11 A/B Split Testing Mistakes I See Businesses Make All The Time
Interesting, and unpleasant: Narratives of Racism in Delhi University. I've never been to Delhi, but I got the impression that Pune is not so bad. There certainly is some racism, but from what I saw the shared comraderie of computer geeks seemed to outweigh it. Maybe I'll visit Delhi and find out if it's as awful as everyone says.
Unboxed Tagged Angst. Oh Scala, how I hate thee.
Interesting (non-)econ paper: Understanding Differences in Health Behaviors by Education. It's a commonly pushed theory that a lot of the reasons poorer Americans are unhealthy is because healthy behaviors (e.g. eating organic hyperlocal free range artisan kale) are expensive. This paper shows that poorer Americans behave in a less healthy way even when it is free (e.g., using car seatbelts).
Bryan Caplan discusses political externalities of immigration. It's a topic he has long avoided. He might be cherrypicking, but I'm glad he is at least discussing it. Bryan Caplan has convinced me that immigration is one of the most important human rights issues today and pushed towards wanting to believe that Open Borders will work. He has just failed to convince me that Open Borders actually would work, but making a convincing case on political externalities will probably tip me over the edge. To all my readers: you probably don't think about this issue enough.
Cool washing machine by Remya Jose.
Skepchick writes down a simple mathematical model for understanding bias. She rediscovers that if you have an objective function f(x) but instead optimize g(x), you probably get an inferior result. I'd pay a lot more attention to feminism if they were all as rational as Jamie (unknown last name).
Scalaz Milestone 5. Creating default instances of various things (Monad, etc) for scala.concurrent.Future is very nice.
India's Child Labor Ban Increased Child Labor. Forgot about the income effect. Doh!