Adventures in Onionism

I wrote the code to transparently and reproducibly run the High Lonesome 100 lottery, which will be conducted tonight (November 15, 2019). The code is available on Github here , and the web app to actually implement the lottery is here . The app has all the details and instructions, but simply put, you just need to pick the seed for R's pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). I don't understand all the gory details of how PRNGs work, but basically, if you write code involving randomly generated numbers, you can set the seed so that every time the code is run you get the same answer. In order to fairly set the seed, the race director Caleb Efta will have public participants roll several 10-sided dice at Laws Whiskey Bar in Denver Colorado tonight. If you didn't set a seed, the code would give you a different answer every time you ran it, so participants couldn't be sure which run the actual results came from. If we just picked some arbitrary seed (my usual is 1492) then...

For the first time in a month I stayed home this weekend and did nothing. Where nothing means grading finals and 51 miles and 12,000 feet of vertical gain, a bunch of it off-trail on Mt. Tam. Also, I got a research fellowship from the Berkeley Institute for Data Science . Starting in the fall I'll be half time at BITSS and half time at BIDS (confusing, I know). I spent Thursday and Friday at a BIDS conference on reproducibility that was pretty interesting, and people were super nice, and they're all better programmers than me, so it'll be interesting see what I can bring to the table as a social scientist. Importantly, it looks like I'll be good to stay in Berkeley for two more years.

I've been busy the last two days with the annual meeting of my employer, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences ( BITSS ). Thursday morning we did a training session on registrations, pre-analysis plans, the Open Science Framework , R, RStudio, git, GitHub, writing a project protocol, and the Harvard Dataverse. (Maybe we bit off more than we could chew in that session?) Thursday afternoon we heard from some of the leaders in the research transparency movement: Ted Miguel (Berkeley), John Ioannidis (Stanford), Brian Nosek (UVA/Center for Open Science), Jack Molyneaux (Millennium Challenge Corporation), Victoria Stodden (UIUC). Friday we heard about recent research in transparency, including my presentation of a draft of the Manual of Best Practices in Transparent Social Science Research. People seemed to really like it. My slides and the draft manual are all on my github account. If you're into research transparency, we're encouraging open partic...