Weekend Links

1) Paul Niehaus' non profit, GiveDirectly, lets you directly wire money to the bank accounts of impoverished families in Kenya

2) Empirical estimates suggest most published medical research is true (previously on FE)

3) On quantum smell (PLoS One)

4) On the ecological dead weight loss of cats (via Stephen Hughes)

5) One of the newly announced Tang Prizes' four areas of focus is "sustainable development" (via MR)

6) Thomas Edsall's spectacular piece on whether consumption inequality has been tracking income inequality (also via MR)

7) Gordon and Dahl on consensus in modern economics (NBER)

8) The "Ringelmann effect" and the Statistics of Statisticians

9) Andrew Gelman on the odd spam academic bloggers get (I just got one on "10 Astonishing Examples of Bizarre Parasitic Life Cycles")

10) V. S. Naipual's influence on Robert E. Lucas 

Weekend Links

1) Coursera's next course on data analysis using R starts January 22nd (via Yaniv Stopnitzky)

2) Dropboxifier lets you back up / share folders via Dropbox without relocating them (via The Lazy Economist)

3) Banerjee and Duflo's "The Challenges of Global Poverty" starts Feb. 13th on edX (via Hartmut Fisher)

4) Google Ph.D. Fellowship nominations and applications are due Feb. 1st

5) The first atmospheric carbon dioxide capture plant is planned to open by end of 2014 (via Marion Dumas)

6) Easy ways to alienate yourself from a profession, Forbes lifestyle piece edition (via Ivana Ng)

7) 125 years of National Geographic photos (via Dave Pell)

8) David Enfield's ENSO FAQ is an oldie but a goodie

9) Daniel Aldrich's two pieces on the "soft approach" to countering violent extremism are now out (see under "Countering Violent Extremism", and previously on FE)

10) "Knowledge workers are bad at working." Cal Newport on the value of "deep work"

11) A mysterious patch of light shows up in the North Dakota dark (via Padraic Hughes)

Weekend Links

1) Sachs on Acemoglu & Robinson on Sachs on Acemoglu & Robinson

2) “It is crucial that scientists sound a more realistic, more desperate, note on global warming.” - Jeremy Grantham. Yes, that Jeremy Grantham. (via Paul Armsworth) - update: and Vaclav Smil responds.

3) Applications for next October's DISCCRS VIII Interdisciplinary Climate Change Research Symposium in Colorado are now open

4) Knowing Where and How Criminal Organizations Operate Using Web Content (via Gordon McCord)

5) Google is using drones to help hunt rhino poachers (via Dave Pell)

6) Is Corruption in China 'Out of Control'? A Comparison with the U.S. In Historical Perspective (via Andres Marroquin)

Weekend links

1) Two papers (one each in Science and Nature) have come out in the past month indicating that onset of human tool use was much earlier than we thought, at multiple points of development.

2) Stata's gift shop is remarkably charming

3) England has maintained a military presence in all but 22 countries around the world (via Artem Peplov)

4) Sam Arbesman on the Kolmogorov compexity of holidays (via MR)

5) Someone needs to come up with a good instrument for high fructose corn syrup consumption

6) Nature's editorial board weighs in on the PNAS gender bias paper and their take on how best to respond (previously on FE)

7) Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net (NBER)

8) Attention as a scarce resource, experimental development econ edition (Science, previously on FE)

9) Suicide and drought in New South Wales, Australia, 1970–2007 (PNAS)

10) There will be an open mic night at this year's AGU Annual Meeting in San Francisco

Weekend Links

1) A nice overview of the recent environmental justice lawsuit against California'a carbon cap and trade bill (via Stephen Zavetoski)

2) The perils of underinvesting in climate data infrastructure

3) Evidence of elite capture in China, and response (via Dave Pell)

4) “Bangalore used to be India’s cleanest city,” said Amiya Kumar Sahu, president of the National Solid Waste Association of India. “Now, it is the filthiest.” (via Stephen Hughes)

5) The long run impact of locust swarms (via Amir Jina)

6) Nate Silver, applied stats vs. punditry, and the "New Age of the Enlightenment"

7) Why it can be rational to vote (via Andrew Gelman)

8) Psychology's "replicability crisis" (via Ed Yong)

9) "At last count, tricks of social attraction have helped restore 49 seabird species in 14 countries, including some extremely endangered bird species."

