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Showing posts from November, 2019

UAW Reaches Tentative Labor Agreement with Fiat Chrysler

The tentative agreement makes Fiat Chrysler the last of the big three Detroit automakers to arrive at a deal with the United Auto Workers this year. (Image credit: Carlos Osorio/AP) News : NPR https://ift.tt/2Y1TM6m December 01, 2019 at 04:05AM

Florida high school first in world to use synthetic frogs for dissection

J.W. Mitchell High School in New Port Richey is the first school in the world to replace the guts and gore associated with cutting open the slimy amphibians -- with man-made, synthetic, frogs used for dissection labs. FOX News https://ift.tt/2Y1ysOg December 01, 2019 at 03:07AM

From a box to a coffin: The long and deadly road home for Vietnamese migrants

They left Vietnam carrying dreams of small fortunes and the heavy burden of family expectations. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/33AiYSw November 30, 2019 at 07:42AM

When speculating about causes of trends in mortality rates: (a) make sure that what you’re trying to explain has actually been happening, and (b) be clear where your data end and your speculations begin.

A reporter writes: I’d be very interested in getting your take on this recent paper . I am immensely skeptical of it. That’s not to say many Trump supporters aren’t racist! But we’re now going to claim that this entire rise in all-cause mortality can be attributed to the false sense of lost status? So so so so so skeptical. You’re cited, and the headline takeaway is about perceived racialized threat to social status. But threat to social status isn’t mentioned — % of GOP voteshare is taken as a straightforward proxy of this. But doesn’t voteshare % jump around for a million reasons, often in reaction the most recent election? I took a look. I don’t see how they can say “For these reasons (and for the sake of parsimony), like Case and Deaton (2017), our starting premise is to examine as a singular phenomenon; the rise in national mortality rates of working-age white men and women.” Just look at figure 2C here . They cite this paper but they don’t seem to get the point that the rate...

China's factory activity unexpectedly returns to growth in November

Factory activity in China unexpectedly returned to growth in November for the first time in seven months, as domestic demand picked up on Beijing's accelerated stimulus measures to steady growth. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/2OWGmV1 November 30, 2019 at 06:46AM

Brazil's president accuses actor DiCaprio of financing Amazon fires, offers no evidence

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro claimed on Friday that Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio financed fires being set in the Amazon rainforest, without presenting any evidence, the right-wing leader's latest broadside in casting blame over forest fires that have generated international concern. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/33wGMXx November 30, 2019 at 05:29AM

Peru opposition leader Keiko Fujimori walks free from jail

Peruvian opposition leader Keiko Fujimori walked free from prison on Friday night after being jailed for more than a year pending a trial over allegations she accepted illegal campaign contributions from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/37PjbVf November 30, 2019 at 05:21AM

China November factory activity unexpectedly returns to growth

Factory activity in China unexpectedly returned to growth in November for the first time in seven months, as domestic demand picked up on Beijing's accelerated stimulus measures to steady growth. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/2DvDsRY November 30, 2019 at 05:17AM

OPEC November oil output slips before Aramco IPO, policy meeting

OPEC oil output has fallen in November as Angolan production has slipped due to maintenance and Saudi Arabia has kept a lid on supply to support the market before the initial public offering (IPO) of state-owned Saudi Aramco, a Reuters survey found. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/2R29VXV November 30, 2019 at 05:09AM

London attacker named, was previously convicted of terrorism offenses

British police named the man who stabbed two people to death in London on Friday in what the authorities called a terrorist attack as 28-year-old Usman Khan, who had been convicted of terrorism offenses and was released from prison last year. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/2rBtjR0 November 30, 2019 at 04:19AM

GRNN with Small Samples

[This article was first published on S+/R – Yet Another Blog in Statistical Computing , and kindly contributed to R-bloggers ]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here ) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. After a bank launches a new product or acquires a new portfolio, the risk modeling team would often be faced with a challenge of how to estimate the corresponding performance, e.g. risk or loss, with a limited number of data points conditional on business drivers or macro-economic indicators. For instance, it is required to project the 9-quarter loss in CCAR, regardless of the portfolio age. In such cases, the prevalent practice based upon conventional regression models might not be applicable given the requirement for a sufficient number of samples in order to draw the statistical inference. As a result, we would have to rely on the input of SME (Subject Matter Expert), to gauge the perf...

Police name London Bridge attacker, previously convicted of terrorism offenses

British police named the man who stabbed two people to death in London on Friday in what the authorities called a terrorist attack as 28-year-old Usman Khan, who had been previously convicted of terrorism offenses and released from prison last year. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/2OxpFAt November 30, 2019 at 03:56AM

Rising seas threaten early end for sinking village in Philippines

Danica Martinez, 16, grew up in a house that grows taller every few years. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/2R4EYCI November 30, 2019 at 03:49AM

Brazil's president accuses actor DiCaprio of paying to burn the Amazon, offers no evidence

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro claimed on Friday that Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio financed fires being set in the Amazon rainforest, without presenting any evidence, the right-wing leader's latest broadside in casting blame over forest fires that have generated international concern. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/2OzgnnI November 30, 2019 at 03:00AM

R-inforcement Learning Part One- Tic Tac Toe

[This article was first published on rstats on Robert Hickman , and kindly contributed to R-bloggers ]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here ) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. I’m extremely biased, but to me, one of the real success* stories in neuroscience over the last (just over) two decades has been in studying reward signals. Since the seminal 1997 paper , a lot of work has gone into figuring out how the brain assigns value to outcomes. *ugh, maybe. This isn’t a blog post about that My PhD project looks at novel ways of eliciting valuation behaviour to study these signals, but as a key part of the modelling involved in this work, it’s important to get a handle on reinforcement learning . When originally working through the Sutton and Barto books , I threw together some code a few years ago for the problem sets- mostly in python and MATLAB. As someone who runs a blog nominally a...

'Tis the season: Quotes from shoppers ahead of America's biggest shopping day

Stuffed with turkey after Thanksgiving feasts, shoppers headed out to stores across the United States in a quest to score the best Black Friday discounts, with early promotions marking the start of a condensed holiday shopping season. Reuters: Top News https://ift.tt/2OumIkp November 29, 2019 at 05:51AM