Lukas Mergele

A Venn diagram shows overlapping circles labeled: "Your Paper", "The Part You're Excited About", "The Part People Actually Read", and "The Part One Reviewer Insisted Your Paper Must Have." The last circle is completely outside the two middle ones.

Sad but true #AcademicWriting #AcademicChatter #ErrantScience

Inclusion of butter in UK recipe for cacio e pepe draws outrage from Italian media Roman restaurant association ‘astonished’ to see four ingredients, not three, listed on Good Food website One of the UK’s most popular food websites has cooked up a storm in Italy after allegedly botching a recipe for the traditional Roman pasta dish, cacio e pepe, drawing diplomatic representations from the main trade association for Italian restaurateur. A recipe on Good Food, formerly owned by the BBC, which continues to licence the web address bbcgoodfood.com – described cacio e pepe, a culinary institution in the Italian capital, as a “store cupboard favourite” that could easily be whipped up for “a speedy lunch” using “four simple ingredients – spaghetti, pepper, parmesan and butter”. Continue reading...

Inclusion of butter in UK recipe for cacio e pepe draws outrage from Italian media

Swiss president to fly to Washington to present ‘more attractive’ tariff offer Move follows Donald Trump’s decision to hit the country with steep tariffs

Swiss president is flying to the US with "a more attractive offer" to lower tariffs.

Could work, the 39% are clearly mad. www.ft.com/content/a710...

Excessive screentime in early age associated with delayed cognitive development, both directly and indirectly through what it crowds out: play, talk, & exploration. But limited use seems fine.

Night lights...

Has ‘excellence’ funding brought a ‘German Harvard’ any closer? For two decades, Germany has spent billions of euros on boosting the research capacity of its top institutions. As selection proceeds for another six-year Excellence Strategy, Emily Dixon examines whe...

Has ‘excellence’ funding brought a ‘German Harvard’ any closer? www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/has-ex...

...includes my two cents on the German excellence initiative

Mehr Geschlossenheit als Härte würde ich sagen. Aber ja, das hat schon geholfen.

Europe’s roads and rail unfit for war with Russia, EU transport chief warns Brussels aims to spend €17bn on upgrading transport networks to be prepared for conflict Trump’s tariff blitz brings US levies to highest levels since 1930s

Where we are

My practical tips for designing and analyzing powerful experiments

My practical tips for designing, implementing, and analyzing powerful experiments. In today's blog I summarize a new paper I've written for a special issue on power calculations. A key message is that it does not make sense to talk of “the” power of an experiment. blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

US and EU reach tariff agreement to avert trade war Deal follows Scotland talks between Donald Trump and European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen

What a deal!
The EU has "agreed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on additional US energy products and weapons, in exchange for the broad 15 per cent levy that covers many European exports including cars."
Not a misprint. Unthinkable during my lifetime. But this is 2025.
on.ft.com/4onuknM
1

Germany’s lefties are European, if not world champions in being miserable. Here they are begrudging football fans waving flags.

Woah. Team Trump really didn’t have a clue about rare earths.

“Beijing called Mr. Trump’s bluff by restricting rare earths needed by US makers of cars, military kit, medical devices, electronics.

As the flow stopped, Mr. Trump began receiving calls from CEOs saying their factories’d shut down”

Makes me miss lunch at Hackescher Markt 🫠

Lucy Bronze on how she decided to blast her penalty down the middle (and score).

“Statistically it’s risky for the goal keeper to stand still… so yeah, I love maths”.

So glad to see that this paper is finally seeing the light of day. Great effort!

🚨 New Paper Alert! 🚨
I'm excited to share my latest research, “Building Capacity in the Public Administration” (with @annagumpert.bsky.social ). We examine a key tool for building administrative capacity: seconding officials from high-capacity to low-capacity public administrations.

About that "no evidence of inflation" from tariffs...

If you know where to look, it seems pretty clear that inflationary pressures are building in the product categories most exposed to tariffs.

More evidence in the 🧵
#EconSky

📢 Job alert: Postdoc position 🧑‍🎓 (up to 6 years, non-tenure track)

In our Center, @henninghermes.com is looking to fill a research position in the economics of education, particularly to join in major field experimental work on mentoring

Come join our team!
👇

Fall of communism unleashes human capital
cc @woessmann.bsky.social @essobecker.bsky.social

The US is a market with only 320 million people.

It’ll need the EU, Japan, Korea, Canada and others to compete w China.

And collaboration out of free will always trump coercion imo.

So 'America alone' isn't a viable strategy to deal with China - and Autor/Hanson rightly criticise it

10/10

Full workflow and link to the @natcellbio.nature.com paper:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

bar plot with lots of clutter, including boxes, bold fonts, text redundancies etc.

cleaned bar plot

👇 Those two are the same graph 👇

...but the 2nd one focuses on the message &

follows @helenajambor.bsky.social's checklist for visualizing scientific data

(1/2)

To break the doom scroll, remember the Christmas Tree Cannon, the distilled essence of German engineering

Makes sense.

Is working from home just a pandemic blip? Not according to the data.

We analysed 1 billion job postings in 20 OECD countries.

The share of jobs advertising remote/hybrid work quadrupled from 2.5% to 11% (2019–2023) and has been stable since

🧵

And of course @akorinek.bsky.social's excellent JEL paper www.aeaweb.org/content/file...

thanks, even better :)

The prompt library by @emollick.bsky.social might come in handy www.moreusefulthings.com/prompts

'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers Instructions in preprints from 14 universities highlight controversy on AI in peer review

This is unethical, but tempted to include white text telling an AI reviewer to reveal itself in my next submission

asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tec...

❓Why do the Nordics & Dutch speak English so much better than the Germans, Italians & French?

➡️ New Working Paper:

Out-of-School Learning: Subtitling vs. Dubbing and the Acquisition of Foreign-Language Skills
w/ F. Baumeister & E. Hanushek

www.nber.org/papers/w33984

A 🧵 1/12