By Katherine Landergan, Globe Correspondent

The Princeton Review ranked the Northeastern University School of Law as having the most liberal law students, in its 2013 edition of the “Best 168 Law Schools,” which was released last week.

The Princeton Review surveyed 18,000 students attending the 168 law schools to decide a number of titles, including the schools with the “best professors,” “best classroom experience,” and “best career prospects.”

To determine whether a school was liberal or conservative, students were asked the following question, “If there is a prevailing political bent among students at your school, how would you characterize it?” Answer choices were: very liberal, liberal, middle of the road, somewhat conservative, very conservative. The Vermont Law School came in second, and American University ranked third. The Ave Maria School of Law in Florida was named the law school with the most conservative students.

Among other rankings by the Princeton Review, Simmons College offered the best opportunities for women among business schools. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology business school ranked the toughest to get into. The Yale Law School (not Harvard) ranked as the toughest law school to get into.

Liza Hays, a third-year student at the Northeastern School of Law, said she used to work for MoveOn.org, a public policy advocacy group that is considered very liberal. But at Northeastern, she leans to the right.

“I feel conservative at Northeastern,” Hays said. “And in the general population I’m liberal.”

Daniel Medwed, who teaches criminal law at Northeastern, said he has taught at two other law schools, one in New York and the other in Utah, and that Northeastern students are by far the most progressive.

“[It’s] really refreshing and exciting as a teacher,” he said.

Medwed said at his previous schools there were “pockets of progressive students,” and he is pleased with the number of forward thinking students at Northeastern who care deeply about public interest law. Many of his students are interested in pursuing careers in the non-profit world, he said.

“What’s wonderful about Northeastern and what attracted me to work here is the public service aspect,” Medwed said. “A large number of students are committed to serving the public interest.”

Audai Cote, who is originally from Revere, said the political bent at the Northeastern School of Law is reflective of Massachusetts in general, he said.

“It’s almost a smaller representation of Boston,” said Cote, who is a first year student.

Cote said he is socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and that he usually does not talk politics while at school. He thinks the Princeton Review ranking is strongly tied to the substantial number of LGBT students at Northeastern.

Sarah Young, a third-year student, agreed.

Selection process

Each application receives an academic index score, which is based on GPA and standardized tests. A low score is usually a dealbreaker, but still all applications are considered.

Each application will be read by 2-3 readers, who recommend either "admit," "deny," or "possible," sometimes qualified with "strong" or "leaning." Readers also rate each candidate out of 10 for academic and personal qualities, which take into account things like socio-economic background.

"You expect it to be more numbers driven than it is, but the message we always got was to make sure we consider everything else in the application."

Reading an application takes 10 to 15 minutes.

"You’re supposed to read 25 to 30 in a day, but that’s tough when starting out, and they encourage you to do quality reads. There’s a high degree of subjectivity, at least in the first read, but that’s what the second and third read are for. The probability that you get 2 people in a bad mood is … lower than the probability that you get one person in a bad mood."

And don’t believe what they tell you about early admission.

"It’s much easier to be admitted during Early even though most schools tell you it’s just as competitive, it’s simply not true. That’s standard administrative rhetoric, but it is much more difficult to be admitted during regular. We’ve already admitted 30 to 35 percent of the class Early. When you first start reading apps you might think one is great, but reading the same app later after 600 others then that kid no longer seems as stellar."

"There’s a big push to admit or deny."

But some applications end up on the waitlist—and about 10 percent of these are eventually accepted.

"Some are placed on the waitlist for political reasons, say a legacy will be waitlisted because they don’t want to deny outright."

Did you know that almost nine in ten people (86 percent) may leave a website when asked to register or create an account?

Lengthy forms and password fatigue are cited as the main issues, but there’s a simple solution: social logins. By allowing your visitors to connect via Facebook, Google and Twitter, you can dramatically increase your the user conversion rate – and experience – on your website.

This infographic from Janrain takes a closer look at the registration challenge for brands and web developers.

    Fox News host Bill O’Reilly began Saturday evening’s “Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium” with Jon Stewart by delivering an opening speech that blasted President Barack Obama‘s spending record, liberals who still blame President George W. Bush for America’s troubles, and people like Sandra Fluke who want “more entitlements.” O’Reilly started his speech by […]

We’re just a few short weeks away from the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, and suddenly it’s all getting very serious indeed.

On Wednesday (Oct. 3), President Barack Obama debated with Republican nominee Mitt Romney at the University of Denver, trading barbed remarks and facts (or “facts”, as some pundits have suggested of Romney) in a heated contest that could decide the next occupant of the Oval Office. But who won? How did Twitter react? What’s the word from the peanut gallery?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud partnered with Ignite Social Media to produce this infographic, which attempts to answer the question: who is the real Commander in Tweet?

The First Presidential Debate: Remixed

Politics breeds creative parody, and the response to this week’s Presidential debate is no exception. Some of the prime examples:

The Gregory Brothers did their thing, and autotuned the debate:

NEW YORK, NY (Ctaholic Online) – On the Feast of St Francis of Assisi, one day before he headed for Rome to participate in the historic Synod on the New Evangelization, Cardinal Timothy Dolan authored another outstanding column. It was one in a series he regularly pens for the "Catholic New York". The series is entitled "Lord, to Whom Shall We Go" and the article, entitled "Cherished Saint Brought Christ to World Around Him",

Our readers should be well aware of the leadership of this great Cardinal of the Church and the esteem with which he is held by this author. I write regularly about his courage and the clarity which he has brought to the leadership of the Conference of Bishops in the United States at this critical time in our history. You can click here to read the most recent of numerous articles I have written about the Cardinal Archbishop of New York. I have written many more and plan to continue the practice. He is one great gift to both Church and Nation.

