I mentioned in my last post that I pulled together this blog with AI. I want to share a bit more detail as a way of demonstrating to others some things AI can do.

I have a habit of starting lots of blogs, tumblrs, and newsletters, writing enthusiastically in them for a few years, and then letting them fade away. For a while, I've had it in my head to pull all of my old forgotten posts together into a central place, but the effort seemed insurmountable. I wasn't sure I even remembered what all my old blogs were.

Open Source Project Tours are recorded sessions where an open source maintainer functions as a tour guide to their project, showing me the lay of the land and answering my questions about how their design reflects the relationships and needs of contributors and users. You can watch the full tour here. I've also created five clips of this interview featuring discussions about open source project lifecycles, a custom bot that rolls out syntax updates to over a hundred repos, the importance of reaching out to a project before making big contributions, learning from BDFL burnout, and stickers.

Most open source project sprints are focused on code contribution. While this makes some sense---open source software is, after all, *software*---it's also a little narrow-minded.

It can be helpful for communities to take stock of their existing governance now and again, especially if they're facing some kind of major challenge, opportunity, or transition.

Some work within a software project is celebrated. Designing and building a new project from scratch, or adding big features to an existing project, is enjoyable and often prestigious work.

There are many ways for newcomers to participate in a project, from testing onboarding documentation to reviewing pull requests to showing up to community events. But it can be surprisingly difficult to find ways for newcomers to contribute code.

Many potential contributors have a desire to contribute but lack knowledge about the codebase and the community that would help them contribute effectively. Context-Building Tasks are tasks which do not require a lot of context, at least at the beginning, but encourage the contributor to learn more and more context as they continue with the task.

Onboarding new contributors is hard. There's so much they don't know. How is someone supposed to contribute when they don't know the codebase, the project infrastructure, community norms, or the specific people who can give them advice? Add in the fact that often new contributors have significant gaps in knowledge about the project's domain and/or the language(s) the project uses, and it's no wonder many new contributors get discouraged and give up.

When embarking on a governance transition, projects are often faced with an unexpected question.

While maintaining an open source project can be fun and fulfilling, it can also be very draining. Many maintainers struggle to get the support they need.

Carol Willing was a crucial part of Python's governance transition from a BDFL model to a Steering Council. She served on the first Steering Council and has also been involved with Jupyter and its governance. This interview was recorded in January 2023, as part of a research project led by Seth Frey and funded by the NSF's DASS grant program. The interview has been lightly edited for readability and shared with Carol's consent.

Back in the early 2010s, I ran a program called 'Open Source Comes to Campus'. We'd go to college campuses around the country and host day-long workshops introducing students to open source, teaching them social norms and tools like git, and encouraging them to make their first contribution.

In early 2024, PlasmaPy maintainer Nick Murphy asked me to help facilitate a workshop for their project. This "summer school" would bring together community members of all kinds, from undergraduates to faculty, from experienced open source contributors to people who barely knew what open source was.

"Move fast and break things" was the internal motto of Facebook up until 2014 they realized, a little belatedly, that perhaps a corporation with worldwide reach and hundreds of millions of active users shouldn't make recklessness its motivating principle.

Imagine a child playing in a sandbox, dreaming up elaborate stories about the castles they've built with their sandbox toys. Now, imagine a group of eighteen adults, two teams of office co-workers, throwing around a baseball according to very precise rules. Those adults are playing too.

People tend to think of laws as set in stone, but they're very changeable. They're changeable in at least two ways: the laws themselves can be altered, through formal legal mechanisms like passing a bill through Congress, or laws can change through how they're enforced on the ground.

Information naturally flows from those who have more power to those who have less.

As we've discussed previously, all systems are built on abstractions, and all abstractions are at least a little bit wrong. The more complex and important a system is, the more likely it is that a leaky abstraction will gum up the works. So systems need feedback mechanisms to detect when an abstraction is leaking, so they can identify and fix the problem.

Every progressive group ought to ask themselves occasionally, "Who are we fighting for? And how do we know what their needs really are?" Self critique, reflection, and open dialogue are vital tactics for organizers, and our work as maintainers of Parsons is no different.

Technologies are built with a model of the world in mind. A hammer presumes a nail, a screwdriver a screw, and so on. But there is, necessarily, a gap between the model and the reality, a gap between how a technology is meant to be used and how it actually functions in the world.

In my last post, I talked about how all systems have flaws, and how these flaws require interpretive labor to be patched or worked around so that the system can keep running. These systems become dysfunctional when it is hard or impossible to learn from that interpretive labor what those flaws are. Without good feedback mechanisms, none of the flaws will be fixed, and the system will not adapt to changes.

A lot of progressive data work involves moving data into and out of third-party tools. While Parsons aims to make that easier, it's still pretty hard. One skill that's really helpful is getting comfortable reading documentation, and in particular, API documentation. So: this is a primer on how to read API docs.

As I've said a few times now, all models are wrong. That includes laws and norms, employee handbooks and product roadmaps, system diagrams and city plans. If something is abstracting away from reality, it's creating a gap. What happens when that gap causes problems?

I've posted before about why it's important to delegate decisions to the people impacted by them. For example, Toyota put the power to halt production in the hands of factory floor workers who were better able to see problems as they arose, and the German Army pushed local officers to be decisive in the midst of battle. This is such an effective strategy because factory floor workers and army officers tend to have much better knowledge of the local contexts where problems first arise.

All models are wrong. Given this, it should be no surprise that humans are constantly messing things up. But don't worry! That's often a good thing, because messing things up is how we learn.

There's a saying: the map is not the territory. Farnham Street Blog has a pretty good explainer:

My sister is interested in genealogy, and several years ago unearthed a gruesome family story: on June 11th, 1880, my great-great-great-grandfather Anthony was caught between two railroad cars and crushed. The newspaper called it a "horrible death", and added that he left behind a wife and five kids "in destitute circumstances".

Few people are happy with the US government these days. Recent Gallup polls show that 71% of people are somewhat or very dissatisfied by "our system of government and how well it works". Common complaints are that government's too polarized and full of conflict, or that it's bureaucratic and inefficient and can't get things done.

Sometimes, you just want someone to tell you what to do.

"Nothing about us without us!" is a rallying cry, a catch-phrase with a clear moral imperative: that those impacted by a decision should be involved in making the decision.

Welcome to the authentication guide for the Parsons project! It has three parts:

Welcome to our Intro to Python Programming guide! It is designed for people without much experience in either programming generally or using Python specifically.

Command line interfaces let you do a lot of different things on your computer, including installing and running programs and navigating the directory structure of your computer.

The following is from my response to a friend’s Facebook post about the value of postmodernism to engineers, and the role that education plays in introducing engineers to postmodernism.

Last week I gave two short talks as part of the IASC Knowledge Commons conference, one on our ability to contest rules in digital spaces, and another on how, more generally, we can engineer more responsive governance. Those links go to YouTube, where you can watch the talks. (Update: you can now also see the panel discussions for these talks: code as contestable law, engineering responsive governance.)

One of my communities is choosing a new governance structure, and in preparation for our first conversation on the topic, I wrote up three governance case studies. I covered DisCOs (Distributed Cooperative Organizations), Enspiral, and Python.

Facebook's 'Oversight Board' recently affirmed Facebook's choice to suspend then-President Donald Trump from its platform the day after the Capitol riots. Although many critics - including myself - support the decision to keep Trump off Facebook, we're not too pleased with the process itself. "[It's] a red herring, substituting a simulacrum of due process in certain high-profile cases for substantive reform," Will Oremus writes in a New York Times op ed. Oremus and others point out that while Facebook has promised to obey the content moderation decisions of the board, it can choose to ignore any policy recommendations. "[Facebook] did not empower the board to watch over its products or systems — only its rules and how it applies them."

There’s not enough disobedience online. Yes, that’s right, you heard me: there’s not enough space for disobedience online.

Note: I recently started writing a newsletter about the intersection of technology and governance,Hello, Governor! I’m still experimenting with format, content, etc, so feel free to give feedback about what you like or what you’d want to see.

It can be a struggle to hold groups accountable for misbehavior, even when the group is structured through legal forms, with public membership and clear leadership. On social media platforms populated by anonymous accounts, with membership and leadership often informal and invisible, accountability feels like a pipe dream.

... so I put some tech governance controversy on the platform you were using for your tech governance newsletter.

Below, I summarize the FTC complaint against Facebook, citing the relevant paragraphs so you can get more detail as needed. This was a useful exercise in helping me understand the case; I hope it also helps you.

Hello, and welcome to the very first edition of this newsletter!

It’s the last day of my mini-batch, although it’s not my last day at Recurse, since there’s an active alum community I’m eager to be a part of.

Today I finally tackled making a code madlibs program.

When we left off, I’d written some rather ugly code that gave us the basic features of a madlibs program without using any macros. But the whole point of this project is to better understand lisp macros. So today I focused on refactoring my program to use macros instead.

Building off of yesterday’s work, today my hope was to finish my humble text-focused Madlibs program, so that I could move onto code-focused Madlibs tomorrow.

Day 1 of my Recurse mini batch is complete! I spent a good portion of it meeting people and learning about the community, but I did also make some small steps on my project:

Next week I’ll be doing a mini-batch at Recurse. I’m planning to blog about it each day, and I figured I’d start by laying out my plans for the week.

I just fixed a Django bug that took me ages to solve. Part of why it took so long is that the errors I was getting weren’t surfacing the right search results. So, in case anyone ever has a similar problem, I will record what happened here and hope the search algorithms send this their way.

I have read a great many non-fiction books in my life, and I remember the details of heartbreakingly few of them. Over the last year or so, I have worked to change that pattern.

This twitter thread is a great example of "minding the gap", that is: doing the necessary improvisational work to complete a task that has only been partially, abstractly specified. I recently learned another term for this: bricolage.

When chants of ‘equal pay!’ ring through soccer stadiums, men jump on Twitter to explain why, despite performing better internationally than the men’s team, women soccer players don’t deserve equal pay because they don’t earn as much revenue.

Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy by Nan Estad at Boston Review:

Via Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice, an excerpt from Woodson v. North Carolina (1976):

This TED talk by Shonda Rhimes underscores the importance of play:

It’s a Crisis of Civilization in Mexico by José de Córdoba at the Wall Street Journal:

The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are, The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him, The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them, The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you, Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the going and coming of commerce and mails, are all for you.

“Many scientists prefer not to think about politics, but the work that scientists do has always had political consequences, from the quiet tragedy of an understudied disease to the undeniable horror of a city destroyed in an instant.

