I missed this bit of DC think-tank inside-baseball yesterday. Matt Yglesias wrote something critical about Third Way: Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda […]
Signs that things are very bad: Emacs 23 from CVS + ESS + Auctex, + a custom color theme. Brought back from the dead because while TextMate has many virtues, Emacs still, unfortunately, beats all-comers for coding with R.
As you may know, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, The Cassini Probe, Britney Spears, Shaq, 10 Downing St and, more tenuously, Darth Vader and the Fucking Pope are all on Twitter. But who is responsible for crookedtimber? Not me. The fact that the one person CT follows is a blocked account makes me suspicious. By the […]
Studies of network contagion in health outcomes and behaviors (such as obesity and smoking) are all the rage these days. So it is interesting to read this paper in the current BMJ by Cohen-Cole and Fletcher that uses Add-Health data to establish some statistically significant but substantively rather implausible effects of just this sort: Objective […]
Allow me a bit of a rant. Until a few volumes ago, Social Forces typeset its articles in Minion Pro, a modern serif face well-suited to lengthy stretches of text. Then, for no apparent reason, the journal was redesigned. (I speak loosely.) Minion was retained for the title, abstract and acknowledgment note, but the body […]
This article is mostly about the Bush Administration’s rush to put a new workplace unsafety rule in place: The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed […]
There’s an article on the Netflix Prize in the Times today. You know, where Netflix made half of its ratings data available to people and offered a million bucks to anyone who could write a recommendation algorithm that would do some specified percent better than Netflix’s own. What tripped me up was this sentence about […]
Soc Blogger Jeremy Freese won this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition, where the goal is to write a text-based puzzle game in the tradition of stuff like Infocom classics. The premise of Jeremy’s game, Violet, is summarized by the Chronicle of Higher Education: It’s noon and you’ve still got 1,000 words to type. That might not […]
I’m so far behind on this one. Here’s a figure based on a table Eric sent me. There is a PDF version. There is also a 4-category version (with a PDF too), that breaks out farm workers from the main category.
“Classmates.com User Sues; Schoolmates Weren’t Really Looking for Him“, reports Wired: When Classmates.com told user Anthony Michaels last Christmas Eve that his former school chums were trying to contact him, he pulled out his wallet and upgraded to the premium membership that would let him contact long-lost fifth-grade dodge-ball buddies and see if his secret […]
Via Cosma, Canadian historian Rob MacDougall on a characteristic American tendency to see radical social change as the inevitable expression of values expressed and promises made at the country’s inception: “We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” said Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. … […]
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