The blogroll

I encourage you to check out our linked blogs. Here’s what they’re all about:

Cognitive and Behavioral Science

BPS Research Digest: I haven’t been following this one recently, but it has lots of good links, I should probably check it more often. There are a couple things that bother me, though. The blog is sponsored by the British Psychological Society, so this sounds pretty serious. But then they run things like advertising promotions sponsored by a textbook company and highlight iffy experimental claim. Most notoriously, in 2010 they ran a wholly uncritical post on the notorious Daryl Bem study that purported to find ESP. After being called on it in the comments, the blogger (Christian Jarrett) responded with, “The stats appear sound. . . . it’s a great study. Rigorously conducted” and even defended “the discussion of quantum physics in the paper.” Follow this blog for the links, not the content.

Decision Science News: A mix of conference announcements and reports of new research. Here’s a typical example. I love this stuff; others might find it a bit technical. Also, this blog runs ads. I wonder how much the advertisers pay? I can’t imagine anyone would pay enough to a niche blogger to make the ads worth it. I mean, sure, if an advertiser offered me enough money for me to hire a postdoc, I’d do it, but I can only imagine we’re talking really small amounts of money. A topic of discussion for Decision Science News, perhaps?

Language Log: Not much needs to be said here. This one’s a classic blog with lots of statistical content, remains strong after all these years.

Seth Roberts: I disagree with him on climate change denial, Holocaust denial, etc. Still, he’s a pioneer of self-experimentation. I hope that the next generation of psychology or medical research involves an integration of informal experimentation with statistical controls.

The Hardest Science: Mostly revolves around reproducible research. It’s where I heard the story of the lamest, grudgingest, non-retraction retraction ever.

Cultural

Light Reading: She’s like me, she likes to write and has a lot of energy. I’m still wondering what she will think of Debutante Hill (I’ll lend her my copy).

Lists and Letters of Note: Great stuff but not much new material lately; he says he’s busy working on a book.

Love the Liberry: Amazingly enough, they keep coming up with good material.

Paperpools: Not much material lately. As it should be. We want Helen DeWitt to be writing novels, not blogging!

Research as a Second Language: Anti-charismatic self-help advice. The alternative to those omnipresent shouting, obnoxious internet gurus.

Streetsblog: Good stuff. Ideally this would all be in your daily newspaper. I don’t read it too often; if I did, I’d be too angry to think about anything else all day.

Sister Blogs

The Monkey Cage: Sometimes I simul-post, other times I’ll rant there and then link from here. (for example)

The Statistics Forum: I recently formulated the plan to fill it up with 365 stories. So far, though, I’ve only received a few. So maybe just a story a week? I’m not sure what to do with this blog. An official American Statistical Association blog seems like a good thing but I don’t really know what to do with it.

Social and Political Science

Chris Blattman: International development, politics, economics, and policy.

Fivethirtyeight: Nate does a good job. I like how he can focus on whatever question he’s answering without getting overwhelmed. Here’s a good recent example.

Lane Kenworthy is a completely serious and reasonable person, just as his name would suggest.

Marginal Revolution: You’ve heard of these guys.

Monthly Labor Review Precis: Direct links to research on things that matter. Good stuff.

Overcoming Bias: He recently wrote, “most people we know talk as if they hate, revile, and despise ads. They say ads are an evil destructive manipulative force that exists only because big bad firms run the world, and use ads to control us all.” I was surprised to hear that most people Robin Hanson knows talk that way, and this gives me a new perspective on why he writes the way he does. It’s gotta be frustrating, hanging around people who talk about big bad firms and evil destructive manipulative forces.

Rajiv Sethi: He only blogs a couple times a month, but he always has something interesting to say. (The opposite of this blog, I suppose.)

The Baby Name Wizard: The one and only, by the people who, among other things, debunked the myth that there’s something special about the word “orange.” But you can just skip directly to the Name Voyager.

U.S. Census Blog: Not the funnest thing out there to read, but it’s good that the people at the Census are doing this for us. When you need good data, the Census is there for you.

Statistics and Machine Learning

Bob Carpenter: He wrote Stan.

Chance News: The original statistics blog.

Christian Robert: People who used to do theoretical statistics, now do computational statistics. This is a good thing.

Cosma Shalizi: He has an odd retro style and enough combination of common sense and knowledge of philosophy that I asked him to collaborate on my paper that became this. His set of interests and frustrations seems to overlap a lot with mine, except that he doesn’t really ride a bike and I’m sure there are some big parts of his life that don’t match to anything in mine.

Deborah Mayo: I learned about her through Shalizi. Mayo believes in learning through model checking, just like Jaynes (and me). Her blog features long comment threads and contributions from the likes of Stephen Senn.

John Cook: Like Tyler Cowen, a guy who does a lot of things but is best known for his blogging. He throws in some applied math and numerical analysis along with the statistics.

Kaiser Fung: Fun to read and utterly sensible. Among many other things, he offered a good probabilistic summary of the Lance Armstrong story, well before it finally broke.

Larry Wasserman: His perspective on statistics is different from mine (for example, he defines p(a|b) = p(a,b)/p(b), whereas I define p(a,b)=p(a|b)p(b)), but it’s good that he can get his views out there. Research proceeds in many different ways, and if everyone agreed with me (or with any single perspective), the field of statistics would make a lot less progress.

Messy Matters: This one reads a bit more like a draft of a pop-science book than like a blog. The trouble is, there are already so many pop-science books about economics and data. They’ll have to come up with their own unique twist.

Nuit Blanche: Compressive sensing: that’s cool stuff! I’m impressed by these CS guys who can effortlessly throw around terabytes of data.

Observational Epidemiology: These guys are thoughtful and I admire the effort they put into their blogging. If they’d started blogging in 2003, they would’ve been on everyone’s blogroll.

Stats Blogs: A convenient compendium, with links back to the originals.

The Numbers Guy: Carl Bialik is one of the original data journalists. He, Falix Salmon, and Nate Silver have very similar profiles (as Bill James might say).

Visualization

Chartsnthings: This is the ultimate graphics blog. The New York Times graphics team presents some great data visualizations along with the stories behind them. I love this sort of insider’s perspective.

Eager Eyes: Graphics research.

Information Aesthetics: Seriously pretty.

Junk Charts: The nitty gritty. What to read if you want to make your own graphs better.