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I’m back from Ireland. It was as magical as I’d hoped. We had such a blast and I’ll always remember the trip, and also how much more mature Wolfie is than me in the context of long lines at airports, even though he’s only 8 (his words: “Of course I do get impatient, mom, but I just hold it inside and I think about positive things like that we’ll eventually be home and that we’ll be able to see our family”).

Also, after coming home yesterday, I went to a nutrition seminar for bariatric surgery with my husband. I have officially completed all the paperwork (tons of it) so right now I’m in the waiting phase, hoping that my insurance clears the surgery soon so I can get on with it. As usual, I’m impatient. I should probably try to channel Wolfie here.

I’m guessing it will be another 6 weeks before I get the surgery, so around August 9th. That’s four weeks for the insurance to clear, and then once that happens, I need to be on a very strict diet for two weeks heading into the surgery. Theoretically I could get cleared in two weeks, and I could even just start the diet early, but since it’s so intense I’m probably not going to start until I have a date.

The strict diet is essentially a protein-drink only, starvation diet meant to reduce the size of my liver in order for it to be not in the way for the actual laparoscopic surgery. It turns out that many people of my weight have “non-alcoholic fatty liver,” which just means a liver that’s bigger and contains more fat than a normal liver. It can get in the way of the surgeon’s tool, which can be a problem. The good news is that livers respond quickly to dieting, so the two week extreme diet goes pretty far in decreasing the size of the liver to a manageable obstacle.

I’ve been practicing making protein shakes lately, mostly with fruit and milk, in order to get used to them, because generally speaking they’re horrible tasting and sickly artificially sweet. I have found a pretty good one though, by which I mean it’s not too sweet, and I just tried it alone with water, and it was actually fine. The trick is: lots of ice and a really good blender. I got a “Ninja Professional Blender with single serve” and it’s perfect.

Also in last night’s seminar we went over the diet for the various stages of recovery. Here’s a cheat sheet:

1. For the week after the surgery, you’re never hungry and you only drink, but the weird thing is you have to drink tiny 1 ounce cup of water or broth every 20 minutes while you’re awake.
2. For a few weeks after that you eat every three hours, even though you’re probably not hungry, but it has to be the pureed like baby food or applesauce. The reason is that your stomach is still healing and is swollen, and might not be larger than the size of a straw in places, so larger chunks of food could get stuck. You also drink tiny amounts very often but you can’t drink and eat at the same time.
3. After that you start introducing slightly less pureed food into your diet. You eventually eat pretty normal food but your stomach is much smaller than before, so way less of it. They suggest you eat mainly protein, and you eat that first, followed by vegetables and fruit.
4. They also give you the following long-term rules: never eat and drink at the same time. Never drink carbonated beverages. Try to eat on 25% of your diet in fat, and avoid refined carbohydrates forever. Also, take vitamins every day for the rest of your life.

If that all sounds like a major behavior change, you’re right. It’s intimidating. On the other hand, the people I’ve interviewed have all told me the one thing that I think makes it possible: namely, that you’re not hungry all the time, even though you’re eating way less. That small amounts of food fill you up for hours. This sounds like a miracle to me, as a person whose hunger rages at me like someone screaming in my ears on a daily basis. So I’m taking a leap of faith, knowing that I’m pretty good at following plans I’ve set for myself, and also knowing that once you’ve developed a habit, it’s not that hard to follow it.

First of all, forgive me if I’m blathering on, I’ve been hanging out with an 8-year-old for a week so I’m kind of starved for adult conversation. And even if you can’t actually answer me in real time, your comments are very welcome.

Second of all, I would like to comment on traveling in general.

