Author Archives: michaeljzoorob

My fentanyl paper was mentioned in Congressional Testimony!

This is a new one for me! My research made it to Congress (in written testimony to a subcommittee). Bryce Pardo, a Rand Analyst, in Testimony presented before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism and Subcommittee on Border Security, Facilitation, and Operations, on July 25, 2019 twice mentioned my paper […]

Norfolk 15th Primary Election (MA state House, 9/4/18)

In the weeks leading up to the primary election, I walked around this state house district and counted/geocoded all the lawn signs for the Norfolk 15th State House race in a smartphone application. (These are both Democrats; no Republican is running). Lawn signs are pretty consistent with vote shares and you can see “homefield advantage” […]

MA-7th Democratic Primary (Pressley beats Capuano)

I was able to get a hold of and digitize the Boston precinct results for this race (maybe 189 of the 270 precincts in this race, though I only get 187 to merge with the Boston precinct shapefile [Edit: One of the oddities may be Long Island; the other is Ward 5, Precinct 2a in […]

Fixing MA’s Good Samaritan Law: Calling 911 to report an overdose can still land you in legal trouble.

Before the legislative session concludes, Beacon Hill lawmakers will pass Governor Baker’s CARE Act, an important bill boosting services connecting overdose patients in the ER to recovery services. But the Care Act suffers from a critical omission: it leaves broken the Commonwealth’s limited Good Samaritan Law, which has failed to protect those who seek help […]

Unions, Right-to-Work, and Occupational Deaths

Happily, my paper “Does ‘right to work’ imperil the right to health? The effect of labour unions on workplace fatalities” is attracting a lot of attention, which makes me feel good as an academic who cares at least a little about producing things that others find valuable (we will see how the sheriff stuff is […]

White Supremacists are the biggest snowflakes in American History

[Cover Image from Jim Crow Songbook, 1847, admonishing Black people not to laugh at “them who happen to be white,” a rather strange play at victimhood in a year when almost all Blacks in America were enslaved.] Of course, white supremacist prohibited Blacks from voting, holding office, serving on juries, having sex with or marrying […]

Cannabis “strain” variation in THC:CBD ratio, by lab

Using the I-502 data from Washington State and the ggridges library in R can make some fun graphics. In my paper with Nick, we show the distribution of logged THC:CBD ratio, by strain, for 30 or so popular strains (according to Leafly review data) for two labs — Confidence and Peak.  Here are those plots […]

Editors choose newspaper headlines, not authors.

Based on the comments on my recent Monkey Cage post (describing a paper Nick Jikomes and I wrote about inconsistent cannabanoid reporting, by lab in Washington’s i502 testing data and several other interesting things about legal cannabis revealed by the state’s testing data), I don’t think so many people realize that editors, not authors, choose headlines. […]