Around the Blogs, Vol. 106

1. The importance of being able to enjoy the mundane (Ben Casnocha)

2. "Nonshared environment" might best be conceived of as noise, not environment, says Kevin Mitchell.

3. External validity alert: Are patients in medical trials selected for large treatment effects? (Andrew Gelman/Paul Alper)

4. Chris Bertram makes a surprisingly good case for the argument "Squeezing the rich is good: even when it raises no money".

5. "Is there no racial bias precisely because it seems like there is?" Ole Rogeberg takes us into the mind of the microeconomist.

6. The fun of being criticized for doing the right thing, namely keeping the normative and the positive apart (Bryan Caplan)

7. An argument against men attending childbirth (Dennis Mangan) (via)

8. 50 great book covers from 2013, collected by Dan Wagstaff (via)

9. The low-hanging fruit of immigration: Bryan Caplan offers another metaphor.

10. The argument that extremely high cognitive talent is specific. (Bruce Charlton)

11. The argument for being an asshole (Scott Adams)

12. What's it like to hear voices that aren't there? (Christian Jarrett/L. Holt and A. Tickle)

13. Which works did sociologists cite most in 2013? (Neal Caren)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 105

1. The home advantage and the move to a new stadium (Mark Taylor)

2. Innovation: The view that government serves as a "useful irritant" (Seth Roberts)

3. Useless (German) news (Andrew Hammel)

4. Fun with Google ads (John Holbo) (By the way, I couldn't replicate that result. Generally speaking, it seems we get much less Google ads here in Germany than they get in the U.S. Or does Google know I rarely buy stuff on the net?)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 103

Bit late today, but here's some recent posts that may be worth your time.

1. Andrew Gelman knows how randomization works in animal studies. (Post starts off with disturbing image)

2. Gabriel Rossman has tips on how to be a better journal reviewer, with a focus on decreasing turnaround times. Fabio Rojas links and summarizes.

3. Christian Jarrett summarizes a new paper by Brian D. Earp, Jim A. C. Everett, Elizabeth N. Madva, and J. Kiley Hamlin, who cannot replicate the "Macbeth effect", i.e., the finding that feelings of disgust increase the desire for physical cleaning.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 102

1. The experiment Milgram chose not to publish (Tom Bartlett/Gina Perry) (via)

2. Disagreement on the bellicosity of stateless societies (Larry Arnhart)

3. Velvet glove, iron fist, or: How government force works. (Bryan Caplan)

4. The "forced rider problem" and disutility from "public goods" (Eric Crampton). Useful concept!

5. The view that TV shapes people's thinking by not mentioning aspects of topics (Steve Sailer/NOTA)

6. Why people dislike photos of themselves: Mirrors meet the mere exposure effect (Robert T. Gonzales). But don't miss the link in the last paragraph.

7. 26 great words from the OED (Carolyn Kellogg/Ammon Shea)

8. Differences in preferences for competitiveness as an explanation of the male-female wage gap (John List and Uri Gneezy)

9. "This must be the strangest publicity still ever taken." (Sherbrooke)

10. Three by Tim Harford: Why pro-free-market arguments don't work well for finance; banks are relying less on leverage; how to use e-mail efficiently at work.

11. Paging Quetelet: Why song lenghts are not normally distributed (Gabriel Rossman) (via)

12. People respond to incentives, giving to the poor edition (Eric Crampton/Jillian Keenan)

13. Feelings of extreme bliss produced by targeted brain stimulation (Christian Jarrett/Fabienne Picard, Didier Scavarda, and Fabrice Bartolomei). Gimme, gimme, gimme!

14. Why wages don't fall during recessions (Bryan Caplan/Truman Bewley)

15. How to make voters better informed (Bryan Caplan)

16. Another bonkers graphic presented by Kaiser Fung.

17. The impact on wages of: height; smoking; testosterone (Economic Logician/Petri Böckerman and Jari Vainiomäki/Julie Hotchkiss and Melinda Pitts/Anne Gielen, Jessica Holmes and Caitlin Myers).

Around the Blogs, Vol. 101: Long Wait, Long List

Because I've been collecting for so long, it's so many links. Because it's so many links, I'm posting it early.

1. If the effect in question was found in a particularly small sample, should that strengthen or weaken your belief in the effect? (Eric Falkenstein) From the same author: A critique of Stevenson and Wolfers' happiness research.

