective Penn Students

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Number one, every student at Penn knows you are a prospective student. Not because you are gawking at all the buildings or you're with your parents (although these are good indicators). It's because you all walk around with a little white bag with a blue Penn crest on it. If you want to look like you fit in, ditch the bag. Number two, don't take pictures next to the Ben Franklin on a Bench on 37th street and locust walk. We giggle when you do so. Frat boys get drunk on the weekends and decide Mr. Franklin would make a great urinal. Number three, realize that (almost) everyone at Penn is extremely career driven. In Wharton and in Engineering it's expected that you will get a high-powered internship every summer. Less so, but barely, in the College. A Penn degree is a means, not an end. Number four, when you are trying to get to know a school, the tour and the admissions lecture should be just a start. You are going to commit four years of your life to one school or another; make sure the choice is the right choice for you. Have a long talk with someone who goes to the school. If you don't know anyone, ask your parents politely to scram and then find someone to tell you about their experience at Penn. I would suggest going to the dining hall or the library. If you're a preppy, pick someone wearing Ralph Lauren. If you're a hipster, find someone who looks like they belong in GQ. If you're an athlete, find someone wearing sweats. Aim to get this person (or group) to talk to you for at least an hour, but don't tell them that up front. This is possibly the best way to find out if a school's right for you: to talk to someone that's been there. Bullshit testimonials or blogs on an admissions website don't count. (I would be more than happy to show you around and talk to you, especially if you are friendly. This is a photo of me: http://gocards44.wordpress.com/wp-admin/upload.php?style=inline&tab=browse&post_id=203&_wpnonce=d327b6ff24&ID=204&action=view&paged If you are resourceful you can get in touch with me.) Number five, make sure you are nice to your parents. They are paying for (most of) you and while they may be embarrassing you in front of your peers it's probably only because they are freaking out about only being able to coddle you for another year. Your parents have invested a lot in you, be nice to them. Best of luck! Let me know if you pick Penn for next year.

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How to Be A Successful Freshman at Penn

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The Quad If your friends are all wearing City Sports t-shirts, buy a City Sports t-shirt. You are, as a freshman and right out of high school, most likely a stranger in a strange land, and it won't hurt to blend in as much as possible. If you are planning on joining a fraternity, start investing in Ralph Lauren. Get a fake ID. Get a good quality one that scans and blacklights, which will set you back around $120. You will need it to get into the clubs and bars around Philadelphia. Keep your room clean. If you can, stack your beds. It's hard to socialize in a small room. Buy alcohol. You will be popular with your friends if you can supply alcohol to them. You will always be able to do schoolwork. Go out. Be generous with your money. If you have money (and if you go to Penn, I am guessing you do). Smile. Nobody likes a grouch. Enter your room with a purpose: Use your room to change clothes, to pick up or drop off schoolbooks, to sleep, to drink with your friends, and to hook up with sloppy drunk chicks. You will not be social in your room. Get off your damn computer. If I had a nickel for every hour I spent checking Facebook, or walking by people's dorms seeing them staring at their computers, I would be rich enough to donate a building. Don't eat alone. Going down to the dining hall and trying to find people doesn't count. Meals are a great time to catch up with people that you don't see every day. Make your habits social habits. If you really like playing basketball, find friends to play basketball with. Reading and playing online poker are nice habits but you will not make friends doing them. Then again, I write a blog and have Google Reader as my homepage.

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My thoughts on the Tournament, seeding, and scoring systems.

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Penn vs. A&M The story of the tournament so far has been the lack of major upsets. The lowest seed still remaining is #7 UNLV, and many strong teams survived the tournament's first weekend. I watched Penn play Texas A&M live, but missed a lot of the other action. Here are a few of my thoughts on the tournament: 1) If the seeding committee wanted to design the bracket so every higher-seeded team would win every game, they would set it up differently from the way it is now. They would set it up as 1 vs 9 5 vs 13 3 vs 11 7 vs 15 2 vs 10 6 vs 14 4 vs 12 8 vs 16 Which means that the current arrangement isn't as high-seed friendly as it could be, and which means that lower seeds (like Penn) can complain they had to play too difficult of a team, and the committee can say, "The higher seeds won every game, clearly our seeding process was good" and they can both be somewhat right. 2) Has anyone tested to see if the committee suffers from a recency effect in seeding teams (Syracuse gets a 5 last year, A&M gets a 3 this year, Oregon gets a 3) for the tournament? It could be tested with win percentage in the conference tourney vs. performance against the seed expectation. I think win percentage alone is over-rated by the committee. There are strong teams that play tough schedules and lose some games (North Carolina), and teams that get lucky and win more than they should against average teams (Long Beach State). 3) Can the preponderance of higher seeds getting to the Sweet 16 can be explained through the same probability as last year's brackets, or was the chance made more likely by the NBA age rules change? I hypothesize that the disparity between the best teams and the average teams in college basketball was made greater by the presence of players who would have jumped straight to the NBA, but instead played a year of college ball. 4) Tourney pools should give points for correctly picking teams to lose games in the tourney. For example I may pick Wisconsin to lose in the second round to GT, which may be because I think GT is good or it may be because I think Wisconsin will choke against whoever they play. So if Wisconsin ends up losing to UNLV, I think you should still be able to earn points in your pool. Otherwise if you have a team still 'alive' in your bracket vs. a team that you called incorrectly (say I picked Duke to play UCLA in the Sweet 16) even if you think the team that's still 'alive' is going to lose, you should pick them to win cause it's your only chance at getting points. 5) I really enjoy reading Ken Pomeroy's website, if only because they employ statistics and analysis to justify their opinions, rather than talking off the cuff. Here's an explanation of what he does at his website.

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