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.