Daily puzzles/problems.

[Scheherazade]

How does the acceptance process work? First-come-first-served?

[MarkBastable]

How does the acceptance process work? First-come-first-served?

Ah - kittens get up earlier in the morning! Or dogs, or whichever it was.

In other words, they are rejected at the same rate, as bill says, but they apply at different rates.

[billl]

How does the acceptance process work? First-come-first-served?

There's a deadline, all applications are considered, and the best ones are chosen.


EDIT/ADDITION: That is, when it is stated that "100 kittens and 100 puppies apply", those applications are all considered for acceptance, none of them are "too late"--it isn't first-come, first-served.


************************************************** ***************
EDIT ADDITION:
To recap, and focus on the essentials: all of the info in this example (from post #427) is relevant, and sufficient to demonstrate the answer:

• 100 kittens (each applying once), 100 puppies (each applying once)
• 58 kittens accepted to classes at the academy this session.
• 42 puppies accepted to classes at the academy this session.
  
• 5 classes, 20 students each.
  
• for each class, puppies and kittens were rejected at the same rate.

[MarkBastable]

Ah...for each class, puppies and kittens were rejected at the same rate.


Subject bias.


If the boys as a group tend to apply to a narrower selection of classes, fewer of them will get in. Whereas the girls might apply more broadly across the classes, so more of them get in.

Let's say eighty boys and twenty girls apply for engineering - and they are rejected at the proportionate rate of four in five, because there are twenty places. So sixteen boys and four girls get in.


The remaining four classes each have five boys and twenty girls apply, rejected at a rate of one in five - so four boys and sixteen girls get into each class.


In total, there are thirty-two boys and sixty-eight girls enrolled in the year.

[billl]

YES!

If anyone wants to solve for 58-42 percent, maybe that can be a nice little puzzle until the next one is presented.


EDIT: By the way, if anyone is interested in the real world inspiration for this example, I'm afraid I can't point directly to it--I've been searching, but to no avail. HOWEVER, I heard about it in a little essay among many other essays by mostly interesting thinkers at the edge.org website. Unfortunately, the essayist (Seth Lloyd) only mentions the name of the researcher he heard about it from (Joel Cohen), and that wasn't enough for me to track it down out of all the papers published by the researcher online, and the undoubtedly many more that haven't been. But Seth Lloyd is a perfectly respectable computer scientist, famous even.

[MarkBastable]

At bleedin' last.

Right, I'll get the next one together over the weekend....


Edit: Sorry - been busy. I'll get there in the next 24.

[MarkBastable]

What connects....

• Me and Bobby McGee
• The Hubble telescope
• The Beauty Myth
• The Van Der Graaff generator

[MarkBastable]

Three days, and no one's so much as taken a punt at it. Are more clues required?

[billl]

I have learned a bit (just a BIT) about The Beauty Myth just now. This one is tough, though. If Janis Joplin had attended Princeton, things might be more than half-way to a solution, but as it is...

[MarkBastable]

I have learned a bit (just a BIT) about The Beauty Myth just now. This one is tough, though. If Janis Joplin had attended Princeton, things might be more than half-way to a solution, but as it is...

....that's not a bad start. You need to look into the pupils of a Colossus.

[MystyrMystyry]

Spaced out, space telescope, spacey, spatial something?

[prendrelemick]

Didn't Newton do something with pupils ? When he was doing light and rainbows in his "Opticks".

[billl]

1) A certain Mr. Roger Miller wrote the song "Me and Bobby McGee".

2) That Mr. Miller also wrote a musical called "Big River" that debuted in New York on April 25 (1985).
April 25 is also the date that the Hubble Telescope was placed in orbit (in 1990).

3) An album called "Present" by the group Van der Graaf Generator was released on April 25, 2005.

4) Naomi Wolf *probably* (I have no proof) liked the sometimes legendarily beautiful singer Janis Joplin, who did her own version of Miller's "Me and Bobby McGee".

[MarkBastable]

Inventive though that is, it falls at the first. Roger Miller didn't write Me and Bobby McGee.

However, you do care who did.


I'll add one to the list, as a further clue

• Me and Bobby McGee
• The Hubble telescope
• The Beauty Myth
• The Van Der Graaff generator
• A stain on a blue dress

[prendrelemick]

Is that Monika Lewinski's famous blue dress.

Ok, I think the connection could be Oxford University, but more research needed.