One prominent idea of rights, common in the US political and legal tradition, understands rights to be barriers against interfering state action: if the state just keeps its hands off, rights are taken to have been secured. The Capabilities Approach, by contrast, insists that all entitlements involve an affirmative task for government: it must actively support people’s capabilities, not just fail to set up obstacles. In the absence of action, rights are mere words on paper. Vasanti was not beaten by the government of Gujarat; she was beaten by her husband. But a government that does not make and then actively enforce laws against domestic violence, or give women the education and skills they need to get a living wage if they leave an abusive marriage, is accountable for the indignity such a woman endures. Fundamental rights are only words unless and until they are made real by government action. The very idea of “negative liberty”, often heard in this connection, is an incoherent idea: all liberties are positive, meaning liberties to do or to be something; and all require the inhibition of interference by others.”

Imagine a child playing in a sandbox, dreaming up elaborate stories about the castles they’ve built with their sandbox toys. Now, imagine a group of eighteen adults, two teams of office co-workers, throwing around a baseball according to very precise rules. Those adults are playing too.

With the exception of rare contrivances like king’s missives and broadcast television, we learn most of what we learn and meet most of the people we meet through networking. This has always been true, but it’s clearer than ever with social media. To be honest I rather like it. When a friend I trust or a writer I admire shares a link I tend to follow along enthusiastically.

I posted a few months ago about negative capability – that is, the ability to tolerate uncertainty, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Coined by the Romantic poet Keats, the term is easily associated with art but applies in all disciplines and all areas of life. Uncertainty pervades everything. So it behooves us to come to terms with it.

This link goes to a fascinating little explainer by Popehat on Twitter. Excerpted here and lightly edited for readability:

Last week I was on a panel about ‘Democracy and the Digital Commons’ at Suffolk University. At the start of the panel, each of us gave a 5-10 minute talk to help frame the discussion. While there’s no transcript of the panel itself, here are my notes for the intro. (Quick context: each of us tied our talk to the Boston Marathon bombing and in particular Reddit’s response to it.)

Back in high school and college, I had friends who offered to do tarot readings for me. I always turned them down. “What a dumb idea,” I’d think. “How could a deck of cards predict your future!”

Almost five years ago now, frustrated by the lack of trans-inclusive children’s books that my best friends’ kids had as options, I sat down and wrote a story about a tiny trans/gender non-conforming superhero named Super Princess. It’s so exciting to finally be able to put this book out into the world. This is a story about the magic of empathy and the importance of approaching the world with love instead of fear.

We often talk about giving people the benefit of the doubt, but seldom talk about its opposite, to the point that no agreed upon phrase for it exists. The best I could come up with is the “burden of doubt”, which largely applies to courtroom settings. Even with the help of judicial documents, the phrase is not very popular.

How to Survive America’s Kill List by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone - an American citizen’s fight to escape assassination by the US executive branch:

“[Socrates] adds that as far as he himself is concerned he believes that “it would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I direct were out of tune and loud with discord, and that most men should not agree with me and contradict me, rather than that I, being one, should be out of tune with myself and contradict myself”. The key notion in this sentence is “I who am one” which is unfortunately left out in many English translations. The meaning is clear: even though I am one, I am not simply one, I have a self and I am related to this self as my own self. This self is by no means an illusion; it makes itself heard by talking to me - I talk to myself, I am not only aware of myself - and in this sense, though I am one, I am two-in-one and there can be harmony or disharmony with the self. If I disagree with other people, I can walk away; but I cannot walk away from myself, and therefore I better first try to be in agreement with myself before I take all others into consideration. This same sentence also spells out the actual reason it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong: if I do wrong I am condemned to live together with a wrongdoer in unbearable intimacy; I can never get rid of him.”

The problem is all inside your head she said to me The answer is easy if you take it logically I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free There must be fifty ways to win the midterms

This old tweet has recently been making the rounds and sparked up some discussion among my Facebook friends:

There is a lot to be said about what happened to Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka yesterday, but this tweet by Jennifer Richeson captures the analysis of the incident that’s most relevant to this blog:

I recently read David Ciepley’s “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation”. I recommend reading it yourself, but here’s my best attempt to summarize it in my own words.

Last week I went to a rally to protest a series of raids by ICE in my city. The rally turned into an unplanned march through the streets, and I had to make two quick decisions: first, whether to join the march, and second, whether to remain in the street when the police started to give warnings.

Principles are really important, and by and large you should try hard to stick to them. I have tremendous respect for those who have died or gone to jail for their principles.

It is in the very nature of a question like “What do I owe my parents?” that there is not and can never be a final, numerically answer. It is a question that we re-visit and re-negotiate every minute we are with them; obligation and love form an endless Möbius strip, through which our complex interdependence on each other makes the idea of paying off that debt – and of thereby severing the relationship – a sort of bitter joke. Precisely because it is a non-monetary “debt,” its function is to be an unpayable and unbreakable bond, one whose dividends never end and one that could and will never default.

This is a quote from Norman Thomas’s Is Conscience a Crime?, a book about conscientious objection during WWI from the wizened vantage point of 1923. Thomas was a six time socialist candidate for President; Secretary Baker, referred to here, was the Secretary of War under Woodrow Wilson.

How to Not Die in America by Molly Osberg at Splinter News:

Socrates, however, who is commonly said to have believed in the teachability of virtue, seems indeed to have held that talking and thinking about piety, justice, courage, and the rest were liable to make men more pious, more just, more courageous, even though they were not given either definitions or “values” to direct further conduct. What Socrates actually believed in in such matters can best be illustrated by the similes he applied to himself. He called himself a gadfly and a midwife, and, according to Plato, was called by somebody else an “electric ray”, a fish that paralyzes and numbs by contact, a likeness whose appropriateness he recognized under the condition that it be understood that “the electric ray paralyzes others only through being paralyzed itself. It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.”

PyCon is one of my favorite events - the only big conference I’ve been to that feels like a small one. This year it was in Cleveland, Ohio, not too far from where I live, so three other pythonistas and I piled into a car together and turned it into a road trip. We had a blast and it made PyCon seem even more like a summer vacation.

This originated as a post to a mailing list on the subject of blockchains and how they might help the cause of open science. The quote below is the claim I was directly responding to.

The point is partly an intergenerational one. Recall from the previous chapter the idea that inequalities of outcomes in one generation becomes inequalities of opportunity in the next and its analog: free associations in one generation become inherited ways of life in the next. This is a necessary truth; children are born into particular times and places and social worlds that have been shaped by the choices their parents have made. This does not simply mean that the parents were free and the children were not; it was also true of the parents that they were born into particular times and places and social worlds. If the parents had some freedom to reshape their worlds in partially original ways, to join or form groups into which they were not born, then the children also have some such freedom. But there could be a narrowing over time; parents can join groups or adopt ways of life that leave their children with fewer choices than they themselves had.

“Refusing the parlements their right of remonstrance was an act of despotism. Liberty had taken shelter in them; it had chosen an irregular method of expressing itself; but since no one had given it another method, it was necessary to allow it that one.”

Here’s a summary of what we know as of the afternoon of Wednesday, March 21st:

I detest and fear dogma. I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic. Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Those who enshrine the poor of Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous. To diminish the danger that ideology will deteriorate into dogma, and to protect the free, open, questing, and creative mind of man, as well as to allow for change, no ideology should be more specific than that of America’s founding fathers: ‘For the general welfare’. (p. 4)

In an article about Milton Friedman in the Pacific Standard, Rick Paulas quotes from an article of Friedman’s published in 1970:

I wrote an ‘intro to operations’ guide. The ideal audience is me a week ago.

Warning: Black Panther spoilers.

To Be, or Not To Be by Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books:

Bureaucracy is stupid, David Graeber writes in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. As the premise for a book, it’s more fertile than it sounds.

an-ephemeral-blog:

_The law locks up the man or woman

In an essay at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova sketches out a conception of identity as a collection of fragments which is, paradoxically, being repressed and sanded down by identity politics:

From the studiously moderate Brookings Institution:

Back in college, I based my Division III (senior thesis) research on a set of empathy studies by Nancy Eisenberg. Eisenberg’s line of research hinges on a distinction between two different kinds of empathy: empathic concern, the ability to recognize and care about the hurt others feel, and personal distress, the experiencing of the other person’s hurt yourself. Counterintuitively, personal distress is not positively associated with helping behavior. In fact, it may even decrease the likelihood of helping, if there’s an easy escape route away from the empathy-provoking situation.

every so often I remember that the clinton analytics team’s motto was “a decision tree grows in brooklyn” and i smile

In a previous post, I wrote that asking questions is harder than answering them, although I qualified that in a big way with “answering [questions] involves going back over and over again and updating our hypotheses, which makes answering questions feel hard”. I want to revisit this claim.

Back when I was a research scientist, I straddled the boundary between “hard” and “soft” sciences. I did social psychology, which is a pretty soft science as sciences go, but I paired it with biology and physiology in general and endocrinology in particular, which meant getting a taste for some of the harder stuff.

What shade of gray would you say this is?

Public Policy After Utopia by Will Wilkinson at the Niskanen Center:

This is a short and subtle piece by Diana Senechal about sexual harassment claims and our response to them. I by and large agree with it, but I like it mostly for the poem (or, well, stanza of a poem) it introduced me to, Robert Frost's The Wood Pile:

Objective truth exists in the way that a perfect circle exists. They're both useful constructs, helpful for comparison and for motivation, but we must be careful in how we apply them.

It's easy to complain about "purity politics". It's easy to complain about "neoliberals" and "sellouts". But we live in hard times, and the easy route's not going to get us anywhere.

Things have been quiet on this here tumblr, in part because I have taken to blogging about a subset of topics here. If you’re interested in my thoughts about “humans and how we interact with each other, with a focus on how we can better deal with complex and large-scale social situations”, I recommend following my new blog as well.

Mike Montiero recently posted an essay to Medium "One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end". It's a good piece, but what really struck me was this referenced Tweet from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone:

I spent a good portion of yesterday staring at my Django test cases and whimpering. No matter what I tried, no matter how thoroughly I flushed the database between each test case, state seemed to be persisting from test to test. “How is this happening?” I howled to my computer.

Andrew Gelman has a brief post up on his blog comparing the way bug reports in open source software are received to the way many researchers respond to criticisms of their work. The comments there are good, and cover my first reaction, which was, "Developers respond well to bug reports?" But that's a bit tongue in cheek. I do think that, overall, developers are a bit more responsive to bug reports than scientists are to published criticisms of their work. Here are my theories as to why that is:

Me: Wow, Django’s Case() sure is a useful addition to the annotate function! You can use it to chain together When() functions to conditionally annotate your queryset! Django is so cool.

