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The first was going to be about my favorite Operating Systems professor ending up in the Financial Times for her quotes at Davos on David Cameron's proposed policies banning strong encryption, but then it passed 450 words, and I spun it off into its own post.

Instead, (speaking of economics and expert opinions,) The Upshot asks how economists came to dominate the [public-policy] conversation, beating out historians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and demographers:

Two hundred years ago, the field of economics barely existed. Today, it is arguably the queen of the social sciences.

These are the conclusions I draw from a deep dive into The New York Times archives first suggested to me by a Twitter follower. While the idea of measuring influence through newspaper mentions will elicit howls of protest from tweed-clad boffins sprawled across faculty lounges around the country, the results are fascinating. And not only because they fit my preconceived biases.

Using the new Chronicle tool that catalogs the entire Times archive, I discovered that in recent years around one in 100 articles mention the term “economist,” and these typically occur in the context of introducing a proponent of the dark arts. Far fewer articles mention the terms historian or psychologist, while sociologists, anthropologists and demographers rarely rate a mention. (...)

If you haven't clicked through yet, ask yourself as a quiz: what major world event let economists pass historians? It's pretty obvious when you think.

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Elsewhere in "economists", George Mason professor of Economics Tyler Cowen (of Marginal Revolution) is one half of MRUniversity, a site full of free open courseware covering topics in economics. Specifically, in the form of three-minute bites like this:

This semester, I'm a Teaching Fellow for CS 161, Operating Systems, taught by the legendary Margo Seltzer, former president of USENIX, advisor to Harvard WiCS, and mother of two.

She's quoted in an article by the Financial Times^[1] alongside two other Harvard professors speaking at Davos^[?], criticizing David Cameron's post-Charlie proposals to criminalize strong encryption:

If bad guys who are breaking laws cannot use encryption, they will find another way. It is an arms race and if governments say you cannot do this, that means the good guys can't and the bad guys can. End to end encryption is the way to go. (...)

Jonathan Zittrain weighs in:

This is not just about hardware but software. You would have to find a way for a phone not to be able to download any app that could defeat [the breaking of] encryption... That would be a referendum on our entire ecosystem. (...)

Making Zittrain's comment a little more concrete, messaging app WhatsApp would run afoul of Cameron's proposed securities policies, as will Snapchat and recent versions of the iPhone.

Cameron's comments:

Speaking on Monday, the Prime Minister asked whether "we want to allow a means of communication between two people which, even in extemis with a signed warrant from the Home Secretary personally, that we cannot read?

"My answer to that question is no, we must not. The first duty of any government is to keep our country and our people safe." (...)

Let's be very clear here -- we're talking about programs so basic, I've been asked to code them as a homework exercise twice, once in an undergraduate math course for sophomores (and the other time, in

I was having an interesting discussion over dinner the other day with my aunt and cousins, which began as a relatively minor complaint about the propensity of Agents of SHIELD screenwriters (yes, I only just discovered this show) to use real science words in absurd ways, rather than making things up. At some point, the conversation had morphed into something about the general habit of filmmakers to publish misleading science as if it were plausible. (I found myself attempting -- but failing -- to communicate a point better made by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his post Science as Attire.) Some of us were of the opinion that this was a pretty bad thing that should probably stop; others didn't see much harm in it, so long as it was in works that were clearly fiction (false-science documentaries another matter entirely.)

My aunt, in the latter group,

"It's fiction, and it's art. If you're watching it as an audience and as a scientist, then it means one thing to you, but if you're just watching it as an audience, the science doesn't really matter, unless it's somehow important to the plot. Besides, anyone who's getting their science education from movies should really educate themselves better."

