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Vote! Today! Before 8pm!

Yesterday, I linked a polling-place guide from the IOP, which was two years out of date. The HPR has a good guide to candidates and their issues, but their polling-place list for Harvard students is also incorrect.^[1] As far as I can tell, the list goes:

• Harvard Yard (inc. Union; exc. Apley), Adams: Gund Hall (48 Quincy Street)
• Dunster, Leverett: Putnam Apartments (2 Mt. Auburn Street)
• Apley, Lowell, Mather, Quincy: Quincy House (58 Plympton Street)
• Quad: Graham and Parks School (44 Linnaean Street)
• Eliot: Friends Meeting House (5 Longfellow Park)

It's unclear to me where Winthrop and Kirkland vote; whether they're also with Eliot, or if they vote in Quincy with the rest.

The Crimson also has a bit on early polling results, especially regarding the four ballot initiatives (indexing the state gasoline tax to consumer prices, expansion of $0.05 bottle-recycling rebates to all non-alcoholic, non-carbonated drinks, banning casinos and dog-racing betting, and sick-leave entitlements for private Mass. employees).

Now go do that now, and come back when you're done!

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Landry and Harris, pursuing the "hacker edition"^[?] of running for UC prez, make it onto the ballot despite collecting petition signatures for only 23 hours. Campaigning is prohibited for another week, and, while it's unclear whether or not the UC Election Committee counts private blogs as press, I'm going to shut up about them for that interval. Expect more later.

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Speaking of UC ballot petitions, the Harvard Teaching Campaign is collecting signatures to put a referendum question on the UC ballot asking:

Do you support or oppose a cap of 12 students on all mandatory and graded sections and

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Reminder: What may be your best chance this year to shape the future of your city/state/nation is tomorrow. So go out there and do the thing! If you're at Harvard and forgot where the heck you were supposed to go to do the thing, tomorrow's post has the rundown.

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Michael Landry '16 and Connor Harris '16 have declared their candidacy for the Harvard Undergraduate Council (vice-)presidency. You may know Michael because the Crimson wrote a piece about him last week, and you may know Connor because he keeps saying smart things about transportation policy, urban planning, and liberal arts education to everyone in earshot.

Cutting to the quick, I'm going to go right out and declare my support for these two right now. I will inevitably write more later, but for now, you should sign the petition to put them on the ballot if you trust my judgment in matters of politics. Or, like, if you believe in the power of a free and open marketplace of ideas.

Update: Connor has announced the official Landry-Harris platform via press release at 1:30 am EST, Monday, November 2:

I'm running for UC with Michael Landry and you should all sign the petition for us to be on the ballot. Campaign planks to include, in descending order of seriousness:

1) better disabled access to Harvard's old buildings;

2) repealing the Thursday dinner dhall restrictions because they're annoying as fuck;

3) getting every department to publish their concentrators' average in- and out-of-concentration GPAs, so one could subtract the former from the latter, sort descending, and have a pretty good index of which concentrations are the hardest or have

0

First, meta of metas, if you like my takes on (some subset of) the week, maybe also check out other people's linkwraps that have come out in the last day or so:

• Unequally Yoked | 7 Quick Takes: Costuming, Conspiracy, and Counterfeiting (Leah Libresco is a one-time atheist blogger, now a Catholic blogger, and remains a devout rationalist. Unequally Yoked's 7QT's get the credit for convincing me to to BoL's.)
• My Biased Coin | Weekend Links (November 1 Edition) (Michael Mitzenmacher is currently my professor for Complexity and Algorithms, and often has insightful things to say on the inner workings of the ivory tower, being a research professor of theoretical computer science.)
• Slate Star Codex | Links for November 2014 (Scott S. Alexander, who also writes as Yvain, writes on his own blog and on LessWrong about...well...lots of things. But I appreciate his thoughts.)

