Category: Web/Tech
Assorted links, from the Appalachian Trail
1. Why isn't there a "Great Mormon novel"? And here.
2. A modest proposal for economizing the time of sociologists, and much more.
3. Hossein Mousavi is an artist and so is his wife.
4. Honeybees can recognize different human faces and discriminate between them.
Assorted links
1. New hypotheses about peer effects, attention-switching, and other topics.
2. What kind of music does your brain make?
3. Is behavioral economics doomed?
5. Being a TARP wife: a dirty, thankless job.
Assorted links
1. Brief survey of Iranian cinema.
2. Nerdy Chicago weather joke.
3. Via Greg Mankiw, Milton Friedman on health care.
5. Koogle, or "kosher" search. It shuts down on the Sabbath.
Assorted links
1. Me on the Hebrew Bible, in print.
2. Markets in everything, making solicitors pay.
3. Markets in everything, iPhone apps edition, the photo is safe for work.
4. The economics of *The Economist*, and why it still makes money.
Lots of assorted links
1. Sushi robots.
2. The market for hugs: not a Bertrand equilibrium.
3. What spelling bee champions have in common.
4. Culture of sexual violence.
5. In defense of weaker copyright.
6. Short video of me speaking on higher education.
7. More from Paul Samuelson; read for instance his bits on Larry Summers.
Zotero
Zotero is a free program for citations management and bibliography generation designed to be competitive with Endnote and similar products. I've been using it for a couple of weeks. Zotero lives as a Firefox extension and it's best feature is the ease with which you can import citations from the web. If you are looking at a paper on JSTOR, for example, you can "one-click import" the citation. One-click import is also available from Amazon, Cite-Seer, ABI-Inform, the Library of Congress, many university library catalogs, Medline, Google books and many others.
Thus it's very easy to generate a citations list in Zotero by visiting a handful of large databases – this is especially easy for books and not too hard for recent articles but it's more difficult to find older articles in online databases. Zotero's interface is somewhat clunky so entering citations by hand is not as convenient as I would like. In addition to grabbing the citation, Zotero can grab entire PDFs so you can keep articles and citations in one database. Exporting of the citations in a variety of bibliographic format is clean and well done.
Zotero is only available as a Firefox extension (the developers take a perverse pride in this fact). The developers are at GMU, although I don't know the team at all. Zotero will import citations from another citations management program so switching is low cost. Worth checking out.
Assorted links
1. Bug resurrected after 120,000 years.
2. Autistics solve problems forty percent faster.
3. The most beautiful words in the English language?
4. The first chapter from Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook; buy the book here.
The Green Dam is Down
This is welcome news and in combination with recent events in Iran provides an interesting commentary on the state of free expression in the world today.
Caving to public pressure, China on Tuesday said that use of its controversial "Green Dam Youth Escort" software is not required….The ministry official added that while all computers sold on the mainland will feature the filtering software, individuals are free to decide whether they use it.
Assorted links
1. Charles Kenny on development vs. growth (intro plus 184 pp.); Felix Salmon summarizes.
2. Ethicists aren't especially ethical.
3. Reinterpreting Alan Blinder on outsourcing.
4. Titlenomics.
Assorted links
1. Testing the Schelling tipping point segregation model, done by Bill Easterly.
2. Markets in everything: Ms.Taken, false engagement rings.
3. More on Zeke Emanuel, from TNR.
4. New developments on the origin of life on earth.
5. The Kennedy plan, as seen by the CBO.
Assorted links
1. Markets in everything: strange beds.
2. Lawrence H. White joins our faculty. In addition to his economics savvy, Larry is an expert on surf music and Bollywood.
3. Will England lead the recovery due to its monetary policy? I hope you're all still reading Scott Sumner.
4. Secret Ballot: an excellent satirical movie on whether Iranian democracy is savior or farce.
5. $134 billion in bearer bonds; trying to get to the bottom of the story, via Chris Masse.
Assorted links
1. Money doesn't matter as much in politics as you might think.
2. How does math look on the new Kindle?
3. Regional variations in Medicare spending, revisited.
4. Markets in everything: monkey-digested coffee (really).
5. Does your Kindle underinspire you? Buy the smell of books, in an aerosol can.
Assorted links
1. Artists should make more money.
2. Markets in everything: meat dress. By the way, here is a Russian woman who wrote a book on the relevance of the Kama Sutra for chess (scroll down for that info). Or maybe you prefer The Geek Atlas.
3. Daron Acemoglu chapter on economic growth.
4. The rise and fall of E-Gold, with reference to Vera Smith.
Assorted links
1. The influence of Milton Friedman on U.K. economic policy.
2. Felix Salmon on the top living artists. Here is a related Times (UK) poll.