Random links

A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Policing
"Traffic police regularly discount the charged speed on drivers’ tickets to avoid a discrete jump in the fine schedule. This behavior leads to an excess mass in the distribution of charged speeds just below the jump. ... we show that minorities are less likely to receive this break than white drivers ... with 40% of officers explaining the entirety of the aggregate discrimination"
"Peer review" is younger than you think. Does that mean it can go away?
"Conventional histories of peer review suggest that it is old indeed. Kathleen Fitzpatrick starts her discussion of its history in the 1750s, although she suggests that the "history of peer review thus appears to have been both longer and shorter than we may realize," extending back to the 17th century but still imperfect by the 1940s. Wikipedia editors are more firm in their straightforward assertion that is was developed by Henry Oldenburg (1619–1677), who built on the work of Ishāq ibn ʻAlī al-Ruhāwī (854–931). ... Most of the histories of peer review in the sciences note how late journals were to adopt it: leading British publications like the Lancet and Nature don't take up outside peer reviewers until the 1970s."
‘When life hands you a lemon, just bite in’
A question from the interview and its answer: "That 1995 Psychological Review piece you mentioned won the George A. Miller award for an outstanding article in general psychology. There was a certain irony about that? In 1960 I was a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. One day I got a letter saying that the Department had decided to kick me out of their PhD programme. They doubted I would ever make a worthwhile contribution to psychology, the letter said, due to my lack of ‘originality and independence’. The letter was signed by the acting chairman of the Department, George A. Miller!"