Everybody Lies

Another lovely day in Sevilla. This in contrast to the misery that is currently the weather in Walla Walla. Nothing but cold and snow there for the next few days. Here, though it was never really winter here, it's clearly moving back to warmer weather here. The beautiful weather along with it being Friday afternoon had lots of people hanging out by the river:

Happy people, enjoying each other's company and the end of winter, such as it is.

Also along the river, the tourist boats were dodging a plethora of rowers:

Not everyone was happy today though. On my way back from walking with Laura to her school for class, I passed this little guy:

He was not pleased. It was cute, so I surreptitiously snapped a photo.

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I got a birthday card from Kathy and Ric today. It was in a padded envelop with a bag full of Milk Duds. Happy birthday to me! Unfortunately, as appealing as the Milk Duds were, the guy on the birthday card kinda made me lose my appetite:

Thanks Kath.

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I started reading Everybody Lies by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz today. This is another data science book. This guy specializes in drawing conclusions about people, culture, societies, etc using Google search and other internet usage data. The unique aspect of this kind of data is that most people use Google unguardedly--thinking that a query, post, or click is private and anonymous (in fact, it mostly is). You can learn a lot more about people this way, especially with respect to sensitive topics like sex or race, than you can by giving them ordinary surveys. People lie very systematically on traditional surveys. For example, it's believed that pollsters missed out on the Trump phenomenon because people didn't want to admit that they were going to vote for Trump. So far, it's been a good read, but I'm only two chapters into it.