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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]

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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]

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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

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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

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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]

 

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How much money do university professors around the world get The Netherlands is doing OK which should make me happy
Sperm do calculus And so should you
Common-pool resources management in Hawai Would love to go for a field study
A discussion of political science efforts to predict US presidential elections Could be better

Beautiful maps at maps.stamen.com

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Chocolate can help you stay slim – gotta love statistics for bringing such insights to the world
Abuses of statistics in psychological research [paper discussed by W. Briggs]
A nice map of media popularity in the US states at Forbes
Policy experiments in Sweden [at the wonderful Development Impact blog]

The Strait of Gibraltar – photo by ESA

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Big data for evaluating education Should have been done long ago, no?

Neanderthals painted

Most relaxing song ever [?!?] 

Testosterone, digit ratio, and abstract reasoning ability [via MindBlog]

‘North Korea’ by Damir Šagolj 1st Prize World Press Photo 2012.  Daily Life Category

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Science visualization challenge 2011

192 answers to the question ‘What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?’

Higher education for the masses [commentary by Felix Salmon]

Researchers feel pressure to cite superfluous papers

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Migration and unemployment File under ‘correlation is not causation’. And ‘endogeneity’. And ‘instrumental variables that do not make sense’.

Equitable decision making has intrinsic value Apparently,there is a region in the brain [anterior insula] ‘linked to the experience of subjective disutility’. Ah, the prospects for utility maximization!

Fukuyama on European identities Surfing on the obvious

A post on the philosophy of explanation at Understanding Society