- Go read Austin Frakt on the importance of counterfactuals in policy debates. Somewhere deep in the Wordpress interface for this blog I have a draft post on the most important lessons I learned in my year of coursework at Hopkins public health -- numbers one, two, and three on the list are "the counterfactual," "thinking about the counterfactual," and "mo really, the counterfactual is everything."
- Two cool upcoming events: in New York City, a big data conference on September 13-14. And in Stockholm, a panel discussion featuring Sachs, Easterly, Duflo, Collier, and Rodrik. Wow. h/t Tom Murphy
- Here's an in-the-weeds description of how two groups of researchers came up with fairly different child mortality estimates -- the pointer came from David Spiegelhalter on Twitter.
- Flowing Data describes how researchers store petabits of data with DNA.
- A friend posts on Awra Amba, a non-religious community with gender equality in rural Ethiopia.
- On a completely off-topic front: a diatribe against splitting the Hobbit into three different movies, at TheOneRing.net. I remain deeply skeptical that the least serious of Tolkien's Middle Earth canon will make one good movie, let alone three...
- Lastly: I met someone recently in Addis who had read my Hunger Games survival analysis in the spring, and the nerdy side of me (which is most of me) found this deeply gratifying.
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