Sunday morning roundup

The military embarks on 360 feedback for top officers. I wonder how RM would fare.

How do you maintain any credibility upon suggesting that North Korea will go after Austin because of its music scene?

@armscontrolwonk @aljavieera @jeremisuri Austin "is a big music scene"!! Where do they find these people??
— Caio B. F. W. Abramo (@caioabramo) April 13, 2013

Just how unrealistic is Barbie, and, more importantly, how do we stop the epidemic of body hatred.

This mom is really confused about the nature of kids.

Temple Grandin suggests that parents of autistic kids over-coddle them.

Yes, bitches, social science is science. You people think you never make mistakes? Protons have been measured as smaller than previously thought. To quote the author (at the first link), Amy Freitag, "So perhaps it is all scientists who should think about making their claims with humility." Jonah Lehrer wrote a big article a couple of years ago about how all kinds of research is wrong. The original blog post is so offensive--especially coming from Scientific American that I'm not even going to link to it. Suffice to say that the suggestion that "social scientists should eschew the quest for truths about human behavior" is tremendously dickish.

Also, over the years, I've called out bad journalism (or at least headline-ism) for reporting on studies (of all disciplines) in ways that distort the findings--and that distortion largely enables the discrediting of social science by physical-science chauvinists. If I were petty, I would be reveling in physicists' righteous indignation over media coverage of the (not really) "signs" of dark matter, not to mention that thing they hate to hear you call the god particle. It would be too easy to say, welcome to our (social science) world, but we should all be banding together in support of integrity in science and science journalism, rather than undermining one another's disciplines.

I may be an anomaly, but I like the very consistent pricing that brought down JC Penney's last CEO. Trader Joe's makes it work.

What is the subtext of swearing and insulting? Either way, that essay is hilarious.

How did the Isabel Allende event sell out before I even saw it? I'd love to hear her speak.