38 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2026
    1. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not find this argument to be persuasive, ruling instead that the question of partisan gerrymandering is “nonjusticiable”—outside their jurisdiction. Subsequent rulings, such as Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens, give little hope that the Supreme Court will impede future gerrymandering.

      The Supreme Court in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) found that Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling wasn't persuasive and found that gerrymandering is "nonjusticable".

    2. A much better mathematical method to detect gerrymandering, known as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, has been percolating throughout the research literature, and was brought before the Supreme Court in the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause. Although it is not possible to compare a contested map against all possible maps, MCMC uses a computational technique called a “random walk” to generate a representative sample of legal electoral district maps by repeatedly making small arbitrary changes to possible district boundaries. Mathematicians, serving as expert witnesses for the plaintiffs and weighing in as amicus curie, argued that if a specific map is an outlier from the rest of samples in terms of political advantage, it indicates possible gerrymandering. The mathematicians found that maps proposed by the 2012 and 2016 North Carolina legislatures fell at the extreme ends of bell curves generated from MCMC-sampled maps, based on measures such as the number of Democrats elected and the number of Democratic voters in specific districts.

      brief description of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling with respect to gerrymandering and it's application in the courts so far

  2. Dec 2025
  3. Dec 2023
    1. Technique #2: Sampling

      How do you load only a subset of the rows?

      When you load your data, you can specify a skiprows function that will randomly decide whether to load that row or not:

      ```

      from random import random

      def sample(row_number): ... if row_number == 0: ... # Never drop the row with column names: ... return False ... # random() returns uniform numbers between 0 and 1: ... return random() > 0.001 ... sampled = pd.read_csv("/tmp/voting.csv", skiprows=sample) len(sampled) 973 ```

  4. Aug 2022
  5. Mar 2022
  6. Jan 2022
    1. Generally, bootstrap involves the following steps:
      1. A sample from population with sample size n.
      2. Draw a sample from the original sample data with replacement with size n, and replicate B times, each re-sampled sample is called a Bootstrap Sample, and there will totally B Bootstrap Samples.
      3. Evaluate the statistic of θ for each Bootstrap Sample, and there will be totally B estimates of θ.
      4. Construct a sampling distribution with these B Bootstrap statistics and use it to make further statistical inference, such as:
        • Estimating the standard error of statistic for θ.
        • Obtaining a Confidence Interval for θ.
  7. Nov 2021
  8. Oct 2021

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  9. Apr 2021
  10. Mar 2021
  11. Jan 2021
  12. Oct 2020
    1. M.B can’t be reduced to stereotypes, of course. But there’s also a bar to entry into this social-media network, and it’s a distinctly technophilic, first-world, Western bar.

      You can only say this because I suspect you're comparing it to platforms that are massively larger by many orders of magnitude. You can't compare it to Twitter or Facebook yet. In fact, if you were to compare it to them, then it would be to their early versions. Twitter was very technophilic for almost all of it's first three years until it crossed over into the broader conscious in early 2009.

      Your argument is somewhat akin to doing a national level political poll and only sampling a dozen people in one small town.

  13. Sep 2020
  14. Aug 2020
    1. Vogels, C. B. F., Brackney, D., Wang, J., Kalinich, C. C., Ott, I., Kudo, E., Lu, P., Venkataraman, A., Tokuyama, M., Moore, A. J., Muenker, M. C., Casanovas-Massana, A., Fournier, J., Bermejo, S., Campbell, M., Datta, R., Nelson, A., Team, Y. I. R., Cruz, C. D., … Grubaugh, N. (2020). SalivaDirect: Simple and sensitive molecular diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance. MedRxiv, 2020.08.03.20167791. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.03.20167791

  15. Jul 2020
  16. Jun 2020
    1. Akhvlediani, T., Ali, S. M., Angus, D. C., Arabi, Y. M., Ashraf, S., Baillie, J. K., Bakamutumaho, B., Beane, A., Bozza, F., Brett, S. J., Bruzzone, R., Carson, G., Castle, L., Christian, M., Cobb, J. P., Cummings, M. J., D’Ortenzio, E., Jong, M. D. de, Denis, E., … Webb, S. (2020). Global outbreak research: Harmony not hegemony. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30440-0

  17. May 2020
  18. Sep 2019
  19. Jun 2015
    1. I don't claim to understand the thought processes that would drive someone to do this, but given the rarity and extremity of suicide, we can assume for every worker who goes ahead with suicide for work-related reasons, there are a hundred or a thousand who feel miserable but not quite suicidal.