Andrew Webber

This guy makes sweaters of places and then takes pictures of himself wearing the sweaters at those places. No more inside; that's it. Sweaters. Places. You know you want to click.

27 of the Best (and Most Hideous) Face Swaps of 2016. You have been warned.

An investigative reporter follows a very.... plump dog to see how it's getting so plump. On the Japanese comedy show Knight Scoop, people write in with questions about a variety of topics (like this man who is scared of leaves), and a detective discovers the answers. Other episodes about dogs: My Dog Is a Misandrist, The Dog Who is Scared of Godzilla, The Mystery of the Escaping Dog. But there is much, much more (and weirder) to this show. Playlist. [All videos have English subtitles]

Ryan Sutton at EATER asks the hard question: What are the best fast food chain chicken nuggets?

Performance on proficiency exams can be a key determinant of whether students are retained or "held back" in their grade. In New York City, passing the statewide proficiency exam essentially guarantees promotion, while roughly 13% of those students who fail the exam are retained. Using regression discontinuity methods, we find that female students are 25% more likely to be retained in their grade due to exam failure than boys. Hispanic students are 60% more likely and Black students 120% more likely to be retained due to exam failure (relative to White students). Poverty and previous poor performance also increase the likelihood of retention, while being young for grade or short does not. We conclude that "patterned discretion" exists in how standardized test results are utilized.

We present a simple model of populism as the rejection of "disloyal" leaders. We show that adding the assumption that people are worse off when they experience low income as a result of leader betrayal (than when it is the result of bad luck) to a simple voter choice model yields a preference for incompetent leaders. These deliver worse material outcomes in general, but they reduce the feelings of betrayal during bad times. We find some evidence consistent with our model in a survey carried out on the eve of the recent U.S. presidential election. Priming survey participants with questions about the importance of competence in policymaking usually reduced their support for the candidate who was perceived as less competent; this effect was reversed for rural, and less educated white, survey participants.

Starlee Kine's popular podcast, Mystery Show, has been mysteriously absent from the netwaves. She's finally gone on record that Gimlet Media fired her six months ago. Gimlet issued a terse statement that the show was unsustainable, but will the new season of StartUp turn into a Starlee-starring soap opera? And will Gimlet fans side with the show's creator or with the company?

Iggy Pop has a pet cockatoo named Biggy Pop. Biggy Pop is on Instagram. They have sweet adventures together, like today's.

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When you see how well it works for Donald Trump, do you ever think to yourself, “Oh, maybe I should be more racist”?

I loved this. If Galifianakis can’t get her to break, what hope does Trump have in the debates? Maybe this is part of her debate prep?

Tags: 2016 election   Hillary Clinton   politics   video   Zach Galifianakis

It seems simple enough. You are presented with two celebrities, and you must choose. Which. One. Vapes.

This paper investigates the effect of locus of control (LOC) on the length of mothers’ employment break after childbirth. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), duration data reveals that women with an internal LOC return to employment more quickly than women with an external LOC. We find evidence that this effect is mainly related to differential appreciation of the career costs of longer maternity leave. Given the high level of job protection enjoyed by mothers in Germany, economic consequences of differences in this non-cognitive skill can be expected to be larger in other settings.

This article examines patterns of entry and exit in a relatively homogeneous product market to investigate the impact of entry on incumbent firms and market structure. In particular, we are interested in whether the organizational form of entrants matters for the competitive decisions of incumbents. We assess the impact of chain stores on independent retailers in the Melbourne coffee market using annual data on the location and entry status of 4,768 coffee retailers between 1991 and 2010. The long panel enables us to include market fixed effects to address the endogeneity of store locations. Logit regressions indicate that chain stores have no discernible effect on the exit or entry decisions of independent stores. However, each additional chain store increases the probability of another chain store exiting by 2.5 percentage points, and each additional independent cafe increases the probability of another independent cafe exiting by 0.5 percent. These findings imply that neighboring independents and chains operate almost as though they are in separate markets. We offer additional analysis suggesting consumer information as a cause of this differentiation.

