"#BIPOC18 is a collective of scholars of C18 culture committed to centering problems of structural racism and legacies of colonization as they inform both the theory and practice of eighteenth-century studies."

"For some varieties of cassava, complete detoxification is an effortful, complex, unintuitive process. Joe Henrich famously argued that the practice could only spread through blind, conformist imitation. But what if cassava just tastes better that way?"

Mark Liberman on Stanley Fish.

Starts with questions I'm interested in (in the context of the text industry): "Why are some industries dominated worldwide by a handful of firms? Why is the size distribution of firms within most industries highly skewed?"

Gelman on (not) using BIC for estimating number of clusters in a mixture model. "I think BIC is fundamentally different from AIC, WAIC, LOO, etc, in that all those other things are estimates of out-of-sample prediction error, while BIC is some weird thing that under certain ridiculous special cases corresponds to an approximation to the log marginal probability."

"Google Suppresses Memo Revealing Plans to Closely Track Search Users in China The company forced employees to delete the document, which stated that a Chinese partner would have “unilateral access” to user data."

Write for the web without wasting space and time.

Typeface for programming.

"""Expert opinion and judgment enter into the practice of statistical inference and decision-making in numerous ways. Indeed, there is essentially no aspect of scientific investigation in which judgment is not required. Judgment is necessarily subjective, but should be made as carefully, as objectively, and as scientifically as possible. Elicitation of expert knowledge concerning an uncertain quantity expresses that knowledge in the form of a (subjective) probability distribution for the quantity. Such distributions play an important role in statistical inference (for example as prior distributions in a Bayesian analysis) and in evidence-based decision-making (for example as expressions of uncertainty regarding inputs to a decision model). This article sets out a number of practices through which elicitation can be made as rigorous and scientific as possible. One such practice is to follow a recognized protocol that is designed to address and minimize the cognitive biases that experts are prone to when making probabilistic judgments. We review the leading protocols in the field, and contrast their different approaches to dealing with these biases through the medium of a detailed case study employing the SHELF protocol. The article ends with discussion of how to elicit a joint probability distribution for multiple uncertain quantities, which is a challenge for all the leading protocols. Supplementary materials for this article are available online."""

"This writing is a collection of small notes (largely from Lee’s Introduction to Smooth Manifolds and Introduction to Riemannian Manifolds) that I find useful as a reference on this subject."

"A growing share of Americans are reading e-books on tablets and smartphones rather than dedicated e-readers, but print books remain much more popular than books in digital formats"

Privacy-preserving settings for nginx.

Block traffic to tech giants at the router level. "Streamlined version of the tech in the Goodbye Big Five Series gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five"