https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/forecast-president.html

Comment Am Neumarkt:
The best information designers are summoned on each election day. It is a good time to learn about the best practices of data visualization.
This “paths to victory” visualization is one of the best I have ever seen. If the put some probabilities on each branch, it becomes a transitional decision tree to estimate risks used by investors.
Does it tell us anything useful directly? Not really. Not all branches are created equal. Without probabilities, It is as useless as a piece of blank paper. But it helps people do some little experiments to feel the competitiveness. In some sense, the probabilities are encoded in the reader’s head. Each reader provides a different reality of probabilities.

Also they started to report uncertainties. I remember last time they were using jittering pointers to educate people of the uncertainties. Now they have range of estimates. Showing ranges is an important step forward.

This reminds me of an old man I met on a train. I reminded this old man, nicely, to put his mask on. He put it on but gave me a strange angry look. In a few seconds, he then stormed to the other side of the train, took his mask off, and started to act like he was suffocating. It was so weird. It would be so easy to communicate instead of acting like a child and trying to put some blame on other irrelevant people.

SQL in 200 years?

Via https://www.linkedin.com/posts/piyushsaxena92_followpiyush-talentacquistion-jobseeker-activity-6727494236213678080-sujR

This is hilarious.

REVEALED: How much Uber pays its employees, from software engineers to data analysts (UBER)
https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-employees-make-pay-salary-software-engineer-data-analyst-2020-11

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2012.00094/full

An emerging consensus for open evaluation: 18 visions for the future of scientific publishing

Flavorfox - flavor pairing search engine
https://www.flavorfox.app/en

I just finished the book Grokking Algorithms last night.
https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-algorithms

I think it is a well-written book for people who is not from a CS background. The book has a lot of examples showing how the algorithms work step by step. To me, the most interesting chapter is dynamic programming.
I had a lot of fun reading this. Highly recommended if you are interested in algorithms!

Wow what is gonna happen to microsoft

https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1326932991566700549

> Guido van Rossum
> @gvanrossum
> I decided that retirement was boring and have joined the Developer Division at Microsoft. To do what? Too many options to say! But it’ll make using Python better for sure (and not just on Windows :-). There’s lots of open source here. Watch this space.

https://thegradient.pub/how-can-we-improve-peer-review-in-nlp/

> (Anderson, 2009) argues that research paper merit is Zipf-distributed: many papers are clear rejects, while a few are clear accepts. In between those two extremes, decisions are very difficult, and any differences between the best rejected and the worst accepted paper are tiny, even given the best possible set of reviewers.

(And the following is quite discriminating towards non english speaking researchers.)
> Work not-on-English: English is the "default" language to study (Bender, 2019), and work on other languages is easily accused of being "niche" and non-generalizable - even though English only workis equally non-generalizable.

Going from Bad to Worse: From Internet Voting to Blockchain Voting


> This article examines the suggestions that “voting over the Internet” or “voting on the blockchain”would increase election security, and finds such claims to be wanting and misleading. While currentelection systems are far from perfect, Internet- and blockchain-based voting would greatly increase therisk of undetectable, nation-scale election failures

https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf

Does Apple really log every app you run? A technical look

https://blog.jacopo.io/en/post/apple-ocsp/

> TL;DR
> - No, macOS does not send Apple a hash of your apps each time you run them.
> You should be aware that macOS might transmit some opaque information about the developer certificate of the apps you run. This information is sent out in clear text on your network.
> - You shouldn’t probably block ocsp.apple.com with Little Snitch or in your hosts file.

I did some investigation on the salary of tech employees working for Cologne city. It seems that the salary for IT employees are quite low. This may not be a fair representation of the whole Germany. But Cologne is one of the most digitized cities in Germany. So I would guess it should be a fair example.

For example, a data manager is among the salary group 11 (net from 2144EUR to 2993EUR)

This is the job description:
https://www.stadt-koeln.de/politik-und-verwaltung/ausbildung-karriere-bei-der-stadt/stellenangebote/datenmanagerin-beziehungsweise-datenmanager-mwd-im-amt-fuer-informationsverarbeitung

This is the salary calculation:
https://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tvoed/vka?id=tvoed-vka-2020&g=E_11&s=1&f=&z=&zv=&r=&awz=&zulage=&kk=&kkz=&zkf=&stkl=

What is e-Residency | How to Start an EU Company Online
https://e-resident.gov.ee/

Legendary Arecibo telescope will close forever — scientists are reeling
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03270-9

The ultimate captcha! 🙃 https://mastodon.gougere.fr/@PierreCol/105249097992224727

Abandon Statistical Significance.pdf

Sci-fi writers can surely borrow some of these
https://youtu.be/MIbFvK2S9g8

Stadt Köln advertises some interesting ideas sometimes.

Guess what, 115.de, a website being used for government related services in Cologne, requires Adobe Flash to run some contents on the webpage. 😧