1. What’s with all the mirrors in hotel rooms? They’re everywhere, and, may I say, completely unnecessary. Now, I get that they make the rooms look somewhat bigger, but what’s the deal with sitting down at the toilet and seeing yourself in a mirror, sitting down at the toilet? It’s not a good look for anyone, I’d wager, and I’m not being ultra self-conscious when I say that. For that matter, I’m pretty at ease with my body, but nobody looks good at the toilet. Or rather, people who do look good at the toilet would look good in any position whatsoever. So even for them, I’d suggest fewer mirrors near toilets, are you with me? [the way I deal with the mirror problem is I walk around the room without my glasses on so I can’t see anything. It solves the problem of the mirrors but also produces its own problems]
2. Also, coffee. I’m not complaining, since free coffee is always welcome (although in Las Vegas the coffee pods cost like $20 each, and I couldn’t even find them because I was on my hands and knees looking for free coffee pods without my glasses), but why oh why so little? I’m in a hotel now where they have one of those tiny pod machines, and they give me all of 2 tiny pods for an entire day’s worth of coffee. Is there any serious coffee drinker who could make do on such a small amount of caffeine? I mean, a small Starbucks black coffee would be equivalent to about 8 pods alone, and who buys small coffee anymore? I don’t get it. [the way I deal with the lack of coffee problem is I steal coffee pods off of the maid carts in the hallways whenever I get the chance. This solves the problem of too little coffee but leads to the problem of feeling somewhat guilty all the time]
3. Having made those whiny complaints, let me say how much I love hotel rooms, and especially how utterly anonymous they are. They’re so comfortingly bland! And everything is designed with disgusting behavior in mind, so you don’t have to worry too hard about messing something up. It’s much better than staying in someone’s house where you might break something. In a hotel room there’s basically nothing to break because it’s all bolted onto the wall and/or stain resistant. It’s heaven.

Also, before I leave, I should mention that I did get a wonderful fiddle lesson from Leisha. I don’t have pictures but here’s a recording of her doing a tune called Cooley’s Reel:

In my previous post, I explained how my trip to Dublin with my son Wolfie came to be. Now I want to tell you what we’ve done so far.

Day 1 – complaints

We started with the standard squished-in-the-airplane for 7 hours, then spend forever getting luggage, then find slow shuttle bus to car rental, then get charged an extra $600 for standard transmission (because you cannot imagine driving on the left side of the road in a city you don’t know AND driving manual with your left hand), then driving the wrong way away from the airport, then getting stuck in horrible Dublin morning commuting traffic, then finally making it to the hotel exhausted.

Having gotten that out of the way we proceeded to take a well-deserved nap, then we got up and found lunch and an extremely slow bus tour around the city, which gave us a broad idea of what we had available to us. Then we got back to the hotel, went swimming in the hotel pool, and crashed.

Here we are waiting for lunch. Can you guess who was more patient?

It took a while to get lunch.

Can you guess who was more patient?

Day 2 – laziness

Really no trip would be complete without a full day of doing nothing at all. So we did nothing on this day, stayed the entire day inside the hotel except for the time I went across the alleyway to pick up food that I ordered in advance. Wolfie could see me off the balcony:

By the way, when I say we did nothing, it goes without saying that we went swimming in the hotel pool, because we believe that is a solemn duty of vacationers.

Day 3 – horses and castles

After resting up, we were ready for a day of action! We woke up early, grabbed breakfast, and drove out west to the Clare Equestrian Centre, where a very nice young woman by the name of Shavonne Siobhan gave Wolfie his very first riding lesson:

Wolfie described this experience as “both awesome and mortifying.” In this picture he’s biting his cheek to prevent himself from throwing up.

After the lesson we went to our hotel for the night, which was absolutely the nicest place we ever have or ever will stay, the Dromoland Castle Hotel. One direct consequence of the horseback riding lesson (a steal at 40 Euros) was that, every time from then on when we talk about “how Irish” something we’re doing is, say drinking Guinness and eating beef stew at a pub, we always mention that it could be just a bit more Irish if we were doing it on horseback.

We were too awed by how nice it was at the castle to take many pictures, but here we are at a fancy tea:

Yes, we got steak with our tea. Yum.

And here’s Wolfie doing a victory dance as he beats me at outside chess:

He’s singing too.

