School Slogan: “Cornell–Mediocrity Delivered”

Most people don’t realize that three out of the seven of Cornell’s undergraduate schools are publicly funded, but most people do realize that all seven are lucky to have been part of whatever blunder placed them in the Ivy League. Cornell produces top “scholars” in two things: agriculture and hoteling; everyone else is stoked on whatever finance job or gorge they’re lucky enough to land in.

The book, by the way, is hilarious.

The website has valid markup and appears to render correctly in Firefox, IE 7, and Safari 3. However, there are a few things that could use improvement:

1) Too many objects

If you look at a loading time estimator or dig into their source code, you’ll see that they actually have 5 CSS files totaling 53.3 KB of data. These should be combined into a single CSS file to reduce the loading time. Additionally, some work should be done to reduce the number of images (28) on the page. The tagline-red-short, tagline-red, and stripe-type images could be replaced with CSS styling.

2) No compression

The website’s textual content, which is 63.2 kb, is uncompressed. Using my mod_deflate tutorial they could reduce their text content to 19 kb. They could probably shave another 10 kb by using the png format instead of ancient, and proprietary gif. Basically, 1/3 of the data on that page could be losslessly reduced!

3) Weird menu links

I expected the links at the top to make themselves known when I roll over them, but they just change color. Here is a more usable idea:

4) No autocomplete

When I start typing Statler, you guys should know what Statler is and present a drop-down list of things which might lead to Statler, or Stately Dinners, or Statistics in the Hotel School:

5) No RSS feeds

Um, there is no RSS feed for your news. So, how am I supposed to keep informed? You don’t *actually* expect me to come by and visit this page all the time, do you?

6) Ugly features links colors

Take a look at this, it’s like something from a bad Microsoft Publisher template:

7) Inconsistent calendar colors

The colors on the Calendar vary randomly. Perhaps that is intended to convey information I don’t understand, but it looks very weird:

Development artifacts

Things like this shouldn’t be left in your code:

<!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/main-section-template.dwt" codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->

9) A lonely footer

The footer is way too sparse for my taste:

Overall it’s a nice redesign, but it looks half-done. There’s nothing special about it, so I wonder what the hotel school really offers. This is in contrast to the homepage redesign, which makes Cornell look alive and dynamic, but light years ahead of the CS department (which 404s if you don’t use the www fake subdomain). The best Cornell redesign site, though, is Engineering, which looks awesome. Any thoughts, Christian?

I’ve seen students climb up on bridge railings at the CTown Cascadilla gorge or Thurston Ave gorge, and I always wondered when one drunk sorority girl would lurch the wrong way at the wrong time, or a sudden gust of wind would push the Titanic-esque wannabe off the precipice.

Standing on the edge of the gorge is just not a good idea, unless you want to risk your life. It’s just not safe. Maybe only 1 in 1000 of the people that do it fall off, but there’s real, physical danger there. You want a thrill, go skydiving.

Cornell student: Do you go to Ithaca College?
Ithaca College student: Yes, how did you know?
Cornell student: I could tell by your dirty shoes. Ithaca College gets their students from the homeless shelter.
Ithaca College student: Excuse me?
Cornell student: I’m your biggest enemy.
Ithaca College student: What?
Cornell student: I go to Cornell.
Ithaca College student: Can you leave me alone?

It wouldn’t be very nice, but it would probably be spot-on sentiment wise. Cornellians tend, I’ve noticed, to be quite elitist about any non-1st-tier schools they meet. Or anything ending in “-college” or “arvard.”

College rankings are becoming increasingly fickle and unreliable indicators of where students should want to go, but since people require numbers, not tranches, they stick around. Personally, I think instead of looking at the US News & World Report rankings, you should talk to your peers and alumni of different schools to find where you would fit best. The State school are great if you can’t afford a private school. And every private University has some specialities it’s most famous for.

That said, here’s the entire Top 100 Universities List that I OCR’ed, sorted by rank in ‘06 with columns for rank in 2005, the University name, and location:

