Fareed Zakaria just mentioned in his GPS at CNN  a list of countries ranked by their passport index.  Countries  ranked by their total visa-free score:

Singapore becomes most powerful passport in the world.

“Paraguay helps Singapore overtake Germany for the top spot. Montreal, October 24, 2017 – Paraguay removed visa requirements for Singaporeans, propelling Singapore’s passport to the top of Passport Index’ most powerful ranking with a visa-free score of 159. Historically, the Top 10 most powerful passports in the world were mostly European, with Germany having the lead for the past two years. Since early 2017, the number one position was shared with Singapore, which was steadily going up. Other Asian passports in the Top 20 include those of South Korea, Japan and Malaysia. According to The Hon. Philippe May, Managing Director of Arton Capital’s Singapore office, “For the first time ever an Asian country has the most powerful passport in the world.” “It is a testament of Singapore’s inclusive diplomatic relations and effective foreign policy,” shared May. …”

 

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I must have been maybe ten, eleven years old, still remember well to a paradoxical title of a journal article : ‘Let the objective numbers speak!” I enlighten you, why was it paradoxical. At the ends of the soccer seasons the sport newspaper evaluated the performance of the players for each of the eleven positions, from goalkeepers to left wingers. The article, in addition to the verbal appraisal, contained eleven ranked lists, one for each position; players from each team were ranked based on their seasonal scores, Fig.  shows. How these scores were constructed? Please note: soccer is not baseball, there is no objective measure to score the players. A journalist apprentice was delegated to every game, and he (surely he) gave a score to each player after each game. Any player, who was sending off from the field, got a score ”one”. A very few players in each season received a score ”ten” for their extraordinary performances. The majority of the scores was in the ”five” to ”eight” interval. More or less the meaning of ”five” was ”somewhat below average”, and ”eight” indicated ”excellent” (but not brilliant). After each game as we walked with my Dad, to the tram stop to get a ride from the suburb called Újpest, where our stadium has been located, to our apartment in ”Újlipótváros”, we also gave our own scores to each players of our team. I was impatiently waiting the morning paper to compare their scores with mines. At the end of the season, when I read about ”objective numbers”, I knew well that they reflected ranks on the objective average of their subjective grades. This observation suggested, that ranking based on subjective rating generates the illusion of objectivity only. The scores were not random, they reflected the best estimations of the journalists, but beyond dispute they were subjective.

 

‘The only guy who seems to have escaped the rankings game is Adam. He got into the record books without trying: Before him there was nobody. Eve had to settle for runner-up, and look what happened when she tried to get ahead by snacking on a piece of fruit…”

I am reading about what people wrote about the ranking game.  Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is president emeritus  of George Washington University published in 2011 a witty article .

“The ancient Greeks picked up the game, fashioning bits of gold, silver and bronze to represent win, place and show. Earning an Olympic medal meant, and still means, you are the best of the best, the top dog in your chosen category of competition. It is absolute and objective, not relative and subjective. The best sprinter gets the gold because she is fast, not because she is popular…”

Thank you, Prof. Trachtenberg!

Adopted from the site

1. See failure as a beginning, not an end

2. Never stop learning

3. Assume nothing, question everything

4. Teach others what you know

5. Analyze objectively

6. Practice humility

7. Respect constructive criticism

8. Give credit where it is due –

9. Take initiative

10. Ask the tough questions early

11. Love what you do, or leave

Mark Cuban threw shade at Forbes’ rich list after Wilbur Ross lied about being a billionaire

(I am not sure whether my friends in Pest and Buda or even in Debrecen know MC…  My daughter and wife like to watch Sharks, so I have heard about him.

Here is the new QS World University Rankings (thanks for Gyuri Bazsa for writing me).

if you click to Methodology, you see again the magic numbers  and categories.

Academic reputation (30%)

Employer reputation (20%)

Faculty/student ratio (15%)

Papers per faculty (10%)

Web impact (10%)

Staff with a PhD (5%)

Citations per paper (5%)

International faculty (2.5%) and international students (2.5%).

Lomonosov is still the first. Written on ~ November 7th, 2017.

Caterina De Bacco, Daniel B. Larremore, Cristopher Moore  published a new algorithm with the title A physical model for efficient ranking in networks.  The model is based on binary interactions among the entities. As often in  physical models, interactions via edges are considered as mechanical springs, and the optimal rankings of the nodes are minimizes the total energy (or “energy”) of the system. They show some examples for identifying  prestige, dominance, and social hierarchies in human and animal communities.

Further studies will tell how efficient is the new algorithm.