However, though I share the Cardinal’s appreciation for St. Francis, the little poor man of Assisi, I was concerned that the title of the Cardinal’s recent column, dedicated to and written on the Feast of Francis, as well as its placement, might limit its readership. That would be tragic. The instruction and insights this column offers on the exercise of our faithful citizenship is simply too important! The concerns which the Cardinal shares must become the material out of which we approach this election and our own exercise of voting.

I offer below a portion of the Cardinals recent article for your serious and prayerful reflection as November 6, 2012 draws near.

*****
Timothy Cardinal Dolan

"Those Americans who have faith in God, and in His Son, Jesus, and venerate saints such as Francis, also find themselves in the middle of the world, and cherish our freedom to bring the teaching of Jesus, which we hear both in the Good News proclaimed in the Bible and in the life of Francis, to the public square and political process."

Did you know that Harvard has 281 times as many Likes on their Facebook Page as they do members of their student body, making them the number one college on that channel, with almost three times as many fans as LSU?

Facebook, of course, was started at Harvard by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, so it kind of makes sense. But Harvard leads the way on Twitter, too. But what about the other social networks? Which U.S. colleges rule the roost on Google+, Pinterest and YouTube?

Be still your beating heart, as all will be revealed, courtesy of this infographic, which takes a look at the top colleges across America on all the major social networks, and ranks them by their Klout score, too.

  Since it first opened its doors to the general public back in July 2006, Twitter has expanded rapidly around the world, quickly establishing itself as the de facto micro-blogging network in almost every major country. In August we looked at a study that suggested, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the bulk of Twitter’s 500 million (and […]

She’s earned the No. 1 spot in our annual ranking of the Most Powerful Women in Business. But to keep Big Blue growing, Rometty will have to sell IBM like never before.

By Jessi Hempel, senior writer

FORTUNE — Ginni Rometty’s first customer conference as CEO of IBM (IBM) was an unusual affair, especially by Big Blue’s buttoned-up standards. The June confab took place in an airy loft in Manhattan’s hip Chelsea neighborhood. When the tiny elevator arrived to whisk a group of us to the meeting space, the doors opened and there was Rometty, flanked by a couple of visibly nervous assistants. "Really good to see you!" she said, clasping my hand warmly as her handlers checked their watches. The presentation was about to begin and Rometty still wasn’t wearing her microphone. "Isn’t this neat?" she asked.

The program started late. At 5-foot-11, with blond hair tucked behind a headband, Rometty, 55, has an almost regal bearing, but on this day she flubbed her entrance, bounding onto the stage before she could be introduced. She laughed it off. When an audience member’s ringing cellphone interrupted the events, she joked, "I hope that isn’t mine!"

You wouldn’t catch Lou Gerstner or Sam Palmisano trying to smooth over someone else’s faux pas. Rometty’s two predecessors also are unlikely to have hosted a sales meeting in a loft, and they definitely wouldn’t have described the proceedings as "neat." But they surely would have approved of Rometty’s agenda that June day. She had assembled some familiar faces, the chief information officers who buy billions of dollars of software, tech services, and hardware from IBM (No. 19 on the Fortune 500), but she had also invited their chief marketing officers. (Thus the trendy venue.) Her ambitious — and yes, unusual — plan: Get the marketers to use IBM tools to sort their data for nuggets that will help them better reach customers and sell more stuff.

MORE: Ginni Rometty – No. 1 Most Powerful Women in Business

When Rometty (pronounced RAH-metty) became IBM’s ninth CEO — and its first woman chief executive — she took control of the 19th-largest company in the world by revenue (2011 sales surpassed $107 billion) and, at presstime, the fifth largest by valuation, with a market cap of $235 billion. Her influence on the world of technology and her company’s impact on the financial markets earn her the No. 1 spot in Fortune’s annual ranking of the Most Powerful Women in Business. She inherits a company with an enviable growth record for its enormous size. Over the past decade, the company has increased profits by an average 16% every year, returning 12% annually to shareholders.

She also needs to live up to almost ridiculously high expectations: IBM has said it will add $20 billion more in revenue growth in the next three years. To put that in perspective, that’s a business roughly the size of Nike (NKE), No. 136 on the Fortune 500.

Not that any of this is a surprise to Rometty, a 31-year veteran of IBM who is known to have thick binders of background material and data prepared for her in advance of meetings. Indeed, the most surprising thing about her June customer debut was how loose and improvisational it was. She’s not a stiff — "There’s nothing imperious or imperial about her," notes Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter — but Rometty rarely leaves anything to chance. For example, she declined to be interviewed in person for this article, and would answer questions only via e-mail.

Rometty was at Palmisano’s side for much of his decade-long tenure, and became a serious candidate to succeed him about four years ago. And she was personally involved in setting the high bar that she must now clear. She and other senior leaders helped him develop the five-year plan — dubbed "2015 Roadmap" — that has IBM targeting more than $125 billion in revenue that year.

For Rometty the challenge of meeting that goal is only partly about inventing new technologies to sell to her existing clients. Growth at IBM’s scale also means creating new markets, much the way it did with its Smarter Planet campaign, which sold nontechies such as mayors and police chiefs on the idea of using software to monitor and manage traffic, water systems, and sanitation trucks. Now Rometty is making a similar pitch to marketing executives, promising that technology will change the way they do their jobs. It won’t be an easy sell: Marketers are less apt than bureaucrats to be wowed by a charismatic CEO or statistics about petabytes. Many are accustomed to seeing computing as a tool to support their creative endeavors, not the starting point.