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Long time no see. Here are some writings worth reading (in case you missed them)"Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight" http://bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/… 20 February - 26 May 2014, London, UK,ht @edyong209"We are moving from an era of private data and public analyses to one of public data and private analyses" http://andrewgelman.com/2014/03/01/…"how 35% of the population can be above the 95th percentile" http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/10813 "Bankruptcy is an important, under-appreciated part of American capitalism" http://businessinsider.com/detroit-and-rome…Detroit was allowed to declare bankruptcy last year. This began a protracted process by which the municipality renegotiated with its creditors, including government worker pensions. This illustrates several characteristics about the American "system". First, it has de-stigmatized bankruptcies, as we saw with GM and Chrysler. Second, bankruptcy is not failure; it is a process by which the creditors are held at bay while restructuring or reorganization can take place. While economists often focus on the barriers to entry, by removing the stigma from bankruptcy and easing the process, it makes lower the barriers to exit. Bankruptcy does not necessarily mean liquidation, but when it does, it allows, the recycling of people and capital. It is an important, even if under-appreciated, part of the flexibility of the United States. This stands in stark contrast with Europe. Consider Rome. Florence Mayor Renzi has become the new Prime Minister of Italy and one of his first acts was to withdraw the proposal from former Prime Minister Letta to bailout Rome. Letta was offering a program of about 850 mln euros, which required parliamentary approval by the end of February. The Northern League and the 5-Star Movement mounted a filibuster to oppose. [to be continued...]"Behind the banner" http://cmsummit.com/behindthebanner …great descriptions of various map projection techniques http://radicalcartography.net/?projectionref  (one more time via @visionscarto)"If anything, faculty members should be a bit more paranoid about social media" http://chronicle.com/article … ht @raulpachecoIf you’re a faculty member, do yourself a favor: Google the phrase "professor under fire." Many if not most of the thousands of hits have something to do with social media—in particular, with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or blogging. Social media constitutes the classic Catch-22 for academics: We can’t ignore it or avoid it, nor do most of us want to, yet it gets us into more trouble than anything else. As born pedants and guides, we find the opportunity to reach new audiences and interact with people, including students, irresistible. But there are times when we should resist that impulse. And there are other times when, even if we don’t put our words out there for public consumption, there’s a fair chance one of our students will do it for us. A series of recent incidents involving professors and social media has focused our attention on the politically fraught nature of that relationship. Or at least it should have. Instead, each new episode seems to catch us by surprise, leaving us more troubled and outraged. We appear to have adopted the stance that social "media" is just that—merely an alternative medium—and our words are no different whether spoken in a faculty meeting or tweeted online. We assume the great institutions that have historically afforded us protection on campus—tenure and academic freedom—will likewise protect us when we venture outside the academy onto websites and blogs. That has turned out not to be true in several high-profile cases. Professors have been censured, suspended, and even fired for things they have tweeted, blogged, or posted on Facebook—or things they said that other people have posted. [to be continued...]"Climate engineering" http://nature.com/ncomms/2014… and http://theguardian.com/environment/ …"Stop Defending The Humanities" http://publicbooks.org/nonfiction/… by @SimonDuring"Is the pharmaceutical industry improving with regard to access to essential medicines?" http://thelancet.com/journals/langlo/…"A 1940s Board Game for French Kids Taught Tactics for Successful Colonialism" http://slate.com/blogs/the_vault/… see"War and Peace in the XXIth Century" http://thomaspmbarnett.com/high-resolution-map/… (Pentagon's perspective)"When it comes to creating, funding and distributing instructional resources, there are two approaches used today..." http://higheredmanagement.net/2014/…"Methodological Arrogance" http://uneasymoney.com/2014/02/26/ …"What’s gone wrong with democracy" http://economist.com/21596796 Democracy