RSS in the news, twice in one day

From cogdogblog and Patreon.

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Statistics for Hackers, or, Hacking for Statisticians

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq9DzN6mvY

using

  • Direct simulation
  • Shuffling
  • Bootstrapping
  • Cross-validation

Note that the resampling book by Julian Simon is out of print, but available online.

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Weak Corporate Governance

https://qz.com/work/1130589/there-are-624-public-companies-with-no-women-on-their-boards-heres-the-list/

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Trump, Puerto Rico, and debt

Trump is trumpeting where he is going with respect to Puerto Rico: privatizing the whole place because of their crushing debt. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/getting-ready-for-trumps-puerto-rico-shakedown

Trump is responsible for some of that debt: will he pay it back? http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-puerto-rico-owe-33-million-golf-club-bankrupt-coco-beach-golf-club-a7970201.html

Note how the Independent is preparing the way for Trump here: they put the word “owes” in scare quotes, and identify Amy Siskind, who wants him to pay it back, as “a prominent Hillary Clinton campaigner”.

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Placebo Effect

I have wondered about this for a long time.

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Trip Planning Technology

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/28/15921842/how-to-plan-a-vacation-travel-apps-flight-deals-abroad

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Kavanaugh’s lies

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/10/brett-kavanaughs-lies-perjury-nomination-killed.html

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Is Earth’s magnetic field flipping? Maybe.

https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5347/to-understand-magnetism-is-to-understand-how-the-universe-and-earth-came-to-be

Thanks to Naked Capitalism for the link.

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Did Robert E. Lee bring any slaves with him to the field during the Civil War?

Yes and no. from https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Lee_Robert_E_and_Slavery:

Yes, early in the war: “in a letter to his brother Charles Carter Lee, dated March 14, 1862, he praised the Confederacy as ‘the noble cause we are engaged in,’ and kept two of the Arlington slaves, whose manumission he was otherwise working through the courts, as servants on his first field campaign in western Virginia.”

No, later: Lee was charged with executing his father-in-law’s will, which required the freeing of his slaves. “But Lee recorded the deed of manumission on January 2, 1863, in Richmond, ’embracing all the names’ of the Arlington and Romancocke slaves, and suggesting a ‘supplementary deed embracing those who have been omitted.’ Curiously, he included among the manumissions the one enslaved family he still owned in his name, that of Nancy Ruffin.” So he owned no slaves on his own account at the time of Gettysburg. He had control over his wife’s slaves, but he also had a major stick up his ass about “honor”, and I don’t think he would have appropriated his wife’s slave to his own service.

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Half a billion years of continental drift

https://kottke.org/18/06/how-the-earths-continents-will-look-250-million-years-from-now

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