"In his book Direct Democracy Worldwide, David Altman moves beyond the classic narratives of Greek city-states and New England town halls to demonstrate that this form of government is pertinent today despite its still relatively modest use at the national level. However, although some forms of direct democracy, particularly citizen initiatives, may enhance a larger representational context, others offer little opportunity for authentic popular voice. Direct democracy here is a tool, rather than a system, a tool that has the potential to be harnessed to refine the limitations of representation. Thus, Altman provides a rich evaluation of the possibilities for such input—a much needed addition to this literature—while initiating a longer term agenda for scholars of democracy.
"More historic understandings of direct democracy have offered a simplistic understanding of its use: Citizens gather in a common place, or through a ballot, and themselves determine the policy that will govern their polity. Yet Altman provokes the reader to consider a much more complex constellation of possibilities in his first chapter. Rather than consider direct democracy as a Weberian ideal type of political order, he effectively offers a vision of this process as a function within a larger representational system."

(etc., etc.)

See if they ever published this.

"Abstract: 20 years after the birth of neuroimaging, we have the exciting opportunity to review the accumulated evidence, and revisit some fundamental assumptions about the functional organization of the brain.  The current talk will focus on the issue of selectivity, and present evidence suggesting that local neural circuits are in fact used to support multiple tasks across diverse task categories–but that they cooperate with different neural partners in each category.
"Overall, the imaging data suggest a story about the evolution and development of the brain whereby new function emerges via the reuse and reconfiguration of existing neural machinery, leaving existing uses largely intact. In addition to reviewing the evidence from neuroimaging, I will discuss in some detail one specific instance of apparent reuse: the involvement of a local neural circuit in finger awareness, number representation, and other diverse functions.
"Specific implications for numerical cognition, and general implications for anatomical and functional modularity will be considered."
Unfortunately, I'm going to be missing the talk...

Leopold II: the gift that keeps on giving.

I want to see the trees!!!

See if the analysis holds up after tracking down paper and if data is available; if so may make it an assignment (or even an exam?) for uADA.

"The conclusion is straightforward. Although inferring different processing stages (or 'modules') from additive factors in data is a venerable tradition in psychology, and one that remains popular (Sternberg, 2011), it is a mistake. As Henson (2011) points out, there's too much non-linearity in cognitive processing, so that you need additional constraints if you want to make inferences about cognitive modules."

--- I find it astonishing that anyone would ever have been tempted to make this inference at all.

"My experiment connects to these ideas because it asked people to make a simple judgement (the colour of the ink), like the experiments supporting an optimal information integration perspective on decision making, but the judgement requested was just marginally more complex because we manipulate both Stroop condition (whether the word and ink matched) and colour strength. If you are a straight-down-the-line optimal information decision theorists then you must believe that evidence about the decision based on the word is combined with evidence about the decision based on the colour to make a single 'amount of evidence' variable which drives the decision. In the paper I call this the 'common metric' hypothesis. The logic is a bit involved (see the paper), but a consequence of this hypothesis is that the size of the effect of the word condition should vary across the colour strength condition, and vice versa. In other words, you should see an interaction. Visually, the lines on the graph of results would be non-parallel." --- You can see where this is heading.

Sounds delightful (and Banff is beautiful).

I shouldn't shoot the paper on the basis of a magazine report, but, seriously?  If some locations are just better ones for solar power, wouldn't anyone expect both more frequent installations and more of them?

I don't see how they could possibly have enough data to reliably estimate that many differences in transition rates, but I need to read the paper.

The divergence of the two curves is so remarkable that I have to wonder if either or both of them is really being calculated properly.  Since total factor productivity growth is basically a regression residual (over-all growth minus growth predicted from observable inputs), if the regression is, or has become, mis-specified, you'd get weird results.

In the long run, of course, the end-point of this scenario is Sterling's "The Beautiful and the Sublime". --- Come to think of it, when was Sterling's story written?  Could either have influenced the other?

RAND "also act quite surprised at the idea that terrorist groups have fixed costs and overheads, which IMO is probably more likely to account for the kinda-sorta experience curves/power law relationships that Aaron Clauset finds in terrorist attacks than anything interesting about self-organised criticality."

The papers on algorithmic complexity, learning and equilibrium look especially interesting.

