Viewing profile — kem

I'm speechless, but also habituating to that feeling. It's as if we reincarnated oil barons from the early 1900s and appointed them all to lead the government without telling them …

Pay-to-publish has its own problems. I think the current model has issues, and there should be a movement in general toward open dissemination of research, but I'm not sure the PLo…

Not bad to think about this, but I think much smaller changes would have huge effects. Thinks like approval or rank voting, for example. I don't understand why these minor changes …

I think there's a bigger problem the article is getting at, that people are kind of missing or downplaying, which is the culture around math skill acquisition and ability. It's obv…

I appreciate this article being posted, and have the utmost respect for NumPy developers. The urgency and discrepancy between use of certain important open-source libraries, and th…

There are pretty low-hanging fruit out there, though. Approval voting or ranking are almost universally agreed to be better than what we have (in most places--some places do have t…

fwiw, it's important to remember that there's a lot of diversity involved. In my university, for example, the library pushes hard for movement toward open public standards. I've al…

Not really an expert in this particular area, but the research I'm aware of kind of suggests if anything the opposite is true, depending on what you mean by "the ability to learn n…

Your point is important, although I think farmers' political impact exceeds their voting power, especially in GOP-voting communities. I know from personal experience that this issu…

Regulatory capture, advertently or inadvertently, is one of the elephants in the healthcare room. I'm tired of all the discussion (on both sides) totally ignoring this issue.

I agree with the "not necessarily" part, but one thing that concerns me is in seeing large, critical institutions, like large hospitals and universities, outsourcing critical infra…

"as long as there are good competitors around"--that's the key, and not something I necessarily trust to be the case. Net neutrality, for example, would be a non-issue if there wer…

FWIW, I think now technically indexing can either be 1- or 0-based.

As someone who used Python and R, and also Julia, my take on Julia has changed over time. My overall assessment is that yes, it's definitely worth getting your feet wet with. It ha…

FWIW, I'm not sure why infidelity is so stigmatized. With all the things going on in the world that seems so minor in the grand scheme of things. Also, presumably the secretary is …

I've published in mathematical/statistical areas as well as applied ones, and my sense is that interpersonal difficulties are more acute, but also more transparent, in math and sta…

There's kind of "converse" problems too, that I think is the focus of the linked article, in that there's an epidemic of hype in academics, math, and the sciences. So it's not just…

... this is like walking through a minefield, but here it goes. A lot of the illnesses they're talking about in the article, like IBS, lower back pain, and CFS have a strong psycho…

Legislators who stand up to nonsense like this need to be supported for protecting children against an overreaching state. The law is absurd in what it targets, but even if childre…

I had a similar reaction. The headlines might as well been "extremely skilled climber makes wildly risky bet and lives to tell the tale." Sure he's skilled; sure he is strategic. W…

Survivorship bias needs to be taught in schools at a young age, like in kindergarten. It's so insidious.

On the other hand, I didn't think of it until I read this. It made me a little satisfied, and then it made me quite angry.

One of the things I wondered when I read this story is if it would be possible to develop software that would somehow circumvent this type of situation. For example, using autoenco…

But this isn't about the NSA, it's about state-level secretaries of state offices.

That's similar to my take here. Whether or not Trump actively colluded with Russia to affect election results, he's still behaving abnormally about the issue. I mean, if you step b…