Your daily dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.

• As I was Googling around looking for some information, I stumbled upon this Inside Higher Ed article from a few weeks ago that seemed pertinent given the University of Missouri’s dalliances with the Southeastern Conference.

The article seeks to rank the major athletic conferences by academic reputation.

It relies on a report from Arizona State University’s Center for Measuring University Performance that ranks universities on nine different indicators — total research, federal research, endowment assets, annual giving, national academy members, faculty awards, doctorates granted, postdoctoral appointees and SAT/ACT scores of entering freshmen.

A university ranked in the top 25 of each of those measures would earn nine points, and an institutions that ranked between 26-50 in each measure would earn 4.5 points.

(Before you ask — and I know you will — KU ranked among the top 50 in zero of those categories in the most recent report among all universities, though the report does separate KU’s Lawrence campus from its medical center campus, which hurts it significantly in many of the rankings.)

At any rate, the Big 10 leads the major conferences with 55 points (and actually comes out a little better than the Ivy League). The Pac-12 is close behind with 48 points.

The Big 12 was tied with the Big East for last among the BCS conferences with 12 points. The SEC wasn’t much better with 14.

Very interesting stuff, I thought.

And, after all that, I forgot the original bit of information I was looking for in the first place when I stumbled on the article. That kind of thing happens to me more often than I’d care to admit.

• Bill Self for Federal Reserve chairman?

This fellow apparently thinks so. Or at least that’s what he was telling an Occupy Wall Street crowd in Denver on a video that’s been making the rounds on my various social networking feeds that you can see here, courtesy of the blog Deadspin.

I like that guy, especially the gusto (and perhaps even a tinge of relish) with which he says Missouri has won no championships of any kind, while KU has won five national titles and 55 conference titles — though he’s not sure about that last one.

Pretty funny stuff.

You know what else is pretty funny? Kansas State fans have apparently glommed on to the “OccupyLawrence” hashtag on Twitter, and appropriated it for their own use, obviously referring to Saturday’s upcoming football game.

Terry Dahl became a fan of KU sports after switching allegiances from his alma mater, Kansas State University.

• Speaking of that game, colleague extraordinaire Sarah Henning penned a good article this week that focused on people with degrees from both KU and Kansas State and checked to see where their sports allegiances lie.

Unsurprisingly, most of them felt most tied to their undergraduate institution.

But don’t tell that to Terry Dahl. He’s an Overland Park resident who works in payroll at the Holiday Inn in Lawrence. He graduated from Kansas State in 1985. But these days, he’s converted to Jayhawk-dom, even though he never went to school here.

He once had Wildcat season tickets, in both basketball and football, but he’s since converted, thanks partially, he said, to his wife, who’s a KU fan.

He doesn’t have negative feelings for Kansas State, he said, where he had a good time at a good school.

“I like K-State a little bit,” he told me. “I just love KU.”

He’s even gone so far to join the KU Alumni Association, and create an email username that indicates he’s a converted Wildcat, even though he’s never attended school at KU (he has a master’s degree from Avila University).

If he’s got any ideas to stop all that purple occupation from going on, I’d love to hear them.

• Here’s another KU event for you — Josh Blue, a really quite funny stand-up comedian who placed first in the 2006 season of the NBC series “Last Comic Standing” who is known for his self-deprecating humor centered on his cerebral palsy will be performing in Lawrence tonight.

He’s scheduled to appear from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. today in Woodruff Auditorium at the Kansas Union.

The performance is free for students and the general public, and is in conjunction with Disability Awareness Month.

• I don’t know anything about this other than what I read in a brief news item from KWCH, but this looks like a case of “universities behaving strangely.”

Notre Dame, apparently, has asked Chapman High School to stop using its “Fighting Irish” logo.

I used to cover the city of Chapman when I worked at the newspaper in Junction City, and found it to be a lovely place with good folks. It was quite proud of its Irish heritage.

I get protection of trademarks and all, but I’m not sure it would have done too much harm to look the other way when a small Kansas town (recovering from a major tornado, no less) happened to use the same logo.

• It’s time again to engage in that age-old Heard on the Hill practice of breaking out the KU directory and soliciting a tip from a random KU employee directly. So let’s have it, Sandra Albrecht, associate professor of sociology, go ahead and tell me something I don’t already know by sending me an email at ahyland@ljworld.com.