This is the destruction of federal funding for scientific research & universities as we know it. A total, comprehensive politicization of the process & an end run around Congress.

Finally updated the search engine behind econlit-db to Meilisearch. Everything should be quite fast now -- under a second or two. Let me know if you have any bugs. paulgp.com/econlit-pipe...

*stares blankly in Regional Science* here's Luc and Dan, a mere forty years ago, discussing the inferential issues in spatial regression, which were already very well-known at the time

on the one hand, it's dope to see spatial analysis win Econometrica's best paper (!) on the other, it's so deeply troubling that this statement is news to economists in 2026

Wrote about how Hegseth’s effort to resegregate the upper ranks of the US military ties into the larger MAGA project to restore hierarchies of race and gender: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago." If you think it is necessary to be on Twitter to communicate your fact-based worldview, the reality is that worldview is being smothered.

starting to think podcasts are the problem

BREAKING: In response to huge cuts in Trump's budget request, NSF is shuttering its SBE directorate. Staff will be transferred to other parts of the agency and "grants that align with Administration priorities" will be maintained. That & more w/ @maxkozlov.bsky.social & @edwrdchen.bsky.social

Notepad++ "Chinese-linked cyberespionage group with a long history hijacked the update process for the popular code editing platform Notepad++ to deliver a custom backdoor and other malware."

if foot traffic flows into a place like downtown LA looked something like this before the ICE raids, then, say, like this afterward... well, there will be economic consequences, on top of everything else socialecology.uci.edu/news/oc-busi...

DID NO ONE SEE WATCHMEN???? bsky.app/profile/scot... it. um. won 11 emmys and explores the inherent racism underlying masked law enforcement

Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti. "Please get the truth out about our son."

Global datasets are really cool. Lots of fun to be had, I used this for looking at city evolution over time, sprawl, building heights, … Just really cool when one can do that globally with the click of a button. E.g.:

dot density maps arent my favorite, but they can be really rich ways of looking at multigroup segregation. If you know the area a bit, you dont even need a legend to recognize what these categories represent. One thing i havent seen before is a combo of dot density with dasymetric mapping

A long-awaited update of federal employment data shows crippling staff reductions in some federal agencies and offices: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Announcing deck.gl-raster: 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭-𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐂𝐎𝐆 𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠. No server required. 1.3 𝐠𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐛𝐲𝐭𝐞 COG, streamed directly into the browser: developmentseed.org/deck.gl-rast... - GPU-accelerated raster reprojection - GPU image processing for colormaps, nodata values - Efficient use of COG overviews

news from PySAL world: we have a new package in the ecosystem(!) As of today, `gwlearn` is available in package managers. It provides a suite of tools for geographically weighted machine learning using a sklearn API. pysal.org/gwlearn/v0.1... great work by lead author @martinfleischmann.net

another sweet port from Kyle! A touch of background on the original, for those interested: knaaptime.com/urban_analys...

My favorite #Python package to use is spopt, a library for spatial optimization. It helps you with: 📊 Facility location planning; 📊 Sales territory design; 📊 Maximizing market share; And much more! Check it out here: pysal.org/spopt/

Is logistic regression "AI"? What about convex optimization? Is LLM AI? What about an image recognition system built without using "feature learning" techniques but done through "feature engineering"?

classic.

furthermore, i dont care how this game turns out, or how many caleb williams apoligistst there are, malik is a better qb

tom. it's not called the windy city because of the weather.

seen this floating around all day, with exactly this thought every time. If you're prepared to spend a 7th of this much, you have not spent enough time in the midwest. the Home Alone house has been valued under 3M until 2024 and its *in the chicago metro* www.zillow.com/homedetails/...

among the many distinctions in *geospatial analysis*, it seems like physical geographers use "AI" in the 'traditional' sense of, like, deep nets applied to imagery data. whereas human geographers use it in the LLM sense of, like 'please vibecode my work for me because i asked so nicely'

ima let you guys finish, but i live down the street from a frazier farms

this, 💯

it's kinda wild that the virtual line judge is basically never used to check first downs in the nfl (as of yet), but like every single offside call in the premier league is assessed with VAR (football/football)

TIL i learned colab comes with pysal 25.7 preinstalled. and, thats cool.

unrelated, im working on a proper 'big data' project with data much larger than memory (so requires lazy/distributed compute) and i guess im the only one on the internet who really dislikes the polars api. maybe just because its unfamiliar but i find it really cumbersome

was reading through the pandas3 release notes the other day and noticed they added support for [bodo](docs.bodo.ai/quick_start/...) as an engine in `apply` (already i was unaware you can use numba as an engine) ive never heard of bodo but it seems *awesome*? it's, like, jit and parallel at once?

PACKERS WIN THERE IS HOPE FOR AMERICA

caleb sucks! the bears are trash! 😝😝😝😝😝

I would love to see Parsons sack a ref

we just not gonna call micah getting held on every play?

dont let the commentators lie to you. caleb sucks. the bears are trash. and everyone in the nfc is deeply embarrassed chicago has a number one seed these are facts

man. @andrew.heiss.phd is [an open source] legend. I'm putting together quarto websites for my winter courses and following his examples is just impossibly useful. Down to the way he parameterizes using variables so content is reusable (i've also used his hikmah manuscript templates for ages)

/end ramble

wow.. where did lets-plot.org come from? ...undeniably impressive, especially the the geo-support.

In lieu of thanksgiving I suggest holding a sort of family court convicting your most annoying relatives of various offenses

no one, ever: i cant spell economics, but i've had a bank account most of my life. Let me tell you how finance *Actually Works* _fucking everyone_, at all times: i have zero training in urban studies but I stepped foot in a house once. I am the world's foremost expert on housing and development

My third point is that the large rise in Black unemployment over the past few months is a reminder that aggregate demand has important distributional consequences. Strong labor markets disproportionately help less privileged workers, weaker labor markets disproportionately hurt them.

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

sometimes you have to call `plt.show()` to make quarto understand a figure is a figure 🤷‍♂️

This seems important. Current AI models can't read graphs. They "see" what they expect to see, even if the data shows something else.

slow clap

as part of this journey, i also learned that knitr (and thus quarto, as a side effect) can automatically translate interactive graphics (e.g. leaflet maps) into static images via webshot2 (github.com/rstudio/webs...), which is just awesome and i wish the jupyter engine could pull that off too