"a running theme in empirical work on IP: it is very, very difficult to show that patents, copyrights, and other government granted monopolies are somehow good for welfare. ... I would guess that the welfare benefits of moving from the current regime to the optimal IP regime are more substantial than the welfare benefits of moving from the current trade regime to the optimal one. So why then do economists write a ton about trade rules but so little about ,,, the deleterious effects widespread in innovation policy? ... I really wish economists would restrict the use of the term “intellectual property” to the legal monopolies granted by copyright, patents, and the like, reserving an alternative term – I like “knowledge goods” ... – for the actual creative works themselves. ... the term “intellectual property” was rare until the 1970s, and was deliberately introduced in order to induce linguistic equivalence between knowledge and physical property."

"I have developed a new approach to 1) identifying complex temporal causal relationships from observational time series data 2) finding causes of particular events. The approach centers on representation of causal relationships using probabilistic temporal logic formulas. At the type level, this allows explicit description of the time between cause and effect and automated testing of arbitrarily complex relationships using methods I developed for testing formulas directly in traces (without first inferring a model). After computing the average impact of a cause on its effect, we can use techniques for false discovery control to help determine which of the inferred causes are significant. At the token level, I have recently shown that we may use the significance of the general (type-level) relationships to reason about and assess the significance of potential token causes in a way that allows for incomplete information."

"collects data on research papers about genotype-phenotype links, as well as ... tests for diseases associated with certain genes ... Celera-held genes saw roughly 30% fewer scientific publications about genotype-phenotype links, and a similar decrease in availability of genetic tests ... more pronounced for Celera genes that the public effort found in 2003 than [in] 2002 ... even today, genes once held by Celera see fewer publications per year ...
"... Bayh-Dole Act ...incentivized publicly-funded research to be patented. ... argument was that ... downstream innovation might increase because [it] would be protected by a license of the original patent. [Instead,] increasing the price of using already discovered knowledge ... decreases downstream product development..."

"In this talk, I will discuss the use of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to analyze Debian mailing lists in order to discover political, social, and technical patterns that could be used to inform project decisions. I will concentrate on a class of techniques known as statistical topic models, which automatically infer groups of semantically-related words, known as topics, from word co-occurrence patterns in documents. The resultant topics can then be used to detect emergent areas of technical activity, identify subcommunities, and track trends over time. In addition to providing a brief overview of statistical topic models and their application to Debian mailing list data, I will present examples of topics inferred from Debian mailing lists, as well as some preliminary political, social, and technical findings discovered via these topics."

The Tobin paper sounds interesting.

"Take Household Finance in the early 2000s. Their aggressive lending practices where people would learn after the fact that they were mislead to how much their total monthly payments were ... led to successful settlements in Colorado, Georgia as well as a $484 million in fines joint settlement with a group of attorney generals, the largest consumer fraud settlement in U.S. history. ... That’s a lot of money, until you divide it among the amount of households that were ripped off. Even after legal fees, its hard to image it wasn’t a profitable experience. So Household Finance has to pay the largest consumer fraud fines in history. I bet you think that the investment community and elite financial institutions wouldn’t look twice at it. ... One month later Household was acquired by HSBC, the London financial giant, for $16.4 billion.... Instead of driving out fraud, the market realized, correctly, that there is a ton of money in consumer fraud, and it rewards it handsomely. "

Not only has the black-white test score gap narrowed tremendously over this time (1978--2004), but the black level is now just about where the white scores started at. One would really like to hear this explained by, say, Charles Murray. (Well, actually, I wouldn't...)

Worked at Los Alamos and, more relevantly, wrote a 2001 thesis on _Articulation Theory and Disciplinary Change: Unpacking the Bayesian-Frequentist Paradigm Conflict in Statistical Science_!

“There are over 1.3 trillion bricks manufactured each year worldwide, and over 10% are made by hand in coal-fired ovens. On average, the baking process emits 1.4 pounds of carbon per brick - more than the world’s entire aviation fleet. In countries like India and China, outdated coal-fired brick kilns consume more energy, emit more carbon, and produce great quantities of particulate air pollution.
“Dosier’s process replaces baking with simple mixing, and because it is low-tech (apart from the production of the bacterial activate), can be done onsite in localities without modern infrastructure. The process uses no heat at all : mixing sand and non-pathogenic bacteria (sporosar) and putting the mixture into molds.
“The bacteria induce calcite precipitation in the sand and yield bricks with sandstone-like properties. If biomanufactured bricks replaced each new brick on the planet, it would save nearly 800 million tons of CO2 annually.”"

