• Young dog locked on balcony, weeping loudly at his masters to get in. At least twice a week.
• Different young dog barking at people on the street for no reason. Seems to have stopped.
• People of subsaharan African origin, loudly talking to people at balconies. Applies to all ages.
• Young people of African origin (including Maghreb), loudly talking to each other. Usually from 2pm to 2am.
• Vans that collect garbage and clean the street, and which happen to be extremely noisy. Around 5am and 5pm.
• The crazy lady that yells incomprehensible things in English to herself while quickly strolling down. Once a week.
• The music from other flats: church organ, AC/DC (once each).

Q: Do I resent any of this? After all, I just listed how my neighbours talk to each other and how they treat their pets with the noise of garbage collection; the analogy is clearly racist. The crazy English-speaking (White) lady is, ironically, the odd one out—and half of the irony comes from the fact that I am probably the only one on the street to understand what she yells.

A: I do not know. I come from a quiet, cat-loving, middle class White background, so by flawed ecological inference and habitus, I should instinctively start resenting my neighbours and their pets (or at least the way they treat their pets). My current residence is a daily exercise in class betrayal. I have yet to start complaining about the smell, but I hardly smell anything in my near-constant tobacco fog.

My lack of taste for the countryside and life in rural areas might be gradually vanishing, and I wonder if I will end up hating any of the large cities that I love today.

think you need an ipad? this morning i impressed a half-dozen people in front of the hotel with a demonstration [of] my nook #asa2010

This confirms that the use of an iPad currently generates geekademic capital, just like other tools do in many disciplines.

Signalling a high geekacademic capital is of high professional value in most branches of academia, and perhaps counter-effective only in those – literature? – where technological Luddism passes for a sophisticated form of passéisme (yes indeed, French has a word for attachment to the past).

Geekacademic capital obeys other rules, such as diminishing returns in nerdish disciplines where everyone knows typesetting and programming. As far as I know, the curve looks like this.

My initial aim was to publish something closer to aphorisms, but I ended up discussing the usual sci/tech nerdery that I spend too many hours geeking through. I understand that is who I am and what I do, and the blog will invariably reflect it: expect emphasis on data, Mac and political science.

The current publishing policy is maintained as for now: advance daily scheduling of text-only content typeset in a monospace font, with limited feedback through channels other than blog comments and trackbacks (try email, Facebook and Twitter).

Search, keywords and categories still seem a bit over the top, although I use them internally to track relevant cross-post references. I use four categories and a maximum of two keywords/post, with no title/keyword redundancy.

“It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.”

“We wanted to get out of what I called 19th-century drug development — give a drug and hope it does something”

Is it the case that hypothesis testing and induction have been joined by a new competitor, pattern identification? Unsure myself, but check Victoria Stodden‘s talk on the digitization of science and the degradation of the scientific method (ref. slide 16/33; via Cosma Shalizi’s feed). Stodden has a full-fledged argument on that matter, and has the ambition to go far with it—up to the revision of Popperian ideals. I think I recognise my own normative structure of science in what she is brilliantly trying to achieve.

I am not surprised this is happening in biomedical/pharmaceutical research, which combines large chunks of data with strict intellectual property rules that are now perceived to constrain innovation instead of enabling it in many cases. The size of the average laboratory is inferior to what contemporary challenges require. Initiatives like the Alzheimer’s one bypass temporary exploitation monopolies and create a virtual worldwide-scale research unit, much in the fashion of the SETI project.

My guess is that, in two decades time, researchers will puzzle at how we did research before public data sharing. Retrospectively, the path dependent institution of industrial property will appear archaic, counter-intuitive and harmful in many domains where it is currently perceived as sound, efficient and necessary. Biomedicine will lead the shift because the moral economy of health places the fight against dread diseases such as cancers and neurodegenerative illnesses well over pharmaceutical revenue, even when that revenue represents such a large fraction of GDP in many WEIRDs.

Such as: “If you accept a relational definition of power, you should your political science relational, which will come with the derived advantage of solving your quant/qual issues by bridging both into a single stream of research.”

Both papers are apparently scheduled for publication in PS: Political Science and Politics, one of my favourite journals next to Perspectives on Politics.

The reform consists of an interesting procedure, QPC, that allows pretty much anyone to ask for retrospective constitutional control. The procedure is a fantastic judicial weapon against the executive and its (fairly disciplined) parliamentary majority: academics, for instance, have attacked a recent university reform as unconstitutional (and lost the case last week). The reform affects separation of powers as well as it accentuates the judicialization of political conflict, at least in the short term and, in all likelihood, in the long term.

I am unsure the reform will really affect the “politics/polity”, or “people vs. politicians”, distribution of power. If governments start losing more on passing or implementing legislation, they will try to win more on political spectacle as to preserve their selectoral support. Sarkozy has lost important legal battles over, e.g., carbon tax and burqas. His mandate is also weakened by implementation failures on, inter alia, tax incentives (e.g. the highly salient restaurant tax cut). In a recent speech given in the city where I spent twelve years, he increased his stigma-attacks against what he has framed as “not-exactly-French” populations (the NYT has an excellent editorial on the topic), and critics are (quite predictably) counter-framing his move by making parallels with extreme-right and authoritarian references. His stigma tactics also remind me of Soviet propaganda, which framed everything, from AIDS to analytical philosophy, as a Western invention to win the Cold War, in the vain hope of driving mass attention away from the derelict state of the USSR on both economic and democratic grounds.

Rule #1: Empiricism—Data or it never happened.

Rule #2: Modelling—Regressions do not run for the lulz.

Rule #3: Refutability—What has been proven can be unproven.

Rule #4: Appropriateness—You are using a shovel to pick up strawberries.

Rule #5: Coherence—What is this I don’t even get the reasoning.