Many ideas start on paper, few go on to be made of it. Yet, when brothers Henry and Fred Hoffman, the duo behind Norwich-based Newfangled Games, sketched their level ideas for a new platformer and then began manipulating the A4 sheet in their hands, Paper Trail was born. The top-down puzzle adventure employs a spatial manipulation mechanic, allowing you to fold its planes and merge its sides to solve puzzles. You play as Paige (get it?), "We were thinking of ways we could manipulate the world, and randomly, we tried folding the paper," says Henry Hoffman, CEO and designer.

Politics has become a technological arms race. In 2016, the Republicans fought back, using big-data analytics and microtargeting of online ads to help propel Donald Trump into the White House. Raffi Krikorian wants to get the Democrats out ahead again. As the chief technology officer of the Democratic National Committee, the MIT graduate is reshaping his party's tech strategy. Krikorian, an expert in software engineering, previously led Uber's Advanced Technologies Center and got its first fleet of driverless cars on the road.

Today's discussion starts with Stuart Buck, who came across a post by John Cook linking to my post, "Bayesian statistics: What's it all about?". Cook wrote about the benefit of prior distributions in making assumptions explicit. Buck shared Cook's post with Jon Baron, who wrote: My concern is that if researchers are systematically too optimistic (or even self-deluded) about about the prior evidence--which I think is usually the case--then using prior distributions as the basis for their new study can lead to too much statistical confidence in the study's results. And so could compound the problem. My response to Jon is that I think all aspects of a model should be justified.