March 24, 2019

Hit and Miss #81: A family day

Hello!

I travelled briefly back to Waterloo this weekend, for my nonno’s birthday. Time with family has kept me happily occupied—I’ll keep today’s letter short. Just some links:

• Jianying Zha describes her dissident brother’s various experiences with China’s state security apparatus. As she explains, ‘Since 2011, China’s annual spending on domestic weiwen, or “stability maintenance,” has, according to some reports, surpassed defense spending.’ China is a major global influence today; it’ll be ever more so tomorrow. This piece brings you into a tiny, revealing corner of the country’s activities.
• Machine learning (jk, standard statistics) helps to investigate the identity of an anonymous Twitter account, @horse_js. It’s a nice, accessible walkthrough of a data science project. (In another “reveal the author” project, Peter McCormick names the probable author of the Supreme Court of Canada’s “by the Court” decision in Comeau, based on textual analysis.)

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas