Gueorgi Kossinets (a Ph.D. student in our collective dynamics group here at Columbia) forwarded this article on the role of social networks in faculty hiring.

This reminds me that Tian once told me that I had the reputation of writing lukewarm letters of recommendation. Of course, I was thrilled to have any reputation at all, but I wasn’t so happy that the rep was of not being nice. After that, I consciously ratcheted up my letters. For a few years, my letters probably had extra impact until people learned to normalize.

But I don’t want to go too far and become like the well-known statistician whose letters are always so uniformly positive that they get calibrated down to zero. Not enough data around to use formal statistical adjustment.