Miscellany

In Which the Author Explains the Likely Origin of the Idea for a Professional Code of Ethics Among Economists

Michael Giberson For more economists caught in the act of navel gazing, check out The Economist‘s forum on the question of whether economists need a professional code of ethics. If you want some background, the urge for a code of ethics came about something like this: Since the end of 2008, economists have been professionally embarrassed by …

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Randomized Testing for Online Fundraising Appeals

Michael Giberson Following up yesterday’s note on randomized testing in free legal aid, here is another kind of applied experimental work: The recently ended Wikipedia fundraising campaign made extensive use of randomized testing to explore just which appeals generated the most revenue. “If everyone reading this donated $5” vs. “If everyone reading this donated $10” …

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White House Declares Emergency in Massachusetts Water Main Break. In Related News, Water Main Break is Already Repaired.

Michael Giberson I don’t know the answer, so someone let me know if you do, but has the President of the United States ever declared a state of emergency over a local water main break before? According the the announcement, “The President’s action authorizes … Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate all disaster relief …

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Fish Leg Counts: What the Web Knows and Doesn’t Know

Michael Giberson David Pennock hears another another tick of the clock in the countdown to web sentience. [In 2003] we trained a computer to answer questions from the then-hit game show by querying Google. We combined words from the questions with words from each answer in mildly clever ways, picking the question-answer pair with the …

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