Aussie Standoff. (slyt)

More kookaburras being dicks.
Birds being dicks to a kookaburra.
Bonus: I want to go to there.

Suddenly, there are four species of giraffe now. Previously there was only one. Scientists have analyzed the genetic code of hundreds of giraffes in Africa and found much variation in their DNA, enough to split one species into four.

Some of the differences were as large or larger than the differences between brown bears and polar bears.

Despite their similar appearances, members of the different species don’t appear to mate with each other. It’s amazing that scientists didn’t know this until now.

Tags: biology   DNA   genetics   science

By guest blogger Stuart Ritchie

For decades, we’ve known from twin studies that psychological traits like intelligence and personality are influenced by genes. That’s why identical twins (who share all their genes) are not just more physically similar to each other than non-identical twins (who share half their genes), but also more similar in terms of their psychological traits. But what twin studies can’t tell us is which particular genes are involved. Frustratingly, this has always left an ‘in’ for the incorrigible critics of twin studies: they’ve been able to say “you’re telling me these traits are genetic, but you can’t tell me any of the specific genes!” But not any more.

With a new method, “polygenic scoring”, behaviour geneticists can now look to see whether people have specific genetic variants or not, and based on this, make some impressively accurate predictions about how they will behave in the future. Particularly in the case of two new studies, this development also means researchers are getting themselves into a whole new set of controversies.

The method is relatively simple. Imagine you’d found in a study that smarter people are much more likely to have one particular version of a gene than people who are less intelligent. You could then, in an entirely new sample, see if people with this “intelligence gene” were doing any better than those without it. The polygenic scoring method is just this, writ large – instead of looking at whether people have one specific genetic variant that’s linked to a particular psychological measure, geneticists look across hundreds of thousands of points on the genome, totting up who has more of the genetic variants that make them susceptible to the trait in question.

Two new papers have applied this technique in the context of educational success – in this case, they built their polygenic scores on the basis of previous gene-hunting studies that had identified the specific gene variants found more often in people who stay in school for longer.

In the first paper in Psychological Science, with the not-at-all-provocative title “The Genetics of Success”, Daniel Belsky and colleagues aimed the education polygenic score at a whole host of life outcomes in the thousand-strong Dunedin Study, a cohort of New Zealanders who have been followed from birth up to age 38. The results are comprehensive, and pretty stunning.

The children with more education-linked genes (that is, higher polygenic scores) learned to read faster. They did better on intelligence tests. They were more likely to go to university, and less likely to have financial problems. They were more likely to leave New Zealand to find job opportunities abroad, and more likely to choose a partner of higher social status. The idea is that the education-linked genes make people smarter, harder-working, and more socially successful—traits that help you lead a more “successful” life. Importantly, all this was predictable from a score that, in theory, could have been calculated on (or even before) the day the participants were born.

All of the above predictions were pretty weak though, in the sense that the polygenic score generally only explained one or two percent of the variance in each of the above traits and outcomes. This is where the second paper published in Molecular Psychiatry comes in. Using an even newer polygenic education estimate from a more recent gene-finding study (published in Nature this year), Saskia Selzam and colleagues found that their polygenic score explained a remarkable 9.1 per cent of the variance in age-16 GCSE results in a sample of 4,300 British teenagers. Because of this impressive effect size, Selzam and colleagues said their study “…represents a turning point in the social and behavioural sciences”. This is a little over the top: I see it more as an incremental (yet vital) step in a long march of studies that are changing the way we think about education.

The polygenic scores are already pretty good predictors: in Selzam’s study, they have just about half of the predictive value of asking about the parent’s socio-economic status, or testing the child’s IQ at age 7 (and the scores are based on DNA variants that are unchanged since birth and can be measured with a simple saliva or blood test). As we discover more about the genetics of education, the predictions will become more and more powerful. Then what? Do these studies usher in a new era of genetic testing to select children for different types of education? Not quite.