The Supermanagerial Reich by Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe at the LA Review of Books:

You did a bad thing…

Julia Evans, in her recent summary of her time at the Recurse Center, links to this cool little project which visualizes how you use Git. Here’s my result:

It’s late Friday night, technically Saturday morning, and like a party animal I’m up googling, “Could someone mess up my server if I let them run arbitrary Python code with no imports.”

This might be the best introduction to an academic paper I’ve come across. From Roger Myerson’s Fundamentals of Social Choice Theory:

A quote by Frank Serpico, by way of writer Lawrence Grobel, by way of Metafilter:

Catching up on the Crooked Timber archives today, I saw they’ve done several seminars since last I looked, on three books/series I’d love to read: Jo Walton’s The Just City and The Philosopher Kings,Ada Palmer’sTerra Ignotaseries,and Cory Doctorow’sWalkaway.For those of you unfamiliar with Crooked Timber, it’s a community blog and their ‘seminars’ are when people all post reviews and reflections on the same work within a short period of time.

So I read Kushner’s statement today, which includes the line “I am not a person who has sought the spotlight” and, well, I couldn’t help myself.

So I’m watching my way through this pop math YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown and out of nowhere comes this extraordinarily fascinating fact: the ancient Babylonians circa 1800 BC probably (possibly?) knew the Pythagorean theorem and were generating Pythagorean triplets:

My friend Sumana Harihareswara recently posted a great collection of links on ‘call-out culture’ to MetaFilter.

If someone asks me, “What is open source software?”, I have an obvious answer: “Software that is licensed as open source and makes its source code available for users to review, modify and share.” Ditto “What is open science?”, to which I’d respond: “Science that is made available to review by anybody and available to reproduce by anyone with the necessary skills and equipment.”

I have seen this argument happen over and over again, especially in progressive spaces.

For Valentine’s Day, I want to talk about the poem I posted the other day, “Law, Like Love” by WH Auden, and why it means so much to me.

I’ve been thinking recently about the human tendency to try to put things in context, to search for patterns across different situations and conversations. It’s something I do a lot, and that my friends and the communities I’m a part of do constantly as well. Here are some examples from just the last week or so:

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun, Law is the one All gardeners obey To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

I visited House Oversight Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz’s office today. If there’s nothing else good to say about him (and there may not be) at the very least his staff is warm and polite, even when you are implying things about their boss.

Let’s say you’ve got an engineer or other employee who costs you $150,000 a year in salary & benefits. And let’s say they lose just 2 days a year to dealing with problems caused by underfunding of the FOSS projects they work with – bugs, missing documentation, lack of features that would make life so much easier.

While I am apparently on a recommendation kick, let me share with you this essay: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds. Have a handful of thought-provoking pull-quotes.

I’m not usually one for podcasts, but I discovered @fansplaining a few weeks ago and have really been getting a kick out of it. It is a “podcast by, about, and for fandom, hosted by Flourish Klink & Elizabeth Minkel” and it is fantastic.

Earlier today a friend/former colleague of mine linked to a dataset on the OpenScienceFramework with the commentary “OKCupid released some of their data!“ It turns out they didn’t release it, it was scraped.

The intro to testing session I ran on Saturday went well. Unfortunately the resolution on Hangouts on Air recordings is not good enough to read my code, so it’s pretty much unwatchable (though folks who saw it live were able to see what I was doing).

This was originally posted to my now-offline personal blog on February 15th, 2014. I’m reposting it now in honor of International Workers Day.

This Saturday at 11am EST I’ll be running a remote workshop with PyLadies on getting started with testing. If you’re a lady or genderqueer/non-binary person who wants to know more about the nitty gritty of unit tests and integration tests or maybe just the high level conceptual stuff like “why do people do this to themselves” you should consider signing up. I’m not sure if there’s an official cap but I know there are a lot of people enrolled (90ish! o.O) so it’s probably a good idea to RSVP if you’d like to join.

Last fall I had a bit of free time and thought I’d try out making apps. It was definitely a learning experience! I got to work with Java for the first time in a long time, and with the Android ecosystem. Said ecosystem has its good parts and its frustrating parts, but let me just say: I love Android Studio. I’d marry it, if people were allowed to marry integrated development environments.

I read a comment recently about the rules for bidding on government contracts. This isn’t the comment, but it gets at the same issue, which stuck with me:

I have never much liked Hamentaschen but it turns out “cookie” and “hat-shaped” are not terribly limiting constraints and much deliciousness can be fit within them.

So, LibrePlanet happened this weekend. It’s one of my favorite conferences, and not just because it’s local. This year Deb Nicholson and I ran a pre-conference workshop for free software projects to improve their usability and new contributor onboarding, hosted by the lovely folks at Bocoup. According to our participants it was a smashing success. Deb and I are writing up a guide so that other FOSS conferences can run similar workshops.

Today I had the pleasure of speaking to a Mozilla study group about The Little R’er. The Little R’er is a project of mine from about a year ago - it’s basically The Little Schemer for R. Or, rather, the first few chapters of the Little Schemer for R. R is, in my opinion, a much less elegant language than Scheme and I found that the socratic method eventually broke down as a pedagogical tool. The discovery of silent recycling did not help my enthusiasm levels either.

I spent a couple of hours today wrestling with encodings. Writing out the details here to help me remember, and perhaps save someone else from grief.

A friend shared this image on Facebook. I thought it was pretty funny, although perhaps not for the reasons its creator thought it was funny:

Modern dating is full of choices, whether between strangers at a bar or profiles on OkCupid. With so many options, it’s important to be rigorous in your search for a statistically significant other. Here are some tips to help you correlate with others.

There’s a body of research literature showing that people overestimate how well they can explain phenomena. Ask someone whether they understand how a can opener works, for example, and they’re likely to say they do. Ask someoneto explain how a can opener works, though, and you’re likely to get confusion, frustration, and a confession that they don’t understand as well as they thought they did.

When David Bowie died two weeks ago, I felt sad, but it was nothing compared to the outpouring of grief and remembrance from friends and from the culture at large. I have always liked Bowie’s music, his style, his interviews, the characters he’s played in movies. But I never quite got Bowie.

That feeling when someone links you to Leslie Odom Jr singing a mashup of the two best musical theater ballads* Stars and Wait For It and you spend the next two hours systematically watching all the other Ham4Hams that have ever been recorded.

Mystery Hunt was this past weekend and as usual I enjoyed the hell out of it. Highlights included Molly’s epic history rap battle, every puzzle name in the Lovecraft-themed round, and helping to solve a number of metas. The Dreamtime meta-meta was particularly fun, so that’s the puzzle I’ll explain, rot13’d to prevent spoilers. You can skip the gibberish if you just want links to my favorite puzzles.

Inspired by this letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, but slowly. My new note-taking system seems to double or even triple how long it takes me to get through a book. Part of me wants to say “screw it all!” and go back to flying through non-fiction like novels but I can already tell how much more I’m retaining now that I’m actually writing stuff down.

Whoops I am falling behind on Iron Blogger. I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff, and have yet to master the art of the casual update, apparently.

I’ve seen a lot of trickster villains recently. Of course, tricksters are nothing new under the sun - they’ve been an archetype for a very long time - but I’ve seen a lot of them lately and I’ve noticed a bit of a pattern: trickster villains tend to be paired with vigilante heroes.

For my birthday this weekend I tried to make a Zoetrope cake. I was inspired by Alexandre Dubosc, whose cakes you should definitely look at after this one, because mine does not benefit from the comparison. I’m putting the gif below a cut, as it may be a bit of a migraine or seizure trigger.

For the record, this recipe is way easier than it looks, and super tasty.

Last year I participated in a novel and exciting meta-analysis project called Many Analysts, One Dataset. A single dataset was given to researchers in over a dozen independent groups to analyze, with the hope of seeing just how divergent the analyses would be.

The players

Last month I quietly launched a new company, Galaxy Rise Consulting. Yesterday, my first client Sumana Harihareswara less quietly launched her new company, Changeset Consulting. If you need advice, auditing, internship support, release management, sprint prep, or anything like it for your FOSS project, I highly recommend Sumana. And if you need a website, app, or data science project developed, I highly recommend me. ;)

Chiu-Ki and Cate from Technically Speaking have challenged people to make and publish a list of public speaking goals for 2016. My goals for this year are fairly modest, as I’m no longer working with an organization that will pay my way to conferences, but that does lead to an obvious first goal:

Earlier this month I participated in a book sprint to raise awareness of the imprisonment of Bassel Khartabil by the Syrian government. Now, it is rumored he has been sentenced to death.

I did an interview with Django Girls. You can read it here.

Yesterday I backed up my entire computer, deleted and resized some partitions, and then attempted to upgrade my operating system from 32-bit to 64-bit. I was following this guide, which unfortunately doesn’t tell you to follow the instructions as root from the beginning. The result? Halfway through the process, I deleted my 32-bit version of sudo in order to install the 64-bit one.

I missed this paper when it went around last week: The prevalence of statistical reporting errors in psychology (1985–2013). Daniel Lakens has a very good review of it.

Making icons for Android is pretty tedious, until you realize you can manage everything with a shell script:

I recently made myself a new personal website, and I noticed there were a couple of problems with the mobile version: the font-awesome icons weren’t displaying, and the collapsed, mobile-friendly navbar wasn’t expanding.

Note: tumblr ate the initial, more comprehensive version of this post. :( Feel free to ping me for more details.

It’s hard to trick my niece - she wasn’t born yesterday, you know!

A few days ago I was playing Set with friends when one of them asked how many cards could be put down without making any sets. Someone else responded that whatever the answer was, there was probably a very sound mathematical/logical reason for it. After a bit of thinking I came up with this:

The other day, as I was sipping hot chocolate and talking with my college friend Cora about the play Copenhagen*, I had a thought:

It’s been about a year since I’ve blogged regularly. My perfectionist tendencies started getting the best of me - every post needed to be essay-like, completely thought out.

Back in February 2013, I ran my first Open Source Comes to Campus event. It was a snowy day with a small but enthusiastic turnout. At one point during the workshop at the end of the day, a student I was pairing with said something which has stuck with me ever since: "Today has been very empowering for me regarding my computer and the ways I can manipulate it."

A year or so ago I wrote the In Person Event Handbook to help people prepare their projects for in-person events like workshops, hackathons, and sprints. With the PyCon 2015 sprints coming up, I thought I'd take a moment to write up the highlights. Want to make your project welcoming to newcomers? Read on!

