Collected links

1. Nature on the IPython notebook.

2. FRED Adds 1,993 Banking and Monetary Statistics Series, 1914-1941 that is.

3. Good post by Ricardo Hausmann on group identity.

4. Ben Bernanke: “How do people really feel about the economy?”:

   In summary, the University of Michigan’s survey of consumer attitudes has shown a normal cyclical pattern of improvement in recent years, both in how people feel about their own economic prospects and in their expectations for the economy as a whole. In contrast, measures of the national “mood,” like Gallup’s “way things are going” question or questions about the “direction of the country,” show a high level of dissatisfaction.

   …

   To an increasing extent, Americans are self-selecting into non-overlapping communities (real and virtual) of differing demographics and ideologies, served by a fragmented and partisan media.

5. Corpus-based judicial opinions.

6. Paul Krugman reviews the book by the former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King [source: The Browser]:

   In fact, King not-so-subtly mocks the authors of such books, which “share the same invisible subtitle: ‘how I saved the world.’”

   […] it is mainly an extended meditation on monetary theory and the methodology of economics.

   The more or less standard account of the 2008 crisis, which King shares, is that the combination of stability-fostered complacency and deregulation led to an accumulation of financial vulnerabilities. Private debt was on a steady upward trend before the crisis, […].

   People cope with this uncertainty by settling on “narratives” that are conventionally accepted at any given moment, but can suddenly change.