This is a periodic newsletter of the interesting things we’ve seen and what we are thinking about in open source policy analysis.

“Demo Days” series at the Policy Simulation Library* (PSL) features Tax-Brain* and Tax-Cruncher*. In the latest PSL Demo Day, Matt Jensen demonstrates how to send a reform from one model to the other using Compute Studio’s web API. Link

Niskanen Center releases analysis of Mitt Romney’s proposed Child Allowance. Samuel Hammond and Robert Orr from the Niskanen Center have released an analysis of Mitt Romney’s proposed reforms for the Child Tax Credit. The analysis uses public data from the Current Population Survey and the Supplemental Poverty Measure and was assisted by Tax-Calculator*. Link

New Jersey court allows defendant to view source code of DNA testing software. An individual accused in a New Jersey shooting has been allowed to view the source code of the MATLAB DNA testing software used as evidence for his involvement in the shooting. Link

An open-source tool for tracking carbon emissions of compute. An international consortium of machine learning and artificial intelligence researchers have open-sourced CodeCarbon, a Python-based tool for tracking the amount of carbon emissions produced during a given computational operation. The software is capable of tracking emissions from simple computing operations (e.g. sorting algorithms) or complex operations (e.g. machine learning/optimization algorithms). Link

Nature explores code & software consequential for science. In a recent article, Nature magazine explored 10 software codebases produced between 1957 and today that have greatly impacted scientific progress. Among the codesbases explored are the Fast Fourier Transform, the BLAS linear algebra package, the arXiv preprint server and the iPython/Jupyter Notebook. Link

* These projects are attendees or graduates of OSPC’s incubator program.

Edited by Matt Jensen and Jacob Chuslo