Jacob Christensen

• Charlie's Diary: I get mail: especially about Linux
  To cut a long story short: for an Eee, I'd recommend a version of Ubuntu, tailored to support the Eee hardware. Ubuntu is another Debian derivative, but this time vastly smoother and more polished than Xandros — and developing rapidly, with a huge user base and active updates to the latest applications. I'd also recommend the Ubuntu Netbook Remix user interface — an application launcher and desktop that does much the same as the Xandros desktop, but is actually useful. This isn't part of the standard Ubuntu distribution, and for full hardware support on the Eee (for example, to ensure wifi, ethernet, and sound work properly) you'd normally need to install some extra drivers. However, the Eee is so popular that there are a couple of sub-distributions out there especially tailored for it.

  These are (in no particular order): EeeBuntu, and Easy Peasy (formerly Ubuntu-Eee)

  (tags: software opensource linux eeepc)
• Do elite economics departments produce the best papers? | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
  his column measures the quality of university economics research in Europe and the UK by concentrating on within-journal rankings of influential articles. The UK and Europe are doing relatively well, and top-level research output is not concentrated at half a dozen world-famous institutions. Science-funding policies by European governments should reflect this diversity.
  (tags: economics academic bibliometrics)
• Did the Swedes nationalize? What does that mean, anyway? – Interfluidity
  (tags: sweden economicpolicy economy politics finance banking)
• The crisis and how to fix it: Part 2, solutions | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
  Frozen credit markets prolong the recession and keep us on the edge of financial meltdown. The ineffectiveness of existing policy to kick start credit markets and bank lending is due to investors’ fear of “unknown unknowns”. Ordinary restructuring-and-liquidation recipes won’t work until the government provide insurance against such systemic events. Recent actions by the US and UK get it partially right.
  (tags: economics finance)
• The crisis and how to fix it: Part 1, causes | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
  In a pair of Vox columns, one of the world’s most respected macroeconomists suggests that the consensus view of the crisis’s causes and cures is flawed. This first column focuses on the crisis’s deep causes. Global excess demand for safe assets played a role in building the ‘accident waiting’ to happen. Now, investors’ fears of unknown unknowns – Knightian uncertainty – is why the waiting mountains of cash are not acting as “stabilising speculation”.
  (tags: economics finance)

One thing which will make me click on a post in my Google Reader is when a newspaper article comes with the headline “Expert: (blah blah blah)”. Not because I trust the content of the article more than any old journamalistic blather but because I’m curious about what “Expert” means this time. Researches? Practitioners? Somebody working in a bank? Or perhaps even the proverbial man in the street?

Today, DR promised me the following: “Expert: Voters put priority on the economy” – which might suggest an advantage for the government, despite recent polls showing that the opposition is managing to challenge the government among voter.

So, who is the expert? I would have expected somebody doing serious electoral research as the question about issue ownership is one of the classical themes in this line of political science and if you look in any of the books published about Danish elections, the subject is addressed.

But, no. The expert in this case was – a journalist. And not just any journalist, but Thomas Larsen, a commentator for Berlingske Tidende. And just to make things really funny, there has been some discussion recently about the relationship between Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Thomas Larsen – here is a view from the left and here from the right. And if you want more fun, here’s Politiken and here is Larsen’s [irony]old friend[/irony] Jarl Cordua on the trail.

Okay: To me, DR fails because there is real expertise out there (even though electoral researchers might be allowed a Saturday out). So basically, I would not trust DR to know or have any kind of criteria about what constitutes expertise in these matters. I’m not quite sure what to make about Thomas Larsen – I don’t have any particular axe to grind with him, and I suspect that there is a lot of bad blood and hurt feelings between some of the people in this circuit, but I do think that the media in general and DR in particular ought to be more careful in the presentation of political op-ed writers as independent analysts. Or even experts.

DN gives us the headline to end all headlines:

Cow-dung used as fuel creates giant brown haze over India

Tasteful, no?

Henry Farrell tells us that political scientists are less un-hot than most other academics:

Second, the above proviso aside, political scientists are pretty damn hot in comparative terms. We rank as number 5, trailing only languages, law, religion and criminal justice. From eyeballing the data, it looks as though there is a minor discontinuity right after political science, where the hotness lurches down a notch, and another, more significant one between psychology (at number 10) and finance (at number 11).

Inspired by this. Daniel Drezner also weighs in. I would assume that in terms of hotness, Salma Hayek would beat any PolSci professor easily, though.