Thomas Lumley

1,8,11

@labeler.urbanism.plus label

March madness

Newsroom has a long piece on traffic congestion in Auckland in March. Near the beginning, Douglas Wilson, from the Transport Research Centre at the Uni of Auckland says “So suddenly people say, ‘Wow, it’s taking me double the travel time to get to work. Why is that the case?’ It’s…

March Madness doesn’t have to be such a pain

Roads are clogged, buses are jammed: the chaos of March is so predictable that it has a nickname – but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Select Committee Reports

Very disappointed to see that the Education & Workforce Select Committee has recommended banning people under 16 from using social media websites such as Facebook, Instagream, Snapchat, TikTok, X and more. selectcommittees.parliament.nz/v/6/e05a9618...

It's a different photo from the one Reddit had

Download advice on feeding newborns to teens

Reminds me of Swift’s Modest Proposal.

That sounds like tidyverse, then.

(If you just mean data management and workflow programming then tidyverse is fine)

For data analysis code I'd support tidyverse first.

For statistical programming I'd be less happy -- you have to learn quasiquotation early, and it makes debugging harder. Introducing {{}} helped, but I'm not sure it did enough. Also, matrices and other things that aren't data frames get in the way

The big online harm SC inquiry report is out. As expected it recommends an under-16 ban. It also suggests a new regulator explore banning VPNs…

Greens and ACT both very against that and caution against the social media ban.

Or employ people who rent

If the image for a website migration program is sandhill cranes in flight, does that mean we're moving to a North American provider?

🎓We are advertising three 2-year research+teaching positions in applied maths or stats.

These have a reduced teaching load (50 lectures a yr) compared to a standard academic position so applicants can gain teaching experience while having time for research

jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/jobdetails/a...

Color map showing population density from Administrativ-Statistischer Atlas vom Preussischen Staate. It is the first known color choropleth.

YES! After a few hours searching, I finally dug up a high-quality scan of the first (known) color choropleth. From haab-digital.klassik-stiftung.de/viewer/fulls...

Thanks to @datavisfriendly.bsky.social & @infowetrust.com who helped with the search.

#cartography #maps #dataviz

Collinearity diagnostic: 💩

Grammarly's presentation of something they call Expert Review, including my name (plus Stephen King's, plus Mary Norris's), though to be sure I've never been contacted by Grammarly, much less compensated.

What in the absolute fuck is this.

Tempted adapt this joke for when I introduce students to the concept of multicollinearity (the state in which there is more than one sheepdog in the vicinity).

I do this for tests of printed output, which have been frustratingly difficult to get identical on all platforms

Or write all the tests you want and put them in a different subdirectory, so CRAN runs only the ones that are appropriate to them

The ratio is a thing that really actually happens in cost-effectiveness studies. I haven't seen the discrete parameter in real life

You can get the whole real line for ratios of normal means where zero is not ruled out in either numerator or denominator. The easiest reasonable way to get an empty ci is a discrete parameter where the hypothesis tests reject all the parameter values

I think this is fine for many of the confidence intervals we generate, which are often practically indistinguishable from credible intervals

It falls over a bit if your ci is empty or is the whole real line, both of which are possible for reasonable (if unusual) ci methods.

A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional. Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal…

A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer:

The cases described are fictional.

My grandad, who was a primary school teacher in England, said he used to get called "Miss" by little kids who thought it was the generic term for teachers.

Book Review: China Mountain Zhang A stone cold classic of future lives which holds up more than 30 years after it was written.   We are small, governments are large, we sur...

Book Review: China Mountain Zhang
A stone cold classic of future lives which holds up more than 30 years after it was written.
@dreddieclark.bsky.social has our review at the NOAF blog

www.nerds-feather.com/2026/03/book...

On the positive side, it's only fraud in very poor taste, not actual necromancy

I presume the real target of this is students who were supposed to have read, eg, The Great Sea, and want their essays to at least not be inconsistent with the main themes

This is not just cursed, its monstrous. The digital resurrection of a historian who died in January of this year, all so Grammarly can get some more clicks and engagement from students and/or scholars and/or others.

It feels so wrong on so many levels, these ghosts enslaved to AI forever

Our most recent episode features David Dutwin of NORC at the University of Chicago sharing recent survey findings on how Americans think about and use federal statistics. Blog summary and episode here: datafoundation.org/news/data-fo...