social bankruptcy: Condition of being so overwhelmed by social media that only solution is to close all accounts http://wordspy.com/index.php?word=social-bankruptcy

Congrats to 'Lucky' @johnshopkins alum @evachen212 on landing at Instagram http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/17/media/eva-chen-instagram/ #didntshealreadyownit?

How to Bake Pi is now in the @lapubliclibrary e-collection: http://e-media.lapl.org/4D596DD2-301B-4EC7-9FCE-F19DDBF9EF00/10/50/en/ContentDetails.htm?id=ba6d3b95-3826-4eee-adb0-3d1999ccdb4e #CTSG15

I have to wonder at the horrible inefficiency of the social media strategy of the @ALifeXV enterprise.
Why do they register and set up a new twitter and facebook account every year and then spend the time refollowing people (and hoping that they're followed back again to rebuild what should be a continuing and built in audience)? Why not just have a relatively generic twitter handle, and just change the display name every year? Then their presumably returning audience will already be following them? The engagement on the user's part will have to be much better as a result as well. Surely staff time would be better spent doing this. There's also the question of how smart their conference must be if their social media strategy is so primitive. Do they know they could also swap @twitter handles on successive accounts if they really wanted to go that route?

What happens if I decide to register the twitter accounts @alifeXVI, @alife16, etc. well in advance of the next conference? This is a total social media fail.

Admittedly @14thALIFE had such a paltry existence, perhaps starting from scratch wasn't too bad an idea, but let's please be thinking about what is going to happen next year...

I like what you've done with the final product and have always thought about doing something similar myself, particularly after I saw what Martin Fenner (https://plus.google.com/106537123721037364937/posts) did with his site at http://blog.martinfenner.org/ which actually allows others to make changes to it via github. Naturally, I'm also highly interested in his take on scholarly communication too, which makes me want to delve in there even more.

Another thing I've been playing around with lately has been some tools/toys at http://indiewebcamp.com primarily within WordPress (I noticed you had one at http://teaching.proftalbert.com/, so you're at least somewhat familiar) though also a bit with http://withknown.com which is a platform built specifically with education in mind (https://withknown.com/education/).

A large part of their philosophy is to own one's own data and then syndicate it out to other social media/external site, but some of their infrastructure allows one to easily make posts on one's own page which then act as replies on another's site. This is particularly interesting from the viewpoint of teaching wherein students and professors can interact with each other, but still have/own all of their individual work. (Incidentally, it also makes for using one's own site as a commonplace book of sorts, which I often find valuable.)

As an exmple, you'll notice on the post on my blog http://boffosocko.com/2015/05/21/category-theory-anyone/ got automatically syndicated to Google+ the other day. Then you replied to it within Google+ but my site sucked your comment back into the comments section on my original blog post, thereby keeping the conversation on my site and not only just on Google's.

I've been doing something similar myself, particularly given the number of social media outlets to which one can publish. To solve part of the problem, I've been attempting to utilize the tenets of the Indie Web (http://indiewebcamp.com/) as well as several of their projects including WordPress and WithKnown. Perhaps some of the material you'll find there will help you to hone what you're trying to accomplish in your "project." One of my favorite portions is being able to publish everything in one place and then syndicate it everywhere else that makes sense as well as to give it the broadest reach. Having a handful of sources like Twitter and Facebook feed back into the comments is pretty nice as well. I've written a tad about it at http://www.boffosocko.com as well. Perhaps you might keep your WordPress blog as a primary hub and then cross-post the appropriate material here to take advantage of your audience?

I find it hard to believe, particularly if you're in financial need, that you'd have a full ride at UT and not have been offered anything at JHU, so double check with the JHU office of financial aid first to see what, if anything, you'd be offered.

More than anything I'd recommend at least visiting both campuses in person and taking a tour and speaking to some students and professors. Asking a question here like you have with only the three data points (two schools and one financial aid package) is not nearly enough to go on for anyone to presume to help you make one of the most influential decisions you're going to make in your life - particularly when the advice is likely to be a terrifically biased and spurious and you're unlikely to delve into the nature of the responses you're getting.

In some sense, you're comparing apples and oranges. A couple of questions you should ask, however, above and beyond the simple ranking portion of the question which most are focusing on in their answers (while the remainder seem to be a bit more biased based on their personal experiences) include:
What are the campus environments like?
How big are the schools and what kind of attention and resources will I have access to?
How big are the cities they're in and what do they offer as part of the undergraduate experience?
What happens after one or two years if you decide to change your major?
Other than the end result of the degree, what do you want out of a college experience?
Are you looking for more diversity or less in terms of culture, religion, etc.?
What are your other interests outside of academics and are those interests actively represented or possible at the school you want to attend? (As an example, are you a musician and want to take classes or have practice time at a college's sister conservatory - perhaps you could get a dual degree? or are there a variety of other music outlets available like bands, symphonies, orchestras, music groups, etc.?)

UT is a humongous place, while Hopkins is significantly smaller, so at UT you're much more likely to be treated like just another number, even within the electrical engineering department. At Hopkins your classes are guaranteed to be much smaller and more intimate which gives you far more access to your professors - particularly when you may need recommendations down the road.

Statistically, if you're planning on going to graduate school, you'll have far more resources for doing research as an undergraduate at Hopkins, which will give you more preparation and a stronger case when you apply. Hopkins excels in undergraduate research experience in part because of its philosophy but also because it gets almost twice the government funding than even the next closest competitor. Additional resources like the proximity of the Applied Physics Lab and the Space Telescope Science Institute (which managed projects like the Hubble Telescope) will give you additional opportunities related to your field while you're in school.

If you do want to play the simple ranking game, keep in mind that only about a third of your course work as an undergraduate will be in the EE department. How highly ranked are all the other programs and departments like mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, English, and others from which the remainder of your coursework will come? Again, what will things look like if you decide to change major part way through?

[Disclosure: I'm an alum of Johns Hopkins class of 1996 with degrees in both biomedical engineering and electrical engineering. I've been both very active on the Hopkins Society of Engineering Alumni board as well as the board that oversees the University's larger Alumni Association. I'm happy to give you more information about Hopkins, and can be easily found via a variety of social media outlets.]