You know the thing about holiday weekends and kids? You end up feeling like you need some kind of vacation — and here’s the work week again. Wheeee!
Here are some of the things I’ve been reading and thinking about while trying to piece together enough continguous space-time bits to craft a proper blog post:

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Lots of items kicking around in the blogosphere that deserve more attention than I have time to give them right now. (I’m off to start taking soccer classes in about an hour — hold a good thought for my knees, please!) But I wanted to share.

• At Log base 2, Nick Barrowman considers the epistemic (and perhaps ethical) consequences of missing values in statistics. He writes:
  

  Missing values are a bit of a dirty secret in science. Because they are rarely mentioned in science education, it’s not surprising that they are often overlooked in practice. This is terribly damaging–regardless of whether it’s due to ignorance, dishonesty, or wishful thinking.

  Read the whole thing and learn how statistical and experimental methods work together in generating what we know — or don’t.

• At nanopolitan, Abi looks at how worked up the editors of Nature are getting at the idea that researchers in South Korea could be offered cash incentives for academic publications. Abi points out that there are already extrinsic rewards for such publications:
  

  [I]t’s important to keep in mind that publications in high impact journals lead to many other rewards: better chance of funding for your future projects, awards and recognition (some of which come with cash prizes), and early promotion (with its built-in cash incentive). Thus, an explicit award for each publication just happens to extend this trend.

  As well, he detects a bit of sanctimony toward the scientific culture of South Korea in the wake of the stem cell scandal. While I think I may have more worries about what cash incentives do to the ethical environment of a scientific community than Abi here, I very much agree with his suggestion that if there’s a problem, it’s not just a South Korean problem — it’s one in which even the editors of Nature are up to their necks.

• Via Pandagon: If a man passes a “domestic violence propensity test” with “flying colors”, and then he goes on to stab his wife to death, is it reasonable to conclude there might be something wrong with the test?
• From three years ago on Kieran Healy’s weblog (people, I have a lot to read), this beautiful post on the continuing battle over whether (and which) social sciences are actually scientific. A taste:
  

  Informed answers to this question are rare. Instead, you tend to get half-baked ideas about predicability and falsifiability as the criteria for science being put into service shoring up one’s allegiance to a chosen tribe. If predictability looks like a shaky foundation (What? You’re telling me bright young economists don’t get hired on the basis of successful predictions?) the ground can be shifted to the existence of “basic shared premises within the field.” If these shared premises begin to look a bit too metaphysical, then we’ll move to a different criterion. Whatever it takes to preserve the phenomena. It’s easy and fun. All you have to do sacrifice is your consistency.

  If you don’t read the rest of the post, you’re living a lie.

More content soon, provided I don’t end up in one of those tragic head-on collisions with a soccer ball!

Very busy. I plan to resurface soon. In the meantime, a few items:

• Help a blogger out: Coturnix (aka Bora Zivkovic) is a science blogger extraordinaire, keeping not one but three excellent blogs (Science and Politics, Circadiana, and The Magic School Bus). He’s also a graduate student and a parent, which means the money’s tight. Tight enough that keeping the electricity (and the internet) turned on is a challenge. If you have a few bucks to spare and enjoy Coturnix’s writing as I do, you might help him out.

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… which is where I’ve been lately. (But I think of you all often, amidst the stacks of essays.) Once you’re a blogger, the mind starts collecting bloggable issues like Post-It Notes. Here are the stickies I’ve accumulated in the past few days:

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You know how, when you go to your day job, the relevant stories keep unfolding? And you say, “Gee, I should think more about that so I have something useful to say here,” but meanwhile another story pops up? And soon, you’ve got like 20 tabs open on Firefox with the things you want to deal with, but you’re going to have to restart the computer because your software update requires a restart and you’re not ready to deal fully with those stories you’ve been tracking?!
Yeah, me too. So, until I can catch up, here are some links:

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