We also went swimming in the hotel pool for a record 90 minutes before falling asleep.

Day 4 – the coast and gay pride

We woke up at the castle, had a fancy breakfast, went swimming, and then drove to the Cliffs of Moher:

We loved it.

Can you see Wolfie in the tower?

I am going for messy hair here.

Can’t decide which shot has messier hair.

Lots of movies have used this cave.

We eventually found ourselves in Doolin, where we bought a few things at the shops:

This lad couldn’t be more Irish unless he was on a horse.

After eating beef stew and Guinness at a pub, and wishing there were live music (we’d missed the Doolin Folk Festival by one week!), we went for a walk to make sure I was fit for driving, and we took some pictures:

Looking like an Irish hero

Sentimentality reigns in Ireland

Action shot

Cows with a view

After that we drove back to Dublin, and when we got there, everyone was walking around in Rainbow flags. It was outstanding, and we soon realized we’d missed the Pride Parade in Dublin, which was a huge deal. That made me think maybe we’d be able to find some live music if we just went to the right place. So after parking, we went on a walk to the Temple Bar. Wolfie found himself some flags:

He named pretty much all of them.

Well we did find live music, but the bars were so loud and crowded we didn’t stay long.

And did I mention that there were quite a few drunken horsemen rushing their horses through the streets this way and that and generally causing confusion and mayhem? It made everything extremely Irish. We were mesmerized, especially as the drunk college students kept trying to heave themselves onto the carriages at the slightest provocation.

We ended up sitting outside at an Indian restaurant, when all of a sudden these three musicians popped up right next to us:

And they were fantastic!

Long story short, I’ve asked the fiddler to give me a lesson today, which is Day 5 – did I mention I brought my fiddle? – and she said yes. More soon.

I’m here in Dublin with my son Wolfie for a week. It’s absolutely amazing. To understand why you’ll need to know how we decided to come here in the first place.

It all started on St. Patrick’s Day, which my son happened to have off, and on which I happened to be procrastinating, so we got all dressed up:

We really enjoyed the parade:

And so we talked about how, even though we’re only technically 25% and an eighth Irish, we’re actually, down deep, 100% Irish. We discussed blarney, the need for embellishment for a really good story, and he agreed that drunk people are funny and the musical tradition is friendly and fun. To celebrate we bought a flag:

And then we cemented the deal with a meal at the Brooklyn Diner:

Weeks went by. Wolfie mentioned Irish castles he’d seen on YouTube. Then he started getting really into flags, first getting the U.S., Irish, and Dutch flags on his door:

And then with his amazing “draw a country, color it in with that country’s flag” project:

You might notice he forgot Northern Ireland here. Oh well.

Long story short, Ireland became a small obsession for me and Wolfie. And, soon enough, when I walked him to school in the morning, at some point he’d ask me, ‘Mom, when can we go to Ireland and see the castles?’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah we should do that.’ Until one day, he asked me for maybe the fourth time that week and I said, ‘OK shit, I’ll go home and buy tickets.’ And I did.

So that’s the story of how we got here. Tomorrow I’ll tell you what we’ve done here so far. Spoiler: it’s been amazing.

This is a guest post, converted from a letter to me, by Derek Osborne, a father of four and active participant in his community with a strong belief that real change happens at the local level. Derek is a data scientist at Intel where he works on a team that utilizes machine learning techniques to optimize the workforce at Intel. Prior to working at Intel, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Biophysics.

I moved to Hillsboro, Oregon four years ago with my wife and three kids after finishing my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. Like many parents when choosing a home, I checked on the school scores of the nearby elementary schools and there was a large variance in the Zillow school scores that are taken from greatschools.org. After house hunting for a long time, we finally found a home that was perfect for our family but it was in the school boundaries of Quatama Elementary that was ranked a 5 out of 10 and red. Asking around, other parents told us the reason was because there was low income housing in the area which was driving down the score. We felt that if the only issue with the school was that the school boundaries included low income housing, it shouldn’t stop us from buying the home. We could always transfer to a better school if we didn’t like the experience.

