Averaging Languages Spoken, Dumbassification of Academia, and More Data Links

This week, as usual, there is much more to read somewhere else than on my own blog.

• “Average number of languages spoken in different countries” via http://bonkersworld.net/… and pleatedjeans see picture on the right, and yes, that is some kind of humour (some followers on Twitter thought that it was serious…)
• “Read before you cite” http://arxiv.org0212043 … ”only about 20% of citers read the original” via Daniel_Luzer‘s post ”No One Really Reads Academic Papers” http://washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/…
• “We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research” http://chronicle.com/…
• “A Tax That May Change the Trading Game” http://nytimes.com/…
• “The long-run gains of not mixing genders in high-school classes” http://voxeu.org/…
• “Data Without Context Tells a Misleading Story” http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/.. via inactinique
• “Scientific publishing: Changing Nature” http://www.economist.com/babbage/ … via costofknowledge
• “Our Absurd Fear of Fat” http://nytimes.com/… and “Thin scientists say it’s unhealthy to be fat” http://andrewgelman.com/… by StatModeling
• “We Paid for the Scientific Research, So Let’s See It” http://nytimes.com/… via frenchrh
• “If postdoctoral life is about playing by the rules, what are the rules?” http://guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/…
• “The Big Banks: Too Complex To Manage?” http://stlouisfed.org/publications/…
• “How to make a scientific result disappear” http://politicalmethodology.wordpress.com/… based on http://newyorker.com/reporting/… (on the “decline effect”) via Rbloggers
• “The coming R&D crash” http://washingtonpost.com/wonkblog/… via MargRev
• “The trouble with ‘science’” http://guardian.co.uk/science/the-h-word/… via tomroud squintar  and cynorrhodon
• “A Nation Of Gamblers: Real Estate Speculation And American History” http://nber.org/w18825  via pkedrosky and econoclaste
• “The Dumbassification of Academia” http://secondlanguage.blogspot.dk/… and http://secondlanguage.blogspot.dk/…
• “To save science, try celebrating ‘high quality ignorance’” http://arstechnica.com/science/… by kenfisher
• Found by TimHarford ”Ha! Dilbert takes a macroeconomics course. Marvellous.” http://search.dilbert.com/…

• (England and Wales) “Court of Appeal bans Bayesian probability (and Sherlock Holmes)” http://understandinguncertainty.org/… via haggismaths and undunc
• “Chartoons are disinformation design, designed to distract rather than inform” by EdwardTufte see http://adage.com/article/adagestat/…
• “Are women really more talkative than men?” http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/… via temptoetiam
• “The Problem with Our Data Obsession” http://technologyreview.com/… via johnmyleswhite and anthonyha
• “Linear vs. combinatoric social science” http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/l-science/ … (not sure that I understood that post)
• “Good Problems To Solve In Data Science” http://dataenthusiast.com/… via prismatic and chlalanne
• [free ebook] “An introduction to data science”http://jsresearch.net/groups/teachdatascience/… via http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/… and Rbloggers
• “Origins of Religiousness: The Role of Natural Disasters” http://superiorw.blogspot.ca/… via milanv and sanderwagnerbased on http://papers.ssrn.com/id=2221859 …
• “How well can adolescents really judge risk?” http://journal.sjdm.org/… via farnamstreet
• “Not Taking Time Off” http://chronicle.com/… indeed… via yusunbin
• “Statistics Done Wrong” http://refsmmat.com/… via @msgbi