A year ago I wrote a post titled 'Goals for Open Source Comes to Campus in 2014'. This is the first of the promised posts -- let's review how well we met our goals, to help us better reach our goals for next year!

## (17 of them!) Last fall, we ran seventeen events at campuses around the country, reaching hundreds of students and making abundant contributions and connections. Here's a whirlwind tour of our semester:

A few months back, a friend recommended watching the videos from a Coursera course, A Brief History of Humankind. I recently finished, and I second the recommendation. The lectures are engaging and encompassing without being overly shallow, and I like Yuval Harari's approach of describing theories while continuously pointing out their contradictions and uncertain nature.

I received a number of comments regarding my recent posts (1,2) about how abstraction/quantification of trust leads to negative consequences such as competition, social judgment, and "gaming the system". This does not surprise me, because my model for quantifying trust is money. And it is hard to find a technology more profoundly impactful and more deeply flawed than money.

I have a habit of qualifying my statements with estimated likelihoods and error bars. "I think about ten people are coming, plus or minus two." "I'm, like, eighty percent sure that it runs on Windows." I worry that it comes off as an affectation, but I also worry that I'm not conveying my level of certainty effectively. *I* know how certain I am, and it pains me when that information gets lost to the ambiguities and inefficiencies of the English language. (I'm told that qualification by certainty is built into Lojban, which I believe with 99% certainty.) When I send my female friends cover letters and grant proposals, they strike out words like "I think" and "I believe" and "probably" and "try". I let them do it - we all know that there's a confidence gap that disadvantages women - but it chafes. Aside from dangly earrings, uncertainty is the aspect of femininity I am most comfortable with. Perhaps too comfortable.

A friend shared with me this 15-minute Planet Money segment called "When Women Stopped Coding". From their intro:

Building on my post about verification a few months ago, I want to talk about quantifying trust. As full verification of all knowledge by a single individual is as impossible as drinking the sea, we are faced with two options: paranoia or trust.

In between weddings both this weekend and last, I made it out to Phoenix for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. I gave a talk at Open Source Day about starting in open source. Rikki Endsley of Red Hat wrote up a summary of my talk, and Serena Larson of ReadWrite wrote an article based on the talk and a brief interview we did beforehand. My slides are here.

Would you like to present at an open source conference, but aren't sure what to talk about, or feeling shy? A poster can be a great way to get started. Not only are they less nerve-wracking to present, they're often more likely to be accepted than talk proposals. Yesterday evening, October 1st, we held a meetup on our IRC channel to brainstorm poster ideas for PyCon 2015.

Things I've accomplished recently, and future plans, offered up as justification for the lack of a "real" post:

I've long known the adage "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" but I've only recently come to appreciate its truth.

If you've never been to a feminist conference, you're missing out. If you've never found yourself surrounded by dozens of brilliant, empathetic, creative and determined women, you should consider giving it a try. If you've never gone from learning about how open source cloud computing platforms work straight to a discussion of microaggressions and how to deal with them, finishing things off by sharing your favorite feminist response gifs - well, maybe you should come to AdaCamp.

A while back I interviewed some core contributors to Wikipedia Project Medicine. While I'm wildly enthusiastic about their work, I can't help feeling that Wikipedia falls far short of being an ideal medium for sharing medical knowledge.

A few months ago, I joined a project called Crowdstorming a Dataset. It's a project affiliated with Center for Open Science and its basic premise is this: what if you gave a single dataset to dozens of researchers, and asked them to prove or disprove a particular hypothesis? What are the different analytical approaches they might take? Would they all give similar answers? Once they're given the opportunity to give and receive feedback, would their answers and methodologies converge?

I could write plenty about my experiences at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) this weekend, and I probably will, later. But I had a quick thought during Steve Rambam's talk on privacy loss yesterday that I wanted to share with you all.

A little over a year ago I did a survey at the job fair of a major tech conference. At each booth I asked whether they were hiring people part time. The response was almost entirely *no way, nuh-uh, never*.

I got interviewed about OpenHatch / Open Source Comes to Campus for an article in Wired. Pretty cool!

I did a lightning talk at AdaCamp called "how to hit a softball". This talk was born of frustration: the only activity I participate in which is less gender-diverse than open source software is softball. I've played in games where I'm the only woman on either side, out of 20+ people.

Three things to share from Open Source Bridge, which I went to this week.

I don't like making quick low-content posts just to avoid paying \$5 to the Iron Blogger pool. (No shade on those who do!) But I am so exhausted from AdaCamp.

I feel vaguely indignant that, despite working hard on a number of projects this week, I have nothing in particular to post about.

*This article is the second in a series highlighting open science projects around the community. You can read the interview this article was based on: edited for clarity, unedited.*

Earlier this week, after the UCSB shootings, Deanna Zandt started a tumblr to document violence against women who refuse or reject men. She was inspired by Kate Harding, who had been tweeting links to some of these stories as a way of explaining that violent male entitlement was not unique to Elliot Rodgers but is endemic to our culture.

Today is International Clinical Trials Day, held on May 20th in honor of George Lind, the famous Scottish physician who began one of the world\'s first clinical trials on May 20th, 1747. This trial discovered that vitamin C deficiency was the cause of scurvy. While it and the other life-saving trials that have been conducted in the last two hundred and sixty seven years are surely worth celebration, International Clinical Trials Day is also a time to reflect on the problems that plague the clinical trials system. In particular, the lack of reporting on nearly half of all clinical trials has potentially deadly consequences.

I decided recently that I want a reproducibility-themed t-shirt. Technology being what it is, I was able to make one in a matter of hours:

I spent weeks going back and forth with Hanne Paine, a student and open source enthusiast at SUNY Stony Brook. For every date she suggested, we already had an event planned. Finally, we decided to wait until the fall to hold a full workshop. I felt badly, though. I knew I'd be passing through New York City in April, right around the dates she'd been pushing for. "How about I just stop by for a couple hours on a week night and do a short intro presentation?"

*This post is in response to Jon Grahe\'s recent article in which he invited readers to propose metaphors that might help us understand why fraud occurs and how to prevent it.*

I am borrowing a very nice camera for work. I'll be returning to my regular (broken, fuzzy, cell phone) camera tomorrow, so I thought I'd grab the chance to explore how manual focus works. These are pictures from my Sunday morning walk.

Back in March, at LibrePlanet 2014, I organized and participated in a panel session on the intersection of open science and free software with Jeff Warren of Public Lab and Madeleine Price Ball of Open Humans.

Dear Professor Lucky,

I made a thing:

There's a joke you probably know:

Spending as much time as I do teaching, writing and thinking about technology, I come across solutionism a lot. (From the link: Morozov defines solutionism as "a pervasive and dangerous ideology\... that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are 'solvable' with a nice and clean technological solution".)

It's the heart of internship application season, and we want to spread the word about opportunities to contribute to open source this summer. The following list of internships are all funded, open to (though not always limited to) students, and taking place over the summer.

A while back, when I was still volunteering for Samaritans, I had a particularly rough evening. I don't remember why: might have had a long conversation with a desperate caller, or a run of calls from harassers. (Yes, that's a thing. A really unfortunate thing.) Or perhaps I was in a bad mood from something else entirely, some other aspect of my day. In any case, I decided to immerse myself in things that made me simply, inescapably happy. So I started this tumblr. I've added to it on and off ever since, whenever I come across something that makes me deeply happy to be alive. Like frost flowers:

\* A friend asked what SCaLE stood for, and I got everything but the 'a'. He laughed and said, "It could mean literally anything!" For the record, it's the a in *Ca*lifornia.

On Tuesday night we had our first official setup sprint -- an IRC get together where OpenHatch volunteers test an open source project's installation and contribution process and documentation. Our inaugural project was Oppia, a tool which helps non-technical users create interactive educational activities online. Three volunteers (Carol Willing, Anurag, and myself) spent two and a half hours working with Oppia maintainer Sean Lip testing and improving documentation. The quick, casual feedback process meant we made a bunch of changes, including restructuring the documentation to be easier to navigate, adding explanations (and/or links to tutorials/guides) where documentation was too terse, and changing the output of the testing suite to be more understandable. We also managed to create the project's 100th issue.

My good friend, a theater professor, is interested in sports as performance, but isn't too familiar with most sports. I collected the following links to send to her, and thought I'd share them here as well:

I came across this image today and was struck by the opposite paths of Perl and Python. Specifically, how they cross over in late 2007 and early 2008.

My aunt died this week. She was a private woman who tried to keep her internet presence to a minimum, so I won't memorialize her here, except to say that she was an incredibly gracious, giving person and a loving aunt.

At OpenHatch we have big dreams. One of them? Keeping better track of our dreams.

Another year, another Mystery Hunt. This iteration was especially nice. For the first time I was able to finish the hunt.

*This article is the first in a series highlighting open science projects around the community. You can read the interview this article was based on: edited for clarity, unedited.*

When it comes to opening up your work there is, ironically, a bit of a secret. Here it is: being open - in open science, open source software, or any other open community - can be hard. Sometimes it can be harder than being closed.

The list of talks, tutorials and posters accepted to PyCon 2014 was announced yesterday. Excitedly, we took to Twitter to congratulate the many OpenHatch community members who had their proposals accepted -- only to realize there's no way they'd all fit in a single tweet! We decided to write a blog post instead.

Time for another list of excuses for shamefully neglecting this blog:

Today, we're releasing a handbook to help open source projects prepare themselves for events.

*This is part three of a three part post brainstorming potential improvements to the journal article format. Part one is here, part two is here.*

Contributing to existing open source projects isn't just about improving those projects -- it's a chance for contributors to grow, too. When we run Open Source Comes to Campus events, we love seeing students exposed to their first projects that aren't throwaway coding exercises. Working on open source projects can teach anyone a lot about software engineering and collaboration. Here's some of what *we've* learned:

*This is part two of a three part post brainstorming potential improvements to the journal article format. Part one is here, part three is here here.*

*This is part one of a three part post. Parts two and three have now been posted.*

A little less than a year ago, I was asked to direct OpenHatch's Open Source Comes to Campus event series. Open Source Comes to Campus is a workshop designed to introduce college students to open source, to teach them how to use tools like version control and issue trackers, and to guide them through making their first contributions. When I joined, OpenHatch was averaging two events a year. I was asked, hopefully, if I could run seven events in 2013.

To celebrate Open Access Week last month, we asked people four questions about the state of open access and how it\'s changing. Here are some in depth answers from two people working on open access: Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and the Harvard Open Access Project, and Elizabeth Silva, associate editor at the Public Library of Science (PLOS).

