Category Archives: Law & Society

Quote of the day: One of many things wrong with the Internet industry

Posted on 2016-02-15 by

This has been making the rounds of, yes, social media — at least among the lefty circles I move in — and will appear soon in the paper New York Review of Books: [MIT psychologist Sherry] Turkle argues against using … Continue reading →

Quote | Posted on 2016-02-15 by | Tagged , ,

Quote of the day: Fred Vultee on the usual suspects

Posted on 2015-11-18 by

Wayne State journalism prof. Fred Vultee is always good for a line when it comes to the depraved weasels at Fox News: Outrage appears to have a lot more to do with who you are than with the scale of … Continue reading →

Quote | Posted on 2015-11-18 by

Computing apportionment for the U.S. House of Representatives

Posted on 2015-07-26 by

Several months ago, I started a really simple project to compute Congressional apportionment, using the method defined in current law, with the intent of considering several different scenarios. I haven’t really had time to work on this since then, but … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Law & Society | Tagged , , ,

On snow

It’s snowing again where I live. I wonder where they’re going to put it all? Every time I start to wonder why Boston deals with the snow so poorly, and think about how we had more snow when I was … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2015-02-07 by | Tagged

Quote of the day: Dan Davies on “microfoundations of macroeconomics”

Posted on 2015-01-30 by

In the “Bull Market” collection on Medium, Dan Davies writes: The actual investment decision is carried out by a corporate manager. He wants to maximise his own income, so he is going to do what he thinks will generate a … Continue reading →

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Quote of the day: Tal Yarkoni on peer review

Posted on 2015-01-29 by

In a footnote to a recent blog post, Tal Yarkoni writes: On a tangential note, this is why traditional pre-publication peer review isn’t very effective, and is in dire need of replacement. Meta-analytic estimates put the inter-reviewer reliability across fields … Continue reading →

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A recommendation and a related random thought on sex and gender

Content warning: potentially NSFW for some values of W. Today on my commute I listened to a great podcast episode from CBC Radio 1’s Ideas called “Not with the Eyes” (MP3 audio). In this episode, Ideas producer Philip Coulter moderates … Continue reading →

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A not-quite-response to Jean Yang’s response to “Comment 171”

Posted on 2015-01-14 by

Last month, MIT Computer Science professor Scott Aaronson (disclaimer: a colleague, although as he’s a theoretician, not one I interact with very much) wrote a thoughtful blog post about MIT’s response to the allegations of misconduct against former Physics professor … Continue reading →

Posted in Law & Society, States of mind | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Quote of the day: Saladin Ahmed on satire

Posted on 2015-01-10 by

From Saladin Ahmed’s Times piece today: The question for writers and artists, then, is not whether we ought to limit ourselves, but how already limit ourselves. In a field dominated by privileged voices, it’s not enough to say “Mock everyone!” … Continue reading →

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Quote of the day: Atul Gawande on priorities

Posted on 2014-12-19 by

Everywhere I see the mistake of ignoring that people have priorities in their lives besides merely surviving another day. Even in severe illness or frailty, people desire connections to others and to purposes of their own choosing. I think we’ve … Continue reading →

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