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We're thrilled to announce that AWS will be sponsoring Cross Validated starting on July 18 through December 31. We wanted to give you a heads-up and walk you through what that means.

How and where will the sponsorship be displayed?

The sponsorship will be found on the right side of the header at the top of the site similar to what you see below.

Cross Validated Home Page with AWS Sponsorship Banner

What else changes?

Not a thing! Borrowing from the original MSE announcement on sponsorships:

First — sponsors do not own these Q&A sites. Sponsors work alongside our communities who ultimately build these sites. Communities ask the questions; communities create the tags; communities conduct elections as they do now, and we are not renaming our current sites like a garish sport stadium to the highest bidder. Any ads a sponsor submits still have go through our crazy-strict ad editorial process… as it has always been. Companies do not have access to personal data, and all Q&A content remains irrevocably licensed under Creative Commons for sharing and attribution.

Sponsorships are a tool that our clients can use to let folks who could be interested in their products know about them in a non-intrusive way.

What if I've found a design glitch/bug?

If something looks off, please report it as a bug so we can investigate and squash it.

That's all. If you have any other questions or concerns, please leave them as answers below.

Lastly, thank you. These types of partnerships help us bring more resources to our communities, and they wouldn't be possible without the work you've put into making Cross Validated successful.

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I’m not sure I like this.

There is a sentiment in some circles of software engineering that statistics is a sub-field, as if knowing how to code sklearn on the cloud is what it means to be a statistician.

I am concerned that this sponsorship reinforces such buffoonery.

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    $\begingroup$ I share your concerns about statistics and data science. I am routinely gobsmacked by some ideas that hard, complicated problems such as cleaning data, detecting outliers and identifying fraud can all be made routine just by some code that a programmer can write. But so far as I am concerned this is like an advertisement that I can ignore and abstractly I approve of others being able to think differently. Stack Exchange is really odd, even though experienced users are used to the oddness. Members write most of the content for free but the framework needs money to support it! $\endgroup$
    – Nick Cox
    Commented Aug 4, 2022 at 8:49
  • $\begingroup$ @NickCox A free software not-for-profit version of Stack Exchange without all the poor decision making of Stack Exchange Inc I believe is possible. See Wikipedia and other mass collaborative works like ArchWiki. $\endgroup$
    – qwr
    Commented Aug 13, 2022 at 0:34
  • $\begingroup$ @qwr You may be right. As said, the fact that there is a company behind this doesn't affect how I contribute here. . I'd want to see any alternative running successfully for some time before I contributed. I remember a Wiki type proposal for software documentation: discussions were mostly about what work other people needed to do. Then a newbie piped up, "I am just learning X, so I could write a few articles" and this was encouraged. I lost interest in a proposal that was doomed. Nothing ever happened. Still, one anecdote is no kind of analysis. $\endgroup$
    – Nick Cox
    Commented Aug 13, 2022 at 0:50

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