This post is a great one about the dismal state of gender equity in science but also about concrete measures that we can take to improve the situation.
Author: cogiddo
Academic journals are about status, not disseminating information
And that is why companies like Elsevier are bucking the trend of media companies fall victim to the Web. Justin Fox puts it like this, in a nice article on BloombergView reporting on an ASSA discussion on economics journals:
Maybe academic publishers will be the Internet’s last victim.
Not exactly news to academic authors, but well explained for the general public in this article.
Great photography and astronomy all in one piece
Check out this post by Phil Plait in Slate, showing a marvelous photo by the Cassini spacecraft of two moons of Saturn. Talk about photo composition!
Birds in the morning on Serangan Island
This photo was taken from a car, driving to Bali after a great sunrise photoshoot, on June 1, 2015. Serangan Island, a small island in the south of Bali, connected to Bali with a land bridge, is a bird sanctuary. If you look carefully, you will also notice some other fauna besides birds, namely, some buffalo on the left.
Abolish juvenile curfews to make cities safer
Jennifer L. Doleac writes in the Brookings Institute’s website an account of her research findings regarding the effect of juvenile curfew laws on urban crime. She claims that repealing juvenile curfew laws is close to a “free lunch” for reducing urban firearm crime. I quote two paragraphs in which she lays out her conclusions:
Our study suggests that juvenile curfews increase gun violence, and therefore impose a cost on society by decreasing public safety. This doesn’t mean that curfews don’t have some positive effects. It’s possible that juvenile curfews reduce other types of crime (for example, minor offenses such as vandalism) that might be uncorrelated with gun violence. To the extent that those types of offenses are a concern, and if they are reduced more than gun violence is increased, local jurisdictions might find juvenile curfews worthwhile.
But to be clear, those are all “ifs”—there is currently no convincing evidence that curfews have such beneficial effects. Absent such evidence, cities should consider ending their juvenile curfews. There are simply too many potential costs associated with curfew policies—in terms of public safety, community trust, and limiting juveniles’ and parents’ choices. Without benefits to justify those costs, there’s no reason to keep juvenile curfews on the books.
It seems to me that she has made a compelling case.
Polarization of blogs
I am preparing fresh lecture notes for my course on the economic theory of networks that starts on January 12. Just now, I wanted a recent image (and explanation) of political polarization online. Quickly enough, a Google search brought me to this interesting blog post with a fairly striking graph.
A related discussion appears in this paper, written by M. D. Conover, J. Ratkiewicz, M. Francisco, B. Gonc ̧alves, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer.
I quote its abstract:
In this study we investigate how social media shape the networked public sphere and facilitate communication between communities with different political orientations. We examine two networks of political communication on Twitter, comprised of more than 250,000 tweets from the six weeks leading up to the 2010 U.S. congressional midterm elections. Using a combination of network clustering algo- rithms and manually-annotated data we demonstrate that the network of political retweets exhibits a highly segregated partisan structure, with extremely limited connectivity between left- and right-leaning users. Surprisingly this is not the case for the user-to-user mention network, which is dominated by a single politically heterogeneous cluster of users in which ideologically-opposed individuals interact at a much higher rate compared to the network of retweets. To explain the distinct topologies of the retweet and mention networks we conjecture that politically motivated individuals provoke interaction by injecting partisan content into information streams whose primary audience consists of ideologically-opposed users. We conclude with statistical evidence in support of this hypothesis.
Amber mood
Stress getting worse for adolescents
I just came across this piece by Vicki Abeles in the New York Times. It discusses the effect on young people of the stress that the rat race in schools creates. The numbers are alarming.
For an economist like myself, a big question arises from this regarding the (in)famous efficiency of “free”, “perfectly competitive” markets, which are of course a theoretical fiction used to exalt the effect of competition on human welfare. Pretty obviously, we need to be very careful to amend our treatment of welfare. This brings to mind a sequence of blog posts on interfluidity, starting with this one, which I have set aside on my browser to read carefully. Now that the holiday festivities have quieted down, I plan to do that and post my thoughts here. Consider this a promise.
Afternoon mood
Happy New Year, little blue marble
What better date than January 1st to share a photo that NASA recently released of our little blue marble we call Earth?
The curious incident of DD on the Web 