Apply to fifty colleges
In this post, we’ll use fake numbers and a simplified model to argue that the most college applicants should apply to far more colleges than they actually do. You can probably extend the argument to job applications and the dating game. I’ll also compute a few fake comparative statics and speculate about why real students don’t apply to more schools.
Grading multiple-selection questions
Consider the following test question:
Which of the following are US States? (select multiple)
- Washington
- Delaware
- Frankfurt
- Memphis
This is a multiple-selection question, so the correct answer is a and b. How would you grade a question like this on an exam?
Mulberry: A college application strategist
I recently created Mulberry, a web app students can use to compute their optimal college application strategy. It is a free, open-source, user-friendly interface to Algorithm 1 from my MS thesis.
Python utility for manipulating subtitle timings
One of my current projects involves editing several hours’ worth of subtitle files in the
.srt format to accompany an online course in numerical optimization. Because we haven’t
decided exactly how we want to break up the videos, I needed an efficient way to delay
or advance all the subtitles in time, so I wrote a small Python program called srt_delay.py today to help me with this task.
Usage examples below the cut, or you can just go straight to the README in the GitHub repository.
Opening Pandora’s Box
A harrowing thing that happens in research is that occasionally, you stumble upon a paper from 1979 (paywall) that appears to solve the exact problem that you’ve been working on for months, but that escaped your attention because it used different terminology or notation.
That almost happened to me this week, but mercy was on my side. The paper linked above, Martin Weitzman’s “Optimal Search for the Best Alternative,” considers a problem called the Pandora’s Box problem that resembles my college application problem except for one crucial difference: The Pandora’s Box problem has a time dimension, whereas the college application problem is static.
The unusual thing is that the static problem appears more difficult.