Roundup: What people are saying about Trump’s executive order on climate

On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order that rolls back many of Barack Obama’s climate policies, including those aimed at meeting the targets of the Paris climate agreement. The full text of the order is available at PBS, the full text annotated by an expert in environmental law is available at Vox.…

Link: Avoiding misinterpreting statistics

In 2017 the world is awash in data and statistics; polls and surveys, censuses and economic data, trending topics and web analytics are just the start. As the internet of things enters our lives, the amount of available data will grow exponentially. With all of that data at our disposal, it is natural and appropriate…

Republicans lost on health care for the same reason Democrats lost the election

In the United States there are two major parties, both of which consist of big tent coalitions. The Democrats start from the socialist left and run to moderates who could just as easily be moderate Republicans. Republicans do the same from the right, from the Neo-Nazi alt-right to people who could just as easily be…

Video: “A better way to argue about politics”

The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan on how to talk about politics without relying on ‘facts’.Both sides have blind spots when it comes to facts that don’t go along with their values so having large amounts of data, statistics and historical facts isn’t as much help as one would hope. In philosophy there is actually a great…

Roundup: The fallout from the failure to repeal Obamacare

Pretty much everyone is painting the defeat of the Republican bill as a major defeat for Trump and the Republican congress including ABC News, the New York Times, Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe, CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and BBC. Despite Republican control of both the House…

Introducing News Cleanse: Detox your news

Welcome to my latest internet … thing. This all started because I was personally disappointed with the quality of information being presented on cable news and social media. I wanted to build a search engine, using Google’s API, that included multiple perspectives but only from sources that are reasonably reliable and not given to sensationalism,…