0

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.

1

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.

2

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:

1

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.

2

Elsewhere in the brave new

1

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.

2

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

0

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!

1

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.

1

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

0

Blah blah blah blah Reading Feed blah.

1

Sometimes, when we're interacting with people on the internet, we forget that, on the other end of a digital pipeline, there's an actual human being.

...and so, sometimes the right way to deal with internet trolls is by letting their mothers know what they're up to:

Sometimes young boys on Facebook send me rape threats, so I've started telling their mothers. pic.twitter.com/0Cbs81eXiE

— Alanah Pearce (@Charalanahzard) November 28, 2014

Alanah Pearce, student and sometime-game-reviewer, is quoted in The Guardian:

"A while ago, I realised that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren't adult males... It turns out that mostly they're young boys and the problem is they don't know any better, so responding to them rationally didn’t resolve the situation. And it got to the point where their comments were starting to make me feel really uncomfortable."

When Pearce sat down to figure out the best way to resolve the situation, she concluded she was best off contacting the boys’ mothers directly, "especially as most of them write to me through their personal Facebook pages. It's shockingly easy to find out who their families are."

Also, we're not going to talk about #gamergate, because Pearce is on the record saying she doesn't want to make it about #gamergate, and that's enough for me.

2

At the other end of the

0

I'm still running an updated-almost-daily feed of readworthy links at My Faults My Own | Reading Feed. Check it out if you're a fan of these BoL's!

1

For reasons which may later become clear, I've written two subtly different versions of this post, for different audiences. Poets, dreamers, and readers who don't particularly care to erect walls between fantasy and reality, click here. Readers who don't have time for my mind games and just want to read a normal Bucket o' Links, click here.

0

First, meta of metas, if you like my takes on (some subset of) the week, maybe also check out other people's linkwraps that have come out in the last day or so:

• Unequally Yoked | 7 Quick Takes: Costuming, Conspiracy, and Counterfeiting (Leah Libresco is a one-time atheist blogger, now a Catholic blogger, and remains a devout rationalist. Unequally Yoked's 7QT's get the credit for convincing me to to BoL's.)
• My Biased Coin | Weekend Links (November 1 Edition) (Michael Mitzenmacher is currently my professor for Complexity and Algorithms, and often has insightful things to say on the inner workings of the ivory tower, being a research professor of theoretical computer science.)
• Slate Star Codex | Links for November 2014 (Scott S. Alexander, who also writes as Yvain, writes on his own blog and on LessWrong about...well...lots of things. But I appreciate his thoughts.)

1

Vigrin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo [exploded in midair on Friday](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29861259), killing one of two test pilots. In [a press statement](http://www.virgingalactic.com/news/item/statement-from-virgin-galactic/), CEO George Whitesides says:

"Space is hard and today was a tough day. We are going to be supporting the investigation as we figure out what