David Hood

Regular readers will know that I have been worrying about the apparent recovery being, actually, a settling at a new low. Latest jobs data doing nothing to allay my fears. No pushing through to job growth apparent in the data at all. Image 2 has the critical service jobs.

One encouraging theme in last night's NC primaries is the simple fact that being pro-trans is now like being anti-ICE among Dem voters: to them, it means you're a fighter, it means you're not giving into Trump.

That's a really, really good sign.

This is from this week's CDC FluView report.

It's a very robust result - last year fully vaccinated kids made up only 11% (22 of 208) of US paediatric flu deaths, even though >40% of kids are fully vaccinated.

Kids are eligible for flu vaccination at 6 months, and it saves lives!

sources below

My work requires me to use a VPN when connecting to the work network when outside of the physical location to help protect organisational data. This is not a proposal that has had prior serious technical consideration in its development.

🎓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...

...so long as we keep getting studies that when you measure company AI use it shows no measurable economic benefit, I am not too worried about being "left behind". If anything, I am more worried about CEOs acting on the mistaken belief they are being left behind.

Chief executives optimistic about economic recovery, fear being left behind in AI race - survey A survey reveals the country's top executives are optimistic about economic recovery and the fortunes of their own companies, but fear being left behind when it comes to artificial intelligence.

www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...

I, who never expect to be interviewed by PWC, on the other hand are not optimistic about an economic recovery over the next year. Because *looks at globe*. But the take-home could also be fewer CEOs optimistic than last year.
And...

Also of interest to people interested in "stuff"

New Zealand is extremely fortunate to be less dependent on gas than many countries. Let's keep it that way.

Global sea levels have been underestimated due to poor modelling, research suggests Analysis shows average levels are 30cm higher than thought, and up to 150cm in south-east Asia and Indo-Pacific

New sea level rise study reveals ocean levels are higher than previously believed and following a relative sea level rise of 1 metre, (increasingly likely this century) more coastal areas and millions more people than previously believed will be affected:

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

An elderfraud case I'm dealing with in this year, 2026 was a guy got a backdoor put in his email which also phished out his phone information and used it and his prior relationship with the client to milk him out of a couple million while my client was going senile

Kākāpō Cam: Live from the nest Watch Rakiura, a female kākāpō, live from her nest on Whenua Hou/Codfish Island, a small, predator free island in southern New Zealand.

kakapo chick feeding live! www.doc.govt.nz/our-work/kak...

Immigration Minister Erica Stanford apologises after inflating overstayer figures The government has been accused of scaremongering about overstayer numbers after Erica Stanford told reporters there were "tens of thousands more" than she had expected last month.

Immigration Minister Erica Stanford apologises after inflating overstayer figures

A Tūī surveying its local area looking for other birds to chase away #birds #Tui

...members of a known set of authors with an unknown author known to be a second instance member of the set, and comparing a set of authors plus an unknown number of other unknown authors with a unknown author not known if it is a member of the known set.

Around 2015 there was certainly technical capacity for non-LLM style analysis as a sock puppet identifier. However, there was non way of ruling out that a new commenter was unknown to the comparison set it needed metadata as well to go beyond similarity judgement. The difference between comparing...

I am glad there were 8 opposed to dictating the acceptability of protests.

I am going to blame my inability to count to 30 today on the staying up late to watch the eclipse. But thanks a lot for that, I appreciate the specific number confirmation.

More directly, the press release is very proud exports are up 2.2 billion, and very silent on imports being up 2.6 billion.

My inexactness here. But also TWOs. The Power BI report says last 30 days but also gives the specific dates 18 Jan - 16 Feb as the range, which is 29 days (inclusive) and 28 if only one end of the range is included.

I'd like to add that I am not detailed tracking the covid admissions anymore, I had just happened to have visited the Te Whatu Ora Power BI dashboard a few hours before, screenshoting and annotating it out of local interest. So a fresh sense of the number magnitudes.

bsky.app/profile/thou...

And I made my own typo - March 2023 was in the ballpark of 180s per week, rather than the 2022 I wrote (not that it effects that the last week of data was 50 a week)

This story needs a correction. It is absolutely true that admissions are the highest since October, but 184 admissions is the last 4 weeks (to 16 Feb), not last week (to 16 Feb). 184 in a week is 2022 levels. This would be much easier to keep track of if we had the data rather than a Power BI report

Fish of the Year | Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust

I will be voting for Sunfish as one of my three votes for fish of the year, simply because of childhood visits to Otago Museum where one was mounted on the wall on the ground floor.

www.mountainstosea.org.nz/fish-of-the-...

A dry year with a reeeeeaaallly long solar eclipse

When Bluesky was down today I went back to Twitter and was punched in the face by the stench of abandoned aquarium. Milo Yiannopoulos, who I honestly thought was dead, stanning Hillary Clinton. Dem flaks earnestly retweeting Nick Fuentes. It’s time to cordon off anyone left and introduce alligators.

Just realized that with Abolish ICE at +11, it's polling over 30 percentage-points ahead of Trump approval. Guess that means if the media wants to be representative, it should give at least like 40% more airtime to people who support abolishing ICE to Trump supporters

Annotation of text says "Timnit Gebru: Anchor legal jargon in lived stakes."

Had I had the opportunity to share this piece with @timnitgebru.bsky.social, I am sure she would have given me insightful and interesting comments. This weird gimmick from Grammarly is neither. /4

Admissions over time

It is both simultaneously true, based on covid hospital admissions to the 16th of Feb (the current latest published), that for Te Waipounamu [1] Admissions are lower than the lowest period prior to 2025 [2] Admissions are higher than the last few months.