First, these results ‘explain variance’ at the group level, and we can’t easily translate this to individual prediction – yet. To do that, we’d need a representative reference panel with which to compare individuals, like the standardization samples used in IQ research. It’s only a matter of time before this becomes a reality for many traits. Second, as the authors of these new polygenic studies note, these results don’t necessarily have clear policy implications: some might argue that we should use the scores to predict who will do best in school and select them into higher-quality education; others may argue we should use the scores to identify those who are likely to struggle. Some will suggest both, some neither.

These varying interpretations – and the quickly advancing science – are why it’s crucial to begin a proper, fact-based debate about the potential uses of these genetic predictors. Is it acceptable to predict people’s educational attainment from a genetic score in practical settings, or should these methods only be used in research? Is it just like giving children an aptitude test, like the 11+, early in life, and if so do the same caveats apply? What if the long-term consequences of this genetic research involve screening and selecting embryos for higher polygenic education scores, as has previously been suggested? The only way to answer these thorny ethical questions is to understand the details and limitations of the genetic research: ignorance and denial are no longer an option.

—The Genetics of Success. How Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Associated With Educational Attainment Relate to Life-Course Development

—Predicting educational achievement from DNA

Post written by Stuart J. Ritchie for the BPS Research Digest. Stuart is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. His new book, Intelligence: All That Matters, is available now. Follow him on Twitter: @StuartJRitchie

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To determine which words are the most "metal", this data scientist wrote a program to sift through more than 22,000 albums to find the words most frequently used in heavy metal songs compared to their use in standard English. "Burn" is the most metal word, followed by "cries", "veins", "eternity", "breathe", and "beast". The least metal words?

particularly
indicated
secretary
committee
university
relatively
noted
approximately
chairman
employees

If you were to run an analysis on what I've written at kottke.org, I doubt it would be particularly metal. \m/

Tags: langauge   music

The Illustrated Book of Poultry by Lewis Wright, first published in 1870 and revised several times in the decades following, was “regarded as the most desirable of the English poultry books”. Poultry was very popular in Victorian England and the book housed a tremendous amount of practical poultry knowledge. From a Harvard Library blog post:

“Hen Fever”, as it became known during the Victorian Age, was an unprecedented obsession with owning, breeding, and showing the finest chickens in the world. The genesis of the poultry fancier owes much to Queen Victoria and her royal menagerie. In 1842, she acquired exotic chickens from China, and whatever the Queen did, the public would soon try to imitate and incorporate at home. The Illustrated London News reported “Her Majesty’s collection of fowls is very considerable, occupying half-a-dozen very extensive yards, several small fields, and numerous feeding-houses, laying-sheds, hospitals, winter courts, &c.”. From this point forward, poultry was no longer viewed as common farmyard critters, but valued and appreciated throughout the classes of Victorian Britain. The import and breeding of poultry was not just a leisurely hobby, but a profitable endeavor with sky rocketing price tags for the finest examples.

But the books also contained many wonderful illustrations of the finest examples of chickens and other poultry in the style of Audubon. The different breeds have amazing names like Buff Orpingtons, Plymouth Rocks, Dark Dorkingtons, and Gold Pencilled Hamburghs.

I pulled the images above from a 1911 edition of the book. (via @john_overholt)

Update: I removed a link to a reproduction of the book on Amazon because a reader reported that the quality was not great. (thx, alex)

Tags: art   books   illustration   Lewis Wright   The Illustrated Book of Poultry

Estimating consumer surplus is challenging because it requires identification of the entire demand curve. We rely on Uber's "surge" pricing algorithm and the richness of its individual level data to first estimate demand elasticities at several points along the demand curve. We then use these elasticity estimates to estimate consumer surplus. Using almost 50 million individual-level observations and a regression discontinuity design, we estimate that in 2015 the UberX service generated about $2.9 billion in consumer surplus in the four U.S. cities included in our analysis. For each dollar spent by consumers, about $1.60 of consumer surplus is generated. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the overall consumer surplus generated by the UberX service in the United States in 2015 was $6.8 billion.

