Data News: Backlash Against Big Data, and More...

some writings worth reading, here and there:

• “difference between science journalists and science communicators” http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/…

there is a fundamental difference between science communication and science journalism. at the science communication end of the spectrum sit the stories that show people how exciting science can be, the discovery of a wonder material, perhaps, or a new subatomic particle. explaining the significance of sightings of the higgs boson or of gravitational waves from the early universe takes real skill. science journalism’s job is to tell the stories that explore the murky underbelly of science, like the selling of bogus stem-cell cures to vulnerable patients. it is science journalism that will expose the rushed policy-making, the undisclosed profiteering, the conflicts of interest and the vested interests, the bad experiments, or the out-and-out frauds . [ to be continued... ]

• “university metrics keep academics in their ivory towers” http://theconversation.com/university… by @jasonensor ht @whitefordpeter
• “why kenyans make such great runners: a story of genes and cultures” http://theatlantic.com/international/…
• “the expected lifespan of middle- and lower-income women is declining” http://onsexandgender.propublica.org/post/… by @byninamartin see

• “what’s ailing us? many serious illnesses we face are embarrassingly simple to avoid.” http://vox.com/2014/4/21/…
• “the value of a sherpa life” http://outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/… ht @laurenfosternyc
• “caught in an avalanche” https://medium.com/editors-picks/… “what happens when the snow begins to slide”
• “blinded by scientific gobbledygook” http://ottawacitizen.com/touch/… by @tomspears via @ivanoransky
• “when easter and christmas near, more americans search online for “church”” http://pewresearch.org/fact-tank/… see

• “everyone knows that kids today are spoiled. is everyone wrong?” http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/… by @alfiekohn
• “the city’s drop in crime has been nothing short of miraculous.” http://chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/may-2014/ … “here’s what’s behind the unbelievable numbers.”
• ipcc https://google.ca/… “another week, another report”
• “ethnic america, mapped: your county’s biggest ancestral populations” http://washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/… see

• “the secret shame of the scholarly writer” https://chroniclevitae.com/news/440… by @jolijensen
• “when to hold out for a lower airfare” http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/… by @junkcharts (see also http://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/1980 )
• “arctic death spiral” http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/… see also http://junkcharts.typepad.com cf

• “implementing a principal component analysis (pca) in python step by step” http://sebastianraschka.com/articles/201… by @rasbt
• “multi-digit number recognition from street viewimagery using deep convolutional neural networks” http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.6082…
• “the backlash against big data” http://economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/04/ …
• a walled world, by philippe reka, a.k.a. @visionscarto see

• “the discipline of economics is becoming so mathematical it’s in the process of disappearing up its own fundament” http://smh.com.au/business/modern-economists…
• “the great divide over market efficiency” http://institutionalinvestor.com/article/3315202/… by @cimmerian999 ht @noahpinion
• via @urbandata “as the number of cyclists & pedestrians increases, city streets get far safer” http://washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/…

• “estimating the payoff to attending a more selective college” http://nber.org/papers/… via @obouba and @adelaigue
• “ignore age—define generations by the tech they use” http://vox.com/2014/4/20/… by @mckinneykelsey
• “raising taxes on the rich will hurt the economy by discouraging super-talented rich people from working hard?” nope http://vox.com/2014/4/20 …
• “confused about high-frequency trading? here’s a guide” http://vox.com/2014/4/15/56…
• “it seems to me that i am more to the left than you, mr stalin” http://newstatesman.com/politics/… the interview by h.g. wells
• nyc (via http://judgmentalmaps.com/

• “life sentences: the grammar of clickbait!” http://theamericanreader.com/life …
• “advice for new assistant professors” http://chrisblattman.com/2014/04/15/… (the first list i probably fully agree with) by @cblatts
• “why climate change hits the world’s poor harder” http://arstechnica.com/science/…
• “we are drowning in data about readers and attention, but which metrics really matter?” http://gigaom.com/2014/04/15/we-are… ht @marianarrpp
• “every recorded meteorite strike on earth since 2,300 bce mapped” http://theverge.com/2013/2/18…