*Recording this for posterity, in case it helps someone the way random websites helped me today.*

Here are two stories about conversations I didn't have this week:

*At each Open Source Comes to Campus event, participants ask unique, thought-provoking questions. We decided to write down these questions and answer them more fully on our blog. If you have any additional suggestions or advice, please add them in the comments!*

For Ada Lovelace Day this year, we decided to profile some of the women who have helped us organize and run our Open Source Comes to Campus events. The five women below are just a few of the dozens of amazing hosts and mentors we've had the honor of working with.

Friends, romans, civic tech enthusiasts, lend me your eyeballs. I come to bury hackathons, not to praise them.

Today, September 11th, is the anniversary of a number of events, but two in particular are being talked about today: the twelve year anniversary of the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks, of course, and the forty year anniversary of the overthrow and forced suicide of democratically elected president of Chile Salvador Allende.

An editorial in Nature by Arthur Ammann points out a number of problems with our current clinical trial system:

From a paper published in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II:

The recent announcement that the University of California - the world’s largest public university system - will be embracing open access has been meet with celebration. However, the new policy only encourages faculty to share their work - there are no requirements. Meanwhile, the UC Regents have voted to create a new corporate entity to manage research funding:

This is a little old - I’m going through my bookmarks - but:

If I was the Supreme Dictator of Science, able to marshal all sorts of resources to support my decrees, I would require that every single journal article contain, in its supplemental materials:

My sister came to visit this week and one of the places I showed her around was the Media Lab. She was curious about the display near the front door, which I had never really investigated. We ended up spending half an hour playing with it. It's called Immersion, and it's online as of today.

!bostonsummer On Saturday, June 22nd we ran our tenth Open Source Comes to Campus event, at Northeastern University. Many thanks to Ali Ukani and the Northeastern University ACM for hosting.

From Retraction Watch, a story about a retraction is really a story about Nature’s failure to publish a refutation:

I've been doing Iron Blogger, in one form or another, for almost two years now. That's over a hundred weeks of posts, with a few misses here and there, paid for in beer. I try to make each post substantive, meaningful to someone, even if just to me.

There's a letter in the Guardian today calling for study preregistration. This is super exciting - I've been wanting this for years.

When I was a young teenager, twelve-thirteen-fourteen, I played fairly high-level softball. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to hit sixty-mile-an-hour pitches. I enjoyed practicing and playing constantly with my teammates and the bonds that naturally arose. I enjoyed figuring out the optimal play, the optimal position.

Ever since I first heard of Victoria Woodhull about a year ago, I've been meaning to read the weekly newspaper that she put out with her sister, Tennessee Claflin, from 1870 to 1877. I found a library that claimed to have the complete collection in microform, so I made my way over there this week.

This PLoS One study attempted to look at how pressure to publish might influence the prevalence of positive results. The author, Daniele Fanelli, made an odd choice by using ‘papers per capita by state’ as the measure of pressure to publish. The state seems way too macro a level to look at. I would expect pressure to vary strongly between schools and between departments within schools. There’s no reasoning for this given in the paper - I suspect that it was just simpler to use this measure, already provided by the NSF, then to come up with a method for looking at individual institutions.

This article about Bionimbus, about an effort to efficiently and securely share cancer genomics data, mentions the Open Science Data Cloud. The OSDC is a platform for sharing large datasets, and although their current set of projects, including Bionimbus, are mostly genomics-focused, they seem to be open to datasets of all types.

*At each Open Source Comes to Campus event, participants ask unique, thought-provoking questions. We decided to write down these questions and answer them more fully on our blog. If you have any additional suggestions or advice, please add them in the comments! *

A colleague referenced this 2010 paper which measures proportion of positive results by scientific discipline.

A quick note on an interesting point raised by Roger Peng:

On Sunday, April 14th, we ran our ninth Open Source Comes to Campus event, at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Many thanks to Tariq Ahmad, Andy Yee, UMass IEEE and UMass ACM. Check out the photo gallery!

My new favorite thing on the internet is math gifs.

A paper and associated web-based tool have been proposed to detect publication bias and p-hacking in the literature. From the paper:

TransparencyCamp is a yearly unconference to celebrate, and work toward, government transparency. It's run by the Sunlight Foundation, and we're honored to be a sponsor! Asheesh Laroia and I will be attending, and Sunlight Foundation has set aside a special area to help open government-oriented open source projects build stronger communities.

I spent three years working in fMRI labs. To this day it’s not clear to me if the field has exceptionally ambiguous standards, or if it’s only one of many scientific subfields based around new technology struggling to define good practice. Whether it’s got company or not, neuroimaging certainly has issues.

It turns out the soil in our back yard is fairly toxic. My housemate Molly, rather than give up gardening, decided to invite a bunch of people over to help make raised beds in which to grow edible plants. I helped in the best way I knew how: by making a themed cake.

There’s an op ed in the New York Times about how a coding error in an economics article may have had profoundly negative influence on economic policy:

I ran into Adelaida on the train yesterday morning, on my way out to Amherst for an OpenHatch event. We struck up a conversation which eventually turned to the book she was reading, Unlocking the Clubhouse. This made me think of Top Secret Rosies, a documentary about women computers during WWII which I bought on a whim recently and which I'm hoping to show soon at BoCoup Loft.

There’s a new article out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience about the failure of scientific studies in general (and neuroscience and fMRI studies in particular) to adequately power their studies. The NRN paper isn’t open access, but you can email the authors for a pre-print. There’s a good write-up at National Geographic.

I'm afraid of flying.

I've been hearing good things about the Capitol Words API for months now, so I decided to try doing something with it. I wrote a script which queries the API for instances of a given word and returns two text files: the first is a compendium of sentences from every time a Republican has said that word (in a given date range), and the second the same but for Democrats. I fed the results into a word cloud generator I found on github, which I modified slightly to suit my purposes.

I spent the last week and a half at PyCon. I have a lot of things to say about it - too many, really, to form a coherent narrative. So here are some scattered thoughts.

An article in the Washington Post details an alleged case of Fraud which led to an as-yet-uncorrected Nature paper and a suicide:

A round up of recent goings on:

An opinion article from Iain Chalmers (of the very well regarded though not fully open access Cochrane Collaboration) and Paul Glasziou (of the Center for Evidence-based Medicine) discusses the high potential for waste in much research.

The Obama administration has announced that all research funded by federal agencies (with R&D budgets greater than $100 million) should be made open access within one year of publication:

An interesting article from Accident Analysis and Prevention from 2004 goes over three case studies where Null Hypothesis Significance Testing may have cost lives.

On the PLoS blog, an article from Jack Andraka, winner of the 2012 Intel Science prize for the invention of a dip stick test for pancreatic cancer, on trying to reach behind paywalls as a 14 year old:

This Saturday, February 23rd, is Open Data Day, "a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments."

Modern dating is full of choices: whether between dozens of handsome strangers out at a bar, hundreds of friends and friends-of-friends on social networking sites, or thousands of profiles on OkCupid or Match.com. With so many options, it's important to be rigorous in your search for a statistically significant other. Here are some tips to help you correlate with others.

Found this interesting paper from a couple years ago: Detecting and Correcting the Lies that Data Tellby F Schmidt.

This post at the Scholarly Kitchen touches on a number of arguments against mandatory CC-BY licensing. They’re all worth talking about, although none seem worth keeping science behind closed doors.

A new PLoS one paper looked at the outcome of 1054 trials submitted to the ethics committee of a major Spanish hospital from 1997-2004. This flowchart captures the basic results:

It’s been my experience that I wildly disagree with some of the fundamental values of the folks at Scholarly Kitchen, but I get a lot out of their posts and arguments. Their most recent post on a possible scandal at Pub Med Central is a case in point:

A relevant follow up to the last post. Science critic Ben Goldacre has a new project: a petition to get all trials registered and to enforce reporting deadlines.

A new PLoS Medicine report investigated how pharmaceutical promotions and advertising influence prescriptions:

An article in BMJ explores how well registered trials adhere to reporting deadlines.

Back in November, Perspectives on Psychological Science put out a special issue on replicability. I’ll be attempting to summarize each of the articles in that issue for this tumblr. See this post for links to all article summaries, or use this tag to browse.

A brief comment points out a major flaw in a published study, in part by using simulations:

As I mentioned in my last post, I chose to look at the EPA Toxics Release Inventory this month. The full dataset was way too large for my little netbook to handle, so I filtered the results to my home state of Massachusetts, and downloaded it in csv format. I used this helpful pdf to identify the variables I was most interested in: year, total release of toxic substances, and whether the substance released was a carcinogen.

A friend forwarded me this paper, “Empirical estimates suggest most published medical research is true”, perhaps in an attempt to challenge my cynicism. I like to believe I am open to being challenged, and I do recognize that purposefully cataloging problems with research leaves me biased. But I don’t think this paper is the best counterpoint.

A post at Retraction Watch summarizes the situation:

I try to explore a bit of government data every month. Previously, I've just grabbed data from the Sunlight Foundation's cleaned up APIs. This month, I tried out data.gov. It was a much more harrowing experience.

At last year's Mystery Hunt, when I woke up early Sunday morning to discover that the coin had already been found, I turned to a teammate and said sadly, "I wish Mystery Hunt could go on forever\..."

My father forwarded an article to me this morning: Clinical trials flawed by biased reporting. It's a write up of Bias in reporting of end points of efficacy and toxicity in randomized, clinical trials for women with breast cancer.

Back in November, Perspectives on Psychological Science put outa special issue on replicability. I’ll be attempting to summarize each of the articles in that issue for this tumblr. See this post for links to all article summaries, or use this tag to browse.

A recent paper did an analysis of breast cancer studies published over the last 16 years. They evaluated 164 trials and looked at whether results re: the drug’s toxicity or overall survival rate was reported prominently in the abstract, within the article, or at all. They looked at who funded the work, the impact factor of the journal the work was published in, and most interestingly, whether the trial found positive or negative results.

I had a conversation with some of my housemates earlier this week about our favorite games, and I thought I'd expound on a few of mine for just a bit. These are all browser-based games, so they're only a few clicks away.

Perspectives on Psychological Science recently came out with a special issue on replicability in psychology research and its implications for the reliability and health of the field as a whole. They cite as motivation the last two years, which have been filled with fraud, admissions of questionable research practices, a published paper in a major paper claiming evidence of ESP, reports that researchers cannot or will not share data or disclose the full extent of their analyses, and the failure to replicate several major findings in the field.

Back in November, Perspectives on Psychological Science put out a special issue on replicability. I’ll be attempting to summarize each of the articles in that issue for this tumblr. See this post for links to all article summaries, or use this tag to browse.