Over the following years we have loved all of our teachers, the principal, and our kid’s classmates and were baffled that it was scoring so low. During this time, we’ve met people that avoided the school when they moved in because of the score they saw on Zillow when they moved to the area. We also have had multiple friends move away because of the school’s ranking. When they would move, we’d ask what in the school do you dislike and they would acknowledge their personal experience was positive but they wanted to move to a “better” school. It was sad to see people trust a single digit score more than a personal experience.

Over this time, I’d check the same single digit ranking every year or so to see if it has gone up but it would remain the same. I felt that our school was a quality school and I was confused why the score never changed. What was even more baffling is that I started to dig into the scores published by the state that go into more detail and Quatama scored nearly the same or higher as its nearby high performing schools. After hearing some other parents say they wouldn’t let their kids go to Quatama, I felt that I needed to figure out why it was “rated low”.

I emailed greatschools.org and explained the situation and I got back a standard cut and paste answer but after a few emails insisting something was wrong they realized there was an error in their publishing system for Quatama. They have now updated the rankings and Quatama is now an 8 out of 10 and “green” which is comparable to its high performing peers. The perception that Quatama is a low performing school was completely erroneous and based off a math system gone wrong.

I’m now working with the principal to see if there is a way for us to measure how this rating has impacted the school. My thought that the same way there are bandwagon fans, there are bandwagon parents. Now that the school is rated higher, will the parents view of the school change? Will the parental support change over the next few years? If it does change, this will open up a large question about the morality of publishing overly simplified data.

My newest Bloomberg View column is out!

What’s Wrong With Letting Tech Run Our Schools

You can see all my Bloomberg columns here.

I’ve got a new Bloomberg View column out:

A Mathematician’s Secret: We’re Not All Geniuses

See all my Bloomberg View columns here.

Nerds, you’re in luck!

We’ve designed Stacks Project Hoodies and they’re for sale. Please tell all your nerd friends to sign up by June 16th so we’ll have them printed in time for the Stack Project Workshop taking place in Michigan at the end of July.

Here’s the Google form, have at it!

Thanks to Wei Ho and Pieter Belmans for their help in organizing!

I ranted against Silicon Valley “entrepreneurs” in my latest Bloomberg View column:

Don’t Expect Tech to Care About Your Problems:

Interplanetary travel is way more fun than accountability.

See all my Bloomberg View columns here.

My newest Bloomberg View column is out:

What If Robots Did the Hiring at Fox News?

See all my Bloomberg View columns here.

I’ve gone and done it, folks: I’ve designed a “Period Equity (tampon) Hat” for my friend Laura Strausfeld, who is speaking later today at a cool rally in D.C.:

Rally for Safe Feminine Care Products in Washington, DC!

Anyway, here’s the hat, tell me what you think:

I had to learn a new technique called “intarsia in the round” in order to knit this hat. Also, I plan to put the design up on ravelry soon, so look for me there if you’re interested in knitting your own Period Equity (tampon) Hat! My Ravelry username is cathyoneil.

Also, if you’re wondering why I’m interested in this particular issue, and why Laura is speaking there, please read this post, as well as this one, about how I was a plaintiff on the New York State tampon tax case, which we won, and Laura was the legal brain behind it.

Laura has recently started an organization called Period Equity to further the cause. And if you look at their site, you’ll see my hat design was pretty much a total rip-off of their website design.

This is a guest post by Eugene Stern, originally posted on his blog sensemadehere.wordpress.com.

“Why am I surrounded by statistical illiterates?” — Roger Mexico in Gravity’s Rainbow

Oops, they did it again. This weekend, the New York Times put out this profile of William Sanders, the originator of evaluating teachers using value-added models based on student standardized test results. It is statistically illiterate, uses math to mislead and intimidate, and is utterly infuriating.

