Items to share (26 November 2011)

Sorry! I've just lost half-a-dozen items. Moral, don't compile stuff like this directly in the Blogger editor!

• The unseen academy: Thomas Docherty's take on the compliance agenda driving "real" scholarship underground. Comments well worth reading
• Now this might persuade even me to watch a Saturday night competition show. 
• Why do we have a sense of humour?
• Daniel Kahnemann explains the essence of his book on fast and slow thinking. I know he was first with many of the ideas behind the current (understandable) obsession with risk and judgement (see Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Dan Gardner--who is particularly good on Tetlock-- Dan Ariely, even Malcolm Gladwell in 2005) but he's late to the party with a popular account, so I hope it's good.
• Barry Schwartz talking about the "paradox of choice" and the possible up-side of economic downturn. I hope his work is more stimulating than Renata Salecl's The Tyranny of Choice (Profile, 2011) which gathers opinions from a formidable range of writers, but very little evidence for anything.
• More on the effort vs. talent debate, swinging back towards IQ here.