From Science Fraud’s post:

I have a tumblr, Dismal Science, which I use to keep track of newspaper articles, journal articles, and blog posts on the topic of how scientific research is practised and the flaws and problems that have arisen. Before the archives grow unmanageable, I'd like to take a stab at organizing what I have so far. So here's a summary of the material I posted last year. (Many of the links themselves were not published/posted in 2012.)

This review of Diederik Stapel’s autobiography quotes this interesting passage:

I found this 2004 article through the footnotes of Nate Silver’s book. Here are the highlights (but I recommend reading it all the way through.)

Massachusetts is not a great place for transparency. We have some of the worst public access to information of any state in the country, and legislators have barely any oversight or accountability. I've heard people talk about trying to get access to information from closed meetings where no attendance is taken and no minutes are kept.

This article raises, for me at least, the interesting question of whether the large amount of research that remains uncited in medical/scientific literature is a good thing, a bad thing, or a neutral thing. I did a little more reading, and found some other posts on the topic.

David Salsburg's The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century is a book that doesn't know its audience. Billed as a history of statistical theories, it is more like a biography of the various statisticians who proposed those theories. Salsburg describes his intentions fairly well in the second to last paragraph of the introduction:

I made five kinds of truffles last Saturday.

From the post:

This article (warning: pdf) talks in detail about how the psychology community frequently fails to account for the great diversity of cultures in our world.

From this article in PLoS Medicine:

From this post:

When Nate Silver correctly called the winner of all 50 states in this year's presidential election (and 31 out of the 33 Senate races), how many people rushed out to buy his book, eager to learn how to make such spot-on predictions? How many were disappointed?

This article is on, specifically, open access metadata, which the author rightly points out is needed to help readers actually locate and use open access articles.

On the six hour drive to New York City last week, my family somehow got on the topic of political campaign songs. Campaign songs today are pretty boring, because politicians just use popular music. Although it's kind of fun to watch Republicans try to find music made by artists who won't sue them to get them to stop using it.

This article focuses on making study results available to patients who are providing the medical data. But it touches on more general themes - on the right of patients not just to control their own data but to access the results of research into their illnesses, and to be empowered to do some of the research themselves.

The investigatory report on Diedrik Stapel, who was found to have published fraudulent research in at least 30 papers, is out. The committee’s report repeatedly highlights the role of the greater scientific community in allowing this fraud.

I normally do not post about sexism, racism, and other forms of bigotry in the scientific community here. While I obviously think they exist and am against them, it is ambiguous how these “isms” impact/bias the scientific literature. (I am sure they do. But perhaps in a less concrete way than, say, the file-drawer phenomenon, or clear misuse of statistics.)

I spent last Saturday teaching neuroscience/psychology to 100+ kids via Splash. It was a survey course, so there were a lot of references and recommendations I made, and some of the kids asked me to put them all in an email. It's a good list, so I thought I'd also share it here.

This post lists common ways that people used to die from their jobs. They're mostly due to inhaling toxic chemicals. One of them, Soot Wart, is a type of cancer that was commonly found among chimney sweeps. The discovery of this link between job and disease, in the late 18th century, was pretty vital in our early understanding of cancer.

From the copy on their website:

I tend to have complex feelings about elections.

The study, published this week as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, used the PubMed Related Citations Algorithm (PMRA) to fish out papers that are topically similar to retracted articles but written by different authors. After a retraction, the rate at which these related papers were cited dropped by 5.7% relative to a selection of control papers that were not related to a retraction.

I've been a bit busier than usual the last few weeks. Missed last week's post. More beer for everyone! Here's a list of things I've done between my last post and now. (Why yes, this is a pretense for skipping another week. Glad you asked.)

Quoting my own write up:

Some of you who read this blog may know that a close relative of mine has been dealing with an aggressive cancer for the last year or so. When I say I admire the young women in this post, I don't just mean because they're intelligent, dedicated and accomplished. I also admire them for choosing to spend their time researching cancer, which is the leading cause of death in the developed world, and the second leading cause of death worldwide. Few people end up helping others as significantly as these young women have already managed - while still in high school.

Last weekend I flew out to Urbana Champaign to give a talk at their annual Reflections \| Projections conference. The talk was on how to get started contributing to free software, and a big portion was on bugs - how to report them and to fix them. It was therefore painfully ironic when the free software I had used to prepare the talk - LibreOffice - essentially deleted the presentation an hour or so before I had to give it.

This week I visited New York and stayed with my cousins while their mother was in the hospital. Over the course of several days, my younger cousin, K, and I hacked the board game 'Guess Who?'

My sister asked me to make a puzzle hunt for her bachelorette party. While it's tailored to her interests, it should be possible for anyone to solve - and hopefully pretty fun, too.

I'm marrying my sister next weekend.

Life has been super busy lately, so here's another link-and-run:

My post for the week is aaaaaaaall the way over at the Sunlight Foundation blog.

*(Written for a friend.)*

A week or so ago the founder of a feminist blog I lurk on asked if anyone could help update their commenting system. It was a real pleasure to realize that hey, this was totally something I could do.

Made some cakes. The first was for my friend Lisa's birthday, and was conceived on this very blog!

Just finished off my three weeks at camp with an afternoon of making chocolate gears, legos, and chess pieces using the latex molds we created during the week. The chocolate gears did not actually function as gears, so I am 0 for 1 on attempts for my friend Dan's moving wedding cake, but I'm going to try again with better gears. (Also on the list of ideas to try: a sterling engine made of rock candy, and a helium-filled fruit leather balloon. I still like the chocolate gears idea best, though.)

Missed last week because I was so busy at camp. The first week of the summer is Girl's Invention Week and instead of the usual 7ish:1 ratio of boys to girls, we had forty awesome lady campers. We built a loom and an interactive mosaic from scrap wood, made soda using dry ice, programmed lots of video games with Scratch, went geocaching, had a thoughtful group conversation about gender identity and gender essentialism, and baked some delicious marshmallow bread. It was fabulous.

For whatever reason, much of the music that I've found and liked has been by men. My favorite singers/bands/acts - Andrew Bird, Sufjan Stevens, Great Lake Swimmers, Paul Simon/Simon & Garfunkel - are all dudes. Not very cool. So half the purpose of this post is to get you all to recommend me some lady singers and songwriters.

41 years ago today, the US government forcibly ended the nearly two year long occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Alcatraz was a famous prison which closed down in 1963. A group of American Indians claimed the island while by citing a 1868 treaty which promised to return all abandoned and unused federal lands.

(A discussion at last Tuesday's Iron-Blogger meetup reminded me of this review I wrote a few years ago.)

Vaughn Bell of Mind Hacks interviews researchers about the problems with fMRI:

Dorothy Bishop critiques a 2003 neuroimaging paper:

One of my favorite things to do at camp is to visit the game shelf. It's stacked high with donated games, most of which sit unused for months at a time. Many of the games are for children much younger than those who go to camp. Others are missing vital pieces or are simply way too bland to lure kids away from building treehouses and robots or hitting each other with boffer swords.

I recently watched Miss Representation, a documentary about how limited and disparaging portrayals of women in mainstream media hurt society. While I agree with most of the documentary, I do think it skips right over a number of amazing female characters both past and present (I started to list my favorites, but I think that's a whole other post.) Obviously individual portrayals can't make up for the overall patterns of representation, which tend to feature young, white, thin, able-bodied women playing out tired tropes. There is plenty of room for criticism there. But for me, personally, what I want even more than better female characters on my television, is explicitly feminist shows.

From the article:

“A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data”

(Lots of other interesting non-dismal-sciencey results here.)

A pair of articles in Infection and Immunity. In addition to summarizing problems, they offer the following reforms (all greatly abridged in the excerpts below):

Public Peer Review:

As described in this Nature article:

From the article:

Following up from last week with a more in-depth post. While I heard a bunch of compelling stories and found out about a ton of amazing projects, ultimately what I appreciated most about Tcamp was the chance to talk about the common issues that have arisen for those of us doing open government work.

I just spent the last two days at Transparency Camp. My capacity for coherent thought is pretty much used up after all the talks and sessions, and I want to save what small amount is left for the hackathon tomorrow. So here's a list of some neat things I learned about, and I'll save the insightful analysis for later.

Over the last week, I've come across a couple new 'science experiments' - that is, experiments in improving science by encouraging the involvement of the online public. The first one, Petri Dish, is basically a Kickstarter for science projects:

From the website:

The other day I was cutting up cauliflower for soup. It looked rather a lot like this:

From the article:

When searching for recipes for our passover seder - an extra challenge with vegetarians and people with nut and gluten allergies sharing the table - we stumbled across this abomination:

An anecdote from Richard Feynman:

The abstract:

From the link:

In lieu of writing an actual blog post this week, here are some pictures of our easter keg hunt. (Apologies for the quality, it's a camera phone.)

From the article:

Alex Tabarrok’s explanation of the controversy around a failure to replicate a famous psychology paper. The abstract of the article:

Via Derek Lowe. From the article:

I love making cakes, especially for friends' birthdays. Yesterday was my housemate Mitchell's birthday, and he requested a carrot cake but did not specify a shape. Given his ardent love for sea slugs, I decided to make him a sea slug cake:

This is an article summarizing this Nature editorial, which is definitely worth reading as well.

From the website:

It's Women's History Month, which I'm going to use as an excuse to ramble about a very cool historical lady I learned about only recently: Victoria Woodhull.

From the link:

From the report’s summary:

Too Hard for Science? is a series on a Scientific American blog asking researchers what experiments they would do if money, ethics, or the laws of the universe weren't an issue. I think the idea for the series is brilliant, although somewhat disappointingly executed - the articles are all way too short, and some of the interviewees fail to actually propose impossible experiments, and just describe hard problems. That said, there are some real gems:

There's another article out this month on all the false positives being published in psychology [pdf].

I had friends over for Valentine's Day, as I frequently do, and this year I decided to make a playlist of songs about friendship, which were astonishingly hard to find. Although to be fair, I did exclude some songs 'cause I didn't like them, but I should have been overwhelmed by options! Anyway, here is the playlist:

So. Correlations. They're fairly simple creatures: they measure the relationship between variables, without making any assumptions or assertions about cause and effect, dependence, or direction. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1, with -1 meaning a perfect negative correlation, 1 being a perfect positive correlation, and 0 meaning no correlation at all.

The other day at work, while I was hanging around the coffee machine, I saw a flyer for an IAP (read: Jan Term) course on "Serious Games". It looked neat, so I emailed the instructor to get the syllabus, and I've started playing my way through. I figured I'd post my half-formed thoughts about how these projects work both as games and as tools to educate/persuade/mobilize people.

