Various extracts from documents on my desktop:

1) DEMOCRACIES PAY HIGHER WAGES
Dani Rodrik

Controlling for labor productivity, income levels, and other possible determinants, there is a robust and statistically significant association between the extent of democracy and the level of manufacturing wages in a country. The association exists both across countries and over time within countries. The coefficient estimates suggest non-negligible wage improvements result from the enhancement of democratic institutions: average wages in a country like Mexico would be expected to increase by 10 to 40 percent were Mexico to attain a level of democracy comparable to that prevailing in the United States. Political competition and participation seem to be the driving force behind the result.

Verdict: Delete.

2) Objectivity and Truth: You'd Better Believe It
Ronald Dworkin

Archimedean or external skepticism is to be contrasted with internal skepticism. A skeptical thesis about value is internally skeptical if it presupposes the truth of some positive value judgment. I shall use moral skepticism as the leading example of internal skepticism, though it is easy enough to construct examples in other evaluative domains as well, as we shall see. I shall assume that all readers, including those drawn to archimedean skepticism, accept that our shared language and common experience include assessments on what we take to be a distinct moral dimension. I shall not attempt to define that dimension, or to separate the predicates we use to employ it. If I am right, no helpful definition of morality as a whole can be given. In any case, the existence of a moral dimension of assessment in our experience is not in question, though its status is.

Verdict: Try to read.

3) THE SELF AWAKENED: PRAGMATISM UNBOUND
Roberto Mangabeira Unger

This little piece is not about how to read James or Dewey, Heidegger or Wittgenstein. However, it starts from the premise that certain tendencies in the evolution of the most general ideas available to us -- tendencies often described as pragmatism -- have been emasculated, philosophically as well as politically, and in this way made more palatable and less useful. It is never too late to change course. I offer here both an argument for why to do so and a proposal for how to do so. The point is not to rescue the real pragmatism; it is to enhance the real us.

*146 pages of similar material follow*

Verdict: Delete.

4) Quantum Microeconomics
Yoram Bauman

For another perspective on the Coase Theorem, consider what blues musician B.B. King said during a discussion about Napster, the pioneering musicswapping website. Commenting on the copyright-infringement lawsuits filed against Napster by various recording labels and artists, B.B. said that “copyright and things of that sort are something that will have to be worked out and they will be worked out. I remember when they didn’t want you to have a VCR, but they worked it out and I think for the best. Smart people always get together and work it out.” Although B.B. has yet to win a Nobel Prize in Economics, his words get at the heart of the Coase Theorem: if there’s nothing stopping people from trading, nothing should stop people from trading until they reach a Pareto efficient allocation of resources.

Verdict: Skim through, speeding past the parts I'm familiar with, then delete.

5) Sociotropes, Systematic Bias, and Political Failure: Reflections on the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy
Bryan Caplan

Economic models of politics typically make two assumptions about voters: First, their motives are egocentric, not sociotropic; second, their beliefs are rational, not subject to systematic bias. Political scientists have presented strong evidence against the first assumption (Mansbridge, 1990), but have become increasingly willing to accept the second. (Page and Shapiro, 1992; Marcus and Hanson, 1993) This article tests these two assumptions, then explores the tests’ broader implications.

Verdict: Skim through, go bleah and delete.

6) BELIEF IN A JUST WORLD AND REDISTRIBUTIVE POLITICS
Roland Bénabou, Jean Tirole

The most common and powerful of form of individually chosen but collectively sustained belief is religion. A simple extension of the model allows us to analyze individual and cross-country differences in a specific but economically important class of religious beliefs, namely those linked (or similar) to the “Protestant ethic”. By this we refer to a belief that there is a hereafter in which rewards and punishments will be determined according to effort and industriousness (or lack thereof) during one’s lifetime.31 The alternative view is that there is most likely no afterlife, or that if there is one, its rewards are determined according to criteria unrelated to industriousness, or even antithetical to material success: vows of poverty and asceticism, good deeds towards others, scrupulous observance of rituals, contemplation, the “extinction of desires”, etc. Uncertainty over the likelihood or nature of divine rewards (and punishments) can be simply modelled as follows:

a) In the production function, let θ be replaced by a fixed return, α ≥ 1. Thus, everyone agrees on the nature of economic processes (rewards in the material world).
b) Preferences involve no time-inconsistency (β = 1) but include an anticipal term for the “value of the afterlife”, u(e, θ), about which agents are uncertain.

Without loss of generality let u(e, θ) = θe, where θH > θL are now the two possible (expected) values of θ, conditional on σ = ∅, L.33 An agent’s preferences at t = 0, 1 are thus U i t ≡ E "(1 − τ )yi + τ ¯y − ¡ei¢2 2a + θ(μi)ei¯¯¯¯¯ Ωi t#

Verdict: Read the abstract and delete due to lots of Greek symbols in the appendix.

7) did it for your country, yourself & for a good cause
2004 global sex survey report
durex

South Africans are the nationality most likely to watch pornography (60%) while the Danes are the ones who most favour blindfolds or handcuffs (55%) and sex toys are most likely to be used by Icelanders

Verdict: Skim through, tut tut at the decadence of modern society and the encroaching insidious influence of Western Values (even though "The Chinese have had more sexual partners than anyone else - 19.3 compared with the Brazilians (15.2), the Japanese (12.7) and the Danes (12.5)") and delete.

