Articles posted here will be open for comment and discussion, and I encourage your participation. Users must register, and while I strongly encourage you to register with your full name or first name and first initial of your last name, a persistent pseudonym or Twitter @handle would also be acceptable.

Quality discussion depends on people following rules of responsible debate.  Criticize ideas and not individuals. Treat people with respect regardless of whether you agree with their point of view.

If you make assertions or claims, I strongly encourage you to cite sources or link to appropriate data to validate those claims. You can expect me to source many of my posts with links to data from external sources or original data sets that I may assemble and share.

If you decide to make demonstrably false claims in response to other people doing hard, detailed work to describe what is going on in the community, your comments may be edited or more likely, deleted. When there is an asymmetry of accountability for accuracy in public debate, unfortunately, the burden of correcting the record often falls on the person behaving responsibly in the discussion. Rather than put that burden on people telling the truth, I will simply delete comments that contain clear falsehoods.

In closing, while I will do my best to let discussions run their course, I reserve the right to remove any comment, at any time, for any reason.