Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 14h

nifty survey methods paper — uses transition matrices to try to detect lazy/careless responses automatically, rather than manually encoding careless response patterns (e.g., looking for 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1 or other patterns)

www.hermanaguinis.com/pdf/ORMLazR....

www.hermanaguinis.com

Reposted by Mark Rieke

Adam L @lauretig.bsky.social · 2d

There’s a Stairway to Heaven, but a Highway to Hell. This implies Heaven is a walkable community, and Hell is a congested interstate.

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 1d

~8hrs, so the perfect backing track for meeting-light days

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Reposted by Mark Rieke

Friend Potato @sentientpotato.bsky.social · 2d

I have been using it for decades, I will NOT cede the em dash to AI

Casey is comforble @caseytheotter.bsky.social · 2d

I hate that the em dash has become a sign of using generative AI. I've known how to use them since forever! It's stolen valour!

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Reposted by Mark Rieke

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 5d

Incredible @perrybaconjr.bsky.social interview with Chris Van Hollen

newrepublic.com/article/2013...

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 5d

Babe Ruth calling his home run

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 6d

I’ll give this a fuller read later, but the framing of “uncertainty is important” is a good one! There are only 438 congressional districts, and the electorate changes cycle to cycle — we can make decisions under uncertainty, but pretending it doesn’t exist is a disservice!

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 6d

Updated paper with @adambonica.bsky.social w/ many more measures of candidate ideology

Mass politics is volatile & uncertain these days, and you should take very confident pundit/consultant claims about What Candidates Should Do™ with a big grain of salt

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mjih7...

Reposted by Mark Rieke

Stephen Wild @stephenjwild.bsky.social · 7d

A meme with two panels. In panel 1 the woman looks disgusted. In panel 2 intrigued.

Text, panel 1: fake data.

Text, panel 2: silicon sample

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Reposted by Mark Rieke

Amanda Litman @amandalitman.bsky.social · 9d

40% of state leg races went uncontested in 2024.

@runforsomething.net is aggressively recruiting for 2026 - we can't leave a single place up for grabs.

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 10d

I ended up figuring it out! The factory wipe was a (semi-reasonable) backup because the first thing I setup on the new laptop was arc / vscode, so it was basically fresh

Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 10d

update: this appears to be a VSCode bug in a recent release. Downgraded from 1.104.2 to 1.103.2 and things are peachy

Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 11d

pinging the #pydata / #databs hivemind — i cannot for the life of me get vscode to select the interpreter properly on a new laptop. It shows up in the dropdown as a “workspace” instead of recommended. Any rec’s?

I may factory wipe the computer because I’ve lost most of Saturday to this lol

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 10d

Yeah everything works fine in the terminal --- I've managed to figure out that it's some sort of VSCode issue. Based on googling around, it sounds like VSCode is (for whatever reason) not recognizing that the venv is a part of the open folder, so it tries to setup a multi-folder workspace that fails

Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 11d

yeah, I’ve swapped to uv for everything new at this point, but it seems like this is a vscode issue (bjorks with both poetry/uv managed projects)

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 11d

pinging the #pydata / #databs hivemind — i cannot for the life of me get vscode to select the interpreter properly on a new laptop. It shows up in the dropdown as a “workspace” instead of recommended. Any rec’s?

I may factory wipe the computer because I’ve lost most of Saturday to this lol

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 12d

True “big data” problems are very few and far between — even when you have lots of observations, you probably have a “lots of small data” problem and just yee-haw’ing a correlation machine at it with no causal theory is probably a recipe for fooling yourself

Paul Hünermund @p-hunermund.com · 13d

Any data science program without DAGs and causal inference is a failure. We don’t need more grads chasing spurious correlations in big data with zero business sense. Prove me wrong.

Chelsea Parlett @chelseaparlett.bsky.social · 13d

Data Science programs often put too little emphasis on causal inference, and it’s hurting their graduates on the job market! The econometrics people are coming for your jobs lol

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Reposted by Mark Rieke

Nathaniel Rakich @baseballot.bsky.social · 12d

The Harvard Political Analytics Conference looks like it has some great speakers, but it's really disappointing to see 23 men and only 4 women on the program. You don't have to go to any special effort to think of several excellent political analysts who happen to be women.

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Reposted by Mark Rieke

amy brown @amybrown.xyz · 12d

Electric Avenue came on in the car on the way to daycare and my kids went apeshit. it’s the best song they’ve ever heard

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 13d

thank fucking god

www.koco.com/article/ryan...

Ryan Walters to resign as Oklahoma state superintendent for private sector job

State Superintendent Ryan Walters announced Wednesday that he will resign from office and take a job in the private sector.

www.koco.com

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Reposted by Mark Rieke

Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · 15d

Tell me something you do when you code that other people would tell you that you shouldn't do.

Tell me the rules you break!

I'll go first: I work in untitled files in the wrong project directories all the time. Like, all the time. Yes, I do tend to lose things 😂 #databs #rstats #python

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 16d

wonderful, emotional, shambles, etcetera

Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 16d

the next project that’ll consume my consciousness for a few months

(was telling my wife about it in the kitchen and needed to get it written down ~somewhere~ before it leaked out of my brain)

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 16d

do you think iger read elliott's article

www.businessinsider.com/jimmy-kimmel...

Jimmy Kimmel is returning to ABC on Tuesday, Disney says

"Jimmy Kimmel Live!" will return to ABC on Tuesday after the late-night host's comments on Charlie Kirk's death caused the network to pull the show.

www.businessinsider.com

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Mark Rieke @markjrieke.bsky.social · 16d

breaching containment (good)

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Reposted by Mark Rieke

Danielle Navarro @djnavarro.net · 17d

Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again

Some notes on probability judgement – Notes from a data witch

For the love of fuck, literally nobody thinks that 20% of the population is transgender. Please stop sharing that ridiculous YouGov statistic

blog.djnavarro.net

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Reposted by Mark Rieke

Jon Mellon @jonmellon.bsky.social · 18d

I would argue this is actually about Bayesian inference

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