 

 

Algorithms are maybe objective. A famous example now known how PageRank gives different results by changing the numerical value of what is cold the ”damping factor”. PageRank is based on an assumption how a web-surfer behaves. For a while the surfer will click to links she is seeing in a certain page, but get bored with the actual page she visits, and then jump to another page randomly (as with directly typing in a new URL rather than following a link on the current page). The original algorithm assumed that the probability of being bored is 0.15, so the numerical value of the damping factor was set as 1-0.15=0.85. So, setting the damping factor for other numbers we may get different ranking. The phenomenon is called rank reversal. Rank reversal is a change in the rank ordering depending on some not important, or many times irrelevant factors. While I find the paper of Seung-Woo Son, Claire Christensen, Peter Grassberger, Maya Paczuski PageRank and rank-reversal dependence on the damping factor  excellent, my opinion does not count much, during almost six years its citation number is just six.

On a somewhat different note it is reasonable to expect that the ranking of any two candidates, A and B, should be preserved even if one more candidate C enters the race. In the theory of election systems it is called the ”rank reversal rule”. This rule was infamously violated in the US election in 2000, when Ralph Nader captured a few per cent of the vote in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush (over Al Gore). As all we know Gore would have won if Nader was not in the race.

(Thanks to János Tóth).

Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion

,,,Imagine a world where many of your daily activities were constantly monitored and evaluated: what you buy at the shops and online; where you are at any given time; who your friends are and how you interact with them; how many hours you spend watching content or playing video games; and what bills and taxes you pay (or not). It’s not hard to picture, because most of that already happens, thanks to all those data-collecting behemoths like Google, Facebook and Instagram or health-tracking apps such as Fitbit. But now imagine a system where all these behaviours are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number, according to rules set by the government. That would create your Citizen Score and it would tell everyone whether or not you were trustworthy. Plus, your rating would be publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine your eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where your children can go to school – or even just your chances of getting a date….:

Read the whole article! Comments are welcome!

We cannot have thousand friends. Not even thousand closer acquaintances. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar estimated the number with whom we can form stable social relationship. It is 150, which more precisely means that between hundred and two hundred. When I opened my this website and run along my INBOX to decide whom I ask easily ”to follow” me … I was shocked.. their number was 149 (well, fifty of them kindly pushed the button. They are the people who know some of my characteristic features and my actions, so my reputation is based on their perception of my activities. But in a broader sense my reputation is the collective opinion of everybody else, except myself (well, too bad :-)). As it is known, to build reputation needs time. We all know that a single moment is sufficient to destroy a good reputation. Unfortunately, even malignant gossips are sufficient to smash this reputation. Well, but having a good reputation among friends might help, as they may defend you even without your knowing.

In the internet age we have digital reputation. Some of the reputation is expressed by numbers, and the whole book is about discussing the reality, illusion of of objectivity. One of my peer ((one of the 149) has more than forty thousand citation. He does not need any manipulation, he has non-digital and digital reputation. When I asked him to follow my website he wrote back: ”Your new project sounds very interesting. I don’t blog, twitter, facebook, etc., but if you want to send along something am happy to comment.”

Well, this peer is in my age, but how about the millennials? As I learned from an article in Chronicle of Higher Education published several years ago, Eszter Hargittai (a sociologist than at Northwestern University, now in Zurich; well it happened than I met her in her parents’s house in Buda, when she was about five years old, but I have not met her later, maybe once) studied the on-line skills of millennials. Her results confirmed what many of us sees in the classrooms, there is an obvious inhomogeneity among the students. It seems to be a correlation between the socioeconomic status of the students and their skill in building their own digital reputation, and there are many students, whose only skill is being able to post on Facebook without thinking how any post form their image. While it ‘s important to tell students that digital reputation is important, and it is possible to teach how to build either personal or business reputation. I hope that it is true that honesty is an essential part of building your online reputation (as I read in Susan Gunelius’ Forbes article from with the title ”10 Ways To Successfully Build Your Online Reputation”), still in 2015 Amazon sued 1,114 people who were paid to publish fake five star reviews for products.

 

The dark side of a success story: the search engine manipulation effect and its possible impact

Actually a big industry emerged to make websites more visible, and there are SEO (search engine optimization) companies who do the job. Even Reputation Management Companies are ranked. In October 2017. As in the Western movies there are characters with white and black hats (white generally worn by heroes and black hats by villains) there are SEOs who make manipulation with ”white hat” on their heads, they are called ethical hackers, and and there are manipulators with ”black hat”. As always, in democratic societies, first there are rules accepted by the community. Second, some people (organizations etc.) have black hats, and try to evade these rules. Third, we cannot do else just help identify and neutralize the effects of these troublemakers. Here is a warning you may find useful: Black Hat SEO can take you to the top of website ranking in a very short time. But strictly speaking, it is totally illegal. If you don’t want to get penalized and crash your Google ranking forever, it is strongly recommended to avoid black hat SEO.