From RANKING to REPAIR!

Buy, buy, buy! We want to buy even we cannot afford it. Therefore if you need money you should ask somebody to lend you. This ”somebody” (whoever she is, your friend
or a bank) has a single question: ”May I trust the borrower will repay the loan?” In a world when people did not live in the ocean of data the potential lenders characterized qualitatively the borrowers. “He looks a nice, reliable guy, well, I think he will repay… in addition, he promised to pay this and this percent of interest”. Owners of corner grocery stores developed skills for century to classify clients, as reliable and not reliable.  I find interesting, but not surprising that the oldest credit reporting agency in the USA emerged from the grocery business. Cator Woolford was a a grocer in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He collected data from his customers, produced a book, and sold copies of the book to the local Retail Grocer’s Association. Based on his success, together with his younger brother Guy, a lawyer, opened in Atlanta a very small business, they called ”Retail Credit Company”. This small business evolved what we call now Equifax Inc. (one of the three giant consumer credit bureaus, the other two are Experian, and TransUnion), which
collects and process information over 800 million individual consumers.

When people should judge other people’s character, it is truly truly subjective. Granting or denying loans or credit requests was very from being objective, and age-, gender- or race-based discriminations happened again and again. To help the decision makers by quantitative analysis was a big step towards objectivity. William R Fair (1923-1996) and Earl Isaac (1921-1983) started to build mathematical models for predicting the behaviour of the potential borrowers. An initial version of a Credit Application Scoring Algorithm was introduced in 1958. This algorithm generated three possible behaviors: the borrower will pay on time, will pay with delay, or not pay at all. The Fair Isaac Corporation has been established, and developed and algorithm and software to calculate what became the famous/infamous FICO score.

Stay tuned! (How a credit score is calculated, and how objective it is?}

Our brain processes external information perceived by all of our sensory systems. The incoming information is useful only if we are able to comprehend, and lists help to organize new information. There are situations, when people are in a complex, dynamic
environment and they should rapidly understand ”what is happening”, and they should bring decisions followed by actions. Historically, military command and control is a field from where the theory and practice of situated awareness emerged. However, other activities, such as air traffic control, fire fighting, aviation and more ordinary complex tasks, as driving a car or even riding a bicycle needs to comprehend the rapidly the changing environment and react. Situation awareness starts with the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, followed by the comprehension of their meaning, and by the  projection of possible future events.

Lists help to comprehend incoming information. Kim’s game is a famous example how a
complex environments should be mapped into a list, and how to improve the efficiency of the the comprehension. Bert and Kate McKay, founders of the Art of Manliness summarized the origin of the game so nicely, that I should copy here:

”In Rudyard Kipling famous novel Kim, Kimball O’Hara, an Irish teenager, undergoes
training to be a spy for the British Secret Service. As part of this training, he is
mentored by Lurgan Sahib, an ostensible owner of a jewelry store in British India,
who is really doing espionage work against the Russians. Lurgan invites both his boy servant and Kim to play the “Jewel Game.” The shopkeeper lays 15 jewels out on a tray, has the two young men look at them for a minute, and then covers the stones with a newspaper. The servant, who has practiced the game many times before, is easily able to name and exactly describe all the jewels under the paper, and can even accurately guess the weight of each stone. Kim, however, struggles with his recall and cannot transcribe a complete list of what lies under the paper. Kim protests that the servant is more familiar with jewels than he is, and asks for a rematch. This time the tray is lined with odds and ends from the shop and kitchen. But the servant’s memory easily beats Kim’s once again, and he even wins a match in which he only feels the objects while blindfolded before they are covered up. Both humbled and intrigued, Kim wishes to know how the boy has become such a master of the game. Lurgan answers: “By doing it many times over till it is done perfectly — for it is worth doing.”

Umberto Eco (1932-2016), the celebrated Italian novelist and and a public intellectual famously wrote: ”We like lists because we don’t want to die”, and list are means of grasping the incomprehensible.

Stay tuned! more to come!

