"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork." - Peter De Vries

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Hotties and Notties

"In 2006, James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson conducted research that sought to establish, inter alia how perceived hotness of professors affected their RateMyProfessors evaluations for teaching quality. As part of this exercise, Felton et al. ranked (Table 2 in their paper) the relative hotness quotients of 36 different academic disciplines. My estimable colleague John Sides prepared a nice graph of the Felton et al. data (see below).

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All in all, this is yet another confirmation of bigoted prejudices popular wisdom, despite the obligatory protestations:

- Academicians in general aren't attractive
- The worst looking discipline in Arts and Social Science is Economics
- Women's and Ethnic Studies are near the bottom of the heap (as some people say, you can't find an attractive feminist)
- The Sciences fare worse than the Arts
- Law is pretty high up there
- Biology fares better than the 'harder' sciences (Physics is rolled into 'Science', which might explain the low ranking)
- The 3 worst fields (in descending order) are Engineering, Computer Science and Chemistry

A surprise was how badly Business fared, though.