A cup of iced green tea, bits of dew forming on the glass because hey, it's still summer in Chicago, the sound of neighborhood dogs barking to each other, and the CBO's latest thriller on the iPad. Perfection. I can really get used to this working (mostly) from home business. 

Ideal experiments are most often hypothetical. Still, hypothetical experiments are worth contemplating because they help us pick fruitful research topics.

Already a huge fan of this book. Sometimes it seems like researchers work from the available data to the research question, with no regard for what may be useful, logical, or interesting.

LK:	I'd just like to say, I knew about this guy before he was saying women can't get pregnant from rape, and back when he was just saying that he wanted to end the Federal lunch program b/c it cost too much
CB:	way to be a hipster concerning garbage politics
LK:	what sort of person do you have to be to think that children should get less food? hell, that anyone should get less food. but esp children.
CB:	someone who thinks life begins at conception and ends once you exit your mother's uterus

It's Monday, the happiest day of the week! And it's all because NBER posts new working papers on Monday. There was lots of good stuff today, but this suggestion was especially interesting. From "The Value of Bosses":

Replacing a boss who is in the lower 10% of boss quality with one who is in the upper 10% of boss quality increases a team's total output by about the same amount as would adding one worker to a nine member team.

In equation form (apparently):

qt = f( Xt, α, b(djt/Nmt, d j t-1 / N m t-1 , ..., d j 0 / N m 0 ) ).

You gotta love the social sciences for their ability to make complicated-seeming equations out of anything.

Gotta love the Guardian, which brings, I think, the right amount of anger and frustration and bemusement to bear on this sad, sad story:

A death row prisoner who has been medically diagnosed as "mentally retarded" and therefore exempt from execution is set to die on Tuesday in Texas, a state that rejects scientific consensus and instead applies its own definition of learning difficulties based on a character in a John Steinbeck novel.

The work done by attorneys who defend death row inmates has got to be some of the most important, and most depressing, done by anyone with a J.D.