• “social disadvantage, genetic sensitivity, and children’s telomere length” http://pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/02/… via http://policymic.com/articles/87199/…
• “jp morgan admits trickle down economics has completely failed” http://addictinginfo.org/2014/04/18/… ht @jeromelboucher
• “monotonicity of em algorithm proof” http://lindonslog.com/mathematics/ …
• “not a summary of economics” http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.ca/2014/04/… by @noahpinion
• “the experts’ advantage” http://project-syndicate.org/commentary/… via @econoclaste

nowadays, it seems as anomalous to have knowledge workers serve as professional leaders as it once did to have scientists in the boardroom. it was previously thought that leadership is less necessary in knowledge-intensive organizations, where experts were assumed to be superior because they were motivated by intellectual pleasure rather than such extrinsic motivations as profit growth and cost targets. this difference in attitude is evident in many areas of society, not least in hospitals in the united states and the united kingdom, where knowledge-intensive medical practitioners operate separately from managers. hospitals used to be run by doctors; today, only 5% of us hospitals’ ceos are medical doctors, and even fewer doctors run uk hospitals. “medicine should be left to the doctors,” according to a common refrain, “and organizational leadership should be left to professional managers.” but this is a mistake. research shows that higher-performing us hospitals are likely to be led by doctors with outstanding research reputations, not by management professionals. the evidence also suggests that hospitals perform better, and have lower death rates, when more of their managers up to board level are clinically trained. we see similar findings in other fields. my research shows that the world’s best universities, for example, are likely to be led by exceptional scholars whose performance continues to improve over time. departmental-level analysis supports this. a university economics department, for example, tends to perform better the more widely its head’s own research is cited. with experts in charge, it may not always look like there is an effective reporting structure in place. but, as the academic saying goes: just because you cannot herd cats, does not mean there is not a feline hierarchy. as with cats, academics operate a “relative hierarchy” in which the person in charge changes, depending on the setting. [ to be continued... ]

• “big data and open data: what’s what and why does it matter?” http://theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2014/…
• wikipedia beats google? http://ploscompbiol.org/article/in… “wikipedia usage estimates prevalence of influenza-like illness in the u.s in near real-time”
• glad to see i am not the only one ! rt @phdcomics “productivity” http://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1699 …

• “university of california at berkeley graduation speech” https://files.nyu.edu/ts43/… by t.j. sargent via http://utopiayouarestandinginit.com/… ht @tylercowen
• “why street protests fail” http://theatlanticcities.com/politics/2014/04/…
• “violent versus nonviolent revolutions: which way wins?” http://psychologytoday.com/blog…
• “visualizing urban expansion” https://youtube.com/playlist… (in 30 global cities) e.g. london

• “the limits of social engineering” http://technologyreview.com/review/… by @roughtype
• “people who think they’re attractive tend to be more comfortable with economic inequality” http://vox.com/2014/4/17/… ht @tylercowen
• “pictures make sense of big data” http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/… via @diegokuonen
• “urban density and sustainability” http://tandfonline.com/doi/… via @brenttoderian and http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/planningphotographycom/241696/ … see

• “econometric methodology at the cowles commission: rise and maturity” http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/archive… by edmond malinvaud ht @sylvaincf @deagiles
• “a game of shark and minnow” http://nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/…
• “searching citations about academic citations reveals the good, the bad and the ugly” http://dahliaremler.com/2014/04/09/… by @dahliaremler
• “twitter is surprisingly accurate at predicting unemployment” http://washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2… ht @dynarski (see also http://personal.umich.edu/~shapiro/… )
• “flipping a coin: theory and evidence” https://cesifo-group.de/docdl… ht @durrobert

in situations where decision-making is hard, a possible procedural preference arises: the decision-maker may wish for the decision to be taken away from herself. her cognitive or emotional cost of deciding may outweigh the benefits that arise from making the optimal choice. for example, the decision-maker may prefer not to make a choice without having sufficient time and energy to think it through. or, she may not feel entitled to make it.or, she may anticipate a possible disappointment about her choice that can arise after a subsequent resolution of uncertainty. waiving some or all of the decision right may seem desirable in such circumstances even though it typically increases the chance of a suboptimal outcome. the difficulty of such preferences is that they are non-consequentialist and are therefore excluded by most models of choice such as expected utility. in particular, flipping a coin between different choice options contradicts expected utility theory except if the decision-maker is exactly indiffrent between these options. yet people regularly do flip coins or revert to other random decision aids. more general than expected utility theory, two closely related axioms of choice stochastic dominance and betweenness postulate that whenever the decision-maker has a strict preference for one of the options, she makes the choice herself rather than delegate it to randomness. [ to be continued.. .]