Ryan Briggs
@ryancbriggs
Raising kids & bread & grant money. Cleaning data & diapers & fish. EA (bed nets not light cone). Social scientist. https://bsky.app/profile/ryancbriggs.net
I’m going to miss her. She did an admirably good job of keeping the library a liberal (open) space, and that wasn’t always easy given the years she ran it.
Before things get started, Mayor Chow pays tribute to Vickery Bowles, Toronto's chief librarian. She's retiring. "We want to today celebrate a remarkable chapter in the life of our city — and in the life of someone who has helped shape it in quiet but powerful ways," Chow says.
If "three strikes" laws seem overly draconian to too many people, we could easily get ~the same outcomes with ten strikes
A third of all shoplifting arrests in NYC in 2022 were due to just 327 people. That's 0.00385% of the population doing 33% of the crime! This guy is one of them. Lock him up.
I'm a big fan of Equivalence Testing. Simple and transparent way to provide evidence that a null result is robust (and not just an underpowered result). Highly recommend to my colleagues in econ.
The first step to publishing null results is to learn about equivalence testing, and design studies that statistically support the conclusion that there is no meaningful effect. lakens.github.io/statistical_in…. If you are a statistics teacher, include this into 2nd year courses.
The lack of accountability for decisions is so deep in Toronto that when the city is asked to follow through on a promises they made they seem genuinely confused.
"I really don't know why they want to pick this fight with us," Carroll says of the federal government. "We are bigger than the city of Vancouver by the size of Montreal. So if you take all the area where sixplexes currently are as-of-right, it exceeds any other city in Canada."
Americans may not realize but the rest of the world is getting stories like this about you at least weekly. This one is especially galling though
I hope Canadian authorities investigate this. If this guy’s story pans out, we are in a whole new world. ctvnews.ca/montreal/artic…
Excited that our (@Apoorva__Lal, @xuyiqing, @zu_gary) paper won the Political Analysis' 2024 Editor's Choice award! It was really a lot of work (we started this in 2018!), so nice to see we've had some impact on the field. It's also open access. cambridge.org/core/journals/…
DC is like Ottawa in that one season is entirely inhospitable for human life, and a good number of people there work for the government. DC is unlike Ottawa in that it is a pleasant place to live
Places in the global DC belt —Brasilia —Canberra —Ankara —Brussels —Ottawa what are some others
I don’t think I could live off of rojak and beer, but it would be really fun to try.
Tragic. Qualitative, comparative, theoretically informed (or theory generating) work in economic history is foundational. e.g. I cannot imagine understanding the 20th century without Barry Eichengreen. The optimal amount of qualitative economic history is surely >20% of papers.
4/ 🧪 Methods: From Time Series to Causal Inference In 2000, 70% of papers used mostly descriptive time-series analysis. Now? It's <40%. Econometrics (IVs, DiD, panel models) are dominant. Machine learning & text mining are on the rise. Qualitative work? Nearly extinct.
There's no "pause" button for PEPFAR. When you cut partners loose, people find new jobs, expertise and community credibility decays. You can't wait out this administration and just flip the switch back to ON next time. The switch won't be there anymore.
One Trump supporter, when I asked about PEPFAR, just shrugged and said "it'll come back." Even if it does, the kids won't.
In high school, some friends of mine and I watched every James Bond film in a row, pausing only long enough to rewind the tapes (yes I’m old). It was glorious.
No kid remembers their best day in front of the TV.
“just 68% of the 7,057 researchers whose work had produced null results had shared them in some form, and just 30% had tried to publish them in a journal.” What a joke. #NullEffectsMatter
Scientists overwhelmingly recognize the value of sharing null results, but rarely publish them in the research literature go.nature.com/472poOC
There were a bunch of people who were really mad when liberals circulated estimates of the deaths from ending foreign aid because those were overestimates if PEPFAR was not in fact cancelled and they thought it was dishonest to suggest that it would be.
U.S. Quietly Drafts Plan to End Program That Saved Millions From AIDS PEPFAR, the campaign to end H.I.V. globally, would morph into an effort to detect disease outbreaks and sell American products, according to documents obtained by The Times. nytimes.com/2025/07/23/hea…
The inner part of the split sidewalk is called a “five foot way” and apparently was in the British plan for the city. They’re brilliant.
Singapore updates: * sidewalks here are often split so half is near the houses or business and half is near the road, and the former is ambiguously private. I haven’t figured the norms out here * bitter melon is very good * had another phenomenal dessert “soup”
It is wild how much tech journalism comes from a place of extreme hostility toward the technology. It often reads like RFK writing articles about new pharmaceutical breakthroughs. No wonder the Silicon Valley set completely ignores this! nytimes.com/2025/07/23/tec…