The weekly link roundup is where I list links for the links that I liked for the week. However, I read a lot of sites related to atheism / religion, and thus a lot of my links end up atheism/religion-related. To take a break from this, I’d like to offer a special edition of the “Weekly Link Roundup” series that doesn’t contain any atheism / religion related articles. (Remember that I don’t necessarily agree with everything stated in every article. Feel free to comment or ask. Lastly, it may be worth noting that I do try to sort these links in the order that I like them, descending.)

• Fuel Efficiency Standards Have Costs of Their Own [NYTimes]: “Just the other day, President Obama unveiled another example of how our hostility to anything that even remotely looks like a tax is leading us down the wrong path, ultimately making us worse off. [...] The reason is fairly straightforward. Fuel-efficiency standards do not really change drivers’ behavior in a helpful way. Gas taxes do.”
• Milton Friedman’s Thermostat: “Everybody knows that if you press down on the gas pedal the car goes faster, other things equal, right? And everybody knows that if a car is going uphill the car goes slower, other things equal, right? But suppose you were someone who didn’t know those two things. And you were a passenger in a car watching the driver trying to keep a constant speed on a hilly road. You would see the gas pedal going up and down. You would see the car going downhill and uphill. But if the driver were skilled, and the car powerful enough, you would see the speed stay constant. So, if you were simply looking at this particular ‘data generating process’, you could easily conclude: ‘Look! The position of the gas pedal has no effect on the speed!’; and ‘Look! Whether the car is going uphill or downhill has no effect on the speed!’; and ‘All you guys who think that gas pedals and hills affect speed are wrong!’”
• Local Action and Remote Donation: “In response to my post on occupy [place] and inequality, I had the following discussion with a friend. They have a perspective that I think is pretty common in my cohort: local activism and community action does more good than trying to earn a lot to give via international aid [...But g]lobally and locally, most rich people live near other rich people. So if everyone works to benefit their local community, this helps richer people a lot more than poorer people.”
• Don’t Jump to Conclusions About the Aurora Killer: “You’ve been bombarded with ‘facts’ and opinions about James Holmes’s motives. You have probably expressed your opinion on why he did it. You are probably wrong. I learned that the hard way. In 1999 I lived in Denver and was part of the first wave of reporters to descend on Columbine High School the afternoon it was attacked. I ran with the journalistic pack that created the myths we are still living with. We created those myths for one reason: we were trying to answer the burning question of why, and we were trying to answer it way too soon. I spent 10 years studying Columbine, and we all know what happened there, right? Two outcast loners exacted revenge against the jocks for relentlessly bullying them. Not one bit of that turned out to be true.”
• When Do We Become Truly Conscious?: “Having prided myself on my objectivity throughout my adult life, I’ve embarrassingly found that my daughter is the main exception to this aim: I’ve not only been taken aback by how fiercely I love her but also by how proud I am of her and how quickly I distort the truth to make her seem exceptional in every way. But when I can step back from these views, I ask myself: At what point did she become conscious? Obviously she is conscious now, as she can tell me her inner thoughts via language. But when did she start experiencing her environment? On a personal, intuitive level, I had little doubt that her first intense bursts of laughter at my silly antics, when she was a few months old, reflected a substantive consciousness. But was she conscious well before this? Was she aware when she was still in the womb, kicking away? Or could she only experience things when she first opened her eyes to the outside world on the day of her birth?”
• Is Character More Important than GPA?: “Wilson explains that students who do poorly at the beginning of their collegiate academic career’s typically follow two paths: a pessimism cycle or an optimism cycle. As the graphic below illustrates, those in the pessimism cycle are quick to doubt their intellectual abilities and easily deem themselves failures. Those in the optimism cycle, on the other hand, usually blame their poor work ethic and strive to improve. In short, Wilson’s study encouraged students to filter into the optimism cycle and out of the pessimism cycle. [...] he takeaway from the Times article is that character is an important part of education and it is often overlooked because test scores and GPA cannot capture it nor do they incentivize it. Wilson and Dweck are suggesting that with just a bit of intervention students learn how important a good hard-working attitude is. That is character.”
• Do Ethicists Eat Less Meat?: “Conclusion? Ethicists condemn meat-eating more than the other groups, but actually eat meat at about the same rate. Perhaps also, they’re more likely to misrepresent their meat-eating practices (on the meals-per-week question and at philosophy functions) than the other groups.”
• Can We Reverse The Stanford Prison Experiment?: “This forward-thinking Canadian detachment, led by a young, new superintendent, Ward Clapham, challenged the core assumptions of the policing system itself. He noticed that the vast majority of police work was reactive. He asked: “Could we design a system that encouraged people to not commit crime in the first place?” [...] Their approach was to try to catch youth doing the right things and give them a Positive Ticket. The ticket granted the recipient free entry to the movies or to a local youth center. They gave out an average of 40,000 tickets per year. [...] According to Clapham, youth recidivism was reduced from 60% to 8%. Overall crime was reduced by 40%. Youth crime was cut in half. And it cost one-tenth of the traditional judicial system.”
• Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They Are From Nigeria?: “Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.”
• “Inbox Zero” is a Thing?: “Wait, zero unread messages? I thought ‘inbox zero’ meant zero messages. People aiming for zero unread messages are at stage one. I’m at stage two: my email inbox contains almost zero messages outright. Since the snazzy ‘inbox zero’ term is already taken, I suppose this could be called ‘true inbox zero’. Or perhaps ‘inbox zero omega’. ‘Inbox double zero’? Every email in my inbox has been read. Every email which has been acted upon, and requires no further action from me, has been archived or deleted.”