Xavier Marquez's year-end list of recommended reading.

Interesting simple analysis of Reddit data by looking at count of news article submissions on (popular) news subreddits. The start of the pandemic stands out. Other changes and missing data issues are visible.

Jennifer Weiner on the benefits of reading Harlequin novels: "But those [Harlequin romance novels], for all their soft-core covers and happily-ever-afters, were quietly and not-so-quietly subversive. They taught readers that sexual pleasure was something women could not just hope for but insist upon. They shaped my interactions with boys and men. They helped make me a feminist." Side note: Asking the New York Times website for this page (just the html page) yields a giant heap of garbage (317K, mostly javascript). The article itself is about 7.4K of text.

Simple analysis of Spotify's business model.

"Reference BLEU implementation that auto-downloads test sets and reports a version string to facilitate cross-lab comparisons."

Cividis colormap looks the same for colorblind and non-colorblind users.

An open-access e-book. It's quite good! " Description Scholars of all stripes are turning their attention to materials that represent enormous opportunities for the future of humanistic inquiry. The purpose of this book is to impart the concepts that underlie the mathematics they are likely to encounter and to unfold the notation in a way that removes that particular barrier completely. This book is a primer for developing the skills to enable humanist scholars to address complicated technical material with confidence. This book, to put it plainly, is concerned with the things that the author of a technical article knows, but isn’t saying. Like any field, mathematics operates under a regime of shared assumptions, and it is our purpose to elucidate some of those assumptions for the newcomer. The individual subjects we tackle are (in order): logic and proof, discrete mathematics, abstract algebra, probability and statistics, calculus, and differential equations. This is not at all the order in which these subjects are usually taught in school curricula, and indeed, it is possible to take a course of study that does not include all of them. Our ordering is borne of our own sense of how best to convey the concepts of mathematics to humanists, and is, like mathematics itself, strongly cumulative."

A domain emphasis of the Data Science major.

"Copyrights for books, news, and other types of media are a critical mechanism to encourage creativity and innovation. Yet economic analyses continue to be rare, partly due to a lack of experimental variation in modern copyright laws. This paper exploits a change in copyright laws as a result of World War II to examine the effects of copyrights on science. In 1943, the US Book Republication Program (BRP) granted US publishers temporary licenses to republish the exact content of German-owned science books. Using new data on citations, we find that this program triggered a large increase in citations to German-owned science books. This increase was driven by a significant reduction in access costs: Each 10 percent decline in the price of BRP book was associated with a 43 percent increase in citations. To investigate the mechanism by which lower book prices influence science, we collect data on library holdings across the United States. We find that lower prices helped to distribute BRP books across US libraries, including less affluent institutions. Analyses of the locations of citing authors further indicate that citations increased most for locations that gained access to BRP books. Results are confirmed by two alternative measures of scientific output: new PhDs and US patents that use knowledge in BRP books."

Implementation details for Certificate Transparency.