 

simply from Wikipedia

Rankings

Winfrey was called “arguably the world’s most powerful woman” by CNN and Time.com,^[105] “arguably the most influential woman in the world” by The American Spectator,^[106] “one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th Century” and “one of the most influential people” from 2004 to 2011 by TIME. Winfrey is the only person in the world to have appeared in the latter list on ten occasions.^[107]

At the end of the 20th century, Life listed Winfrey as both the most influential woman and the most influential black person of her generation, and in a cover story profile the magazine called her “America’s most powerful woman”.^[108] In 2007, USA Todayranked Winfrey as the most influential woman and most influential black person of the previous quarter-century.^[109] Ladies Home Journal also ranked Winfrey number one in their list of the most powerful women in America and Senator Barack Obama has said she “may be the most influential woman in the country”.^[110] In 1998, Winfrey became the first woman and first African American to top Entertainment Weekly‘s list of the 101 most powerful people in the entertainment industry.^[111] Forbes named her the world’s most powerful celebrity in 2005,^[112] 2007,^[113] 2008,^[101] 2010,^[114] and 2013.^[115] As chairman of Harpo Inc., she was named the most powerful woman in entertainment by The Hollywood Reporter in 2008.^[116] She has also been listed as one of the most powerful 100 women in the world by Forbes, ranking fourteenth in 2014.^[117] In 2010, Life magazine named Winfrey one of the 100 people who changed the world, alongside such luminaries as Jesus Christ, Elvis Presley and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Winfrey was the only living woman to make the list.^[118]

Columnist Maureen Dowd seems to agree with such assessments: “She is the top alpha female in this country. She has more credibility than the president. Other successful women, such as Hillary Clinton and Martha Stewart, had to be publicly slapped down before they could move forward. Even Condi has had to play the protegé with Bush. None of this happened to Oprah – she is a straight ahead success story.^[119] Vanity Fair wrote: “Oprah Winfrey arguably has more influence on the culture than any university president, politician, or religious leader, except perhaps the Pope.^[120] Bill O’Reilly said: “this is a woman that came from nothing to rise up to be the most powerful woman, I think, in the world. I think Oprah Winfrey is the most powerful woman in the world, not just in America. That’s – anybody who goes on her program immediately benefits through the roof. I mean, she has a loyal following; she has credibility; she has talent; and she’s done it on her own to become fabulously wealthy and fabulously powerful.”^[121]

In 2005, Winfrey was named the greatest woman in American history as part of a public poll as part of The Greatest American. She was ranked No. 9 overall on the list of greatest Americans. However, polls estimating Winfrey’s personal popularity have been inconsistent. A November 2003 Gallup poll estimated that 73% of American adults had a favorable view of Winfrey. Another Gallup poll in January 2007 estimated the figure at 74%, although it dropped to 66% when Gallup conducted the same poll in October 2007. A December 2007 Fox News poll put the figure at 55%.^[122] According to Gallup’s annual most admired poll, Americans consistently rank Winfrey as one of the most admired women in the world. Her highest rating came in 2007^[123] when she was statistically tied with Hillary Clintonfor first place.^[124] In a list compiled by the British magazine New Statesman in September 2010, she was voted 38th in the list of “The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures 2010”.^[125]

In 1989, she was accepted into the NAACP Image Award Hall of Fame

The best nonfiction books

What should I say?

Gloria Origgi is an Italian philosopher and cognitive scientist working now at the famous EHESS (CNRS) in Paris. Her book Reputation: What It Is and Why It Matters has been published now by the Princeton University Press .

“A compelling exploration of how reputation affects every aspect of contemporary life

from Virgil Cox (Dean, Engineering & Industrial Technologies, Gaston College):

https://wordpress.com/comments/approved/aboutranking.com/4

 

 

 

 

December. As a college professor, my seasonal duty is writing letters of recommendations, and rate students based on  several criteria to help them to be accepted by graduate schools. Students should ask a number of professors to evaluate them. Occasionally I have to tell a student that I would not be able to be a strong recommender, so it is better not to ask me. We, evaluators, combine quasi-objective data (say, grades) and subjective impressions to generate a rating score. Subjectivity is far from being identical to random, and college professors don’t have better ways to help students and graduate programs to find a good match.  Admission committee has a strong interest in ensuring they only accept mature, polite, reliable and stable people into their program, and my professional duty is to help them.

CollegeNET  is a corporation, which provides software as a service for many universities, among others for admissions and application evaluation. There are six criteria to rate students:

• Knowledge in chosen field
• Motivation and perseverance toward goals
• Ability to work independently
• Ability to express thoughts in speech and writing
• Ability/potential for college teaching
• Ability to plan and conduct research

We should choose among five options: Exceptional (Upper 5%) Outstanding (Next 15%) Very Good (Next 15%) Good (Next 15%)  (Next 50.)

