Jonathan N. Katz
jnkatz.bsky.social
Jonathan N. Katz
@jnkatz.bsky.social

Professor at Caltech. Social Sciences and Statistics.

Economics 41%
Political science 38%

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Every Californian with an email address and an internet connection can now visit California’s Bookshelf and access more than 300,000 ebooks and audiobooks.

www.library.ca.gov/uploads/2025...

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Innovation is afoot in the ski industry.

BOA boots are changing skiing ... and ski racing.
www.skimag.com/gear/boa-ski...
BOA Boots Are Changing Skiing—So Why Won’t Racers Wear Them?
Skiers swear by BOA technology, yet the world’s best racers refuse to make the switch. Do they know something we don’t?
www.skimag.com
We are very happy to publish the "National Elections Database," including the results of 1,023 presidential and 2,962 parliamentary elections conducted worldwide since 1946!
www.nationalelectionsdatabase.com
with Benjamin Marx and Vincent Rollet
Overview
National Elections Database
www.nationalelectionsdatabase.com

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

538-style poll collection has now been recreated by a small group of fans and former staff. all fully transparent and public now. return of live public aggregation is imminent

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
Polls
docs.google.com
I got laid off today, with the rest of 18F.

18F was an elite federal software shop. We made gov't websites work better, more efficiently for the American people. We saved taxpayers from getting screwed over by contractors. And were fired for it.

We made this website to tell our story:
18f.org
We're not done yet | 18F
18f.org

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

#UMISR: Preserve At-Risk Government Data!

DataLumos, an open-access archive at ICPSR, is working to preserve/share critical govt data. Help keep the data accessible.

Donate: datalumos.org
Explore & contribute: myumi.ch/egrbW
Volunteer: icpsr-data-rescue@umich.edu

#DataPreservation #SocialScience

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Rdatasets is a collection of 2300 free and documented datasets in CSV format. It's a great resource for teaching and exploration!

The new `get_dataset()` function from the {marginaleffects} 📦 allows you to search and load them directly in #Rstats.

vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/ar...

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Looking for free, short readings on elements of congressional politics for your course? Check this out. stevesnotes.substack.com
Steve's Notes on Congressional Politics | Steven S. Smith | Substack
Insightful briefs on the politics of the the U.S. Congress. Click to read Steve's Notes on Congressional Politics, by Steven S. Smith, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.
stevesnotes.substack.com

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

If you have an issue where Dropbox is constantly syncing while @posit.co #RStudio is open, one solution is to run the following code in Terminal:

find "Dropbox" -type d -name ".Rproj.user" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' folder; do xattr -w com.dropbox.ignored 1 "$folder"; done

#rstats

I have even voted on one.

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Last week, Jacob Morrier and I presented about work that dramatically speeds up probabilistic record linkage using GPU acceleration. Documentation and code for Fast-ER is available, fast-er.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

But better yet, watch the video!
youtu.be/wsv__0a_KDY?...
Fast ER GPU Accelerated Record Linkage in Python by Dr R Michael Alvarez and Jacob Morrier CalTech
YouTube video by Data Analytics Colloquium
youtu.be
Voters are mostly partisans who rationalize, swing voters are often ignorant and voters project their views onto their candidates. But this has always been true! The media was better once, but there was no golden age. Most of their grandparents did not read Walter Lippmann's column.
we're cooked

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

we're cooked
Americans are now one-third less likely to die from cancer at the same ages as Americans in 1990

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

I'm teaching a grad seminar this winter on Prediction for Decision-making. We'll look at what it means to make good predictions for decision-making from various angles, with a focus on decisions for & about people.

Reading list: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/12/06/n...

Suggestions welcome!
New Course: Prediction for (Individualized) Decision-making | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
Our JSS article is out!

And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned.

www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Please fix your handle and bio before you start following people.

Makes it a lot easier to know whether people should follow you or not.

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

New notebook:

Sample Size Calculations in #RStats : Money and Power

arelbundock.com/posts/money_...
If you're interested in trying out LLMs in #rstats but don't know where to begin, I've added a few two vignettes to elmer: elmer.tidyverse.org/articles/elm... and elmer.tidyverse.org/articles/pro...
Getting started with elmer
elmer.tidyverse.org

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Great to see @aleximas.bsky.social and gang of coauthors measuring salience *independently of choice* with an early well-trained algorithm (from @caltech.edu btw) that predicts visual attention for any image (a la Li and me QJE academic.oup.com/qje/article-...)
After a review process so long and intensive that the title changed twice, I'm excited/relieved that "How to Distinguish Motivated Reasoning from Bayesian Updating" is accepted at @polbehavior.bsky.social.

osf.io/preprints/os...

Here is how it's relevant for your Thanksgiving dinner 🦃👇
OSF
osf.io

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

How does Approximate Bayesian Computation *ABC) work? @rabaath.bsky.social has a classic nice simple intro the ABC using the problem of infering the number of socks in a sample of laundry. There's a movie and a page with all the code. www.sumsar.net/blog/2015/07...
Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Socks of Karl Broman: The Movie
This is a screencast of my UseR! 2015 presentation: Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Socks of Karl Broman. Based on the original blog post it is a quick’n’dirty …
www.sumsar.net

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Yes, it was an anti-incumbent environment, *globally*—but the US had weathered the pandemic economy so much better than everywhere else, it was totally reasonably to think that the incumbent party could prevail. It was not a forgone conclusion. It was close, but still decisive against incumbents.

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Boosting Anton's starter pack to #StatsSky and #polisky. Lots of people worth following here.

bsky.app/starter-pac...
Political Methodology
Join the conversation
bsky.app
Since it is inefficient to attempt to educate every reviewer individually, I am yeeting into your feed this clear paper from Gelman, Hill, and Yajima on how Bayesians can do even better than correcting for multiple comparisons. arxiv.org/abs/0907.2478
Why we (usually) don't have to worry about multiple comparisons
Applied researchers often find themselves making statistical inferences in settings that would seem to require multiple comparisons adjustments. We challenge the Type I error paradigm that underlies t...
arxiv.org

Reposted by Jonathan N. Katz

Now that @jacksonmatthewo.bsky.social has arrived, it’s a real network