Links of the Week (7/3/14)

1. A look back on the facts of the Kitty Genovese case
"The fact that this crime, one of six hundred and thirty-six murders in New York City that year, became an American obsession—condemned by mayors and Presidents, puzzled over by academics and theologians, studied in freshman psychology courses, re-created in dozens of research experiments, even used four decades later to justify the Iraq war—can be attributed to the influence of one man, A. M. Rosenthal, of the New York Times."

2. Belo et al. (2014), Broadband in School: Impact on Student Performance, Management Science
"This paper examines the effects of providing broadband to schools on students' performance. We use a rich panel of data on broadband use and students' grades from all middle schools in Portugal. Employing a first-differences specification to control for school-specific unobserved effects and instrumenting the quality of broadband to account for unobserved time-varying effects, we show that high levels of broadband use in schools were detrimental for grades on the ninth-grade national exams in Portugal. For the average broadband use in schools, grades reduced 0.78 of a standard deviation from 2005 to 2009. We also show that broadband has a negative impact on exam scores regardless of gender, subject, or school quality and that the way schools allow students to use the Internet affects their performance. In particular, students in schools that block access to websites such as YouTube perform relatively better."

3. Most researchers don't understand error bars (2008)

4. Angus Deaton on 'What good are children'?
"It is a commonplace that new parents are overwhelmed by a “tsunami of love” when they first meet their dependent offspring. Older children, though often a source of irritation and worry, are also a source of joy, and there are few parents who can even bear to think of a world without their children. Yet, study after study has shown that those who live with children are less satisfied with their lives than those who do not."