Shauna's Writing

every so often I remember that the clinton analytics team’s motto was “a decision tree grows in brooklyn” and i smile

Back when I was a research scientist, I straddled the boundary between “hard” and “soft” sciences.

What shade of gray would you say this is?

Public Policy After Utopia by Will Wilkinson at the Niskanen Center:

It's easy to complain about "purity politics".

Things have been quiet on this here tumblr, in part because I have taken to blogging about a subset of topics here.

Objective truth exists in the way that a perfect circle exists.

This is a short and subtle piece by Diana Senechal about sexual harassment claims and our response to them.

Mike Montiero recently posted an essay to Medium "One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end".

I spent a good portion of yesterday staring at my Django test cases and whimpering.

Andrew Gelman has a brief post up on his blog comparing the way bug reports in open source software are received to the way many researchers respond to…

Me: Wow, Django’s Case() sure is a useful addition to the annotate function!

The Supermanagerial Reich by Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe at the LA Review of Books:

☐ and you should feel bad. ☐ and that makes you a bad person. ☐ and you should at least admitthat it was bad. ☐ and you should not do it again. ☐ and you…

Julia Evans, in her recent summary of her time at the Recurse Center, links to this cool little project which visualizes how you use Git.

It’s late Friday night, technically Saturday morning, and like a party animal I’m up googling, “Could someone mess up my server if I let them run arbitrary…

This might be the best introduction to an academic paper I’ve come across.

A quote by Frank Serpico, by way of writer Lawrence Grobel, by way of Metafilter:

Catching up on the Crooked Timber archives today, I saw they’ve done several seminars since last I looked, on three books/series I’d love to read: Jo…

So I read Kushner’s statement today, which includes the line “I am not a person who has sought the spotlight” and, well, I couldn’t help myself.

So I’m watching my way through this pop math YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown and out of nowhere comes this extraordinarily fascinating fact: the ancient…

My friend Sumana Harihareswara recently posted a great collection of links on ‘call-out culture’ to MetaFilter.

If someone asks me, “What is open source software?”

I have seen this argument happen over and over again, especially in progressive spaces.

For Valentine’s Day, I want to talk about the poem I posted the other day, “Law, Like Love” by WH Auden, and why it means so much to me.

I’ve been thinking recently about the human tendency to try to put things in context, to search for patterns across different situations and conversations

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun, Law is the one All gardeners obey To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

What's left?

I visited House Oversight Committee Chair Jason Chaffetz’s office today.

Let’s say you’ve got an engineer or other employee who costs you $150,000 a year in salary & benefits.

While I am apparently on a recommendation kick, let me share with you this essay: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds.

I’m not usually one for podcasts, but I discovered @fansplaining a few weeks ago and have really been getting a kick out of it.

Earlier today a friend/former colleague of mine linked to a dataset on the OpenScienceFramework with the commentary “OKCupid released some of their data!

The intro to testing session I ran on Saturday went well.

This was originally posted to my now-offline personal blog on February 15th, 2014.

This Saturday at 11am EST I’ll be running a remote workshop with PyLadies on getting started with testing.

Last fall I had a bit of free time and thought I’d try out making apps.

I read a comment recently about the rules for bidding on government contracts.

I have never much liked Hamentaschen but it turns out “cookie” and “hat-shaped” are not terribly limiting constraints and much deliciousness can be fit…

So, LibrePlanet happened this weekend.

Today I had the pleasure of speaking to a Mozilla study group about The Little R’er.

I spent a couple of hours today wrestling with encodings.

A friend shared this image on Facebook.

Modern dating is full of choices, whether between strangers at a bar or profiles on OkCupid.

There’s a body of research literature showing that people overestimate how well they can explain phenomena.

When David Bowie died two weeks ago, I felt sad, but it was nothing compared to the outpouring of grief and remembrance from friends and from the culture at…

That feeling when someone links you to Leslie Odom Jr singing a mashup of the two best musical theater ballads Stars and Wait For It and you spend the next…

Mystery Hunt was this past weekend and as usual I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Inspired by this letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, but slowly.