10) Income inequality-related voting behavior by Congressional representative (via Upworthy)

11) Tropical cyclone landfall as inferred by tidal gauge maxima  (PNAS, via Odbayar Batmunkh)

Weekend Links

1) View of the Sarychev Volcanic eruption from the International Space Station (animated gif)

2) The new course in Marginal Revolution's online university: Water Economics

3) The perils of genoeconomics (via Amir Jina; Ashraf and Galor paper available here)

4) Publish or Perish, for extracting bibliometric data from Google Scholar (via Quayshawn Spencer)

5) Wikipedia's list of publications in economics could use some help (and not entirely unrelated)

6) Contraceptive Economics

7) MIT's Cambridge Solar Tool "shows Cambridge residents, businesses, and property owners how much electricity can be produced on their rooftops from solar photovoltaic (PV)"

8) Visualizing federal spending vs. media coverage

9) "Sex distorts time discounting; under plausible conditions, sex increases patience." (AEJ: Micro, ungated version here)

10) SciLogs (in association w Nature) has just announced their new science blog lineup. It looks good, and the master RSS feed is here (via Bora Zivkovic)

11) The Island Where People Forget to Die (NYT, via Walker Hanlon)

12) 1st International Workshop on Econometric Applications in Climatology

Weekend links

1) NASA faked the moon landing, Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science

2) The US Gini coefficient is higher now than it was in 1774 even when one adjusts for slavery (via  Dave Pell )

3) Military spending and Godel's incompleteness theorem

4) Paleolithic animation

5) Why bother trying to attribute extreme events? (RealClimate.org)

6) How random are Randomized Control Trials? (via MR)

7) More on Agflation (via Udadisi)

8) The NY Times Sunday Magazine's Inspiration Issue (for inspiration on those grant proposals)

Weekend Links

1) Alternate markets in life insurance, Apollo 11 edition

2) A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization (Nature)

3) "We use differential declines in service provision --measured by nuns/capita-- to identify its effect on fertility, controlling for secular trends. They are large: 300 to 400 children per nun." (NBER)

4) Human capital disinvestment as an externality of arranged marriage norms (also NBER)

5) Marginal Revolution is starting an online university, and the first class is in development (via Udadisi)

6) Chris Blattman gives advice on PhD students' NSF applications

7) Frontiers of forensic academic honesty enforcement, Crimson edition (via Dave Pell)

8) Niall Ferguson, the John Yoo line, and the paradox of public speaking (via Luke Stein)

9) Buffalo bones, phosphorous, and the legacy of renewable resource mismanagement (via boingboing)

10) Terra Populus' data extract system is almost ready

11) Revolutionists

G-FEED blog is live!

David Lobell, Michael Roberts, Wolfram Schlenker, Jarrod Welch and I have started a blog on Global Food, Environment and Economic Dynamics (G-FEED).  It's a compliment to Fight Entropy (not a substitute) and will focus primarily on food production around the world and its relationship to the environment and economics.

check it out: www.G-FEED.com

Weekend links

1) Anesthesiologist Fabricates 172 Papers (via Michael Clemens)

2) This much I know: Daniel Kahneman (via MR)

3) Tatyana Deryugina's new paper on local weather fluctuations and attitudes towards climate change (also via MR)

4) A Visual Git Reference

5) Version 3.0 of the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) is out (via Mona Khalidi)

6) Number sense across the lifespan as revealed by a massive Internet-based sample (PNAS, via Kyle Meng)

7) Development economics and my native borough (via Dave Pell)

8) Optimal TED Talk Structure

9) The IDV User Experience blog has some great (mostly spatial) data visualizations (via Reed Walker)


10) Graphing Every (Wikipedia) Idea in History

11) Convection over Manhattan this past Wednesday

Weekend Links

1) On giving (bad) advice to kings (via bb)

2) The epidemiological transition as illustrated by cause of death (NEJM, also via bb)

3) The Cost of Friendship (NBER via, *cough cough*, Sol)

4) A popular press indictment of hurricane risk modeling

5) Estimating the welfare loss of natural disasters in developing countries using willingness to contribute labor (via Amir)

6) Visualizing an infection in real time (via Ram)

7) The New Yorker's top five TED talks (via Dave Pell)

8) Design and Analysis of a Text Mining Experiment (via Suresh)

9) Skill Premia in Commercialized Sex Markets

10) Michael Lewis on idiosyncratic human capital outcomes and public good provision (basically)

Weekend links

1) Ironspread: Scripting Excel using Python

2) Is Chagas Disease the "New HIV/AIDS of the Americas"? (PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases)

3) Geography, land quality, and the origins of ethnolinguistic diversity (AER)

4) Per capita income correlates with tree density (via bb)

5) Defensive patent licensing pools

6) Humans may have only been partly responsible for the loss of wooly mammoths (Nature)

7) Dani Rodrik on the future of the nation state

8) Germany vs. the Euro area in 7 easy graphs (via cp)

9) "The safe release of genetically-modified [malaria-resistant mosquitos] into the wild will be an issue down the line..." (PNAS)

10) Creating the new development ecosystem (Science, via Hannah)

11) Daniel Aldrich's exhaustive lit review on the politics of natural disasters (via Amir)

12) An economic history of the Sinaloa Cartel (via Dave Pell)

Weekend Links

1) Routes and imputed travel times between 751 sites in ancient Rome (via The Economist)

2) AfricaMap: a collaborative GIS data project at Harvard (via Hannah)

3) OpenROV, a $750 open source submarine Will someone at one of the oceanographic institutes get a grant together to swarm these, please?

