Category: Hyperlinks

After a not-so-short hiatus during which I visited friends and family in Bulgaria, went through a couple of seasonal colds, and got a new workstation up and running (MacBook Pro with W7), I am finally back to the blog. As a warm-up, a bunch of interesting links you might have missed during January: The art of procrastination (surprisingly effective) Why students don’t learn Modeling the spread of rumours (in the digital age) Visualizing the connections between the artists who developed abstract art Coursera starts a free course on Social Network Analysis (with R) Calls for more science-based policy making coming from the UK What happens when you take you econometric results too seriously  What’s like to spend 40 years in the Siberian taiga (if you understand Russian, watch the amazing videos about the story) Coral by Fleix Salazar [via Colossal]

Obama Analytics Not only Nate Silver crunches numbers Marijuana Use and Driving Incidents More of these weird correlations Registry for Research Designs Why it’s not such a great idea The oldest town in Europe Unearthed   Bubbles. Jason Tozer [via Colossal]

It’s been a while since the last post but I am slowly getting back on track after the triple shock from the arrival of a new family member, a new house and a new office (which all happened within a week during the summer). For a starter, a selection of interesting links from the last two months: Animals have morals. Brought to you by one of my academic heroes. Abuses of public budgeting for election purposes. 1) Find a black hole item in the budget. 2) Put all budget cuts there. 3) Brag that you have solved the budget deficit problem. Statistics bring emotions. Probably faked, but still nice to see. When do academic do their work?  At night, at during weekends, too. Watercolor your scatterplots. Yammy. Here as well. Fractals in nature (as seen from Google Earth). By Paul Bourke

Cognitive Democracy  Middle East Studies Wars Disturbing Democratization and the Age Structure of Society Strong and interesting results but all the dislaimers for an observational study apply Writing Research Articles  Advice by Andrew Gelman Photo by CMGW Photography

Racial spillover Racists hate dogs but they hate the dogs of black presidents even more Exercise primes the brain for addiction No excuse to avoid the gym though Fracking linked to earthquakes Disturbing Baboons can learn to recognize more than 300 English words Approaching the average student’s vocabulary size Book Igloo by Miler Lagos [via Colossal]