A new college ranking says your best bet is to go to...CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College?

A ranking of 900 colleges and universities by a company called CollegeNet focused not on prestige, but on how much bang for your buck you get for attending the institution. Specifically, how well do various places of higher learning provide improvement on economic mobility and how affordable are these schools to families of disadvantaged financial means?

The top ten schools according to CollegeNet are nothing remotely close to those found in the Princeton Review or U.S. News and World Report's annual listings.

CollegeNet's ten are (with U.S. News and World Report's ranking as comparison):

And where do U.S. News and World Report's top five colleges and universities rank on CollegeNet's social mobility index?

I think we all kind of knew on some level that what's-its-face school...hold on, let me look it up again...uhh...CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College was where we all dreamed to go.


Ranking Graphs: CollegeNet, U.S. News, via Yahoo

Everyone loves this mystery first grader's poem.

Photographer Jason Gardner visited some New York public schools to photograph various students and their families, when he caught a glimpse of poem written by an anonymous first grader during an after school program for National Poetry Month.

The photo has since gone viral, as people have flocked to the simple, cute imagery penned by a child.

While the poem and photo from Gardner's Facebook page has become all the rage, the story behind it is now become the most shared item on New York's NPR website, and countless websites like Yahoo, Gawker, and Perez Hilton have all jumped on the bandwagon. Whoever wrote it, it's the most popular poem written in America in the 21st century. Which is saying something.


Photo: Jason Gardner



I call shenanigans. This anonymous first grader apparently can't spell for their life, and the letters somehow change shape in the last sentence (specifically the letter "E")--but they know how to use adverbs and phrases like "personal space." And though it's posted in a school, somehow no one has any idea who wrote it. No teacher, no aide, no supervisor, no one. Sure. Mystery children are often allowed to randomly post things in a school with no one else aware.

Yes. I'm a cynic.

That really inspirational/witty/clever tweet you love can now be immortalized in wood or metal.

#PermanentRetweet, a company launched this week, takes any 140 characters of unforgettable Twitter magic and etches it into permanent material. The cost? $20 for wood, $25 for metal.

Creator Brian Thompson tells Yahoo that the inspiration for the idea backfired on its original source. "It was originally inspired by my wife’s frustration with how distracted I get by Twitter, as she put it ‘looking at your phone instead of being here in the real world with us,'" Thompson says.

Now the man looks at Twitter all day and makes permanent tweets.

The question about royalties is something Thompson covers, too. "I’m giving two-thirds of the purchase price to the original tweeter," he tells Yahoo.

So all those people on Twitter that quote the Bible? Jesus is going to make some bank soon.




photo: PermanentRetweet.com

My cat is illiterate, but I'd prefer we ignore this dark secret.

Yahoo's Shine has a photo montage of "Cats Who Are Book Worms"--generally photos of cats traipsing all over books.

Like this one...

And this one...

Cats are largely far-sighted though, so don't let their purring over a Stephanie Meyer book fool you. Even they can't be bothered to read her work.



Photos by: 1.) raider of gin /Flickr  2.) Trinity /Flickr

This Week in Science!!!

Here's the occasional wrap-up of anything noteworthy in the world of science.

Starting with a 100 million-year old murder mystery:

Story One:

Fossilized spider caught red-handed murdering a wasp!!!

Someone contact Dick Wolf, because he might have another addition to the Law & Order franchise. Researchers have found a 100-million-year-old spider attack on a wasp trapped at the moment of murder in frozen amber.

It is the only fossil known of a spider attacking its prey.

According to Oregon State University zoology professor George Poinar, Jr.,"This was a male wasp that suddenly found itself trapped in a spider web. [Ed: Cue dramatic music.] This was the wasp's worst nightmare, and it never ended. [Increase tempo of the violins.] The wasp was watching the spider just as it was about to be attacked [Cue blood-curdling scream.], when tree resin flowed over and captured both of them." [Annnd end scene.]

In other news, zoology professors are third rate horror movie scriptwriters.


