Just a minor note: if you want an admin update on this weblog, go to my twitter account. You don’t need to subscribe, as you might not be interested in all my random interactions with other bloggers. But if I don’t post for a few days, please don’t email me or post a comment in the thread wondering if I’m well, just check the twitter account. Easier that way not to clutter up the content on this website. You can always find the link to twitter right under my head shot on the sidebar. You can’t miss it.
Getting even with the odds ratio. To some extent it’s “common sense,” context matters. But nice to be reminded. Especially when in some cases context doesn’t matter.
Complexity Not So Costly After All: Moderately Complex Plants and Animals Can Be Better Equipped to Adapt. “By incorporating a more realistic representation of pleiotropy, Zhang’s analysis found the reverse of Orr’s arguments to be true. Although Fisher’s observation still holds, reversing Orr’s assertions minimizes its impact, thus reducing the cost of complexity.” I plan on blogging this, so I won’t say more.
Why Charity Ratings Don’t Work (as of now). People want an easy number, but summary metrics can’t replace really legwork. Though perhaps Holden & company can help us develop our own personal heuristics.
Tragedy at the Virginia Quarterly Review. This is of a piece with Emily Bazelon’s previous reporting on bullying, but check this out: “It had a staff of six, including Genoways and Morrissey, and a circulation of less than 5,000.” This weblog gets 2,000-3,000 visitors on a given day. Much more if you evaluate over the month as some people only drop in once or twice a week or every other day. Of course there’s a lot of editing and such which goes into those high quality small circulation periodicals, so apples to oranges, but still….
How California Became America’s Greece. The climate’s the same. I wonder….