Wired or Unwired?

Duquesne University shows up at number 7 on The Princeton Review/Forbes Magazine's recent poll of "Most Wired Campuses" in the U.S.

That's nice, but it would be more impressive if this weren't such a meaningless and manipulable statistic. One of the most heavily weighted factors in Forbes's survey is the number of student-accessible computers that the university owns, divided by the number of undergraduates. Since a lot of the savviest institutions are getting out of the hardware business -- students bring, and prefer, their own -- the numbers are likely to be skewed in favor of schools buying machines in order to play catch-up with more cutting-edge campuses.

In the cutting-edge spirit, then, congratulations to Carnegie Mellon for showing up at number 6 on Intel's survey of "Most Unwired Campuses" in the U.S., measuring wireless computing access.