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Jonathan N. Katz

@jnkatz.bsky.social

1.8K followers 1.7K following 7 posts

Professor at Caltech. Social Sciences and Statistics.

Videos

Economics 41%

Political science 38%

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

jessamyn @librarian.bsky.social · Mar 29

Every Californian with an email address and an internet connection can now visit California’s Bookshelf and access more than 300,000 ebooks and audiobooks.

www.library.ca.gov/uploads/2025...

Two women standing on top of a gnarled ancient pine tree on Sentinel Dome with a mountain range viewable in the background

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · Mar 22

Innovation is afoot in the ski industry.

BOA boots are changing skiing ... and ski racing.
www.skimag.com/gear/boa-ski...

BOA Boots Are Changing Skiing—So Why Won’t Racers Wear Them?

Skiers swear by BOA technology, yet the world’s best racers refuse to make the switch. Do they know something we don’t?

www.skimag.com

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Reposted by Nathan Nunn, Jon H. Fiva, Jonathan N. Katz , and 2 more Nathan Nunn, Jon H. Fiva, Jonathan N. Katz, Todd Landman, Bruno Martorano

Vincent Pons @vinpons.bsky.social · Mar 13

We are very happy to publish the "National Elections Database," including the results of 1,023 presidential and 2,962 parliamentary elections conducted worldwide since 1946!
www.nationalelectionsdatabase.com
with Benjamin Marx and Vincent Rollet

Overview

National Elections Database

www.nationalelectionsdatabase.com

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · Mar 7

538-style poll collection has now been recreated by a small group of fans and former staff. all fully transparent and public now. return of live public aggregation is imminent

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Polls

docs.google.com

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Reposted by Monica G. Turner, Tracey J. Woodruff, Joshua A. Tucker , and 9 more Monica G. Turner, Tracey J. Woodruff, Joshua A. Tucker, Donald Tomaskovic‐Devey, Jane E. Fountain, Mark Hallerberg, Jonathan N. Katz, Todd Landman, James M. Graham, Lynette Shultz, J. Warner, Tobias Barrington Wolff

John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · Mar 1

I got laid off today, with the rest of 18F.

18F was an elite federal software shop. We made gov't websites work better, more efficiently for the American people. We saved taxpayers from getting screwed over by contractors. And were fired for it.

We made this website to tell our story:
18f.org

We're not done yet | 18F

18f.org

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

ICPSR @icpsr.bsky.social · Feb 21

#UMISR: Preserve At-Risk Government Data!

DataLumos, an open-access archive at ICPSR, is working to preserve/share critical govt data. Help keep the data accessible.

Donate: datalumos.org
Explore & contribute: myumi.ch/egrbW
Volunteer: [email protected]

#DataPreservation #SocialScience

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · Feb 14

Rdatasets is a collection of 2300 free and documented datasets in CSV format. It's a great resource for teaching and exploration!

The new `get_dataset()` function from the {marginaleffects} 📦 allows you to search and load them directly in #Rstats.

vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/ar...

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Steven S Smith @profstevensmith.bsky.social · Dec 30

Looking for free, short readings on elements of congressional politics for your course? Check this out. stevesnotes.substack.com

Steve's Notes on Congressional Politics | Steven S. Smith | Substack

Insightful briefs on the politics of the the U.S. Congress. Click to read Steve's Notes on Congressional Politics, by Steven S. Smith, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

stevesnotes.substack.com

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Noah Greifer @noahgreifer.bsky.social · Dec 14

If you have an issue where Dropbox is constantly syncing while @posit.co #RStudio is open, one solution is to run the following code in Terminal:

find "Dropbox" -type d -name ".Rproj.user" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' folder; do xattr -w com.dropbox.ignored 1 "$folder"; done

#rstats

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Jonathan N. Katz @jnkatz.bsky.social · Dec 14

I have even voted on one.

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

R. Michael Alvarez @rmichaelalvarez.bsky.social · Dec 11

Last week, Jacob Morrier and I presented about work that dramatically speeds up probabilistic record linkage using GPU acceleration. Documentation and code for Fast-ER is available, fast-er.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

But better yet, watch the video!
youtu.be/wsv__0a_KDY?...

Fast ER GPU Accelerated Record Linkage in Python by Dr R Michael Alvarez and Jacob Morrier CalTech

YouTube video by Data Analytics Colloquium

youtu.be

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Reposted by Emily K. Vraga, Jonathan N. Katz

David Karol @davidkarol.bsky.social · Dec 10

Voters are mostly partisans who rationalize, swing voters are often ignorant and voters project their views onto their candidates. But this has always been true! The media was better once, but there was no golden age. Most of their grandparents did not read Walter Lippmann's column.

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · Dec 10

we're cooked

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · Dec 10

we're cooked

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz, Lamar Pierce

Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · Dec 9

Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990

How has the risk of dying from cancer changed in the United States?

To understand this, we can look at national cancer death rates in the United States.

