Reading How Africa WorksJoe Studwell

Studying Probabilistic record linkage Robin Linacre's write-up. The clearest account of Fellegi-Sunter I have found, and it is free. Apache Ossie The semantic interchange spec, formerly OSI. A common format for what a metric actually means, across tools. Synthetic data as a design problem Google's write-up on generating datasets from first principles rather than imitating a sample. Coverage, complexity and quality as separate dials.

Fact of the month

Entities do not exist in the information system. They exist in the real world. Information systems store references to entities, never the entities themselves. Sep 2026 · Something I keep coming back to. · all marginalia

Theory

4 entries

A category is a decision 9 September 2026
Similarity is not transitive 5 September 2026
Sameness and similarity 1 September 2026
Human machine symbiosis, sixty years on 9 August 2026