is going through a difficult time. Where autocrats have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Yet just a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world. In the second half of the 20th century, democracies had taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible—in Germany, which had been traumatised by Nazism, in India, which had the world’s largest population of poor people, and, in the 1990s, in South Africa, which had been disfigured by apartheid. Decolonialisation created a host of new democracies in Africa and Asia, and autocratic regimes gave way to democracy in Greece (1974), Spain (1975), Argentina (1983), Brazil (1985) and Chile (1989). The collapse of the Soviet Union created many fledgling democracies in central Europe. By 2000 Freedom House, an American think-tank, classified 120 countries, or 63% of the world total, as democracies. Representatives of more than 100 countries gathered at the World Forum on Democracy in Warsaw that year to proclaim that “the will of the people” was “the basis of the authority of government”. A report issued by America’s State Department declared that having seen off “failed experiments” with authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government, “it seems that now, at long last, democracy is triumphant.” Such hubris was surely understandable after such a run of successes. But stand farther back and the triumph of democracy looks rather less inevitable. After the fall of Athens, where it was first developed, the political model had lain dormant until the Enlightenment more than 2,000 years later. In the 18th century only the American revolution produced a sustainable democracy. During the 19th century monarchists fought a prolonged rearguard action against democratic forces. In the first half of the 20th century nascent democracies collapsed in Germany, Spain and Italy. By 1941 there were only 11 democracies left, and Franklin Roosevelt worried that it might not be possible to shield “the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism”. [to be continued...]"I've Discovered the Internet's Most Internet Sentence, and Your an Idiot if You Disagree" http://newrepublic.com/article/…"What your name says about your politics" http://washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/ …"Extreme Weather in parts of the world" http://wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/news/… with a nice dipole map"California fights drought with big data, cloud computing" http://computerworld.com/s/article/ … by @DCgov ht @Geopolitics2020"California’s drought won’t only affect Californians" http://350.org/californias-drought-spells … see also http://zerohedge.com/news/… and"Taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines" http://nature.com/nclimate/…[R] "Expressing yourself in R" https://youtu.be/wki0BqlztCo  by @hadleywickham"US inequality due to assortative marriages" http://voxeu.org/article/…"Bitcoin itself may not flourish as a currency but the underlying technology is suggesting valuable new applications" http://technologyreview.com/review/…"The global spread of Leprosy, Malaria and Smallpox" http://thelandofmaps.tumblr.com/post/… see"Markov Models of Social Change (Part 1)" http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/ …"Thanks to a leak of Syrian web censorship data, see what steps an authoritarian regime takes to restrict traffic" http://technologyreview.com/view/…"Why Rational People Can’t Succeed as Economic Forecasters" http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/…"The philosophical anthropology of the 1%" http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog …Will Hutton poses the not unreasonable question, why is it necessary for a CEO to earn 190 times the average wage? Of course it's not necessary, by any conceivable economic or psychological rationality. The logic of incentives doesn't cut it here, and has been heavily undermined by work in hedonic psychology and behavioural economics showing that relative changes in income are what matters, rather than absolute levels. And unless one subscribes to a 'war for talent' ideology, it's difficult to see how this is an efficient labour market, even if orthodox economics struggles to identify the precise ways in which it isn't. So we have to view it as political, that is, CEOs are able to exploit organisational opportunities for rent extraction. That is scarcely very surprising. But I would go further, and suggest that it also has certain metaphysical-political elements to it, in which particular anthropological claims (namely that a minority of individuals have a freakish, inexplicable talent, making them incomparable to the general mass) and economic practices (salaries of 190 times those of the general mass) are