Story Two:

'Flying Saucer' from the 1950s was actually clumsy Air Force test vehicle!!!

Declassified Air Force documents from 1956 reveal an attempt by the American government to channel its inner E.T. and build a flying saucer-like vehicle capable of reaching heights of 100,000ft and traveling upwards of 2,880mph.

The project was called "Project 1794," and was contracted to Avro, a Canadian firm, to build it. The end result was a flying saucer that hovered unstably three feet off the ground and never moved faster than 35mph.

Which is all a convenient cover-up for the truth that Canadians are aliens. This explains Vancouver.


Story Three:

'Supermice' are invading Western Europe with super sperm!!!

Researchers have discovered that the Eastern European house mouse has invaded Western Europe and impregnated Western European house mice in the least disturbing variation of raping and pillaging one can describe.

This has led to a hybrid mutant house mouse with super-high sperm counts.

They never explained this side to Mighty Mouse on the Saturday morning cartoons.

Apparently some high school kid is running an illegal library out of his locker?

A friend forwarded this recently from a Yahoo! Answers section.

A high school kid asks if distributing books banned by the school is a good or bad thing. Here's his whole message:

-----

Is it OK to run an illegal library from my locker at school?

Let me explain.

I go to a private school that is rather strict. Recently, the principal and school teacher council released a (very long) list of books we're not allowed to read. I was absolutely appalled, because a large number of the books were classics and others that are my favorites. One of my personal favorites, The Catcher in the Rye, was on the list, so I decided to bring it to school to see if I would really get in trouble. Well... I did but not too much. Then (surprise!) a boy in my English class asked if he could borrow the book, because he heard it was very good AND it was banned! This happened a lot and my locker got to overflowing with the banned books, so I decided to put the unoccupied locker next to me to a good use. I now have 62 books in that locker, about half of what was on the list. I took care only to bring the books with literary quality. Some of these books are:

>The Perks of Being a Wallflower
>His Dark Materials trilogy
>Sabriel
>The Canterbury Tales
>Candide
>The Divine Comedy
>Paradise Lost
>The Godfather
>Mort
>Interview with the Vampire
>The Hunger Games
>The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
>Animal Farm
>The Witches
>Shade's Children
>The Evolution of Man
> the Holy Qu'ran
... and lots more.

Anyway, I now operate a little mini-library that no one has access to but myself. Practically a real library, because I keep an inventory log and give people due dates and everything. I would be in so much trouble if I got caught, but I think it's the right thing to do because before I started, almost no kid at school but myself took an active interest in reading! Now not only are all the kids reading the banned books, but go out of their way to read anything they can get their hands on. So I'm doing a good thing, right? Oh, and since you're probably wondering "Why can't you just go to a local library and check out the books?" most of the kids are too chicken or their parents won't let them but the books. I think that people should have open minds. Most of the books were banned because they contained information that opposed Catholisism. I limit my 'library' to only the sophmores, juniors and seniors just in case so you can't say I'm exposing young people to materiel they're not mature enough for. But is what I'm doing wrong because parents and teachers don't know about it and might not like it, or is it a good thing because I am starting appreciation of the classics and truly good novels (Not just fad novels like Twilight) in my generation?

Additional Details

More books I have:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Slaughterhouse-5
Lord of the Flies
Bridge to Terabithia
Catch-22
East of Eden
The Brothers Grimm Unabridged Fairytales.
...the list goes on.

-------

Thank God someone's banning Catcher in the Rye, because that book is terrible. (HA! Joke. Joke. I don't want emails from fans threatening me with witty diatribes. Salinger fans are a touchy bunch. LOVE YOU GUYS!)


Of course, everyone answering this on Yahoo tells our young hero the lad is, indeed, a hero. I'm just confused as to the reasoning why 75% of these were banned.

Is Catch-22 too anti-war? Because, really, if there's anything Americans should strive for it's more bloodshed.

East of Eden too long? Damnit, Steinbeck, keep it pithy, okay?

And Hitchhiker's Guide too glib? Because we all know sarcasm died, circa 1978.