The Mystery Hunt was last weekend. It was unexpectedly musicals-themed and expectedly exhaustingly awesome. I wanted to briefly highlight my favorite puzzles from this year:

I'm usually one of the first to criticize Facebook, but I'm really pleased about the new suicide prevention initiative they've rolled out.

I like the word cool. Unlike other positive adjectives, like groovy, gnarly, or dope, it's been around for 50-150 years (depending on whether you count this use by Abraham Lincoln) and always stayed, well, *cool*.

My previous post about p-values has reminded me that I've been meaning to brush up on my statistics. I'm hoping to do this by writing a series of tutorials for this blog, and to keep things interesting for my less statistically-inclined readers, the datasets I'll be using will be campaign finance and lobbying information from Open Secrets and Sunlight Labs. So come, join me as I learn about quantitative analysis and also the pervasive corruption of our government\... The data in this post are from .OpenSecrets.org and represent the total contributions from commercial banks to individual house members in the current (2011-2012) election cycle.

 *"You keep using that statistical test. I do not think it means what you think it means."*

It's my birthday today! My present to myself is a quick, fun post.

On the road back from Thanksgiving, my dad and my sister's boyfriend Alex were discussing the NBA lockout (which was just resolved yesterday.)

There's a dispiriting article being passed around feminist-friendly corners of the blogosphere today. What makes this article different from all the other tired, sexist articles I've come across recently - and therefore what makes this article worth posting about, for me - is where it was published: Nature. Yes, *that* Nature - "the world's most highly cited interdisciplinary science journal". The same journal that first published the structure of DNA, first proved there was a hole in the ozone layer, first documented nuclear fission and the cloning of mammals, is the source of this drivel:

I'm in the middle of an incredibly busy month, so I thought I'd be efficient and document one of my favorite procrastination activities as a blog post. I call this activity "finding shiny things on the web". Today's theme is science and nature photos.

I was a mid-90s geocities page for Halloween. It was a fairly mediocre costume - I had a bunch of ideas for it, some of which worked and many of which didn't. I don't usually repeat costumes but I think I want to try to improve on this for next year.

I've given three public talks in the last six months. What really strikes me is how different these talks were, in content, structure, and intent.

Last night at a dinner party made up mostly of science folks, I pitched an idea that's been stewing in my head for a while: results-blind submissions reviews for journals.

For Ada Lovelace day I thought I'd go back to my roots and write about a psychological scientist. Being as I am prone to digressions, I ended up writing about two - one historical, one current. We'll go chronologically.

I have an idea in my head for an interactive fiction story: a depressed young man sits in a cafe, waiting for a phone call from his girlfriend. Depending on what happens - what she says, whether he even gets the call, whether he talks to the older man reading a paper or the little girl playing with his shoelaces, whether he springs for the expensive sandwich and finds out he's overdrawn his account, whether an overheard phrase or a stray shadow spark a memory - the young man experiences a different future. Sometimes he reaches out for help. Sometimes he goes home and kills himself. Sometimes he lashes out in anger and hurts someone. Sometimes an instinctive, kind reaction on his part saves someone else's life.

There's a conversation going on over at metafilter about how people cook and eat in this country.

"But congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" *Debate moderator to candidate Ron Paul. The audience with cheers and shouts of "Yeah!"*

In what is surely the longest and most informative comment I've ever gotten on this blog, Stone points out that the story of oppression and reform I describe in The Cry of the Crow is the first of many in recorded history:

I took the overnight train last night from DC, where I was visiting my family, back to Boston.

This interview with anarchist/anthropologist David Graeber, who has a book about the history of debt coming out, is pretty interesting. In it, he talks about the old practice of jubilee: the forgiveness of debt and the freeing of slaves and prisoners.

The last two weeks my attention has been pretty well captured by Parts & Crafts, the summer camp my housemates run. They invited me to come teach this past session, which was themed 'Imaginary Worlds'. We made card games, choose your own adventure books, chocolate aliens, telegraphs - but by far everyone's favorite activity was the Puzzle Hunt.

The last couple of days have been FULL of cake. My friends' theater company turned five this summer, and they requested a cake from me to have at their celebration. They're called Flat Earth Theater, so the design for the cake was obvious:

Story a Day projects frequently result in large clumps of dross - I should know, I've done one myself. So when I stumbled across Ommataidia, an archive of over 1000 bite size stories written daily for years, I expected the same.

There's a thing I like to do, whenever someone says something is "like riding a bicycle".

The other day I was talking with one of my housemates about putting shelves up on the wall outside my room. Now, I had a totally underhanded reason for wanting shelves there - I want the challenge of building them and putting them up. But her arguments were equally out of left field to me: she thought that walls of books were tacky.

I think bodies are neat. I always have, especially the insides. I think I'm the only person in the world to enjoy a root canal, thanks to the awesome dentist who explained to me what she was doing as she worked. (Did you know that the roots of a tooth are like a plant's, sucking up nourishing water?) A few years ago I lived with a med student. She snuck me in to their anatomy lab and showed me everything they'd been learning; even better, she let me hold and explore a human heart. !Heart and lungs from Did you know that you can carry tons of weight with your hair? That you can dissolve razor blades in your stomach? Your body is badass! Your liver especially. It performs over 500 different functions; it helps you digest, metabolize and pee, it directs your immune system, regulates blood pressure and blood coagulation, it's a storage house for vitamins, including years worth of vitamins A and B12 and of course, as everyone knows, it breaks down alcohol at the rate of roughly one margarita an hour. (And that reminds me - I'll spare you the details, but just so you know, the way that vomiting works is really, really cool.) Also, the liver can regenerate itself, even if over half of it is diseased or lost. The liver is like the undercover superhero of your internal organs. That said - I am, of course, a total brain partisan. Full of soft grey-white nerves winding and flashing, swimming with hormones and neurotransmitters, with a cobweb-like membrane that hugs it tight and washes it with fluid. The most beautiful part of the brain is the cerebellum, a primitive structure handles motor control. When you cut it open, you can see neuron bundles branching upwards and outwards like a thriving old oak tree. I even love the names scientists have given areas of the brain. The almond (amygdala, associated with fear and anger); the seahorse (hippocampus, associated with memory); the fornix, which yes, comes from the same root as fornication. "What?" you ask. In ancient greece, prostitutes frequently loitered underneath archways. *Fornix* is the greek word for arch, an apt description of this gently curving section of the corpus callosum, the tough bundle of nerve fibers which connects our left brain to its right. !Hot. I'm getting carried away here. I could go on like this for a while, but what I really want to talk about is a moment several years ago when I gave blood for the first time. As the nurse was labeling the bag, I asked her shyly if I could hold it. It was hot to the touch, in a weird but totally neat way, and my delight at the experience must have shown on my face because the nurse said, "No one ever asks to do that! You must be so comfortable with your body." And I just sort of gaped at her because that wasn't true at all. Not even close. Like many women - like many *people* - I grew up internalizing all sorts of little hatreds. I was too fat, my face too plain, my skin alternately too flaky and too oily, as if it too was fighting its own private war with itself. My front teeth were damaged from a highly competitive game of freeze dancing; like others, I spent years refusing to smile with my lips open. Like others, I avoided the mirror, hating what I saw. I never thought these two things were related. I mean, they weren't for me. I loved my insides, loved learning about them and imagining them. And I hated my outsides. I hid them as best I could, and when I thought of them, I disparaged them. For me, a huge part of accepting the quirks of my physical appearance has been learning to approach them with the same sort of curiosity and enthusiasm as I do the rest of my body. !a representation of a triglyceride Sometimes when I'm "feeling fat", I put my hand under my shirt and feel the soft, jiggling roll of my belly. I try to picture the fat cells - the adipocytes - that swell and deflate as fat is taken in and out of them. I picture the fat itself, in it's smallest form, triglyceride. Just a chain of atoms, far too tiny to even see, but there, resting below the surface of my skin, waiting to be broken down and released into my blood. I think of every missed breakfast, every day-long hiking trip, every teenage starvation diet. Without those little chains of atoms, the triglycerides my body so thoughtfully stored for me, I would have died. *With* those chains of atoms, I can go for weeks if I need to, living off of my my own body. Like the migratory birds who fly for days without stopping, I hold a tremendous storehouse of energy in the palm of my hand. Then there's the acne. I was told it would go away once I grew up, but it remains, ugly and sometimes painful. I went once, in college, to a makeup counter at the mall. The assistant there clucked her tongue and then smiled, coating my face with concealer from neck to temple. I looked at myself in the mirror and couldn't see the acne, but I couldn't see my own skin either - the light hairs of my cheeks, the little moles and freckles, the scar by my eye that I've had most of my life. I didn't buy the concealer. Now when I look in the mirror, I seek out the raised red bumps. I try to see them as a message from my immune system - the same one that's fought off chickenpox, pneumonia, and the common cold. I picture my white blood cells rushing to the pimple, throwing their arms out and shouting like Gandalf in the mines of Moria: "You shall not pass!"

I've been sporadic about blogging lately, but that's all about to change: my friends/housemates Molly and Asheesh and I are doing "Iron Blogger". Basically, we try to post weekly, and for each week we miss we contribute \$5 to a communal pot. Once the pot's sizable enough, we split it three ways and go out drinking together. I plan to update with regularity and fervor, and laugh at Molly and Asheesh all the way to the pub. (It occurs to me that a *real* Iron Blogger competition would involve being given a random topic and 60 minutes to write a blog post. But it seems like the readers would be the real losers there\...) Anyway, on to the first blog post of a new era.

I've been doing a lot of baking lately. Last weekend I made banana bread, mango bread, and a vegan gluten-free chocolate raspberry torte all within a 24-hour period. This weekend, I devoted myself exclusively to a very important task: the making of my littlest friend's first birthday cake.

Yesterday my friend Nagle and I ran an activity at Bring Your Grandmother To Math at the MIT Museum (a part of the Cambridge Science Festival). A few days earlier, we'd spent an afternoon reading through Vi Hart's blog for inspiration. We looked at the Mobius strip music box, Penny sierpinski triangles, and followed a link to a tricycle with square wheels. We were briefly entranced by various foods in various shapes before finally deciding on a less messy version: balloon geometry.

I have another old story of mine I'd like to share. But first, let me explain something: for years and years I've been obsessed with ancient Sumer.