constantly propping each other up. Both of these have to be viewed as equally foundational. If rampant salary inflation were explained purely in economic terms, there is the grave risk (from the beneficiaries perspective) that it could be falsified using economic evidence, namely that these rewards don't translate into performance, as it is well-understood that they don't. It needs, therefore, a substrate which suggests that these people are not ordinary, culturally or anthropologically, and can therefore not be measured using the yardsticks familiar to the rest of us. They are exempt from ordinary modes of evaluation and criticism, indeed their leadership status makes them the authors of new modes of evaluation and criticism. Moreover, seemingly unjustifiable levels of income are then profferred as examples of how unusual these people are. The more they are paid, the harder it is to subject them to any public measure of evaluation, because the less they appear to be normal members of society, and the more they seem like an eruption of genius or glorious violence. They don't claim to have 'earned' their money, any more than Roger Federer claims to have 'earned' his back-hand; their money is one manifest symptom of how different they are from the rest of us, and must be tended accordingly. In my forthcoming book, I suggest that Schumpeter is the key figure here. Through his emphasis on entrepreneurship, Schumpeter implicitly offers an anthropology of difference, that is, his economic theory rests on the assumption that there are certain individuals who do not or will not operate according to the same rules as everyone else. They are exceptional and amoral, transcending the norms and standards which the rest of us allow to constrain us. They produce the institutions of capitalism, while the rest of us inhabit those institutions. It stands to reason that only a very small minority can be classified in this exotic way. [to be continued...]"The Use and Abuse of Statistics in Global Politics" http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/… ht @Geopolitics2020"Labour markets" http://economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/ … "A theory of troubles""The seductive appeal of cultural stereotypes" http://timharford.com/2014/02/the-seductive-appeal-of-cultural-stereotypes/ … by @TimHarfordWe always find stereotyping plausible. That is why it is treacherous. But there are three big holes. The first is selection bias. If Indian doctors and engineers are given US visas, and they and their children are successful, is that because of Indian culture, or because the children of doctors and engineers also do well? The second is social networks. Chua and Rubenfeld may not emphasise psychological research but their worldview is ultimately about psychology rather than the contacts an immigrant network might bring. Most fundamentally, they fail to justify their basic premise: that the way to understand success is as a phenomenon that applies to religious or ethnic groups. They say that if we couldn’t generalise about Jews or Chinese Americans, “we wouldn’t be able to understand the world we live in”. Treating people as individuals is, apparently, just too much like hard work."Arctic thaw significantly worsens global warming risk" http://newscientist.com/article/…"1918 influenza pandemic probably sprang from domestic and wild birds, not from human and swine virus mixture" http://nature.com/news/study…"Scientific knowledge is as much about culture as education" http://theguardian.com/science/occams-corner/…"The use of Big Data to to profile citizens is subtly, silently constraining their freedom" http://theatlantic.com/technology/… via @Geopolitics2020Corporations and governments are using information about us in a new—and newly insidious—way. Employing massive data files, much of the information taken from the Internet, they profile us, predict our good or bad character, credit worthiness, behavior, tastes, and spending habits—and take actions accordingly. As a result, millions of Americans are now virtually incarcerated in algorithmic prisons. Some can no longer get loans or cash checks. Others are being offered only usurious credit-card interest rates. Many have trouble finding employment because of their Internet profiles. Others may have trouble purchasing property, life, and automobile insurancebecause of algorithmic predictions. Algorithms may select some people for government audits, while leaving others to find themselves undergoing gratuitous and degrading airport screening. An estimated 500 Americans have their names on no-fly lists. Thousands more aretargeted for enhanced screening by the Automated Targeting System algorithm used by the Transportation Security Administration. By using data including "tax