Tumblr

Not blogging that much lately. Blame it on tumblr. Tumblr gets the job done for small posts (laziness, busyness ...)

Economists...the truth might not be beautiful

I once heard a professor at my faculty say that computer simulations are not economics. That's at the very least naive. Take away numerical solutions from physicists and we probably wouldn't have cellphones. Economists strongly prefer beautiful math over more insightful potentially less beautiful things, and that is hurting the field as a science.

... the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth ...

How did economists get it so wrong? @NYT

Total eclipse flow chart

See the flowchart here.

Alternating between crooning and belt singing is very important...

(source)

How fair is that some are smarter?

How willing people are to give to others depends on what they like and what they believe. There's (between-individual and between-group) differences in what is considered (believed) to be fair...

...Turning to the effects of the belief variables, our results showed that these too vary significantly across countries. Believing that coming from a wealthy family is important to get ahead in some countries had basically no effect while in others it involved an over 20 percentage point increase in the probability of supporting redistribution. The effect of believing effort to be an important income determinant varied from being statistically non-discernible from zero to decreasing the probability of supporting redistribution with around 15 percentage points. With respect to believing intelligence/skills to be rewarded the results were mixed, with both negative and positive but in most cases statistically insignificant effects.

Isakssona and Lindskog. Preferences for redistribution- A country comparison of fairness judgements. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

we are the wwworld

we are the wwworld, originally uploaded by 9 0 0 0.

5,113,758,962 humans don't give a shit about comments, profiles or your favorite song of Morrissey ... Congrats b#tch, you are the minority!

illustration + text by 9000

{entrevista con 9000 - in Spanish}

Animatronics by Banksy

Here's a small (self-made) video from the animatronics at the Banksy vs Bristol Museum exhibition. Most of them were already shown at the Pet Shop project in NYC (see coverage by the wooster collective).

(source)

Narcissism and Facebook

Not that it's a particularly surprising result, but at least it's been given scientific rigour now...

Narcissism predicted (a) higher levels of social activity in the online community facebook and (b) more self-promoting content in several aspects of the social networking Web pages facebook

here's the paper. Hat tip to the marginal revolution.