prior probability

Yulier P. is the nom de guerre of the Cuban graffiti artist Yulier Rodriguez Perez (@yuliergraffiticuba). I featured some of his art on this blog last year (see here and here, for example). He was recently interviewed by Diario de Cuba, and the short interview is available here, in Spanish. Also, below is a short video featuring some of his recent work.

 

Following up on my previous post, here are two additional in-depth reports (in Spanish) about the homicide of Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano: this entry in Wikipedia and this report by BBC News Mundo. According to these reports, the only reason news of this police killing became public is because a family member was able to post a picture of Hansel’s lifeless body on Facebook on June 25.

Alternative Title: Defund the Cuban Police

One more “data point.” Another cruel indignity. This time at the hands of the Cuban State Police. I just found out that an officer working for Cuba’s National Revolutionary Police shot and killed an unarmed black man in the back, Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano (pictured above), and that since this incident, which occurred on June 24, state “security” agents from Cuba’s Interior Ministry have detained or arrested dozens of people for the political crime of protesting Hansel’s untimely death. Here is the Cuban Government’s official version of the story, where they destroy the victim’s character after having murdered him, and here is the truth (via Human Rights Watch). #JusticiaParaHansel #LibertadParaCuba

The two-hour launch window opens on Thursday, July 30 at 7:50am (Eastern).

On the recommendation of my colleague, friend, and fellow Indophile Alex Tabarrok, I finally got around to reading Megha Majumdar’s debut novel “A Burning,” which revolves around a false criminal prosecution for terrorism and sedition. Here is the blog post by Professor Tabarrok that introduced me to this beautiful book, and here is an excerpt from Tabarrok’s post (link in the original): “What impressed me more was the less obvious commentary on social media, which is very relevant to the US. How does the pressure and potential of being seen by many others alter our choices? There are multiple mobs in A Burning; two of the mobs, one virtual, the other not, result in the brutal murders of innocent people, a third mob launches a star.” To the point, I wholeheartedly recommend “A Burning.”

While I am “on vacation” working on sundry scholarly projects and enjoying some R&R with my family, I created this film noir collage of some of the classic noir movies my family and I have seen during the month of July. You’re welcome!

What role does probability theory play in legal trials? What role should it play? In addition to my “Bayesian voting primer“–yes, the same one that an anonymous group of moderators found “unrefereeable“–, I have also been writing up an extended reply to and critique of Ron Allen and Mike Pardo’s “theory of relative plausibility.” Moreover, although my “Bayesian voting primer” and my extended reply to Allen & Pardo appear to be about different domains of laws (the primer is about elections, while the extended reply is about jury trials), both of these papers are ultimately about the same thing: “the aggregation of individual preferences” or decision-making by multi-member bodies. I will have much more to say about this topic in the next day or two.

That is how an anonymous group of self-described arXiv “moderators” described my most recent work in progress “Weyl Versus Ramsey: A Primer on Bayesian Voting,” which I have been diligently working on during my summer break and which I tried to post to arXiv, an open-access electronic archive for a wide variety of fields, including “theoretical economics,” the category I used to submit my paper. (Theoretical economics includes “social choice theory,” which is what my paper was about. See also the nasty email from arXiv, pictured below.) Better luck next time, I guess? Thank goodness for SSRN!