Here’s the worst part:

When he began calculating value-added scores en masse, he immediately saw that the ratings fell into a “normal” distribution, or bell curve. A small number of teachers had unusually bad results, a small number had unusually good results, and most were somewhere in the middle.

And later:

Up until his death, Mr. Sanders never tired of pointing out that none of the critiques refuted the central insight of the value-added bell curve: Some teachers are much better than others, for reasons that conventional measures can’t explain.

The implication here is that value added models have scientific credibility because they look like math — they give you a bell curve, you know. That sounds sort of impressive until you remember that the bell curve is also the world’s most common model of random noise. Which is what value added models happen to be.

Just to replace the Times’s name dropping with some actual math, bell curves are ubiquitous because of the Central Limit Theorem, which says that any variable that depends on many similar-looking but independent factors looks like a bell curve, no matter what the unrelated factors are. For example, the number of heads you get in 100 coin flips. Each single flip is binary, but when you flip a coin over and over, one flip doesn’t affect the next, and out comes a bell curve. Or how about height? It depends on lots of factors: heredity, diet, environment, and so on, and you get a bell curve again. The central limit theorem is wonderful because it helps explain the world: it tells you why you see bell curves everywhere. It also tells you that random fluctuations that don’t mean anything tend to look like bell curves too.

So, just to take another example, if I decided to rate teachers by the size of the turds that come out of their ass, I could wave around a lovely bell-shaped distribution of teacher ratings, sit back, and wait for the Times article about how statistically insightful this is. Because back in the bad old days, we didn’t know how to distinguish between good and bad teachers, but the Turd Size Model™ produces a shiny, mathy-looking distribution — so it must be correct! — and shows us that teacher quality varies for reasons that conventional measures can’t explain.

Or maybe we should just rate news articles based on turd size, so this one could get a Pulitzer.

My newest Bloomberg View Column:

Donald Trump’s Path-Independent Theory of Mind: How the U.S. president is like a Google ad test

You can see all of my Bloomberg View columns here.

My newest Bloomberg Column about politically driven data finagling:

Unreliable Data Can Threaten Democracy

Also, you can see all my Bloomberg columns here.

I’m a bit behind with posting my latest gargantuan knitting project. I call it the 100 Day Blanket because I bought the yarn on the day after the election in an effort to counterbalance my wildly unbalanced thoughts and emotions, and I finished it 100 days after the inauguration. It was a very successful coping mechanism for anxiety.

Given that it has 144 squares in it, and that there were about 10 weeks in between the election and inauguration, that means I knitted nearly one square on average. Actually it took me a couple of weeks to gather the courage to put it all together so I’d say I really did just continuously knit for a while there.

Because, dude, that’s a lot of nervous energy. I should also mention that I knitted numerous pussy hats and other smaller projects during that same period. Serious question, what do non-knitters do to deal with their anxiety?

Without further ado, the 100 Day Blanket:

Please don’t look too carefully at our messy side tables.

Here’s a glamour shot:

And a couple of shots of putting it together:

This took place at our friends’ ‘Happy House’ upstate.

One quarter at a time!

My latest Bloomberg View column, probably my favorite so far:

Don’t Grade Teachers With a Bad Algorithm

My newest column in Bloomberg View, in which I argue that Yuval Harari is putting us all on:

I’d Rather Not Merge With Robots, Thank You

This is an anonymous guest post.

Mentorship is important in any field. In the tech industry, it is essential. In tech, one’s network is key for learning about the existence of smaller startups, where the financial upside is often higher than at big companies due to stock grants. For a culture that emphasizes meritocracy so heavily, tech is much more of a who-is-who than I ever realized before moving out to the Bay Area as an engineer last year. Not only that, but it is especially difficult to access this network as a woman.   I believe that the informal culture of tech, in which professional and social mix to an extent that it is unclear whether an interaction is professional or romantic, harms women in finding mentorship. Ultimately, those with real power and influence in Silicon Valley are in a network of their own.

