# Minimizing a Median

$$\def\xorder#1{x_{\left(#1\right)}} \def\xset{\mathbb{X}} \def\xvec{\mathbf{x}}$$A somewhat odd (to me) question was asked on a forum recently. Assume that you have continuous variables $$x_{1},\dots,x_{N}$$ that are subject to some constraints. For simplicity, I’ll just write $$\xvec=(x_{1},\dots,x_{N})\in\xset$$. I’m going to assume that $$\xset$$ is compact, and so in particular the $$x_{i}$$ are bounded. The questioner wanted to …

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# Pragmatism and the Cultivation of Digital Democracies

As technology enables us to communicate with one another in unpredictable ways that allow for an unprecedented public exchange of diverse ideas, cultivating the philosophical habits of an engaged fallibilistic pluralism gains in urgency. The emergence of the World Wide calls us to consider how an ethics of philosophy might enable us to cultivate practices …

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# Comparing MPLUS and MCLUST output

Introduction At present, MPlus is a widely-used tool to carry out Latent Profile Analysis, and there does not seem to be a widely-accepted or used way to carry out Latent Profile Analysis in R. This compares output from MPlus to output from the R package MCLUST, which is accessed through the package tidymixmod which I …

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# Public data and digital research ethics

The Verge recently posted an article that highlights some of the ethical dilemmas involved in collecting publicly-available data for research purposes. The article begins by describing the work of a researcher working on facial recognition of people before and after hormone replacement therapy: On YouTube, he found a treasure trove. Individuals undergoing HRT often document their progress …

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# Varieties of Snowflakes

I was pleasantly surprised that New Yorker editor David Remnick and Berkeley law professor Melissa Murray continue to support the First Amendment, even if some of her students do not. Remnick gives Historian Mark Bray (author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook) a tough time about the role of violence in political movements. After Charlottesville, the Limits …

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# How to be an effective acting director, chair or dean — Part II (essay)

Last week, Inside Higher Ed published an essay of mine describing my experience as an interim dean. It covered several practical, task-oriented topics: identifying one’s core mission for the interim period, allaying colleagues’ fears, acquiring reliable information and triaging the issues that land in your inbox. But leading a college that includes a department of theater helped me recognize …

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# Using notebooks for beginning-of-semester planning

One of the first posts I published to this blog was a lament that I just couldn’t get notebooks to work for me. About a year ago, though, I finally found a routine that got notebooks working for me. I started off working my way through two copies of a Self Journal before borrowing some …

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# DeepMind and StarCraft II Learning Environment

This Learning Environment will enable researchers to attack the problem of building an AI that plays StarCraft II at a high level. As observed in the video, this infrastructure development required significant investment of resources by DeepMind / Alphabet. Now, researchers in academia and elsewhere have a platform from which to explore an important class …

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# Using MPlus from R with MPlusAutomation

According to the MPlus website, the R package MPlusAutomation serves three purposes: Creating related groups of models Running batches Extracting and tabulating model parameters and test statistics. Because modeling involves comparing related models, (partially) automating these is compelling. It can make it easier to use model results in subsequent analyses and can cut down on copy and pasting …

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