Sixty-three

Peak migration.

1. Poorer countries and island countries tend to eat their own grains. Richer countries tend to eat animals that eat grains, or they make fuel.

   

2. Peak Spring Bird Migration Periods for U.S. Cities - BirdCast

   

3. Binoculars to Binomials

   It's for coders who are interested in cultivating an observational practice, and for birders who want to dive into the rich pool of data that comes out of their hobby.

   

4. Framework for Easy Statistical Modeling, Visualization, and Reporting • easystats

   

   You’ve probably already heard about the tidyverse, another very popular collection of packages (ggplot, dplyr, tidyr, …) that also makes using R easier. So, should you pick the tidyverse or easystats? Pick both!

   Indeed, these two ecosystems have been designed with very different goals in mind.

   The tidyverse packages are primarily made to create a new R experience, where data manipulation and exploration is intuitive and consistent.

   On the other hand, easystats focuses more on the final stretch of the analysis: understanding and interpreting your results and reporting them in a manuscript or a report, while following best practices. You can definitely use the easystats functions in a tidyverse workflow!

   Plan to check this out some time.

5. Restaurant sales & traffic are the weakest since they were closed during covid.

   

6. The Law and Economics of Mutual Fund Fees by Stewart L. Brown :: SSRN

   There is a large financial anomaly hiding in plain sight. In 2021 investors paid almost $90 billion in total fees on about $14 trillion of actively managed mutual funds to an industry flogging a product demonstrably inferior to index funds. Gruber identified this puzzle in 1996 and we are no closer now than we were then to understanding this mystery.

   The warp and woof of academic finance is the idea that financial markets correctly price financial assets. How is it that the high cost of actively managed mutual funds is not eliminated by competitive forces? How does this clearly inferior product survive?

   I admire those who 1) take on massive, complex, unresolved problems, and 2) write good abstracts.

7. Pushback on The Anxious Generation

   Sounds a little like smoking and lung cancer, maybe? “Well, the science doesn’t support the claim, therefore the subject of the claim cannot be a factor at all.” The real (generic) reason is “genetic and environmental factors”. Doesn’t that phrase cover like 95% of factors?

   1. Pushback on the pushback from one of the authors

      
      Also, it’s fascinating how fast this discourse can happen when facilitated through platforms such as Substack. In scientific literature the discourse is much slower.