identification number, past travel itineraries, property records, physical characteristics, and law enforcement or intelligence information" the algorithm is expected to predict how likely a passenger is to be dangerous. [to be continued...]"Economists and our responsibilities to society" http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2014/02/economists-and-society/?utm_source=dlvr.it&#38;utm_medium=twitter&#38;utm_campaign=economists-and-society …"On the scalability of statistical procedures: why the p-value bashers just don't get it" http://simplystatistics.org/2014/02/14/… by @simplystats"Regional Statistics Illustrated" http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/RSI/  ht @reza_izaa e.g. Regional GDP"Age and Scientific Genius" http://nber.org/w19866.pdf via "Why major creative breakthroughs happen in your late 30s" http://qz.com/177694/…"Can Big Data Help Us Predict The Next Big (Snow) Storm?" http://business2community.com/big-data/…"Visualization's getting big in journalism" http://civic.mit.edu/blog/…"How Numbers Rule the World" http://newleftproject.org/index …"How the north ended up on top of the map" http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/... by @ajam ht @visionscarto"Nothing can dent the divine right of bankers" https://google.ca/url?www.ft.com… (discovered via http://monde-diplomatique.fr/2014/02/A/50084  )"When You Fall in Love, This Is What Facebook Sees" http://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/… (number of posts)"Daniel Kahneman changed the way we think about thinking. But what do other thinkers think of him?" http://theguardian.com/science…"Professors, We Need You!" http://nytimes.com/2014/02/16/… ht @raulpacheco"There is no DNA test to prove you're Native American" http://newscientist.com/article/…From university communication department to newspaper, http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2014/02/… on scientific communication in 2014 (and science journalism)Setting the quality of these studies aside for a moment, what is the Washington Post doing reprinting press releases? The Post's website groups the Health &#38; Science Section under national news. Is the Post so strapped that it can't report its own national news, but instead must give over its pages to universities trying to promote themselves? Would the Post, with its history as an aggressive government watchdog, turn over its pages to press releases from the government? And maybe we shouldn't be so quick to set aside the questionable quality of the two stories I've mentioned. A bit of reporting might have persuaded the Post's editors that these stories should not have been done--or it might have uncovered reasons why they were more important than the press releases make them seem. Other recent press releases published in the post include "Why baby talk is good for your baby" from the University of Washington; "Men have a harder time remembering things than women do" from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology; "Despite warnings, about 24,000 kids are hurt annually in shopping car accidents," from Nationwide Children's Hospital; and "Too many men take testosterone when they don't need it," from the Endocrine Society, which represents endocrinologists and reports, on its website, that it got coverage of its testosterone release in The Washington Post! These press releases appear in print and online, under the rubric "Study Hall." At the top of each story online, the Post's editors write, "Study Hall presents recent studies as described by researchers and their institutions." And they identify the institution that issued the release. [read more]et plusieurs articles passionnants, en français,"La propriété..." http://blog.tcrouzet.com/2014/03/04/… (passionant, à méditer !)En tant que commoniste, je pense qu’il existe deux types de biens, ceux qui sont commonisables (les biens rares et les biens potentiellement abondants) et ceux qui ne le sont pas (les autres types de biens). Ma maison n’est pas commonisable. Elle n’est ni rare (une maison n’est pas rare), ni abondante (sa duplication coûte de l’argent, et le terrain n’est pas duplicable, sans être absolument rare). Il va ainsi de beaucoup de choses. En revanche, mes textes sont potentiellement abondants parce que leur copie ne coûte rien. Ils sont donc commonisables, ce qui signifie qu’ils peuvent, si je le souhaite, être versés au domaine public, déplaçant par là même le curseur d’un infime cran vers la paix. Quand un mathématicien découvre un nouveau théorème, il l’offre à l’humanité (souvent son statut de fonctionnaire lui évite de se poser des questions). Quand Einstein formalise la relativité, il l’offre aussi à l’humanité (il n’était pas alors payé pour réfléchir à la physique). Pour beaucoup