8) Beyond Belief
A.L. De Silva

The purpose of this book is threefold. Firstly it aims to critically examine Christianity and thereby highlight the logical, philosophical and ethical problems in Christian dogma. In doing this I hope to be able to provide Buddhists with facts which they can use when Christians attempt to evangelize them. This book should make such encounters more fair, and hopefully also make it more likely that Buddhists will remain Buddhists. As it is, many Buddhists know little of their own religion and nothing about Christianity - which makes it difficult for them to answer the questions Christians ask or to rebut the claims they make.

Verdict: Skim through, realise that I know all of this already (at least the non-Buddhist part), and delete.

9) Human Rights and Asian Values: What Lee Kuan Yew and Le Peng don't understand about Asia
Amartya Sen

There is little general evidence, in fact, that authoritarian governance and the suppression of political and civil rights are really beneficial in encouraging economic development. The statistical picture is much more complicated. Systematic empirical studies give no real support to the claim that there is a general conflict between political rights and economic performances. The directional linkage seems to depend on many other circumstances, and while some statistical investigations note a weakly negative relation, others find a strongly positive one. On balance, the hypothesis that there is no relation between freedom and prosperity in either direction is hard to reject. Since political liberty has a significance of its own, the case for it remains untarnished. There is also a more basic issue of research methodology. We must not only look at statistical connections, we must examine also the causal processes that are involved in economic growth and development. The economic policies and circumstances that led to the success of east Asian economies are by now reasonably well understood. While different empirical studies have varied in emphasis, there is by now a fairly agreed-upon list of "helpful policies," and they include openness to competition, the use of international markets, a high level of literacy and education, successful land reforms, and public provision of incentives for investment, exporting, and industrialization. There is nothing whatsoever to indicate that any of these policies is inconsistent with greater democracy, that any one of them had to be sustained by the elements of authoritarianism that happened to be present in South Korea or Singapore or China. The recent Indian experience also shows that what is needed for generating faster economic growth is a friendlier economic climate rather than a harsher political system.

Verdict: KIV

10) Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia's Anti-Democratic Values
Kim Dae Jung

The ancient Chinese philosophy of Minben Zhengchi, or "people-based politics," teaches that "the will of the people is the will of heaven" and that one should "respect the people as heaven" itself.

A native religion of Korea, Tonghak, went even further, advocating that "man is heaven" and that one must serve man as one does heaven. These ideas inspired and motivated nearly half a million peasants in 1894 to revolt against exploitation by feudalistic government internally and imperialistic forces externally. There are no ideas more fundamental to democracy than the teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Tonghak. Clearly, Asia has democratic philosophies as profound as those of the West.

Asia also has many democratic traditions. When Western societies were still being ruled by a succession of feudal lords, China and Korea had already sustained county prefecture systems for about 2,000 years. The government of the Chin Dynasty, founded by Chin-shih huang-ti (literally, the founder of Chin), practiced the rule of law and saw to it that everyone, regardless of class, was treated fairly. For nearly 1,000 years in China and Korea, even the sons of high-ranking officials were not appointed to important official positions unless they passed civil service examinations. These stringent tests were administered to members of the aristocratic class, who constituted over ten percent of the population, thus guaranteeing equal opportunity and social mobility, which are so central to popular democracy. This practice sharply contrasted with that of European fiefdoms of that time, where pedigree more or less determined one's official position. In China and Korea powerful boards of censors acted as a check against imperial misrule and abuses by government officials. Freedom of speech was highly valued, based on the understanding that the nation's fate depended on it. Confucian scholars were taught that remonstration against an erring monarch was a paramount duty. Many civil servants and promising political elites gave their lives to protect the right to free speech.

Verdict: Read. I'm not so sure that he's got his ideas of Mencius being an exponent of democracy, or that meritocracy is democratic (though neither is it anti-democratic) right though.

11) Prediction of Androgen Receptor Antagonists Using Statistical Learning Methods, With Descriptor Selection by Recursive Feature Elimination
creampuff. Oh Yeah.

Androgen receptor (AR) antagonists are used to treat prostate cancer and premature puberty in boys. Only one AR antagonist has been shown to have no AR agonist activity in vitro and in vivo. Thus the search for better AR antagonists continues. We propose that statistical learning methods be used in this search – these methods can, from a structurally and chemically diverse dataset, generate a list of physicochemical features for discriminative classification. 138 AR antagonists and 101 AR non-antagonists were collected. 22 features were selected from support vector machine-recursive feature elimination (SVM+RFE) to describe the 239 compounds in chemical space, for statistical learning analysis by six methods: logistic regression, linear discriminant analysis, k-nearest neighbour, probabilistic neural network, support vector machine, and C4.5 decision tree. 5-fold cross-validation and Independent set validation were used in combination with the standard evaluation parameters to compare performance. Five antagonists and five non-antagonists were misclassified by SVM in the Independent validation set method. Our study suggests that statistical learning methods are potentially useful for the prediction of AR antagonists, and that the RFE-selected descriptors have great potential in further QSAR studies and molecular modeling studies of AR antagonists.

Verdict: OMG WTH?!