Daily Data Dump (Thursday)

Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook. I kicked in some $ last week for what it's worth. The Euro in 2010 Feels Like the Ruble in 1998. The 1998 crisis prompted the bailout of Long Term Capital Management, who turned out to be an appetizer for the latest financial crisis. I'd recommend When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management to get on the inside of a toy model of what's become the norm over the last few years. Leamer on the State of Econometrics. This is a podcast, but very interesting. I've pulled back from getting too complicated in my data analysis with the GSS in large part because it started to become obvious how easy it was to secretly massage the model to get a statistically significant result. Instead I've leaned toward presenting simple descriptive frequencies and providing the variables so that readers can follow up themselves. In that way more complicated digging into the data can (theoretically) occur in the comments and so operate on a level of transparency. Otherwise I'd feel obligated to record and list all the various "quick & dirty" regressions and controls I ran, and that gets tedious. Infectious Diseases Caused Two-Thirds of the Nearly 9 Million Child Deaths Globally in 2008. I guess the war against infection hasn't been won. Rapid sympatric ecological differentiation of crater lake cichlid fishes within historic times. It's all about niches.