My one cousin and I had spent some time pushing against this head-on, without much success, when my other cousin tried a different tactic:

"You two, you're framing the stakes wrong. Mom, what would you say about a movie, clearly fiction, which had some offhand scenes involving domestic violence in a light that made it seem acceptable, or even normal? I mean, it's clearly fiction, and the screenwriter isn't an expert or adviser on

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The Harvard Political Review reports that a Chicago nonprofit is scraping Twitter to pass on complaints about food poisoning in restaurants to the Chicago Department of Public Health:

Foodborne Chicago depends on human judgment in addition to computerized predictions. First, the algorithm "surfaces tweets that are related to foodborne illnesses." Next, "a human classifier goes through those complaints that the machine classifies, [...determining] what is really about food poisoning and what may be other noise." The Foodborne team then tweets back at the likely cases, providing a link for users to file an official complaint. In short, computers deal with the massive quantity of Twitter data, and humans ensure the quality of the result. According to its website, between its launch on March 23, 2013 and November 10, 2014, the Foodborne algorithm flagged 3,594 tweets as potential food poisoning cases. Of these tweets, human coders have identified 419, roughly 12 percent, as likely cases meriting a reply on Twitter.

But does it actually work?

In its first nine months of operation, Foodborne initiated 133 health inspections. Approximately 40 percent of these investigations uncovered critical or severe violations of the health code -- the kinds of violations that force restaurants to shut down or to remain open only under strict conditions. As Richardson noted, "that percentage is equivalent to the ... percentage of violations we find based on reports we get from 311" -- the phone number citizens can call to report food poisoning to their city’s municipal services. (...)

Apparently, yes.

Elsewhere in the brave new

It takes a certain amount of courage to, in a post-Jyllands-Posten-incident world, remain committed to printing images of Muhammad in the name of satire. But discretion is the better part of valor, and in discretion, it has been said that Charlie was, perhaps, lacking. Slate | Charlie Hebdo is heroic and racist. We should embrace and condemn it.:

[T]heir work featuring Mohammed could be [called] sophomoric and racist. Not all of it; a cover image of the prophet about to be beheaded by a witless ISIS thug was trenchant commentary on how little Islamic radicalism has to do with the religion itself. But often, the cartoonists simply rendered Islam's founder as a hook-nosed wretch straight out of Edward Said's nightmares, seemingly for no purpose beyond antagonizing Muslims who, rightly or wrongly, believe that depicting Mohammed at all is blasphemous.

This, in a country where Muslims are a poor and harassed minority, maligned by a growing nationalist movement that has

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The Upshot, when they're not putting out awesome data features, apparently publishes things like Obama's Community-College Plan: A Reading List, which is a useful read on (1) what is actually being proposed (2) how it compares to other similar proposals and programs (3) why any of this matters.

The odds of a Republican Congress passing an Obama proposal on any issue aren't very high... [But i]f nothing else, the Obama proposal seems likely to increase the profile of the universal-college movement. That movement echoes the universal-high-school movement of the early 20th century, as I mentioned in an article Thursday. (...)

And a short bit of opinion on the necessity of "universal college":

Yet we never stop to ask why 13 years of universal education has become the magic number -- and why it should permanently be so, given how much more complex our society and economy have become in the ensuing century. If nine years of free education was the sensible norm for the masses in the 19th century and 13 years was the sensible norm in the early 20th century, what is the right number in the 21st century?

Anyway, after spending a plane flight from SLC to Baltimore discussing universal-community-college with my mother, I've come around to the belief that this is by no means as simple as "just throw money at it" -- there are going to be lots of secondary market effects and unintended consequences -- but I think it's time we're having the conversation, at least. Maybe I'll try to write a thing later.

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Also in politics: If you're familiar with the Net Neutrality debate, this headline will mean

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First, you should totally check out Scott Alexander's 12/14 linkwrap at Slate Star Codex; it's got:

• Werewolves (and the President of Argentina)
• Nuclear rocket engines
• Gender bias in maritime disasters ("Women and children first!" a myth?)
• A new cure for Alzheimers
• ...and so much more.

Do it!

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Okay, okay, real links from me. The Economist explains why so many Koreans are named 'Kim'.

It's got a lot to do with the country's feudal history (there was a time when surnames were only allowed for nobility, but could be 'bought' by rich tradesmen...), and similar effects seem to explain why so many Vietnamese people are named Nguyen.

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Speaking of demography, the US Census Bureau announces plans to collect less information about births, divorces, and marriages, because...I don't actually know. Writes Justin Wolfers in the New York Times:

[Due to these changes, w]e will not even know whether marriage and divorce rates are rising or falling. For all the talk of evidence-based policy, the result will be that important debates on issues including family law, welfare reform, same-sex marriage and the rise of nontraditional families will proceed in a