Skip to main content

January 03, 2018

From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book I wish I’d written"):
Samuel Beckett’s exquisite and deeply moving late text, Ill Seen Ill Said. But of course I couldn’t have written it, not in an eternity of Sundays.

From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book that had the greatest influence on my writing"):
The Oxford English Dictionary. With Roget’s Thesaurus in a support role. The latter, by the way, for finding words I can’t bring to mind, not for learning fancy new ones.

From The Economist:
In 2015 two-fifths of all American babies were born to unwed mothers. In France the proportion is 59%; in Colombia it is 84%. Just 21% of Britons aged between 15 and 24 now agree that people who want children should get married, half the share in 1989.

From Child Development:
The uncanny valley posits that very human-like robots are unsettling, a phenomenon amply demonstrated in adults but unexplored in children. Two hundred forty 3- to 18-year-olds viewed one of two robots (machine-like or very human-like) and rated their feelings toward (e.g., “Does the robot make you feel weird or happy?”) and perceptions of the robot's capacities (e.g., “Does the robot think for itself?”). Like adults, children older than 9 judged the human-like robot as creepier than the machine-like robot—but younger children did not. Children's perceptions of robots’ mental capacities predicted uncanny feelings: children judge robots to be creepy depending on whether they have human-like minds. The uncanny valley is therefore acquired over development and relates to changing conceptions about robot minds.

From SSRN:
With a growing debate over tighter firearm regulations, we consider an important social consequence of increased firearm access: increased firearm suicides. Using data from the federal criminal background check system, we consider the impact of firearm ownership of firearm suicide rates. To deal with concerns of identification, we instrument for firearm background checks with state-year level Google search intensity for phrases that reflect fear of future gun shortages and learning about the constitutional rights of firearm owners. We find that an increase in firearm ownership has a sizable and statistically significant impact on firearm suicide rates. A 10% increase in firearm ownership increases firearm suicide rates by 3.1%, which is five times larger than OLS estimates. Furthermore, we find no effect of gun ownership on non-firearm suicide rates, suggesting our findings are not simply capturing a suicide method substitution effect. The results are consistent with a variety of validity and robustness tests. Our results make clear the link between firearm ownership and firearm suicide rates, both of which have increased dramatically over the last decade.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

January 16, 2018

From  CEPR Discussion Paper : Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains. What explains the formation and decay of clusters of creativity? In this paper we match data on thousands of notable individuals born in Europe between the XIth and the XIXth century with historical data on city institutions and population. After documenting several stylized facts, we show that the formation of creative clusters is not preceded by increases in city size. Instead, the emergence of city institutions protecting economic and political freedoms facilitates the attraction and production of creative talent. From Harper's : Business researchers posited that busyness has replaced leisure as a marker of prestige for Americans, constituting “an alternative kind of conspicuous consumption that operates by shifting the focus from the preciousness and scarcity of goods to the preciousness and scarcity of individuals.” From Harper's : Among Germans,...
Post a Comment
Read more

January 02, 2018

From Harper's : Racists in the United States support free-speech rights for racist speech, but not for speech critical of their co-workers or the police. From The Economist : Affluent parents intensively nurture their children for success; the offspring of less fortunate homes fall far behind before they ever set foot in a school. From The Economist : Helpfully, some European countries have begun to offer civil unions for heterosexuals. (Gay couples already had that option.) They confer nearly all the rights of marriage but entail less of the intimidating hoopla. These now account for a fifth of new formal unions in the Netherlands, and more in some working-class districts. They have not undermined marriage so far. It is a small fix for a huge problem, but it might help. From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book that changed my life/the world"): The Catechism of the Catholic Church. It had all the answers; it told you what simony is, and why you will go...
Post a Comment
Read more

February 05, 2018

From The Economist : Older generations have been complaining about the state of young people’s writing since a teacher of Sumerian complained about his charges 4,000 years ago. (“A junior scribe...does not pay attention to the scribal art.”) From The Economist : [Two] letters can add up to a lot of money. No area of technology is hotter than AI, or artificial intelligence. Venture-capital investment in AI in the first nine months of 2017 totalled $7.6bn, according to PitchBook, a data provider; that compares with full-year figures of $5.4bn in 2016. In the year to date there have been $21.3bn in AI-related M&A deals, around 26 times more than in 2015. In earnings calls public companies now mention AI far more often than “big data”. From The New York Times : As the longevity entrepreneur Arram Sabeti told The New Yorker: “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it.” Of all the slightly creepy aspects to...
Post a Comment
Read more