Since I just railed against Congress for being a bit two-faced about privacy I thought some rud.is site disclosure would be in order. At present, third-party tracking is limited to: Something in my WordPress configuration adding a DNS pre-fetch for fonts.googleapis.com. There are a few more other DNS pre-fetches that I’m also going to try… Continue reading
Post Category → Commentary
Does Congress Really Care About Your Privacy?
I apologize up-front for using bad words in this post. Said bad words include “Facebook”, “Mark Zuckerberg” and many referrals to entities within the U.S. Government. Given the topic, it cannot be helped. I’ve also left the R tag on this despite only showing some ggplot2 plots and Markdown tables. See the end of the… Continue reading
Tragic Documentation
NOTE: If the usual aggregators are picking this up and there are humans curating said aggregators, this post is/was not intended as something to go into the “data science” aggregation sites. Just personal commentary with code in the event someone stumbles across it and wanted to double check me. These “data-dives” help me cope with… Continue reading
The 🍊 Resistance
I need to be up-front about something: I’m somewhat partially at fault for 🍊 being elected. While I did not vote for him, I could not in any good conscience vote for his Democratic rival. I wrote in a ticket that had one Democrat and one Republican on it. The “who” doesn’t matter and my… Continue reading
North Carolina’s Neighborhood
UPDATE: I’m glad I’m not the only one who was skeptical of this project: http://andrewgelman.com/2017/01/02/constructing-expert-indices-measuring-electoral-integrity-reply-pippa-norris/ When I saw the bombastic headline “North Carolina is no longer classified as a democracy” pop up in my RSS feeds today (article link: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article122593759.html) I knew it’d help feed polarization bear that’s been getting fat on ‘Murica for the… Continue reading
The Actual, Über, Ultimate Fake News List
It is surprisingly shorter (or longer if you grok regular expressions) than you think it might be: http[s]://.*. Like it or not, bias is everywhere and tis woefully insidious. “Mainstream media” [MSM]; Alt-left; Alt-right; and, everything in-between creates and promotes “fake” news. Hourly. It always has. Due to the speed at which [dis]information travels now,… Continue reading
Jumping on the “Banned” Wagon
>_The parent proposed a committee made up of parents and teachers of different cultural backgrounds come up with a list of books that are inclusive for all students._ Where’s the [ACLU](https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/artistic-expression/banned-books)? They’d be right there if this was an alt-right’er asking to ban books with salacious content they deem (rightly or wrongly) “inappropriate” or “harmful”… Continue reading
The Most Important Hashtag for 2017
When something pops up in the news, on Twitter, Facebook or even (ugh) Gab claiming or teasing findings based on data I believe it’s more important than ever to reply with some polite text and a `#showmethedata` hashtag. We desperately needed it this year and we’re absolutely going to need it in 2017 and beyond…. Continue reading