Interesting facebook stats...

are available now, thanks to the newest (yes, another) design of facebook. Looking at the networks for U.S. News's Top 28 national universities (why the top 28? Because that's as far as I got), some interesting notes:

• The #1 interest, at every school, is the suitably generic "Music." #2 is almost always "Reading" (understandable exceptions: "Skiing" at Dartmouth; "Movies" at USC).
• As for that music, 25 out of 28 schools had Coldplay #1 in mentions. The Beatles, Radiohead, and Jack Johnson were the most common #2 and #3; some combination of those two popped up almost everywhere.
• In movies, the two most commonly cited movies were Fight Club (#1 at a majority) and Wedding Crashers. As you move down the rankings, Wedding Crashers becomes more prevalent. The only school with a different #1 was Harvard (Love Actually).
• TV provided an interesting pattern. Almost everywhere, the top program was "Family Guy" or "Grey's Anatomy." A top predictor of which was #1 was provided by whether there were more self-identified male or female students. "Family Guy" schools averaged +5 percent male. "Grey's" schools averaged +3 percent female. (One school--Princeton--had "24," then "Family Guy," then "Grey's"; it is +7% male).
  
• And for the readers, "Harry Potter" as a generic category was #1 at all schools. #2 was split between several books, the most common being The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye, with no discernable pattern showing.
  
• As for self-identification of sex, the top male school was MIT (44%) and the top female school UNC (46%).
• Students at the very top schools tended to be more discreet about their political leanings and relationship status. At the top 10 schools, an average of 57 percent revealed no political affiliation; at the remaining 18, the average was 51 percent. The gap was even more profound for relationship status (52 percent versus 43 percent).
• As for that relationship status, 40-45 percent of those divulging tended to say "single," and at all schools, 32-36 percent of those responding said "in a relationship" (of course, this counts facebook-only relationships). At most of the 28 universities, from 6 to 8 percent of all in-network people stated "married," and from 2-4 percent said "engaged." "It's complicated" almost always netted 2 percent of the network and "in an open relationship" (almost always fake) 1 percent.
• The top school for singles, relative to those responding, was UCLA (52% single), with USC (51%) a close second. The lowest proportion of singles was Harvard (37%).
• Finally, as for political affiliation, on a scale of 5 points for "very liberal" and 1 for "very conservative," and excluding "libertarian," "apathetic," and "other," the top 28 broke down as follows:
• Most liberal: UC-Berkeley (3.85), Yale (3.82), Brown (3.80), Columbia (3.77)
• Most conservative: Notre Dame (3.02), Vanderbilt (3.11), UNC (3.16), UVA (3.40).
  
• Note for Huskies: UW (not one of the 28 included) comes in at 3.48, towards the middle of the ranked schools.
  

You'd think these are a somewhat accurate reflection, despite the inclusion of some alumni.

I am not talking about garden implements!

The continuing controversy over broadcaster Don Imus's comments has had a beneficial side effect for me: I can spell a new word! Maybe.

The New York Times reports that Imus's offense was to call the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed ho's." Now, if we break it down, "ho's" is the plural form, and we come up with the singular form ho' (the apostrophe cannot, of course, be part of a pluralization, unless done incorrectly). This would make sense, since the word omits the following "r" sound of the original ancestor word. However, were the singular to be spelled ho, then ho's is a clear grammatical error.

AP, via ESPN.com, disagrees with NYT, however, using the plural "hos." This form seems to leave open the dangerous possibility of pronouncing the word "hoss," as in "Ol' Hoss."

How, exactly, are these cases decided at a newspaper? Majority vote? Or is the word ho' really in somebody's Style Guide?

Addendum: In no way do I condone the comments Imus made, by the way, but I haven't followed it closely so I have nothing to add to that discussion; there's plenty in the mass media. To me, honestly the more interesting aspect is this linguistic one.

lolcats

I generally don't comment on changes to my links, but... please welcome the newest addition to my "Other Links," I Can Has Cheezburger?

An example of their fine work:

City frustrations

Some cities are apparently well run.

And then there is the Houston website.

I will leave the complaints about potholes, random road closures, and other such infrastructure troubles (as well as overall cluttered unsightliness, pollution and socioeconomic problems) aside for now. I want to discuss the website, the portal through which people connect to the city.

Houston's website is here. Note something about the drop-down menus on the front page. Yes, they go behind the pictures. They've been doing that for a while now.

I had a car accident today (got rear-ended by a guy on the interstate while stopped in traffic). Apparently, here the police don't come out... you go to a substation with the info to file the report. I don't know if that's common in larger cities so I have no comment on it. I went to the website to search for a station close to me (actually, I googled "Houston Police Department" and wound up at the police website, which is part of the main website). Note first that the police website uses a rather unattractive older template (only the front page of the website has really been changed). The left sidebar scrolls even though it doesn't take up the entire page, and it is unclear whether it refers to the police or the entire city (I'm pretty sure it's the latter).

I then spent a long time trying to find the listings of police stations. You'd think one of the top choices would be to know this. But no... although you can view crime statistics, there's no link for "find a station." At length I did find it (through the "Contact HPD" button--here it is). Note that the listings state that the storefront in Neartown is open 24 hours. So, of course, I drove there, and it is open 6 am to 10 pm. I arrived around 10:08 and will have a return trip early tomorrow morning.

Right.

For reference, here are some other cities which seem to have decent web designers... Seattle, New York, Chicago...

In this day and age, if you're a U.S. city and you don't have a good website, what are the odds of things being better once you actually get there? This complaint might seem petty, but as you might guess it's part of a pattern of rather greater frustration.

The crazy optician

This guy (from Toronto) is just crazy. When the consumer advocate reporter comes to talk to him again, he... opens the door in his face, tries to punch him and throws snowballs at the cameraman, then barricades himself inside the store until the riot team arrives.

Apparently, he was:

• Making fake Oakleys and other brand-name glasses (when the reporter confronted him, blamed Oakley);
• Refusing to refund money for the above ("We don't do money back here");
• Performing eye exams, even though in Ontario, opticians are not permitted to do so ("Your eye doctor is probably going to say something like I'm not supposed to do this, but he's my competition").
  

Now he has reportedly changed the name of his business and tried to make it look like the neighboring one. The archive of old news videos about him is here.

Schoolyard penis seen from space

Despite being busy, I fulfill my obligation to post the most important news I can.

It took me a while to find it in the picture, but hey, it's there. That's an accomplishment to tell your kids about. Or maybe they'll find out on the Internet...