I learned this firsthand when I met with my first Very Important Person (VIP). This VIP invited me to meet at The Battery, described on its website as a “unique sort of social destination” featuring “an eager, inquisitive bunch, always curious, always on the hunt for new ideas and problems to solve…Here is where they came to refill their cups. To tell stories. To swap ideas. To eschew status but enjoy the company of those they respected. Here is where they came to feel at home on an evening out.” For an easy annual payment of $2400.

I was initially surprised when this VIP decided to meet with me, given how difficult I had found it to get face time with anyone. I was even more surprised when he talked at me for nearly an hour (ignoring my pre-prepared questions), until his next meeting – a tall blonde girl – arrived. Being just out of college and naive, I thought nothing of it, though he did reference how he “just wanted to get laid in college” during our meeting – until the emails and texts started coming. Over the course of the next month, I received email after email from this person, to all three of my email addresses which he somehow got, and later to my cell phone, saying “wanted to see me again” among other things. I will never be 100 percent sure about his intent. At the same time, why on earth would a VIP be so interested in seeing me again?

Whatever his intent, I am confident that it wasn’t mentorship. Despite my having prepared specific questions for our meeting that I wanted advice on, he instead talked at me for the full hour. I think that was the most upsetting piece of it for me. I wanted mentorship, and instead ended up getting weird emails and texts.

I am not the only one of my friends with a Battery story. I’ve been told that there is a secret bar behind the regular bar, which is where things get really weird.

This VIP is certainly an outlier. Only a small fraction of men have creepy intent. And yet, I am sure that plenty of white men aged 35 to 50 (the “older generation” by tech standards that I am trying to access) probably don’t want to talk to me for precisely that reason. Getting coffee with a young woman can look like a date even if it is not, and men in positions of power are especially wary of sexual harassment allegations.

I believe that the informal culture of hoodies and happy hours makes it more difficult for women to access mentorship. A college classmate who works in politics remarked that senior people in politics are more willing to chat with her, sometimes for hours. The informal culture of tech, in which men frequently grab a drink with a male mentor but often do not feel comfortable doing the same with a woman, means that it is difficult for women to get access. At least in politics, it is more clear whether a mentor is inappropriately hitting on you in a professional setting, because that setting is clearly professional.

What about senior female mentors? I have pursued this strategy as well with some limited success, but feel that there are simply not enough senior women to go around for this to be a viable solution. Attrition rates, coupled with the fact that this industry was far more hostile to women 10+ years ago, means that senior women are few and far between, as well as stretched thin. It is essential to connect with mentors of all genders.

I am enormously grateful to those who have provided me with mentorship, including peers just a year or two above me who have helped fill in some of the gaps. That being said, I feel that as long as succeeding in tech involves being well-connected in a way that women and minorities in tech are not, diversity in the industry will stall. The past year has felt more like The Social Network than I ever could have imagined – creepy but well-connected mentors, hiring decisions made over drinks, and all.

Here’s my newest Bloomberg View column, about female engineers at Facebook and Simpson’s Paradox:

Is Facebook Tough on Women? Let’s Check the Data

This is a guest post by Phil Goff, the inaugural Franklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity, and an expert in contemporary forms of racial bias and discrimination, as well as the intersections of race and gender.

On November 9, 2016, the world of police accountability shifted dramatically. Though the Movement for Black Lives and local engagement in police reform did not end, the drastic change to the political landscape left many who supported those fights in shock. And as the first 100 days of the new Administration are now behind us, the ways in which this Administration has already changed the trajectory of criminal justice reform and other aligned civil liberties is discouraging. From the appointment of Jeff Sessions to Attorney General to his order to review existing DOJ grants, investigations, and consent decrees, many are expecting both an evaporating role of federal government in police accountability and an expanding role for it in immigration and surveillance activities that run antithetical to public safety and fairness.

