read | Chris Aldrich

David Shanske (david.shanske.com)

I’ve been working on a patch for WordPress that involves fixing the incorrectly stored timestamp stored as part of WordPress image metadata. I already do something like this in my Simple Location plugin, but I’ve found a way that works more simply. To summarize the issue, there are multiple date...

Listened to Episode 10: FOSDEM, CopyleftConf and Spritely by Chris Webber and Serge Wroclawski from Libre Lounge

Chris and Serge are back from FOSDEM and CopyleftConf. Chris has a grant to work on an exciting new ActivityPub application and the dynamic duo talk about recursive compilation and Lisp without parentheis.

Links:

FOSDEM 2019 (fosdem.org)

CopyleftConf 2019 (copyleftconf.org)

Chris is awarded the Samsung Stack Zero Grant (dustycloud.org)

Spritely (gitlab.org)

A Guiler's Year of Racket (fosdem.org)

ActivityPub panel (fosdem.org)

GNU Mes (fosdem.org)

Experience with wisp (fosdem.org)

Listened to The one thing I wish I'd done when I first started my design career by

Craig Burgess from getdoingthings.com

There's lots of things I wish I would have done when I first started my design career, but this one is a big one. The worst bit? It's taken me 15 years to realise it.

ᔥ Jamie Tanna Bookmarked: The one thing I wish I’d done when I first started my design career (2020-02-15)

In this 9 minute podcast, Craig Burgess speaks about how he wished he’d got started on his Personal Website and doing more blogging early on in his career. Craig also speaks about the IndieWeb and why everyone should get involved.

Read A Song of Scottish Publishing, 1671-1893 by Shawn (electricarchaeology.ca)

The Scottish National Library has made available a collection of chapbooks printed in Scotland, from 1671 – 1893, on their website here. That’s nearly 11 million words’ worth of material. The booklets cover an enormous variety of subjects. So, what do you do with it? Today, I decided to turn ...

This is more cool than truly useful, but I could see audioizations of data like this being used to surface and recognize patterns that might not otherwise be seen.

Read Why Don’t Polls Have More Information About Black Voters? by Kevin Drum (Mother Jones)

Rashawn Ray wants us to stop treating African Americans as a monolithic group:

Black Americans vote on par or higher than their state population. They represent a significant share of Democratic voters, especially in states like South Carolina (nearly 60%). Despite representing this large voting bloc, polls such as Quinnipiac continue to frame black Americans as a monolithic group, while disaggregating white people by age, political identification and education.

I argue it is important to see the heterogeneity of black Americans. Others agree. Professor Eddie Glaude Jr said: “We have to be more nuanced in how we talk about black voters. I would love to see the breakdown of the Q poll. Age. Class. Etc.” Rolling Stone writer Jamil Smith said, “I’ve examined the newest Quinnipiac poll very thoroughly … and unfortunately, it does not break down black voters by age, class, education, or even gender. Just ‘Black.’ White respondents receive more nuanced treatment in the poll.”

The problem here is not one of racism, but of statistics. The average poll reaches about a thousand people. Of those, about 13 percent are likely to be black. If you then break things down by, say, age, you’ll have only about 30-40 respondents in each group. Unfortunately, as the group size goes down, the margin of error for each group goes up. In this case, the margin of error for each of the age groups is upwards of 15-20 percent, which makes the results useless. It would be a dereliction of duty to even report them.

Some polls oversample blacks and Hispanics to avoid this problem, but that’s expensive. It’s usually done infrequently, and only for surveys specifically aimed at reporting the views of one ethnic group. So don’t blame Quinnipiac for this. It’s a problem of arithmetic and money, not bad faith.