de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity

And here's a thread of cool things I worked on in my 1.25 years at NEH that I was able to release publicly

As a reminder, here's a quick (over) estimate of how much each American has spent over their lifetime to support the work of the NEH

Yesterday was my last day with NEH. All the best to my fellow union members who were also involuntarily separated. All the best to those who were required to stay — keep the 🔥 burning. Join, support, start a union ✊

The original piece, on the other hand, is very interesting

Increasingly my mental model of corporate LLMs and how they are being used is a less interesting version of I Am Sitting in a Room

Scott is right — my numbers ignore this distribution to make things simpler. By my calculations, most people would get back much more than they actually put in.

Is this trickle down economics? 💁‍♂️🦋

Here are NEH appropriations adjusted for inflation. In real dollars, the agency's highest funding levels were over $600 million (2024 dollars) in the late 1970s and have been flat for the past 30 years. NEH staff have been excellent stewards of public funds, doing so much with increasingly less.

In FY2024, NEH received $207 million in appropriations — its highest ever. Here's a graph of its funding trajectory over the agency's existence. In talks of efficiency, however, we should account for the real value of those dollars...

Well worth a think: cumulative per capita contributions to #NEH funding vs. the incredible #humanities impact we bring to all 56 states/jurisdictions that we've been posting about here.

NEH staff are responsible stewards of #taxpayer $$, and the benefits for the American public are incalculable.

NEH is funded by the loose change in your sofa.

Not exactly the same, but sort of like this? bsky.app/profile/btsk...

As an elder millennial, I could trade my lifetime of tax contributions to the NEH for one month of Netflix and have just enough left over to get some avocado toast if I split it with two other people

In my year at NEH, we did a lot of other data work more directly tied to humanities and agency needs, of course, and were building infrastructure for cool projects in the coming years. These projects represent just small bits in service of that primary work that we thought might also help others.

Code to convert large US Census state, county, and congressional district shapefiles to lightweight TOPOJSON files for web use. Again, we made this so as to include territories where most solutions do not. Both unprojected and projected files are in the repo. github.com/nehgov/usa_t...

Code to make equal area tile choropleth maps in GeoJSON and TOPOJSON that include territories as well as states. We needed to make these since most existing solutions don't include territories and/or require the use of a specific language (e.g., R). Data files in repo. github.com/nehgov/state...

An R package, ripeds, that allows users to interact with the complete IPEDS data system in an API-like way. Importantly, it allows users to batch download all complete data files and interact with a local directory. More on this in another thread. nehgov.github.io/ripeds/

With most of my NEH colleagues, I was RIF'ed last week. It has been an honor to work with so many talented and dedicated public servants as the agency's first (and for now, last) data scientist. Here's some incidental and public software, code, and data that came about as part of that work:

Currently running to test and it does take a minute, so probably don't wait to last minute if you want the whole thing...

Also remembering I originally wrote this out of anger at the 2013 shutdown. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Higher Ed friends: if you need IPEDS and fear losing access with a government shutdown, here's a script I wrote that will let you download the entire thing (or select files) github.com/btskinner/do...