The gray line shows the crude rate, which is the rate of deaths from cancer per 100,000 people. It has risen between 1950 and 1990 and has fallen slightly since then.

However, cancer death rates rise sharply with age, and the age of the US population has increased since 1950, so we would expect cancer death rates to rise for that reason alone.

What if we adjust for the increased age of the US population?

The red line, the age-standardized rate, shows this. It shows the cancer death rate if the age structure of the US population was held constant throughout.

This shows a slight rise until 1990 and then a significant decline; rates have fallen by one-third.

This means Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990.

This comes from several factors: better screening and earlier diagnosis, medical advances in cancer treatments, and public health efforts to reduce risk factors like smoking and exposure to carcinogens.

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · Dec 6

I'm teaching a grad seminar this winter on Prediction for Decision-making. We'll look at what it means to make good predictions for decision-making from various angles, with a focus on decisions for & about people.

Reading list: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/12/06/n...

Suggestions welcome!

New Course: Prediction for (Individualized) Decision-making | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

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Reposted by Sam Harper, Jonathan N. Katz, Ewan Carr

Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · Dec 1

Our JSS article is out!

And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned.

www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Magnus B Rasmussen @magnusrasmussen.bsky.social · Nov 30

Please fix your handle and bio before you start following people.

Makes it a lot easier to know whether people should follow you or not.

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · Nov 29

New notebook:

Sample Size Calculations in #RStats : Money and Power

arelbundock.com/posts/money_...

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz, Wei Yang, Vijay Barve

Hadley Wickham @hadley.nz · Nov 29

If you're interested in trying out LLMs in #rstats but don't know where to begin, I've added a few two vignettes to elmer: elmer.tidyverse.org/articles/elm... and elmer.tidyverse.org/articles/pro...

Getting started with elmer

elmer.tidyverse.org

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Colin Camerer @cfcamerer.bsky.social · Nov 27

Great to see @aleximas.bsky.social and gang of coauthors measuring salience *independently of choice* with an early well-trained algorithm (from @caltech.edu btw) that predicts visual attention for any image (a la Li and me QJE academic.oup.com/qje/article-...)

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Reposted by Gijs Schumacher, Jonathan N. Katz

Andrew Little @anthlittle.bsky.social · Nov 27

After a review process so long and intensive that the title changed twice, I'm excited/relieved that "How to Distinguish Motivated Reasoning from Bayesian Updating" is accepted at @polbehavior.bsky.social.

osf.io/preprints/os...

Here is how it's relevant for your Thanksgiving dinner 🦃👇

OSF

osf.io

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · Nov 27

How does Approximate Bayesian Computation *ABC) work? @rabaath.bsky.social has a classic nice simple intro the ABC using the problem of infering the number of socks in a sample of laundry. There's a movie and a page with all the code. www.sumsar.net/blog/2015/07...

Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Socks of Karl Broman: The Movie

This is a screencast of my UseR! 2015 presentation: Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Socks of Karl Broman. Based on the original blog post it is a quick’n’dirty …

www.sumsar.net

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Jennifer N. Victor @jenvictor.bsky.social · Nov 27

Yes, it was an anti-incumbent environment, *globally*—but the US had weathered the pandemic economy so much better than everywhere else, it was totally reasonably to think that the incumbent party could prevail. It was not a forgone conclusion. It was close, but still decisive against incumbents.

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Carlisle Rainey 👨‍💻📊📚 @carlislerainey.bsky.social · Nov 26

Boosting Anton's starter pack to #StatsSky and #polisky. Lots of people worth following here.

bsky.app/starter-pac...

Political Methodology

Join the conversation

bsky.app

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · Nov 26

Since it is inefficient to attempt to educate every reviewer individually, I am yeeting into your feed this clear paper from Gelman, Hill, and Yajima on how Bayesians can do even better than correcting for multiple comparisons. arxiv.org/abs/0907.2478

Why we (usually) don't have to worry about multiple comparisons

Applied researchers often find themselves making statistical inferences in settings that would seem to require multiple comparisons adjustments. We challenge the Type I error paradigm that underlies t...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Stephanie Wang @sweiwang.bsky.social · Nov 26

Now that @jacksonmatthewo.bsky.social has arrived, it’s a real network

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz, Aswan Aswan

Hadley Wickham @hadley.nz · Nov 25

I'm writing up a brief history of the tidyverse? What do you want to know about it? #rstats

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Jonathan N. Katz @jnkatz.bsky.social · Nov 25

Could you please add me? Thanks.

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Derek Willis @dwillis.bsky.social · Nov 25

OpenElections update: we've posted official precinct results data for 17 of Michigan's 83 counties (20%) and will continue to keep rolling. You can help and we can get you started!

github.com/openelection...

2024 General Election Precinct Results · Issue #69 · openelections/openelections-data-mi

Using Tabula, OCR or whatever method you can, parse precinct-level results for the following counties. Original sources are in individual county files in the sources-mi repository. The goal is to c...

github.com

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Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz, Peter K. Enns