It is notoriously hard to study the effect of alcohol on decision making, given the selection that takes place in who drinks alcohol and when they choose to do so. In a controlled laboratory experiment, we study the causal effect of alcohol on economic decision making. We examine the impact of alcohol on the following types of tasks: math and logic, uncertainty, overcon dence, strategic games, food choices, anchoring, and altruism. Our results indicate that alcohol consumption, as measured by the blood alcohol concentration (BAC), increases cooperation in strategic settings and altruism in Dictator games. We do not find any effects of alcohol on individual decision making tasks with the exception of anchoring. People with higher BAC did better in the anchoring task. The results suggest that the effects of alcohol are domain specifc.

We document the hidden costs of one of the most policy-relevant nudges, reminders. Sending reminders, while proven effective in facilitating behavior change, may come at a cost for both senders and receivers. Using a large scale field experiment with a charity, we find that reminders increase donations, but they also substantially increase unsubscriptions from the mailing list. To understand this novel finding, we develop a dynamic model of donation and unsubscription behavior with limited attention which is tested in reduced-form using a second field experiment. We also estimate our model structurally to perform a welfare analysis, showing that reminders are welfare diminishing for the potential donors as non-givers incur welfare loss of $2.35 for every reminder. The net benefit of every reminder to the charity is $0.18. Our evaluation shows the need to evaluate nudges on their intended as well as unintended consequences.

Growth in imports of strawberries, particularly from Mexico, threaten the Florida strawberry industry. To better compete with strawberries from Mexico, the Florida strawberry industry has focused on product differentiation with an emphasis on quality. In this study, we conducted one sensory test combined with experimental auctions to examine the impact of fruit quality and labeling strategies on consumer purchase. Two strawberry varieties, Sweet Sensation and Festival are used in the experiment. Ten samples with different labels under different strawberry varieties were randomly presented to participants. In total 103 panelists participated in sensory test and experimental auction. Results show that without labeling, consumers cannot distinguish different varieties of strawberry. In most cases, labeling varieties does not directly affect consumer preference. This indicates that actions need to be taken to improve consumers’ awareness and recognition of variety labels such as Sweet Sensation.

Acts of dishonesty permeate life. Understanding their origins, and what mechanisms help to attenuate such acts is an underexplored area of research. This study takes an economics approach to explore the propensity of individuals to act dishonestly across different contexts. We conduct an experiment that includes both parents and their young children as subjects, exploring the roles of moral cost and scrutiny on dishonest behavior. We find that the highest level of dishonesty occurs in settings where the parent acts alone and the dishonest act benefits the child. In this spirit, there is also an interesting, quite different, effect of children on parents' behavior: parents act more honestly under the scrutiny of daughters than under the scrutiny of sons. This finding sheds new light on the origins of the widely documented gender differences in cheating behavior observed among adults, where a typical result is that females are more honest than males.

We estimate the causal effects of regular and occasional grandchild care on the depression of grandmothers and grandfathers, using data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and an instrumental variables strategy which exploits the variation in the timing of interviews across individuals and the fact that childcare declines with the age of grandchildren. We find that 10 additional hours of childcare per month, a 31 percent increase with respect to the sample average, increases the probability of developing depressive symptoms by 3.0 to 3.2 percentage points for grandmothers and by 5.4 to 5.9 percentage points for grandfathers. These results suggest that policies that substitute informal with formal childcare can improve the mental wellbeing of grandparents.

Who better to discuss this episode of Beverly Hills 90210 than its director ... oh, and the series star Jason Priestley! His new film Zoom is in theaters now, and of course we’ve loved him since first seeing him onscreen as Brandon Walsh in 1990. Jason is also currently starring in the series Private Eyes and Raising Expectations, with Molly Ringwald.

You can still donate to our fundraising campaign for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles, for exciting rewards at gofundme.com/donnamartingrad

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He is Ragnol