Matthew Kay

@mjskay.com

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Assoc Prof Computer Science and Communication Studies at Northwestern. Infovis, HCI. Author of tidybayes & ggdist R pkgs. he/him. 🏳️‍🌈 https://mjskay.com/

Co-director https://mucollective.northwestern.edu

Co-founder https://journalovi.org

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Matthew Kay

Bridgy Fed news: we're now bridging web sites to Bluesky! Bridgy Fed can automatically generate a Bluesky presence for your site. You can also use it to follow any site that has microformats2 or an RSS/Atom feed. Includes profiles, posts, IndieWeb interactions, etc. Click through for more news...

snarfed.orgsnarfed.orgsnarfed.org Hi all! Time for another regular (ish) Bridgy Fed status update, with big news: we’re bridging web sites to Bluesky! We’ve supported this on the fediverse for a while, and we’re n…

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Matthew Kay

It's not elites

Most say Biden should withdraw from the Presidential race - AP-NORCapnorc.org Sixty-five percent of Democrats say President Biden should withdraw and allow his party to select a different nominee. There are growing misgivings about Biden’s mental capability to be an effective p...

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Matthew Kay

[theme song to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia plays] The Gang Defends A Trump Rally

Incredible stuff.

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Matthew Kay

I think if you want a polling bump after an assassination attempt, you do have to live your life in such a way that most of the country hasn’t spent the last 10 years hoping for your death.

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Matthew Kay

Psst: Project 2025 is terrifying for a lot of reasons but also because on page 5 it calls for teachers and librarians who grant access to books that are maligned as pornography (which just means anything LGBTQ) to be registered as sex offenders. Pass it on.

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Matthew Kay

This is rly rly well done. https://www.cip.uw.edu/2024/07/15/trump-assassination-rumors-collective-sensemaking/

@Birdbassador.jorts.horse.ap.brid.gy just posted a great article about problems with bar charts I first became aware of our mutual hatred of bar charts at a vis literacy workshop and it brang me much joy

The Problem With Bar Chartsmcorrell.medium.com This post is adapted from a talk I gave as part of a Tableau Users Group meeting called “Bad, Biased, and Baffling Bars.”

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Matthew Kay

Reply to

Voilà: Francis Gagnon

I now stay out of debates on whether dataviz should be precise, easy to read, insightful and what not. It can be all and none of these things, like any language. 5/5

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Matthew Kay

10 TIMES I CHANGED MY MIND #dataviz #Voilà10 📊 Old view #2: "Visualization is based on a set of rules" In 2011, armed with basic knowledge of dataviz, I began teaching the immutable rules of visualization, based on the research in visual perception. 1/n

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Matthew Kay

The International Society for Bayesian Analysis tells me Statistical Rethinking has won the 2024 DeGroot Prize for its contributions to "statistical inference, decision theory and statistical applications". This is huge honor especially given the previous winners who have influenced me so much.

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Matthew Kay

Republican president was shot by a Republican because of an environment of normalized violence that Republicans insist we all live in, and somehow this means that both sides need to tone it all the way down, which in practice means that Democrats and only Democratic need to stop talking entirely.

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Matthew Kay

dem leadership thought that, after biden was inaugurated back in 2021, it was essentially mission accomplished. trump was politically dead, the maga movement defeated, and it was time to move on. this is the most parsimonious explanation for dozens of awful decisions they made.

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Matthew Kay

[uspol] Never forget: The GOP (which is just MAGA now) embraced and cheered Kyle Rittenhouse's gleeful murdering of folks at protest for racial justice. I'm not going to go on, as there are *dozens* of examples where there has been championed violence and regular calls for violence against […]

Original post on mastodon.socialmastodon.social

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Matthew Kay

Just found an R package that is an absolute work of art 10/10 no notes… It pains me to admit it’s very Bayesian 😂

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Matthew Kay

Fractured post-Twitter social media landscape continues to be a pain. Your choices are What if Twitter were Instagram, What if Twitter were Linux, What if Twitter were Just Shitpoasters, and What if Twitter were Twitter set on fire and then put out with pig slurry. None particularly satisfactory.