4) The gap in US black-white life expectancy appears to be shrinking (via Will)

5) Why Do Firms Use Non-Linear Incentive Schemes? (or "understanding sales jobs")

6) The UN Global Pulse Report on Big Data for Development, and commentary by Patrick Meier (via Emmanuel)

7) On switching from Stata to R (via Johannes)

8) “If you want to live longer and healthier than the average American, come to New York City” (The Lancet, via Krista)

9) Multiple Event Studies in Public Finance: ASimulation Study with Applications

10) "I need the rest of you to help me fix the world." A round up of this year's best commencement addresses (via Dave Pell)

11) Why I'm leery of field research

Weekend Links

1) The importance of stupidity in science (via Colleen)

2) Average annual decline in under 5 mortality in selected SSA countries since 2005: 5.9% (via Mark)

3) Child mortality in the Millennium Villages: a non-randomized controlled assessment (The Lancet, via Amir)

4) Understanding basic weather phenomena in a few short pages

5) Whatever happened to the Journal of No Results? (via Gordon)

6) The Rise and Fall of Unions in the U.S., or "The Fastest-Dying Jobs of This Generation" (NBER, via Dave Pell)

Weekend Links

1) Bertrand Russel's Ten Commandments of teaching

2) NYT on Dick Lindzen, cloud feedbacks, and denialists (via Dave Pell)

3) "The iPhone has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary developments since the invention of Braille." (also via DP)

4) Should blogging count towards tenure decisions? (Robin Hanson, via Krista)

5) "Observed acceleration indicates that sea level rise from Greenland may fall well below proposed upper bounds" (Science, via Kyle)

6) Pakistan is going to roll out mandatory natural hazard insurance for all citizens (via Amir)

7) Google Refine, for cleaning messy data (via Nicole)

8) "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" was published 50 years ago last month. It's quite readable. (via bb)

9) A novel strategy for the prisoner's dilemma under non-simultaneous signalling and bequests.

Weekend Links

1) Google search -implied discounting correlates with GDP (Nature, open access)

2) GIS and Agent-Based Modeling (via Krista)

3) The first satellite photo of California dates from 1851 (or not)

4) Honesty about effect sizes in development (via Amir)

5) Association of Kawasaki disease with tropospheric wind patterns (Nature)

6) Guess which three developed nations have the highest adolescent death rates? The first one's pretty easy. (via Dave Pell)

7) A table of slightly wrong tables and identities (xkcd)

Weekend Links

1) The Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans, and discussion here (via bb)

2) "We find that in the absence of Asian anthropogenic emissions, 20% of MDA8 O3 exceedances of 60 ppbv in the model would not have occurred in the southwestern USA." (via Marion)

3) Mapping patterns of long-term settlement in Northern Mesopotamia via satellite (PNAS)

4) "[S]uch records suggest that the last deglaciation was punctuated by a dramatic period of sea-level rise, of about 20 metres, in less than 500 years." (Nature, via Kyle)

5) Coastal California fog contains 5x more mercury than ever recorded in rainwater

6) How much of the neuroimaging literature should we discard? Or, the importance of Bonferroni corrections  (via MR)

7) Updating the CRU and HadCRUT temperature data

Weekend Links

1) More on pirates and game theory (previously, and more generally)

2) The Brookings Institute's Fall 2011 National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change

3) Is high ability necessary for greatness?

4) Stephen Wolfram analyzes data on his own productivity behavior (via Ben Goldacre)

5) "If you want to help, your first duty is to make sure you don’t make things worse." Blattman on Kony

6) The animated GIF as climatological commentary (via Krista)

7) A generalizable technique for solving difficult problems (via MR)

Weekend Links

1) Maxing out lifetime insurance coverage in one year: a personal appeal from a Ph.D. student in sustainability at ASU

2) "Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive advertising about product quality is prevalent..." (NBER working paper, great natural experiment)

3) "Mom, where do atmospheric data come from?"

4) Net worth of presidents and the problem of capture

5) Satellite photos of the world's largest slums

6) A Legal Defense Fund for Climate Scientists

7) Acemoglu and Robinson are blogging (via MR)

Weekend Links

1) The last swimming elephant in the Andaman Islands

2) "The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life." (via Emmanuel)

3) The Stata community at StackOverflow is pretty active

4) Is Environmental Quality Worth the Cost? by V. Kerry Smith

5) Energy use in NYC buildings at the tax lot level

6) Energy poverty photography (via MF)

7) Political economy and climatology (not what you think)

8) "We can only have as good a foreign policy as the public's understanding of world affairs."

9) The BBC on American tent cities (via bb)

10) Industrial policy, growth, and ultraheavy manufacturing