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Why do so few humans kill themselves?
The always-excellent @ctrlcreep eloquently states a puzzle in 140 characters that it took me lots of words to express previously. This puzzle is expressed at the outset of C. A. Soper’s artic…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 658 posts.
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I got arrested in Kazakhstan and represented myself in court
When I was arrested in San Francisco, I ended up spending a night in prison naked, in solitary confinement. But, I have a dirty secret: it…
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Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart
This data sculpture depicts a map of housing prices in San Francisco. It's a map of the city, torn at the seams. The height of each area represents the average price per square foot for recent home sales. Where neighboring areas are close in value they are connected, but if neighboring areas are too far
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Why I’m Suing the US Government
Today I filed a lawsuit against the US government, challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 means that you can be sued or prosecuted for accessing, speaking about, and tinkering with digital media and technologies that you have paid for. This violates our First Amendment rights…
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Why I won’t give talks about being a woman in tech
You can now find it at /posts/2016/why-i-wont-talk-about-being-a-woman-in-tech-and-neither-should-you/ . If you don't do anything, you'll be redirected automatically (if your browser supports that).
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Why California is so expensive: It’s not just the weather, it’s the regulation
The state of California has some of the most expensive housing in the country. In new research, Kristoffer (Kip) Jackson investigates why homes in the Golden State have come to cost so much. He finds that it's down to how land use is regulated; each new land-use regulation reduces a Californian city's housing supply by
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Cyberpower crushes coup
Rewriting the rulebook on coups, time to add cyberpower
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Is duckduckgo.com partially enforcing the “celebrity threesome injunction”?
The "celebrity threesome injuction" forbids publication in England and Wales of the identities of a famous married couple who reportedly had sex with someone else. In other words, nothing bad, or important.
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Child and Infant Mortality
Child mortality remains one of the world’s largest problems and is a painful reminder of work yet to be done. With global data on where, when, and how child deaths occur, we can accelerate efforts to prevent them.
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Is Ego-Depletion a Replicable Effect?
Abstract It has been a common practice in social psychology to publish only significant results. As a result, success rates in the published literature do not provide empirical evidence for the existence of a phenomenon. A recent meta-analysis suggested that ego-depletion is a much weaker effect than the published…
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Simple questions to help reduce AI hype
AI is a young field full of amazing potential. This mystery and lack of understanding allows for hype to grow unchecked.
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Make the Web Work for Everyone
Updated 2016/07/22: Commenters found a few data errors (thanks!) which have now been corrected. Millions of websites have compatibility problems on one or more of the major browsers, leading to ...
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Who Owns the Federal Reserve Banks?
Is the Fed public or private? It's both: the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations.
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I tried to watch Game of Thrones legally in France, Here is what happened
As many of my friends in France started watching the last season of Game Of Thrones: I decided to start watching it too.
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Living, in Limbo
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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Bulgaria Passes a Law Requiring Open Source
Less than two years after my presentation titled “Open source for the government”, and almost exactly one year after I became advisor to…
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Researchers use light to coax stem cells to repair teeth (2014)
Noninvasive laser therapy could radically shift dental treatment and lead to a host of broader clinical applications in regenerative medicine
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FOIA Improvement Act Signed into Law
President Obama signed into law the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Improvement Act of 2016 yesterday. The Act places a 25 year limit on the use of the deliberative process exemption, codifies a presumption of openness, and makes various procedural improvements in the FOIA. The Department of Justice summarized its…
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Google collects metadata from Android phones
[German]It seems that Google has established a surveillance function for Android phones. They are claiming the right, to collect and store meta data from incoming/outgoing phone calls and SMS from…
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The Fining of Black America
We analyzed the cities most likely to generate substantial revenues from fines. The best indicator that a government will levy excessive fines? If a large proportion of the city's citizens are Black.
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What happens when you try to publish a failure to replicate in 2015/2016
Anyone who has talked to me in the last year would have heard me complain about my 8-times-failure-to-replicate which nobody wants to publis...
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Fewer Than 1000 Brits Googled “What Is the EU?” After Referendum
I’ve never seen such snobbery in my life. The post-Brexit condescension has been nauseating. The media, pundits, and academics have desperately tried to paint the Brexit voters as ignorant, backwoods troglodytes who only voted to leave the EU because they don’t like brown people.
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The Brexit Possibility
Brexit’s downsides are clear; might tech help realize upsides in building something new based on a new world order?
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The Moral Economy of Tech
This is the text version of remarks I gave on June 26, 2016, at a panel on the Moral Economy of Tech at the SASE conference in Berkeley. The other panel participants were Kieran Healy (whose remarks are here ), Stuart Russell and AnnaLee Saxenian .