2. Thoughtful, personal essay by Eric S. Raymond about the emotion and cognition of racism.

3. A body-mind theory of lefties and righties (Agnostic)

4. "Annals of Self-Refuting Tweets" (Jeremy Freese presents the American Sociological Association make an ass of itself)

5. Wie intensiv werden die Deutschen eigentlich von der eigenen Regierung ausgespäht? Man weiß es nicht. (Niko Härting) (via)

6. "A conservative estimate is that we’re spending a million dollars per year per terrorist, maybe more – that’s not even counting Iraq and Afghanistan." (Gregory Cochran)

7. The case against (eating lunch) outside (Matthew Yglesias) (via)

8. Matthew Desseem reviews Rififi.

9. Person fixed effects and psychological testing.

10. The theory that Marcia Lucas contributed more to Star Wars' quality than is usually acknowledged. (Fabio Rojas)

11. A discussion of reviewing and reviewers (with a focus on sociology) (olderwoman and commenters)

12. Is US violent crime actually down? Looking at non-police data. (Steve Sailer)

13. "William Boyd’s Taxonomy of the Short Story" (Will Wilkinson)

14. How not to get published. (Andrew Gelman/Brian Nosek, Jeffrey Spies, and Matt Motyl)

15. Getting the priorities straight (Foseti) (on this blog)

16. Male feminists: Demand and supply. (Nick Borman)

17. Real life cases of amnesia that are stranger than fiction. (Christian Jarrett)

18. Season of birth is endogenous (Eric Crampton/Kasey S. Buckles and Daniel M. Hungerman)

19. A model of how the internet works (Marco Arment) (via)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 99

1. What happens to CEOs who don't want to hand over their customers' data to the NSA? (Jason Kottke/John Gilmore)

2. This looks like it might be a useful equation for stratification researchers, if they allowed themselves/dared to use it. (Gregory Cochran)

3. Robin Hanson and Bill Dickens develop a theory of fertility.

4. ". . . and if you be drunke annoint your privie members in vineger, and ye shall waxe sober." Advice from 1628 (via).

5. A graphical test for whether time trends moving in parallel suggest causality (Kaiser Fung)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 97: Heritability, Indians, Blotzheim [delete commas to obtain band name]

1. "The national news media appears to be turning into a giant conspiracy to feed me material." A rather funny post by Steve Sailer. From the same author: A good example of environmental influences on heritability (estimates), as a part of musings on the height of actors.

2. "Close friendships appear to counteract genetic vulnerability to depression in girls, but not boys" (Christian Jarrett/Brendgen et al.). Suggestive, but correlation-not-causation/endogeneity alert.

3. German name of the day (Andrew Hammel)

Enjoy your weekend!

Around the Blogs, Vol. 96

1. Neurobonkers summarizes the results of a new review on the efficacy of learning techniques (via). Contains link to the full, open-source paper, but that's one long article, that is.

2. If the excerpt presented by Michael Blowhard Esq. is anything to go by, Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowolf into modern English is tasty.

3. How much benefit has the Human Genome Project brought so far? Says Roberts says meh.

4. ". . . the average free-market economist doesn't take the unemployment problem seriously", says free-market economist Bryan Caplan. And he's not happy about it.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 94

1. Deontic or consequentialist ethics? Bayesianism! (Eric Raymond)

2. How to keep your brain clean (Bryan Caplan)

3. Are learning styles a myth? (Mo Costandi)

4. 11 rules for critical thinking (Maria Popova/Peter A. Sturrock)

5. Bonkers infographics (Adam Obeng) (via)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 93

1. Why social science research is so hard: The case of guns and violence. Part one, part two. (Maggie Koerth-Baker)

2. Important questions that are easy to not ask dept.: Which type of growth trajectory are you on? (Scott H. Young) And are there sudden jumps? (Ben Casnocha)

3. Brits probably shouldn't worry about the economic effects of immigration. (Tim Harford)

4. Self-reports underestimate BMIs in Ireland, too. (Economic Logician/David Madden)

5. Placebo effects in priming. (Christian Jarrett/Ulrich W. Weger & Stephen Loughnan) Will it replicate?

Around the Blogs, Vol. 92

1. Their behaviour suggests that hardcore libertarians are actually consequentialists. (Eric Crampton)

2. When Will Wilkinson's analytical mind and the topic of writing fiction meet, something interesting is bound to happen. And it does. (via)

3. Using science to beat procrastination. (lukeprog) (via)

4. Jim Manzi explains banking regulation in a way that I can understand.

5. The argument that it's the long-run effects of minimum wage laws that really count (Isaac Sorkin) (via)

6. "Unpaid Internships Have Officially Jumped the Shark" (Paul Gowder)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 90

The next few Fridays will bring another playlist, so let's empty out the Around the Blogs folder:

1. Do high wages drive economic growth? (Tim Harford)

2. Attempts to answer the questions, "What is science?" and "What is love?", collected by Maria Popova.

3. How women think about love. (Penelope Trunk)

4. Let's Potato (Andrew Hammel and his brother).

5. "Infographic Names 21 Emotions with No English Word Equivalents" (Erin McCarthy) (via). Large version of graph here. "Saudade" seems especially useful.