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Matthew Kay

I changed my mind. Several times. For the 10 years of Voilà:, I tracked 10 things on which I changed my mind about data visualization and information design. As of next week, I'll be sharing them here one by one, as I think it can be interesting to the dataviz community. #Voila10

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Matthew Kay

November 2023: Dean Phillips is only damaging Biden by running in the primaries and he should be expelled from the party. July 2024: Biden's legitimacy as a candidate comes from his landslide victory in the primaries, which were real and good.

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Matthew Kay

One way to know that “faculty governance” of universities is not real is that our expense system works the way it does

I am convinced that it would be MUCH cheaper for the university to simply give me a pre-paid credit card with a 5-10k limit to cover conference travel, software, per-diems blah blah blah than whatever they are paying the layers of admin and also my lost productivity doing onerous expense reports

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Matthew Kay

My university "updated" concur, and in the process deleted all past and pending expense reports, along with all future travel information. Beautiful. No notes. Exactly what we want from our accounting software slash travel agency. Good thing I keep my own records, I guess?

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Matthew Kay

Fight against daunting odds, because it’s the right thing to do, and because sometimes you win.

BREAKING NEWS: Voters turned out in numbers not seen in decades to stop the far-right National Rally from taking power in the French National Assembly. Polls predicted a first-place finish for National Rally, which instead came in third in initial results as polling stations closed.

Projections in France's election show voters rejecting the far rightwww.npr.org Voters turned out in numbers not seen in decades to stop the far-right National Rally from taking power in the French National Assembly. Polls predicted a first-place finish for National Rally, which ...

A lesson for that fight

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Matthew Kay

🧵 In 2020, I nearly died from mysterious industrial chemical exposure at my apartment. Later, I discovered my employer was dumping toxic waste into our windows from their Skunkworks semiconductor fab next-door. I tipped off US EPA, who then raided them in 2023. EPA sent me the report on Friday. 💀 ⬇️

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Matthew Kay

This semester I’m going to tell my students I don’t care if they use ChatGPT to write their papers, much as I don’t care if they use LSD and a ouija board write their papers. I’ll give fancy-sounding bullshit a failing grade no matter how it’s produced.

Well this is grim

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Matthew Kay

More UK general election fun with ggplot than should be legal without production of government issued ID. #GE2024 #GE24. 2019 Conservative seats with 2024 winners. Seems they could only be confident if majority was > mid-30s.

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Matthew Kay

"Trump v. Anderson’s holding lacked any real basis in text and history and also is at odds with the basic structure of the Electoral College" "The court’s reasoning [on immunity] went well beyond any specific part of the Constitution or any determinate constitutional tradition"

ignore the hed, this is extremely harsh criticism from the very measured Will Baude of the Court's rulings in the 14th Amendment and immunity cases www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/o...

Opinion | A Principled Supreme Court, Unnerved by Trumpwww.nytimes.com Most of the court’s decisions were principled and sound — most, but unfortunately not all.

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Matthew Kay

Reply to

Carl T. Bergstrom

This description resonates. I stopped using Mastodon once Bluesky reached its critical mass. bsky.app/profile/kenw...

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to offend, but I really deeply dislike Mastodon’s vibe. It’s like being trapped at a party with two other people: one who demands you debate them on whether Dick York or Dick Sargent was the better Darrin, and one who becomes irate that you said the word “Dick.”

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Matthew Kay

Reply to

Wraithe

Bill Murray's delivery of the line "I care!" in Richard Donner's 1988 re-imagining of Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol, *Scrooged*, aptly demonstrates that the oft-derided American construction "I could care less" is not in fact a malapropism, when accompanied by sufficient sarcasm. Discuss.

When I work late, You work lateyoutu.be ScroogedIF YOU HAVE ANY REQUESTS, LET ME KNOW [email protected](Aprox time in movie helps......ex. (Between 1:04:56 and 1:05:25)ENJOY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!P...

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Matthew Kay

Google Books Ngram Viewer: 🔴DATUM vs 🔵DATA POINT

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Matthew Kay

Yesterday, I shared this same Canada Day thread on Bluesky, Threads, and X. Here's what I found. 🧵

“Canada is such a northern country, don’t we want a little global warming?” I often hear. In a nutshell, NO. We’re warming 2x faster than the rest of the world, driving extreme heat, flood, and sea level rise we are not prepared for. The wildfire season started in Feb this year. Feb! #canadaday

Canada’s Changing Climate Reportchangingclimate.ca