Occasionally I come up with puns that are, shall we say, executable? And although it may take me years to follow through on them, eventually I do. I'm not sure how many pesaschs have passed over without these, but finally! Here they are:

Monday even horseradish tastes good eaten near loved ones well maybe not *good*

I was at a parade a few days ago when the brass band marching by played what I'm sure they thought was the Battle Hymn of the Republic. What fewer people know is that the song was popularized during the Civil War with completely different lyrics:

I spent pretty much all my free time last week studying for the psychology GRE subject test, and I have to say that I resent how much I now know about Freud. It's not that I think studying the history of a discipline is pointless - far from it. But the history of psychology that the GRE tests is, how shall I put this\... painfully white and Western.

I've been tutoring a friend of a friend in Matlab, and we spent a good hour this afternoon chasing down a bug in his program. He asked how I can stand it, the constant trouble-shooting spiced up by the occasional epic search for a minor flaw\*. "Doesn't it drive you crazy?" he asked.

The blogs of my writing and editing friends have been buzzing today with the story of a YA author who was told by the editor of an anthology to change the romance in her story from gay to straight. It's satisfying to see the online community rally around the author, and I hope that something tangible comes out of this - say, a new commitment to encouraging work with gay protagonists. Perhaps an anthology!

There's a provocative short story by Ursula Le Guin called *The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas*. You can read it online here, and I suggest you do so before going on, because I'm about to spoil it completely.

I've never really been a connoisseur of the visual arts. I'm not drawn to them the way I am to music or writing, so I don't really know much about them - any artists beyond the famous ones, the terms for techniques, movements, styles.

I share other bloggers' hesitations towards Women's History Month (and International Women's Day). It seems, sometimes, like a sop to distract us from the ongoing problems facing women.

A few days ago I was browsing around Play This Thing, looking to find a present for a friend, when I stumbled across something else entirely: a review for Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!, a board game made in 1969 in honor of the Columbia riots. According to Play This Thing's review, the game is a fun, maybe even thought-provoking, but has roughly zero replay value.

I've put off posting my original fiction to this blog, because most of the stuff that I think is really good - that I'm really proud of - I'm trying to polish and submit for publication. Which leaves the 'halfway decent' and the 'truly terrible'. No one will ever get to hear the truly terrible, except for maybe my cat, but the halfway decent\... the halfway decent I'm going to start sharing here.

The Great Lake Swimmers are one of my favorite bands, although I didn't really understand just how incredible they are until I got a chance to see them live. Sitting in the front row of a small theater is the best way to experience them - unless you can somehow convince them to play you a concert in the middle of the woods somewhere, or on a beach, or a mountaintop. Because the Great Lake Swimmers write love songs to, for, about nature.

Several years ago I read an article in the Atlantic Monthly that has stayed with me: Lincoln's Great Depression.

Found via a friend: the Electronic Literature Collection is a treasure trove of stories, statements, and pieces of art that use their electronic medium to confuse, provoke and entangle the audience.

I've only been semi-following the PAX east/dickwolves controversy, so I'm not going to write a novel about what happened and who was in the wrong and why.

This gorgeous graphic has been making its way around the internet lately:

*Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.* \~ Buckminster Fuller

Reading a novel or story by Milan Kundera is not like reading anything else: he has a languid style which slides imperceptibly from narrative to essay and back again. His books are full of delicate caged moments set side by side with off-hand philosophy. He's never made me laugh or cry, but sometimes when I read him I have to put him down and close my eyes and just swim in his words for a while.

It's been about a year since I started this blog, and I'm slowly getting a sense of what I want it to be, on multiple levels.

Parts and Crafts, the kids' hackerspace that I've been working with on and off since the summer, has launched a kickstarter. They've made an awesome video to go with it:

Hannukah has always been my favorite Jewish holiday. No fasting, no seders - just candles, latkes, and dreidels. Here's a confession, though. I don't like the dreidel game. It's - well, it's boring.

Ah, Christmas Eve in a Jewish/agnostic household. My tummy is full of Chinese food and my stockings stuffed with feet.

My birthday was a couple of days ago. I got obsessed with making the electrically conductive cake described in The Hungry Scientist, only I didn't get a chance to re-read the recipe until the morning of, so when I discovered that I needed the rare (and expensive!) cake decoration silver leaf, I thought for sure that crushing disappointment awaited me.

My family and I watched Agora, the new movie about Hypatia of Alexandria, over Thanksgiving weekend. We were all very excited about this, having been intrigued by Hypatia ever since we watched the segment of Carl Sagan's Cosmos on her - the same clip which apparently inspired Alejandro Amenábar, the director of and force behind Agora.

A few nights ago, Sprout had their monthly spaghetti dinner. Every month is a different theme, and I had been looking forward to this month's - mythology - with what might be considered excessive enthusiasm. The evening was heavy on puppetry, with an accordion-accompanied retelling of an old Yiddish folk tale, as well as a surrealist examination of a precious American myth: the failure of Reconstruction. (I am now tempted to go off on a rant about the election of 1876 - one of my favorites rants! - but I will save that for later.) There was also a performance by Molly Allis whose new album is a transformation myth. It's such a fertile topic, with so many people having so much to contribute, that they may even do a reprise (a retelling?) in the spring.

I went home last weekend, and I was excited for a chance to snuggle my cat, cook with my mom, and engage in the endless after dinner conversations my family manages so frequently to have \-- you know, the kind where your butt gets sore from sitting still and you go for thirds and then fourths because you've just had that much time to digest, but you can't quite bring yourself to say, "Okay, that's enough dissecting of Dr. Who/Beatles' rockband/the decline of rationality in modern political thought."

Over the last month or so, the folks at Sprout have been putting together a walking machine based off of Theo Jansen's models.

A few weeks ago, I spent the afternoon at Parts and Crafts, the learning-by-doing oriented summer camp a friend of mine co-founded. I wanted to try out a style of teaching I've been thinking a lot about lately. Inspired by role-playing and puzzle-hunting, I want to create expansive, immersive learning experiences which allow kids to "re-invent the wheel" as well as to see the cultural context in which technology is created and scientific advances are made. It's my hope to incorporate into each "experience" two or more of the following: science and technology, philosophical and political history, arts and literature, themes of social justice.

A few months ago I was browsing through a comic book store with my friends Orli and Skim. You'd think a nerd like me would be a devourer of comic books/graphic novels, but I've actually only read a few series. Although those series (Y: The Last Man, Sandman) & Transmetropolitan, for the curious) have been pretty roundly fabulous, I've just never started reading regularly. In fact, at that point I'd never bought a single comic book.

I ask a lot of questions. I get curious about things I don't understand and, fortunately or unfortunately, I don't understand a lot of things around me. Sometimes I get lucky and I'm surrounded by people who can answer my questions. (For instance, last night at Sprout, I had, "How does a chop saw work?" and "What is polynomial time?" and "What is in this delicious soup?" answered quite satisfactorily.) Sometimes people don't know and just shrug. It is in these moments of great need that I turn to google.

As a psychologist, I find it extremely frustrating when people attempt to explain away gender differences as genetic or evolutionary, rather than exploring the role of socialization by an imperfect society. For one thing, it gives people an excuse not to confront injustice. After all, they're just doing what they're biologically programmed to do. For another, it's frequently shoddy science.

The other day I was visiting my friend's summer camp when I saw a young camper fiddling around at the electronics table. She showed me the bracelet she had made by twisting wires together in patterns, and said she liked to have "a different take" on electronics from the boys at the camp. After talking a little bit about conductive thread (her mind, it was blown) we set about making a bracelet that incorporated a basic circuit. From our experiences, this is how you do it:

I've been an avid science fiction fan since I read Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time" when I was a teensy one. Since then I've read Asimov and Bradbury, Le Guin and Heinlein, and countless others, and despite the feats of imagination and storytelling they've achieved, I have to say, you seldom see a depiction of an alien that beats real life earth creatures for their strangeness.

The transition from Bush to Obama has been a strange one for me. There is a certain ease to opposing someone whose ideology is so different from yours. There is no need to be subtle, to try and tease apart where things are going wrong - you know why they are doing this thing that you hate: because they don't value what you value.

When it comes to social psychology, everyone seems to know two names: Milgram and Zimbardo. It's funny, because they both studied essentially the same thing - under what circumstances otherwise normal, compassionate people will act to hurt others.

The ever-insightful Echidne has up a though-provoking post on genealogy and how patriarchal naming practices cause women to "disappear into the midst of time".

I've been fascinated with volcanoes ever since I was a little kid, so of course the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland has got me pretty excited. This picture from APOD is absolutely glorious:

*Today is Ada Lovelace day, which means its time to celebrate women in technology and science! If you have the time, consider writing a blog or facebook post about a woman who has inspired you. Otherwise, feel free to browse the posts at Finding Ada and learn more about the women who've advanced our knowledge of the world. You can start with my post below, about pioneering cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock.*

The other night I gave a talk at one of Sprout's Spaghetti dinners. I thought I'd throw it up here for everyone's enjoyment. I've edited it a little bit, because a good portion of the presentation was two experiments I did with/on the audience, which doesn't translate, but aside from that and the inevitable rambling that happens when I speak in public, this is pretty much the talk I gave. Watch for asterisks (\*), they'll be links to pdfs of the studies I'm citing.

With a subject as complex and influential as Alan Turing, how could this biography fail to be fascinating? The premise of the book is an examination of Turing as an outsider, someone prone to working alone, a trait which helped him come up with outside-the-box ideas of universal machines. It explores Turing's deep-seated sense of isolation and to what extent it was caused by his position as an unashamed but closeted gay man and how he feared his homosexuality would be used to discredit his ideas. As Turing once wrote in a syllogism:

Last night, after much fun during the day, Orli, Russ, Keith, Cora and I sat down to play Morton's List. Now, for those of you who've never heard of this game, it's basically a list of hundreds of different things to do, and you roll a set of dice to randomly select your task for the evening. The trick to the game is that you can't back out, or switch to another task, unless it's physically impossible to complete the first one. The tasks are very varied - the last two times we played we got "relax" and "protest something".

I've had a couple of really good conversations lately about the value of doing. By doing, I mean creating: baking, sewing, hammering, soldering, writing, programming, composing. Wires in your hands, words on your lips, dough beneath your fingernails - these are all reminders that you can still influence some small part of the world. That you can make some tangible change in your surroundings. In a world where people are encouraged to acquiesce to conventional wisdom, to give in to frustration and not fight the system, and to ignore the suffering going on in the world because "there's nothing you can do to help", simply getting your hands dirty can be a kind of revolution.

Hi everyone! Welcome to my blog. I wanted to put this post up as a place for people to comment on the blog as a whole. I've written the code for the blog from scratch, so there may very well be problems that emerge. Please let me know if you have any issues, and your feedback is always welcome.