(In some other softwares the “exceptional” is the upper 2%. I noticed that while I am ready to place students in exceptional category if is defined as upper 5%, and very infrequently, if they should be in the upper 2%.)

How  do we generate the numbers and choose the appropriate rubric? In principle, a micro-rationalist, bottom up approach would work: teachers could collect and store data from students back to decades, and they might have a formal algorithm to calculate the percentages. I do believe, still many of us adopts top down strategies. I ask myself: do I want to grant an “all exceptional” set of grades? Does the applicant  have a clearly weakest point, so  should I check the third or maybe the fourth rubric?  How about to check four exceptional and two outstanding rubrics?
Good or bad, decision makers calculate the sum of the grades, analyze the grade distribution.

As Churchill could have told: Quantification is the worst form of evaluation, except for all the others.

Are These The 20 Most Beautiful Places in the World?

Ethan Arsht published an analysis of Ranking Every* General in the History of Warfare. He adopted  a “system of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). WAR is often used as an estimate of a baseball player’s contributions to his team. It calculates the total wins added (or subtracted) by the player compared to a replacement-level player. For example, a baseball player with 5 WAR contributed 5 additional wins to his team, compared to the average contributions of a high-level minor league player. WAR is far from perfect, but provides a way to compare players based on one statistic.”

Arsht constructed a database from Wikipedia. The database  includes 3,580 unique battles and 6619 generals, and using a not too complicated linear model he got some remarkable results:

“Among all generals, Napoleon had the highest WAR (16.679) by a large margin. In fact, the next highest performer, Julius Caesar (7.445 WAR), had less than half the WAR accumulated by Napoleon across his battles. Napoleon benefited from the large number of battles in which he led forces. Among his 43 listed battles, he won 38 and lost only 5. Napoleon overcame difficult odds in 17 of his victories, and commanded at a disadvantage in all 5 of his losses. No other general came close to Napoleon in total battles. While Napoleon commanded forces in 43 battles, the next most prolific general was Robert E. Lee, with 27 battles (the average battle count was 1.5). Napoleon’s large battle count allowed him more opportunities to demonstrate his tactical prowess. Alexander the Great, despite winning all 9 of his battles, accumulated fewer WAR largely because of his shorter and less prolific career….”

For the details visit his website, see also comments on his post.

People have a desire to compare themselves with others. In many cultures children learn they should win to demonstrate that they are better, stronger and more successful than the others.

Direct comparison might lead to different results from Muhammad Ali’s famous ”I am the greatest” via ”The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” Actually, Ali stated even more: ”I’m not the greatest. I’m the double greatest. Not only do I knock ’em out, I pick the round. I’m the boldest, the prettiest, the most superior, most scientific, most skillfullest fighter in the ring today.” In principle we may believe that self-qualification is suspicious, and leads to woolf-boolf type biased ranking. Ali’s statement on himself, however, is approved by the ”collective wisdom”: almost everyone from the generation who saw him in the ring believes that Ali was really the greatest. When the U.S. Army measured Ali’s IQ at 78, he said, ”I only said I was the greatest, not the smartest.” I find amazing how objectively describes himself: ”It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.”

As opposed to the result of Ali’s positive self-ranking, another class of comparison expresses inferiority complex. The idea behind the quotation ”The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” may have its origin in the poem of Ovid (43 BCE – 17 or 18 CE) Art of Love. He wrote, ”The harvest is always richer in another man’s field.” There are other proverbs expressing similar attitude: ”The apples on the other side of the wall are the sweetest,” ”Our neighbour’s hen seems a goose,” and ”Your pot broken seems better than my whole one.” These all convey the message of others have a better life, are more fortunate than we are. The German version of the proverb states that ”Kirschen in Nachbars Garten schmecken immer besser” (The cherries in the neighbour’s garden always taste better.) A life might be miserable if you always feel that others have better stuffs. The feeling makes you envy and might lead to anxiety and to other mental health problems. The suggestion of Robert Fulghum, author of former best seller book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten is not only more objective, but also offers a viable strategy: ”The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. No, not at all. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you are.”

The idiom ”comparing apples and orange” refers to situations, when two items practically cannot be compared. Apples and oranges are thought incomparable or incommensurable. In many European language ”comparing apples and pears” are used. Since comparison is the basis of any ranking procedure, and it has a unique role in or decision makings, I will argue that we need to find the balance between accepting reality and make an effort to change things towards future successes.