de gens, et depuis longtemps, il est naturel de verser dans le domaine public ce qui peut être reproduit quasi infiniment. C’est une offrande presque ritualisée. Un tribut à l’humanité. Un geste de paix. Comme je l’ai déjà expliqué, je ne me sens pas propriétaire de mes œuvres. J’en ai déjà versé certaines au domaine public, notamment ce blog, et je vais le faire avec mon prochain livre Le geste qui sauve. Le livre ne sera pas gratuit pour autant. Il sera vendu en librairie, mais vous aurez le droit de le copier et de le distribuer. Vous en serez, dès ce moment, tout aussi propriétaire que moi (cette propriété potentiellement infinie devient un bien commun). Tous les auteurs ne sont pas obligés de m’imiter, mais, par mon geste, je prouve que le droit d’auteur n’est pas un droit de propriété. Je reste l’auteur de mes textes sans en rester le propriétaire. [à suivre...]"La théorie selon les Simpson" http://liberation.fr/debats/… ht @jrbourge"Tous des menteurs" https://google.ca/lemonde.fr  par @3wen"Chaque année, un chercheur passe plusieurs mois à remplir des formulaires ultraprécis" (pour rien) http://lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2014… et tant d'autresUne enseignante du campus rennais témoigne ainsi avoir « craqué », il y a deux ans et être restée incapable d’ouvrir ses mails pendant plusieurs mois, à la suite d’un énième refus de subvention pour un projet de recherche européen. C’est là l’une des croix du chercheur contemporain : la nécessité de décrocher soi-même des financement, les subventions toujours plus réduites des laboratoires n’y suffisant plus. Chaque année, un chercheur passe donc plusieurs mois à remplir des formulaires ultraprécis d’organismes européens ou de l’Agence nationale de recherche (ANR) avec, chaque fois, neuf chances sur dix de voir son projet retoqué. « Pour chaque projet échelonné sur trois-quatre ans, il faut développer, mois par mois, le temps consacré par chaque membre à chaque activité, explique Anne Atlan, chargée de recherche CNRS en biologie évolutive à Rennes. Comme s’il était possible d’anticiper à ce degré de précision ! En recherche, par définition, on ne sait jamais ce qu’on va trouver… » Face aux plaintes répétées, l’ANR a bien établi, en juillet 2013, un appel à projets simplifié, visant à établir un premier tri parmi les demandes. Mais à la clôture des dossiers, en octobre, elle annonçait 8 444 prépropositions éligibles. Un chiffre décourageant pour Anne Atlan, dont les onze projets déposés ces deux dernières années ont tous été refusés. Il y a dix ans, « l’arrivée des principes de gestion dans le monde de la recherche, jusqu’ici assez libre, a été une catastrophe », déplore le chercheur Pierre-Henri Gouyon, passé il y a quelques années au Muséum national d’histoire naturelle à Paris pour gagner un peu de sérénité, dans un environnement plus « grand public ». Car la quête de contrats n’est pas, loin s’en faut, la seule mission (ni le seul dossier) à remplir. [à suivre....]"L'éternité c'est longue, surtout vers la fin" http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/jamesinparis/… "ainsi va la vie d'un lanceur d'alerte" #angoissant"Organisation d’un débat public sur des questions scientifiques est impossible. A cause d’eux" http://slate.fr/france/83845/… and http://piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/… "Les actions de boycottage d'un groupe d'activistes baptisé Pièces et Main d'Œuvre (PMO) ont rendu impossible l’organisation d’un débat public en France sur des questions scientifiques ou techniques. Anonymes, ses membres refusent toute participation aux émissions de radio et de télévision.""Amis chercheurs, vous vous faites arnaquer trois fois (merci Elsevier)" http://blogs.rue89.nouvelobs.com/… (ht @Infusoir @FrenchRedFrog @gunthert etc)"Je ne suis pas informaticien" http://franceculture.fr/emission… par @xporte"Population sur Terre" par @visionscartoAntoine Compganon au sujet du métier d'enseignant, reliant le déclassement subi par la profession et sa féminisation http://telerama.fr/idees/ … via @SH_lelabo"Intégrer ou exclure par la langue ?" http://lmsi.net/Integrer…"Les algorithmes sont-ils notre nouvelle culture ?" http://internetactu.net/2014/0…"Frustrée, la jeunesse française rêve d’en découdre" http://lemonde.fr/emploi/article/2014/… avec du @cecile_vdv dedans"vers le maintien de la rente et la confirmation d’un contrôle hégémonique des données de la recherche" http://savoirscom1.info/2014…"Ne pensez pas que l’herbe est plus verte au Canada que dans l’hexagone" http://blog.slate.fr/sagalovitsch/2014/02/19/… "elle est juste mieux entretenue" (un peu schizophrène comme billet mais intéressant)[free ebook] "Les méthodes d’analyse d’enquêtes" https://books.openedition.org/enseditions/…Did I miss something interesting?