Alys Brooks - Articles by Alys S.Brooks

Bad Actors Likely Have a Small, But Real Impact on Poll Aggregates

Saturday, November 02, 2024 By Alys S.Brooks

The past few elections' focus on polling has lead to a proliferation of theories about the polls, with varying levels of evidence and plausibility.

One late-breaking theory is that right-wing pollsters are deliberately releasing skewed polls to improve the perception of former president Donald Trump's lead, what one writer has …
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Data From Reuters Suggests Substantial Trans Care Gap

Monday, October 02, 2023 By Alys S.Brooks

In trying to argue for skepticism of the growing amount of gender-affirming care, Reuters reported data suggesting, ironically, that many trans youth are not getting the care they need. Here's Reuters:

To get some idea of the increasing prevalence of these cases, Reuters asked health technology company Komodo Health Inc …
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GPT-4 is a Risky Dependency for FOSS Projects

Saturday, April 15, 2023 By Alys S.Brooks

Alongside the surge of interest in Copilot, ChatGPT, and now GPT-4, there's been a corresponding surge in free and open source projects¹ that use them. I totally understand the curiosity about what large language models (LLMs) can do, the creative itch to experiment with them, and the engineering impulse …
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The Job Market is Tight Again

Wednesday, June 22, 2022 By Alys S.Brooks

Data from FRED, Federal Reserve of St. Louis

In August 2020, I wrote about the perhaps obvious fact that the economic issue of the early pandemic was a job shortage. This problem has mostly disappeared—there are now more openings than unemployed people and there have been for months.

The …
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Review: A Short Hike (2019)

Friday, January 01, 2021 By Alys S.Brooks

Many games promise a world, and some even deliver¹. A Short Hike definitely delivers, but its world is the size of a single (marvelous, gorgeous, detailed) island.

You play as Claire, a bird who's visiting her Aunt May, a park ranger. Claire's expecting an important call but needs to …
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Job Shortages are the Norm

Monday, August 24, 2020 By Alys S.Brooks

Data from FRED, Federal Reserve of St. Louis

Since the pandemic began, there aren't enough jobs to go around. You might be thinking that this is obvious, but many people either forget this fact or leave it out of their analysis. The graph above of the ratio of unemployed people …
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2019 Year of Freelancing in Review

Tuesday, February 11, 2020 By Alys S.Brooks

In 2019, I covered far-right extremists, spoke to LGBT activists in Puerto Rico, sold my first piece of fiction, and looked at states that actually added abortion clinics in the 2010s. The previous year of freelancing involved a lot of dusting off my reporting skills; 2019 was much more about …
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99% Chance of Magic

Tuesday, May 21, 2019 By Alys S.Brooks

A coming out story about a trans girl named Em who has decided to tell her family a very big secret. (Hint: She's a witch!)

Illustrated by Jeanelle Tabaranza

This story is in the fortcoming anthology of the same name, which is written by trans women, transfeminine people, and AMAB …
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Analyzing Wisconsin's Record Midterm Turnout

Friday, May 10, 2019 By Alys S.Brooks

2018 was a high water mark for midterm voter turnout in Wisconsin—almost 60 percent turned out. While that's still lower than most presidential elections, it's the highest midterm since at least 1948.

There's a fairly big range between the highest turnout counties and the lowest ones. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the …
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Wisconsin Democrats Won More Votes in the Midterms. In the Legislature, It Didn’t Matter.

Saturday, March 23, 2019 By Alys S.Brooks

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