1. Cool pictures of old plane crashes.2. A very Ann Arbor story involving obsessive house construction and opinionated neighbors.3. I agree with Tyler that this is provoking and well worth reading.4. What academic statisticians make.5. Are banks more moral than porn stars?#1 via the agitator. Hat tip on #5 to Charlie Bro...
Monday, May 27, 2013
Check out the Society for Metal Music Studies and read an interview with a metal studies sociologist.A taster from the interview:Q: What, in your view, is the dividing line between “metal” and “rock”?A: Metal is one louder. I guess that means metal goes up to 11.Great stuff.Hat tip: a speaker at this conferen...
Sunday, May 26, 2013
AbstractA growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables.The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected...
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Forbes provides a most excellent take-down of the CDC's input into the campaign to privatize alcohol sales in Pennsylvania.The only thing missing is a mention of the fact that even if privatization does increase the negative consequences associated with excessive alcohol use, it might still (and perhaps easily) pass a social cost-benefit test. Increased consumption means more utils that have to be weighed against any bad consequences that do emerge.The public health profession needs to get better at separating science from Sunday scho...
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
I picked The End of Eternity up at the bookstore at Boston Logan Airport last week. It turns out that if you get past all the rubbish at the front of the store, there is actually some pretty good stuff in the back. And the ladies who were running it last Sunday were eager to talk about books.As one might expect given the author and an original publication date of 1955, this is classic science fiction. There is an intricate plot, big ideas, time travel paradoxes (paradoxii?) and all the rest. It is, as one would expect from the genre, a bit short...
Monday, May 13, 2013
Saturday, May 11, 2013
The Seminary Co-op has its grand re-opening today in Hyde Park.What seems to be missing from the new location is opportunities to hit your head, which were plentiful indeed in the old location in the basement of a seminary (hence the name). This was always a memorable part of the shopping experience for ...
The Atlantic writes about a very PR-friendly program in which corporate employees teach after regular school hours in middle schools serving disadvantaged students.Sounds great. Surely someone has evaluated it in some serious way, as the article indicates that it is expanding around the country. What does the Atlantic writer offer up on this score?First, we learn that students in the program are self-selected:Citizen Schools now serves about 5,000 middle school students each year across eight participating states, and the program documents lasting...
1. Happy birthday itunes. Somehow it seems like both more and less than a decade.2. Library porn from the UM alumni association.3. A bibliographic essay on Margaret Thatcher from the FT4. An excellent post on the market for apples from Alex at MR5. The Village Voice watches the Client List with a real sex work...
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
My thoughts on the Reinhard and Rogoff coding error:1. I liked the piece by Greg Mankiw.2. I liked the piece by cyniconomics, which was linked to on MR.3. I liked the piece by my colleagues Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers 4. Journalists and other economists need to have a reasonable prior here. The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking replication exercise, summarized in this (gated) American Economic Review article and now more than two decades old, probably provides the best evidence. The authors of the summary article conclude...
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