Data News: How to Analyze Your Facebook Friends With R, and More

Some writings worth reading,

• “What if startup success was just completely random?” http://blog.ploki.info/what …
• “Statistical inference on massive datasets” http://personal.psu.edu/users/j/x/jxz203/lin/… via Xi’an’s http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2013…
• rediscovering “Blame the Economists, Not Economics” @rodrikdani‘s http://project-syndicate.org/commentar… (see also the more recent http://mainlymacro.blogspot.ca/2013/11/… ) via @econoclaste

So is economics in need of a major shake-up? Should we burn our existing textbooks and rewrite them from scratch? Actually, no. Without recourse to the economist’s toolkit, we cannot even begin to make sense of the current crisis. Why, for example, did China’s decision to accumulate foreign reserves result in a mortgage lender in Ohio taking excessive risks? If your answer does not use elements from behavioral economics, agency theory, information economics, and international economics, among others, it is likely to remain seriously incomplete. The fault lies not with economics, but with economists. The problem is that economists (and those who listen to them) became over-confident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation transfers risk to those best able to bear it, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful. They forgot that there were many other models that led in radically different directions. Hubris creates blind spots. If anything needs fixing, it is the sociology of the profession. The textbooks – at least those used in advanced courses – are fine. Non-economists tend to think of economics as a discipline that idolizes markets and a narrow concept of (allocative) efficiency. If the only economics course you take is the typical introductory survey, or if you are a journalist asking an economist for a quick opinion on a policy issue, that is indeed what you will encounter. But take a few more economics courses, or spend some time in advanced seminar rooms, and you will get a different picture. [to be continued...]

• “Five ways to handle Big Data in R” http://blog.eoda.de/2013/11/27/… via @Rbloggers
• awesome “Relative Population, by Lattitude” via @approx_normal

• “Feminism, According to Stock Photography” http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/…
• “An Economic History of Thanksgiving” http://priceonomics.com/this-holiday…
• “Structural Corporate Degradation Due to Too-Big-To-Fail Finance” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.… via @baselinescene ‘s http://baselinescenario.com/2013/1…
• “Data Science: Not Just For Big Data” http://kalido.com/data … via http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2013/11… and @statisticsblog

• “How high will sea levels rise? Let’s ask the experts.” http://washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013… (see also http://nature.com/scitable/knowledge/… )
• “revised (lower?) standards for statistical evidence” http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2013/11/28/… via @Econo_Stats
• good to know http://improbable.com/2013/11/26/… “Heavy Drinking Is Bad for Marriage if One Spouse Drinks, but Not Both” via @MarcAbrahams
• “Points of significance: Power and sample size” http://nature.com/nmeth/journal/v10/n12/… via @amstatphilly nice article, worth reading

• “Who’s good at forecasts?” http://economist.com/news/21589145…
• “Eugene Fama explained. Kind of” http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.ca/2013/10/… , http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.ca/2013/10/… and http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.ca/2013/10… on @Noahpinion‘s blog
• “Dow Jones 1928-29 vs 2012-13″ via @JackDamn and http://mcoscillator.com/learning_center/… (those graphs are always fun)

• “Peer review needs to expand so that more scientists are reviewing papers” http://theguardian.com/higher-education-network/…
• “A Review of the Economic Costs of Natural Disasters” http://risk.earthmind.net/files/RFF…
• “Mating system change reduces the strength of sexual selection in an American frontier population of the 19th century”http://ehbonline.org/article/S … via @jasonacollins‘s http://jasoncollins.org/sexual… cc @VisionsCarto
• MT @bradleyvoytek “My favorite Acknowledgements” #OverlyhonestMethods via @tomroud

• “If I Ruled The World” http://economist.com/news/special-report/215…
• “Destruction, Disinvestment and Death: Economic and Human Losses Following Environmental Disaster” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers … via @SciencePresse related to http://newscientist.com/article/dn… “Typhoon Haiyan: baby girl death toll will rise”
• “What is the make-up of a data scientist?”http://datacommunitydc.org/blog/2013/… via @siah
• “Home Sweet Home” RT @benoitmelancon see

• “Too Big to Manage? Or Too Badly Managed to be Big?” http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/… worth reading! via @Ian_Fraser and @aussietorres
• “Science communication should be more than dissemination to the public, it should also flow in the other direction” http://wtheguardian.com/science/occams-corner/2013…
• “Who made economics?” http://understandingsociety.blogspot.ca/20… see also http://sociology.berkeley.edu/sites/…
• “Why smart people are stupid” http://newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/201… on Daniel Kahneman’s experiments
• “The Strange Secrets of the World’s First Obstetricians” http://priceonomics.com/th…
• “How to analyze your Facebook friends network with R” http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2013/… 13 lines to get