It is almost in the Production

Please provide a description of your work (about 250 words), written at a level suitable for a potential purchaser. We will use this as the basis for cover copy and promotional material directed at individual customers.

We like to see who is stronger, richer, better, or more clever. Since we humans (1) love lists, (2) are competitive, and (3) are jealous of other people, we like ranking. We can rank some situations in objective ways: students ranked in ascending order based on their heights reflects objectivity. However, many “Top Ten” (or twenty-one, thirty-three, etc) lists are based on subjective categorization and give only the illusion of objectivity. In fact, we don’t always want to be seen objectively since we don’t mind having a better image or rank than deserved. The book applies scientific theories to everyday experience by raising and answering questions like: Are college ranking lists objective? How do we rank and rate countries based on their fragility, level of corruption, or even happiness? How do we find the most relevant web pages? How employees are ranked ? The book is offered to people whose neighbor has a fancier car; employees, who are being ranked by their supervisors; managers, who are involved in ranking but may have qualms about the process; businessmen interested in creating better visibility for their companies; scientists, writers, artists, and other competitors who would like to see themselves at the top of a success list; college students who are just preparing to enter a new phase of social competition. The Reader will engage in an intellectual adventure to better understand the difficulties of navigating between objectivity and subjectivity and to better identify and modify her place in real and virtual communities by combining human and computational intelligence.

 

How would you briefly describe your work to a non-specialist, such as a bookseller or sales representative (about 100 words)?

Everybody with whom I have talked in the last two years has seemed to agree that the topic of ranking is hot.

Ranking of people, schools, products, countries, and just about everything else is part of our daily lives.

We are in a paradoxical relationship with ranking: ”ranking is good because it is informative and objective; ranking is bad because it is biased and subjective, and occasionally, even manipulated.” RANKING combines the application of scientific theories to everyday experience with entertaining personal stories and helps the Reader to both compete successfully and accept the eventual fiascos.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s