1 1 Harvard University United States
2 3 University of Cambridge United Kingdom
3 4 University of Oxford United Kingdom
4 7 Yale University United Slates
6 5 Stanford University United States
7 8 California Inst of Tech United States
9 13 imperial College London United Kingdom
10 9 Princeton University United States
11 17 University of Chicago United States
12 20 Columbia University United States
13 11 Duke University United States
14 15 Beijing University China
15 14 Cornell University United States
16 23 Australian National Univ Australia
17 11 LSE United Kingdom
18 24 Ecole Normale Superieure France
19 16 University of Tokyo Japan
21 24 McGill University Canada
22 19 University of Melbourne Australia
23 27 Johns Hopkins University United States
24 21 Swiss Federal Inst of Tech Switzerland
25 28 University College London United Kingdom
26 32 University of Pennsylvania United States
27 29 University of Toronto Canada
28 62 Tsing Hua University China
29 31 Kyoto University Japan
29 36 University of Michigan United States
31 37 Univ of California LA United States
32 26 Univ of Texas at Austin United States
33 30 University of Edinburgh United Kingdom
33 41 University of Hong Kong Hong Kong
35 44 Carnegie Mellon University United States
35 38 University of Sydney Australia
37 10 Ecole Polytechnique France
38 33 Monash University Australia
39 88 University of Geneva Switzerland
40 35 University of Manchester United Kingdom
41 40 Univ of New South Wales Australia
42 46 Northwestern University United States
43 56 New York University United States
44 42 Univ of California San Dieg o United States
45 47 University of Queensland Australia
46 52 University of Auckland New Zealand
46 73 Kings College London United Kingdom
48 73 University of Rochester United States
48 58 Washington Univ in St Louis United States
50 38 Univ of British Colombia Canada
50 51 Chinese Univ of Hong Kong Hong Kong
52 69 i Sciences Po Paris France
53 114 Vanderbilt Univ United States
54 71 Brown university United States
54 University of Copenhagen Denmark
56 141 Emory University United States
57 50 Indian Inst of Tech India
58 45 Univeisltat Heidelberg Germany
58 43 Hong Kong Univ ScVTech Hong Kong
60 109 Case Western Reserve Univ United States
61 117 Dartmouth College United States
61 48 Nanyang Technological Univ Singapore
63 93 Seoul National University South Korea
64 49 Bristol University United Kingdom
64 34 Ecole Poly Fd de Lausanne Switzerland
67 70 Eindhoven Univ of Tech Netherlands
68 84 Indian Inst of Maneigement India
69 58 University of Amsterdam Netherlands
70 103 Sch of OrientalAfrican Ss United Kingdom
70 105 Osaka University Japan
75 127 University of Basel Switzerland
76 88 Catholic Univ of Louvain Belgium
77 58 University of Illinois United States
78 111 Trinity College Dublin Ireland
79 186 University of Otago New Zealand
79 73 University of Wisconsin United States
81 101 University of Glasgow United Kingdom
82 67 MacQuarle University Australia
82 105 Tech Universltat Munich Germany
84 S8 University of Washington United States
JB5 97 University of Nottingham United Kingdom
85 53 Delft University of Tech Netherlands
87 65 University of Vienna Austria
88 193 University of Pittsburgh United States
89 133 University of Lausanne Switzerland
90 143 University of Birmingham United Kingdom
90 138 Leiden University Netherlands
92 57 Erasmus Univ Rotterdam Netherlands
93 79 Moscow State University Russia
93 88 Univ PierreetMarieCurie France
95 120 Utrecht University Netherlands
96 95 Cathofic Univ of Leuven Belgium
97 108 Wageningen University Netherlands
98 55 Universitat Munich Germany
99 112 Q Wary Westfleld Con United Kingdom
99 64 Pennsylvania State Univ United States

The list isn’t accurate, but it should give you an idea of who’s who in the Uni world!

I haven’t written anything on Wikipedia in a while, but I still log in to check up on my watched pages, and found this pleasant surprise. Should be good PR for the school!

You might think that’s not a bad idea. I’d point you towards their requirements:

• You will be expected to be intelligent about both the approach to and the crafting of your posts with regard to subject matter, language, and tone
• The media [...] do not need to know about how much beer you drank on Slope Day or the sordid details of your Friday night hookup. We ask that you approach delicate topics, well, delicately.
• But you should be fully aware of the fact that your blogs will likely be visited by members of the Senior Administration at the university; all of whom are people not known for being shy when expressing their opinions. Rest assured that you will be spoken to if you stray across the line.
• Okay. Let’s be plain, here. If you think that you would get in trouble for saying something, you probably will. That’s the line, people. You’re smart. Use those Ivy League brains.

In other words, write what you want, so long as it doesn’t offend anyone. Unfortunately, some of the best writing I’ve done is also my most offensive. Under these guidlines, writing about Matt Pearlstone’s drinking habits, or the suicide of Ash Thotambilu ‘06 would probably get me “spoken to.”

In other words, what this program boils down to is a structured attempt to recruit student labour to be a carefully monitored PR voice for Cornell University. In politics, this technique is called astroturfing:

In American politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior. The goal is the appearance of independent public reaction to a politician, political group, product, service, event, or similar entities by centrally orchestrating the behavior of many diverse and geographically distributed individuals.

They already turned down one hot student blogger; you can be next! Just fill out the insanely long application form!

If you’re wondering what the Comprehensive Master Plan (CMP) is, a sentence from their opening paragraph describes it best:

The plan will guide the long-term physical development of the Ithaca campus in concert with the University’s academic goals over the next 10 to 25 years and is expected to be carried out over the next 18 to 22 months.

In other words, the CMP is a program is designed to create a plan for the use of physical property across the Cornell University Ithaca campus over the next decade. Decisions about student housing, campus atmosphere, parking, public transportation, physical security, beauty, new buildings, and renovations are in the CMP committee’s purvue. As Cornell students, you should be intimately interested in who is running this committee, as it will make wide-ranging decisions that affect day-to-day student life.

While a number of consulting and architectural teams have been chosen, the comittee itself is lead by David Skorton, C. Biddy Martin, and Steve Golding, who comprise the executive steering committee. It’s only fair to point out that provost Biddy Martin has been involved in a bid to close to the college of Architecture, Art, and Planning, the resignation of Arts dean Phil Lewis, and according to the Cornell Review some diversity favoritism.

I’ve always noticed that the buses in Ithaca are very noticeably without decal or decoration. Compare this with a city like NY or PHX, where all the buses are sporting huge billboards.