Sunday Links

I’ve decided to join the Internet-wide trend of posting regular updates on articles, blog posts, etc. that I have read recently and find interesting. I see multiple benefits in such a practice:

• As a commitment mechanism: With the Internet watching, I will (hopefully) feel more motivated to maintain good reading habits. Furthermore, I’ll have an incentive to write about my insights on each piece (these posts would otherwise be of no more value than any other news aggregation).
• As a more effective method of sharing: Individual posts on social networks often seem “drowned out” to me, quickly eclipsed by the slightly newer articles displayed immediately above it. This form of more formal publication should counter that effect.
• As a log of my reading progress: I envision an archive of my reading interests over the weeks / months / years¹ could be very useful to my future self.

Without further ado, here begins the Sunday Links series!²

• Sean Trende from RealClearPolitics claims that House campaign spending only has significant effects for challengers. This post is based on findings from the late 80’s / early 90’s. Levitt (1994) contradicts these ideas and suggests that the marginal dollar of funding actually does little for both the incumbent and the challenger, after controlling for candidate quality and performing more than a simple cross-sectional analysis (as Trende has done).
• Varshney et al. (2013) describe a system for computational creativity. The system combines many disparate datasets on cuisine and food ingredients (containing data concerning e.g. regional cooking practices, observed links between chemicals and “hedonic psychophysical effects,” olfactory properties, etc. etc.) and automatically designs and assesses “creative” novel meal recipes.
• F. A. Hayek’s article “The Use of Knowledge in Society” explains how a free market can resolve the problem of insufficient knowledge on the part of any given individual through prices. Hayek claims that a system of central planning would require a single entity with total knowledge of the circumstances of all of its constituents, and argues that a decentralized system which regulates itself by prices is superior.
• David Luposchainsky provides examples of strange loops in Haskell with two simple functions, loeb and moeb.