Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira

I loved this deep dive into one of my favorite standards. There is a great playlist in the show notes, too!

Maya, Ai, Ife (love in Nepali, Japanese, Yoruba).

A Bureaucratic Theory of Statistics This commentary proposes a framework for understanding the role of statistics in policy-making, regulation, and bureaucratic systems. I introduce the concept of "ex ante policy," describing statistica...

I have a theory. arxiv.org/abs/2501.03457

Dune book cover

"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them"

A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia - Nature Using a natural experiment that avoids common bias concerns, this study finds that the live-attenuated shingles vaccine reduced the probability of a new dementia diagnosis within a follow-up period of...

@mattpfox.bsky.social - the article you mentioned as a preprint on the SERious EPI podcast on regression discontinuity is now in Nature. Ahead of the curve! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

álvaro j. castro rivadeneira - a log and blog Scattered intermittent thoughts and notes

I got the link to show a preview! 🎉
micokoch.github.io/me/blog.html

I went to an awesome solo ~guitar evening featuring @nbraddo.bsky.social and Paulo Angelino at the Drake in Amherst and was inspired to write about it:
micokoch.github.io/me/blog.html...

En 2023, EE.UU. destinó cerca de $1.800 millones de dólares en ayuda a Latinoamérica. La suspensión de USAID obliga a gobiernos, ONGs y contratistas a cancelar proyectos, despedir personal y anular contratos. Te dejamos algunos ejemplos sobre las consecuencias para la región.🧵

C'est ce dont s'acquitte quelqu'un comme Bill Gates, qui touche des milliards de dividendes Microsoft

Certains milliardaires américains ont trouvé d'autres techniques d'évasion, mais en moyenne ils payent plus que nos Français (la barre est basse, certes)

gabriel-zucman.eu/files/report...

Should I tag these? #MedSky

~Estafa, venta de cargos públicos, simulación de funciones públicas, robo de combustible, violencia intrafamiliar, delincuencia organizada y asesinato. 11% de los aspirantes a asambleístas (236 de los 2.089 candidatos) tienen denuncias penales desde el 2014. #Ecuador
gk.city/2025/02/02/c...

Brilliant think piece on whether primary care physicians should do preventive medicine: "Considerably more effective and less costly interventions would be public policy such as taxes and regulations that may not be attractive politically but, unlike primary care, actually succeed."

~In Octavia Butler's "The Parable of the Sower" climate change has disrupted society. A new, populist pro-business, anti-regulation president gets elected, enacting policies that intensify inequality. Written in 1993, Butler’s prophetic book is set in 2024-2027.
www.democracynow.org/2025/1/16/in...

"Democracy is predicated on formal, substantive equality: one person, one vote. Capitalism is not, and is incompatible with substantive equality, because it is composed of workers and owners, success and failure, rich and poor."
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

The Atari 2600 console and an image of some of the games used in the ALE

📢 In Defense Of Atari 📢

New blog post in which I argue why the ALE is still a valuable resource for RL research!

psc-g.github.io/posts/resear...

I thought the article preview would be nicer.

"The aforementioned results support that paternal caregiving phenotypes rely on the same neural and hormonal substrates as maternal caregiving, referred to as the global human caregiving network."
[I wonder about the difference in magnitude of these changes]
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...