New-ish BBS article claiming there isn't any universal grammar, merely several stable strategies in a sort of evolutionary game.

"This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how assumptions about speakers' abilities changed the evoked BOLD response [changes in blood oxygenation indicating neural activity] in secular and Christian participants who received intercessory prayer. We find that recipients' assumptions about senders' charismatic abilities have important effects on their executive network. Most notably, the Christian participants deactivated the frontal network consisting of the medial and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex bilaterally in response to speakers who they believed had healing abilities. An independent analysis across subjects revealed that this deactivation predicted the Christian participants' subsequent ratings of the speakers' charisma and experience of God's presence during prayer. These observations point to an important mechanism of authority that may facilitate charismatic influence..." !!!!!!

Annals of financial innovation, 1920s American real-estate edition. (Note to self: Was this a direct precursor of the gov't-established secondary mortgage market? Should re-read Carruthers & Stinchcombe.) Also: more support for Galbraith's contention that there is really hard anything new in any bubble.

"In a new study, Daniel Reeves, Duncan Watts, Dave Pennock and I compare the performance of prediction markets to conventional means of forecasting, namely polls and statistical models. Examining thousands of sporting and movie events, we find that the relative advantage of prediction markets is remarkably small. For example, the Las Vegas market for professional football is only 3% more accurate in predicting final game scores than a simple, three parameter statistical model, and the market is only 1% better than a poll of football enthusiasts.... Given that sports and entertainment markets are among the most mature and successful, our results challenge the view that prediction markets are substantively superior to alternative forecasting mechanisms. ... [W]hile prediction markets may yet prove to be useful, it would seem the enthusiasm for their predictive prowess has outpaced the evidence."

Right: this is the decreasing marginal disutility of bads. (Going from ten people screaming in your ear to nine is much less of an improvement than going from one screamer to zero.)

Describes working with the standard cross-cultural sample in R. TODO: track down the actual file! TODO: think about devising suitable examples/problems for data mining.

Sounds promising, but much depends on the model, about which he is vague here.

Hmmmm.

"In the list of horrible waste of tax-payer’s hard earned money exposed by Fox News, I saw this: '$50,000 to build a computer model of an ancient city in Pakistan complete with “animated and interactive ‘inhabitants’.' If history is our guide, it won’t be long before these inhabitants fall to radical ideologies and turn back on the NEH! Agent-based computing models are already rife with terrorists and terrorist-sympathizers. We know this."

Loads of talks.

I actually found this looking for more stuff by Moretti, but some of the references look like they might make teaching fodder.

An attempt at explaining some "post-Keynesian" ideas about money and credit. Plausible-sounding but much depends on the strength of the econometric evidence he mentions but does not detail.

Truly dreadful page design, but I can't help liking the last line: "Neoclassical economics—and especially that derived from Milton Friedman’s pen—is mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

This is... odd.

Latent semantic indexing applied to learning analogies, and systems of analogies. Conceptually simple, psychologically implausible, but extremely impressive.

Don't ask me what the title means. Papers may be worth tracking down. Huge causal inference problems implicit here.

Update: thanks to Wolfgang for telling me that "Dengue Fever" is the name of a California-based Cambodian rock band.

Update 2: They're on emusic and they sound pretty good.

Fast, cheap, and self-controlled. (They'd be perfect if they were only cute.) Disclaimer: Alexis is a friend-of-the-family.

One of these books sounds much more valuable than the other.... (I didn't much care for _Orientalism_, but I read it twenty years ago and don't know how I'd react now.)

Needless to say, my prejudices are abundantly confirmed. (But I should really track down the original paper.)

If the problem is violent crime from drug markets, deal with that...

on "star wars"

Dissociating receptivity to specific smells from reactions to them. Silly journalists do not say where the research was published. Cool picture.

More on the lead-crime link

More on lead as a source of poor self-control and hence crime

1996 Times write up of study. Interesting if true, but I always wonder about the stats. Done in Pittsburgh - see if data are available.