1

Vigrin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo [exploded in midair on Friday](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29861259), killing one of two test pilots. In [a press statement](http://www.virgingalactic.com/news/item/statement-from-virgin-galactic/), CEO George Whitesides says:

"Space is hard and today was a tough day. We are going to be supporting the investigation as we figure out what

This week, MIT released Survey Results: 2014 Community Attitudes on Sexual Assault, making them one of the first schools to release such broad survey data on sex crimes. These are the results of a survey emailed to MIT undergraduate and graduate students last April, which had a response rate of 35% from 10,831--3,844 total responses.

Now, MIT is clear that the document they've published should be taken as initial, not final, results:

"This document is a summary of the most pertinent results corresponding to questions asked in the survey; it is intended to be an initial summary of survey results. Throughout the upcoming academic year we will work with the community to use the
survey data to answer additional important questions. New findings will be posted to web.mit.edu/surveys/health/, where the full text of the survey questions and other related information can also be found."

They are also upfront about acknowledging the inevitability of response bias:

"Response bias is expected in virtually any voluntary survey, particularly one focused on a narrow topic. While we invited all enrolled graduate and undergraduate students to take this survey, and more than one-third responded, it is not possible to know if students self-selected in or out of the survey in a way that would bias our results. For example, it is difficult

It's Jonas Salk's 100th birthday (as commemorated in Google's daily doodle, above, which, ironically enough, enjoys more patent protection than does the polio vaccine it commemorates), which makes for a fine reminder that you should get your annual flu shot! By doing so, you're:

1. much less likely to get the flu
2. decreasing potential anxiety as a result of experiencing flu-like symptoms, which, annoyingly, are highly similar to the early symptoms of Ebola every disease ever.
3. protecting your friends, family, the elderly, babies, and the immunosuppressed through herd immunity.

On this last point (herd immunity), Vax is a neat online game where you try to shut down epidemics by vaccinating and quarantining people; my top scores are 94%/81%/76% in turn-based mode and 94%/91%/84% in real-time mode. It's addicting, but mercifully not that long, so you won't lose days of your life to it.

Anyway. Happy birthday, Dr. Salk. May the world always have scientists so visionary and daring. May your legacy as the man who killed a disease be less rare in the future, when we've likewise struck malaria, worms, and so many more preventable diseases from the list of things that kill us, but until then, thanks for getting us this far.

1

The only thing I have to say about #GamerGate is: Felicia Day, who is a person you know of if you were a nerd who grew up with the internet, has a really nice post on her own blog entitled "The Only Thing I Have to Say about Gamer Gate". For those of you less plugged into the internet gaming community, #GamerGate is more or less a whole lot of uproar by some sexist gamers who are angry that it's not okay in this day and age to be a sexist gamer. Writes Day:

"I have not said many public things about Gamer Gate. I hav tried to leave it alone, aside from a few @ replies on Twitter that journalists have decided to use in their articles, siding me against the hashtag. Why have I remained mostly silent?

Self-protection and fear.

...

HOW SICK IS THAT?"

More at her blog; I'm not going to steal her thunder.

Epilogue: After some trolls, in response to her post, issued public threats against Day and published her address, phone number, and other personal information online, she wrote on Facebook:

I posted this essay yesterday afternoon on Tumblr. Yes, personal information was leaked shortly after, but the

1

According to a Harvard FAS report (as reported in the Crimson), there are now more students at Harvard studying "Engineering and Applied Sciences" than "Arts and Humanities". But fear not that we're losing our liberal-arts soul; there are still half again as many students in NatSci than SEAS, and more students studying Social Sciences than SEAS and NatSci put together.

2

One of the awesome benefits of the House System at Harvard (think kind of like Hogwarts's house system, except the Sorting Hat is a random-number generator, and it happens after your freshman year, rather than on entry) is that I've gotten to eat dinner a few times with Doug Melton, of recent "giant leap foward in the quest to find a truly efective treatment for type 1 diabetes" fame, but who's also been in the TIME 100 two times. He's a fantastic guy, and Eliot House is lucky to have him as House Master. For that matter, the world is lucky to have him as scientist, as well.

3

Relatedly, there's not enough research funding to go around. The Director of the National Institutes of Health went