Thomas Lumley

Official statistics

As you may have heard, President Trump has dismissed the head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming that payroll employment figures presented by the BLS were faked to make him look bad. Politicians meddling with official statistics is a bad idea.  This isn't because…

1. Rank tests need strong assumptions to agree with *any* ordering of distributions

2. Calibration/raking of weights is the same as AIPW estimation

3. Consistency and asymptotic Normality of an estimator need not tell you anything about convergence of the mean and SD that you put in your tables

Whereas if P=NP is false, the Time Hierarchy Theorem says there's a fine-grained hierarchy from polynomial up to whatever NP-complete turns out to be, and factoring is a good candidate for being somewhere in the middle

Factoring, like graph isomorphism, is a problem that's obviously in NP and where the current best algorithm is slower than polynomial, but is thought to probably not be NP-complete.

Because some NP problems are *easy*. NP means checkable in polynomial time, so all really easy problems are NP. The open question is whether there are *also* hard problems in NP. Most people believe there have to be, but it's not proven

If P=NP is false there has to be a tower of increasingly hard problems within NP, and factoring is a good candidate for being NP and neither P or NP-complete

The thing that's mutual is NP-complete, the hardest NP problems, where if you can solve any one, you can solve them all

Other way around. Solving any NP-hard problem solves anything in NP. So if you could solve all NP problems you could also factor and sort and do division (which are all NP) but it doesn't go the other way

... which was more than a decade after the first bug report, sadly

uhm actually all friends have benefits

At this summer camp run by grandmas, kids learn cooking skills and life advice At a summer camp in Fullerton, California, grandmas are in charge. Every week, they teach a group of 8-to-14-year-olds how to cook a new dish, and a handicraft such as sewing, embroidering, clay jewel...

objectively genius, now to find out how to support local initiatives this like

"The kids have learned about kitchen safety and how to cook with a grandma’s touch — such as mixing spices with water before adding them to a dish so they don’t burn, or using fresh turmeric"

apnews.com/article/cali...

🙀

We introduced the error message in the R Sprint at Warwick like two years ago because it could never work
bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi...

Venn diagram blue 'heritage' plaque

There's a special place in Hull for John Venn

"The trick of teaching wasn’t to know more than your students—it was remarkably easy, after all, to know more than most teenagers. Teaching wasn’t about being right, or being clever, or being in charge. It was about making them believe." -- The Incandescent, Emily Tesh

The side of a building that is 2 stories on the left and a single story on the right. It is built of Chicago common brick. Painted on the side in yellow letters is "Children Cry for" then in white script "Chas. H. Fletcher's" and again in yellow all caps "Castoria." A few scrubby bushes obscure a bit of the writing.

Ghost sign on W. Madison St., Chicago. "Children cry for Fletcher's Castoria."

Ok, that's substantially more nuts, but it does actually fit the picture

The retro CRT television in the bedroom, too.

If anyone still believes in the Turing Test it should be the Turing Institute

I lived at home as an undergraduate and cooked for my family (who weren't fussy about ingredients), then as a graduate student I lived with other people but we mostly cooked for ourselves. And as an assistant professor I could afford an apartment of my own.

Yeah. When I've had to feed other people they haven't been fussy about what they ate

Personally, I have given up on whole chicken because getting the right amount of cooking for all the bits at once is too hard. Chicken legs or thighs cooked slowly, or maybe breasts cooked fast.

Surely they worked in base 8, though?

a fun game to play with BLS numbers is to go “that’s stupid, why do they do it that way” and then go find the paper explaining why they do it that way to see if you still think it’s stupid, and if you do, you win

I am like 0 for 19 lifetime at this game

I think it's "injured, and therefore inactive" rather than a second contrasting group

This is both readable and precise. Highly recommended!

Onehunga is one exception that is in central Auckland and has good transit but is getting developed

"if you want to be open-minded, there’s no good reason to start with work promoting a politically loaded, much-debunked idea and published on a propaganda site."
--Andrew Gelman

If you pass by on a windy night near the new moon, you can sometimes still hear them...

I'm very confident British English would include the 'e', but I don't know about US