6. "Prosecutors are Demi-Gods in the United States" (Andrew Hammel)

7. I want that drug! (Jon M)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 89

Yeah, not a lot of original content lately; and given that it's the end of the year, readers should prepare for lots more listed-links-type of posts. Perhaps I'll get round to writing some original stuff over the holidays, but I doubt it. So, here's some noteworthy recent blog posts:

1. Steve Sailer vs. Elizabeth Sweet on economic development, sex roles, and presents. Funny and thought-provoking. From the same author: The Wertherpedia theory of mass shootings

2. Ben Casnocha's best Tweets collected

3. When outcomes for the treatment group affect outcomes for the control group, results won't scale up. (Economic Logician/Pieter Gautier, Paul Muller, Bas van der Klaauw, Michael Rosholm and Michael Svarer)

4. Perform your own meta-analysis (soon, perhaps) (passed along by Tyler Cowen)

5. A partial model of U.S. politics, from Andrew Hammel

Happy holidays, everyone.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 88: Social Science Special

1. Bryan Caplan discusses Malcolm X's autobiography: Directory to all parts.

2. How important are survey response rates? Jeremy Freese, Fabio Rojas.

3. Retracted psychology articles keep getting cited as evidence. (Sanjay Srivastava)

4. What would an ideal stats text book look like? (Phil Price)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 86

Long time no Around the Blogs, lots of links collected:

1. "New study shows half of the global warming in the USA is artificial" (Anthony Watts)

2 The exploit/explore tradeoff (Seth Roberts)

3. "Disclosing hospital quality works" (Economic Logician/Lapo Filistrucchi and Fatih Cemil Ozbugdayand)

4. Who's to blame for biased reporting on medicine: researchers or journalists? (Andy McKenzie/Yavchitz et al.)

5. Stuff you might not yet know about questionable practices by medical journals, or: Ever wondered who buys reprints these days? (Richard Smith) (via)

6. Anonymity may decrease the accuracy of questionnaire responses. (Christian Jarrett/Yphtach Lelkes et al.)

7. Just in case you had Malcolm X down as some kind of civil rights hero, Bryan Caplan reminds you what a vile racist he was.

8. Sociologists name their papers (Kieran Healy) (related post)

9. Relational aggression as a form of mate competition (Eric Barker/Jesse Bering)

10. Blogger points out he has been misquoted, commenters go bonkers (Tyler Cowen and commenters)

11. Six tips for better sleep, number 4 being almost definitely wrong for me (Eric Barker/David K. Randall)

12. Taste for extreme answers as a factor distorting the comparability of cross-cultural questionnaire data (Christian Jarrett/Möttus et al.)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 84

1. Teaching children morals: in through the back door (Christian Jarrett/Joshua Rottman and Deborah Kelemen)

2. How Google ads work (Tim Harford)

3. Will streaming video kill The Simpsons? (Adam Ozimek)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 83: Braces Special

Andrew Gelman writes about the perils of before-after comparisons and writing research articles

The Marginal Revolutionaries find evidence of women responding to incentives* and Germans having humour**.

Bryan Caplan informs us about the behavioural genetics of saving money and clarifies the relationship between views on education and predictions about online universities (my take on the latter here).

______

*I'm inclined to buy it.

**To really appreciate this one, you need to know that Chemnitz used to be called Karl-Marx-Stadt.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 82

1. Advocating marijuana decriminalization: You're doing it wrong, Sandy Mulqueen! (brought to us by Eric Crampton)


2. Robin Hanson makes an unwise/brave publication decision and channels Goffman.


3. John Althouse Cohen raises an interesting point about moral psychology (will have to have another look at the Sowell book).


4. Andy McKenzie discusses bets on the replicability of research results.


5. Serguei Saavedra, Satyam Mukherjee, and James P. Bagrow deliver the overgeneralization of the month (brought to us by Tyler Cowen)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 81

1. How to be happy: a summary of the research (Klevador), plus speculation about the effects of irrationality (Robin Hanson).

2 A pineapple left behind (Andrew Gelman)

3. Wild guess on current U.S. racial politics (Steve Sailer)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 80

1. Weird views traced to the idea that an object's value is inherent in the object (Katja Grace) 


2. Towards a theory of external validity (Christian Jarrett/Gregory Mitchell) 


3. Economics in ten sentences (David Henderson) 


4. The hypothesis that sonograms may cause autism: one, two (Seth Roberts) 


5. Netflix never implemented the algorithm that won the Netflix challenge (Mike Masnick) 


6. "It is just a handy cheat sheet to use when a certain (blessedly rare) kind of pompous, overbearing German launches into an anti-American tirade." (Andrew Hammel)