The retreat from principles of safety and justice hurts me, too. But I don’t despair. That’s at least in part because I’m a professional JusticeNerd™ (in addition to being one in my spare time). My job is to build more and better protections for civil rights through science. So, while the picture at the federal level is not inspiring, the rest of the landscape is. Specifically, recent commitments from philanthropy and tech giants like Google bring the promise of accountability through data metrics closer than it was before the election. Here’s what I mean:

When the crisis of public trust in police began, we had no national data on police behavior. Nothing on stops. Nothing on use of force. Nothing on policies. Nothing on officer psychological profiles. Nothing. And without metrics, the job of holding police accountable is nigh impossible.

But unbeknownst to many, police chiefs were already organizing to fix that. Yes. Police chiefs. At a conference my organization, the Center for Policing Equity (CPE), co-hosted with DOJ, representatives from 36 of the largest police departments called for a national database where stops and use of force could be standardized, compared, and mined for insights about racial disparities. They wanted answers to their questions about how “bad” their disparities were—and what they could do to fix them. As a result, CPE won a million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, and we began constructing the National Justice Database (NJD), the first and still the largest standardized database of police officer behavior. The NJD also collects data on officer psychological orientations (including implicit bias), providing a unique opportunity to study the roots of racial disparities in policing.

But the database was not ready when the crisis hit. We were still putting together the infrastructure. Still adding departments. So, when the crisis hit, first in Ferguson, then in Baltimore, New York, Minneapolis, Baton Rouge, and Charlotte, we had fewer answers than questions. Still, like the JusticeNerds™ we are, we persisted.

The past 5 years have been labor intensive, with data extraction, cleaning, standardization, and analysis taking months for each department. With those months of effort came valuable insights about the right metrics to use for identifying racial disparities that were rooted in broader racial inequality (e.g., employment, education, or housing disparities) as opposed to police policies, psychologies, or behaviors. The metrics represent the ability to hold police accountable to the values of equality we should all share. And, with voluntary commitments from departments that cover around one-third of the United States by population—with so much enthusiasm among police and communities—I was already optimistic about where things were headed.

Then, recently, Google came into the picture, and my optimism soared. Along with a $5 million commitment, Google did what we most needed: pledged to help us automate the processes of data extraction, cleaning, standardization, and analysis. This means that the months-long slog of putting a report together for each department is likely to turn into a matter of hours or days. And that means that there will no longer be any reasonable excuse for a department who collects data on any of these factors to say they don’t know what they mean.

What CPE—and the field—needs now are analysts. Lots and lots of analysts. And we, at least, are hiring DataNerds who want to be JusticeNerds™. With departments now coming in by the state-load, we are inundated with confidential data that needs to be interrogated so that we can answer some of the most fundamental questions in policing like: what economic conditions predict racial disparities in police stops? When does housing segregation most influence police activity? And, how do race and gender intersect in predicting police use of force?

Doing this work is exciting. It’s energizing. And, most importantly, it staves off the temptation to despair when it seems that progress is in retreat. So, even if policing isn’t your thing, my goal in writing this is to encourage folks to consider being a professional JusticeNerd™, regardless (in addition to being a nerd in your spare time). Because my hope is that the JusticeNerds™ who have not yet connected to this work professionally have also not given up on it. I hope that as more folks who feel passionately about social justice—and geek out over data architecture and social science—think about how they want to make their money, that they will work to find employment at the intersections of tech and justice. Or that they will create those opportunities.

Our country needs professional JusticeNerds™, and we are in short supply. My colleagues at the Vera Institute, Measures for Justice, the PICO Network, the National Network for Safe Communities, PolicyLink, Urban Institute, the Police Foundation, as well as at CPE are almost constantly in need of a diverse array of the most creative and committed folks. Folks who may have felt dispirited, but who are willing to fight despair as a vocation. So, if you feel like I’ve been talking directly to you (or to someone you know), you’re probably right. And if you are looking to make your passions your fulltime gig, please do. The whole field is hiring. And the whole country needs us to.