readme with binder badge

README.md

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 # Dev-II
- Materials for The Graduate Center's Spring 2016 Economics Development II PhD seminar.
+ Materials for The Graduate Center's Spring 2016 Economics
+ Development II PhD seminar.
 
 
  __Lecture and reading Notes as Jupyter Notebooks__
 
-This is a repository of [jupyter notebooks] on Development
-Microeconomics. The collection has started out small and rough but should grow
-and improve over the course of time. I hope to write-up notebooks on papers
-in the fields of trade and growth, household economics, equilibrium models
-of the size distribution of firms, the political economy of property rights and
-institutions, the theory of contracts and intermediation (in markets for
-land, labor and financial services), and on RCTs and program impact evaluation.  
-
-This is less like a coherent sequential collection of lecture notes and more
-like an idiosyncratic collection of reading notes with
-embedded model simulations and data analyses for a set of interesting
-academic papers and useful model frameworks.
-
-Several notebooks are posted as
-first rough first drafts with simple and often incomplete analyses of
-a model or reading. I will hopefully rewrite and improve these over time.  
-I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions (feel free to open
-a github issue, or make a pull request).
-
-All notebooks are in the [notebooks folder]. The best way
-to explore the content is to clone
-this repository to your own computer or cloud service and run them
-interactively there.  If you just want to view them with out interaction
-the Links in the table below lead to static views via the jupyter [nbviewer]
-service.
-
-The course site [dev-ii-seminar.readthedocs.org] has the reading list
-and syllabus for the course and auto-generated styled HTML and PDF versions of
-all this content (but as of 2/6 not all repo content was converting).
-
-There are only a few draft notebooks in the collection now.  I hope to expand
-this somewhat as the semester advances.
+This is a repository of [jupyter notebooks] on topics in the Microeconomics of
+Development. There are only a couple rough notebooks here now, but over time
+these should become more numerous and more polished. Some notebooks offer
+just simple analytic summaries of interesting topics or academic papers, while
+others provide code for simulations and visualizations of applied theory models
+to replicate and extend results. I hope to add a few replications of empirical
+papers as well. Topics are drawn from the fields of trade and growth,
+household economics, agrarian production structure and the equilibrium
+size distribution of firms, the political economy of property rights,
+institutions and policy reform, the theory of contracts and intermediation
+(in markets for land, labor and financial services), as well as papers on
+targeting, RCTs and program impact evaluation.
+
+In its present form this is much less like a coherent sequential collection
+of lecture notes and more like an idiosyncratic collection of reading notes
+and materials that complement lecture notes by inviting you to explore and
+extend the embedded simulations and data analyses.
+
+If you click [![Binder](http://mybinder.org/badge.svg)](http://mybinder.org/repo/jhconning/Dev-II)
+you will launch a cloud-based juptyer notebook server that will allow you to
+run any of the notebooks interactively.  Alternatively, clone this github
+and run them on your own computer.
+
+The following table describes the contents of the notebooks folders and links
+to quick static views of the notebook content.
 
 | Lecture/Reading Note |Description  |
 | --------| :-----|
 | [jupyter_notebooks]  | Economics with Jupyter Notebooks  |
 | [SFM] |The Specific Factors Model |
 | [Lucas90] |Lucas' 1990 AER paper 'Why Doesn't Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?'' |
-| __Micro-building blocks__ | |
+| __useful building blocks__ | |
 | [consume_opt1] | Static consumer optimum and (interactive) indifference curve plot  |
 | __Jupyter & python tips__ | |
 | [DHBox] | How to run notebooks using the GC's DHBox service (no setup on your machine)  |
 | [DataAPIs] | Use the pandas library and a data API to access online datasets |
 
 
-
 [jupyter notebooks]:https://jupyter.org/
 [nbviewer]:http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/
 [notebooks folder]:https://github.com/jhconning/Dev-II/tree/master/notebooks
@@ -61,7 +54,9 @@ this somewhat as the semester advances.
 [DHBox]:http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/jhconning/Dev-II/blob/master/notebooks/DHBox.ipynb
 [DataAPIs]:http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/jhconning/Dev-II/blob/master/notebooks/DataAPIs.ipynb
 
-
+The course site [dev-ii-seminar.readthedocs.org] has the reading list
+and syllabus for the course and auto-generated styled HTML and PDF versions of
+all this content (but sometimes not all repo content converts).
 
  __Other Resources__