Richard D. Morey

he can't keep getting away with this

These were *awesome* for scraping soap scum off bathtubs (if you didn't have an old credit card laying around)

No, I did not ask it to *make up* reasons that aren't true (that's just what they do, turns out).

Gil Scott-Heron intensifies

"The problem with AI isn't that it can do your job. It can't. The problem with AI is that your MBA-brained boss's boss doesn't know how your job works and thinks AI can do your job at fractions of a penny on the dollar, and hears the siren song of 'maximize shareholder value'."

MBA-brain is real.

Domain-General Cognitive Ability In subject area: Psychology Domain-general cognitive abilities refer to cognitive skills that are not unique to humans but are present across various primate species and potentially other mammals and birds, indicating a general factor underlying cognitive performance that correlates with brain size and is associated with selective attention and working memory capacity. AI generated definition based on: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2012

Was looking into what Cognitive Scientists mean by ‘domain-general’ cognition, and then hit upon this. This is definitely NOT how we use that term.

Tip: read the last sentence to understand what went wrong here.

Sigh.

Been uploading my papers to various LLMs and asking them to write reviews justifying rejection. It's pretty wild the things they'll say (confidently saying things that aren't in the paper that are, or vice versa). Reviewer 2 was bad *enough* in the before times.

What's the best way nowadays to create blog posts with Rmarkdown? Is {blogdown} still being actively maintained?

The Box-Cox power exponential distribution – Notes from a data witch This is so obviously a prequel post to something else that I want to write about GAMLSS models

I regret to inform you that she has, yet again, written more words than are necessary on a topic you don't care about

Trump, Claiming Weak Jobs Numbers Were ‘Rigged,’ Fires Labor Official

When power is derived from lies, data become the enemy.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/b...

Trump Orders Firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics Chief After Weak Jobs Report President Trump said he directed his team to fire the top Bureau of Labor Statistics official after the bureau issued a weak jobs report on Friday. Trump in a social media post said Erika McEntarfer, ...

By design, federal statistical agencies operate independently to guard against politicization of data collection and reporting.

This is an alarming and dangerous move that threatens the scientific integrity of independent statistical agencies across the government. www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

"WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 1, 2025) – The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced today that it will begin an orderly wind-down of its operations"

cpb.org/pressroom/Co...

YouTube video by Guttmacher Guttmacher expert Chelsea Polis on CNN: Impact of US plan to destroy $9.7M in contraceptives

Guttmacher expert @cbpolis.bsky.social spoke with @cnn.com about the Trump administration’s plan to incinerate nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives and the impact of denying these essential supplies to women and couples in low- and middle-income countries.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUZY...

The same painting as in the above post, photographed with a penny and a bamboo-handled traditional Chinese brush.

Original artwork available at auction ending Friday 1st August, 18:00 BST. 🙏

www.facebook.com/share/p/19UA...

2/3

if you don’t ask them what’s up, how are you gonna know what’s up with them…?

An eloquent image:

Setting aside the content under the tarp for a moment, teens were asked to make art expressing what it is like to be a teen, and the end result was a mural wrapped in a tarp by adults.

I bet a lot of teens would find this expressive of their experience.

Scientist on green card detained for a week without explanation, lawyer says A Korean citizen studying in Texas on a green card was detained in San Francisco after a trip overseas. His lawyer says authorities won’t give a reason.

Tae Heung Kim, 40:
- Lived in US since he was 5
- Has green card
- Getting PhD at Texas A&M
- Researching vaccine for Lyme disease
- Has 1 minor pot charge from 2011, since sealed

Also: Detained incommunicado by DHS after returning from wedding in Korea

www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

GitHub - flatironinstitute/stan-playground: Run Stan models in the browser Run Stan models in the browser. Contribute to flatironinstitute/stan-playground development by creating an account on GitHub.

💻 This was also my first time using Stan playground (github.com/flatironinst...) to teach a class! Thank you Brian Ward for creating this tool and helping me set it up for the class!

#comics

Where does the UK find the endless well of absolute doofuses that end up in high office here?

good dad (derogatory)

Even if they're comparative in nature, we still don't know who/when someone is comparing to. So we're in the same interpretational bind.

1. Cartesian coordinates do not depend at all on cut points; they have inherent metric information that ordinal scales lack (that's why they're ordinal) 2. Even IF Likert scales were inherently comparative, they needn't be social, because I can compare myself to yesterday, or last year; then what?

Sometimes, yes, but also there's the issue of the criterion itself - e.g., why P(Hit)/P(FA) are hard to interpret but d prime is more interpretable. The ordinal model removes the dependency on irrelevant parameters. Even in the ideal case that the orig. measurement is great, it is hard to interpret.

I never know how to interpret, say "How happy are you (1-5)" so I don't understand why the ordinal model is more difficult; just seems like people *think* the original scale is easier. Why would numbers that depend on cut points be easier to interpret?

Cowards, give us what we really want: spin-offs in the Barry Lyndon Cinematic Universe (TM)

It absolutely makes sense that men are using AI more and seeing more job benefits, because confidently spouting nonsense in the shape of information (what LLMs are programmed to do) has always been much more of a pathway for career advancement for men than for others.

just remembered one of my all-time favorite posts: