pilowsky

One difference between the USA and the rest of the world as far as college/university education is concerned may be the "Servicemen's readjustment bill" of 1944. Here is a nice table that compares the percentage of adults with a university degree. Canada 48%, NZ and Japan 41%, Norway and Australia 34%, My house 100% (not including the poodles). http://bit.ly/AdultsUniversity There are University degrees and University degrees, Doctorates and Doctorates. When you put the letters after your name, they all look the same.

It isn't as blunt as you think. You may have been a Dean Lukin https://www.menshealth.com.au/dean-lukin-lift-of-a-lifetime when you were younger - but when he lost weight, his BMI returned to something sensible. My first publication used Bayes theorem. I learned it in High school then applied it a couple of years later. I suspect it is only "obscure" to the people that write in the Guardian. On the other hand, most of my friends from High School became lawyers/politicians and probably never heard of it. Just because you don't know something doesn't make it obscure; you just don't know it. Embarrassingly, I think I got it wrong last year and was corrected (with varying levels of kindness) on this Forum. I noticed that the Brits have something called SAGE (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies/about). When I said elsewhere that 1/100 year events happen every year, SAGE was exactly the kind of body I fantasised would exist worldwide to help us keep safe. The Americans seem to have this in a very fragmented way (e.g. NTSB) or the Pandemic Playbook - but it is not taken (as) seriously by the government. Someone told me when I was a teenager that there are many things that can't be worked out from first principles; you just have to know them. Guessing doesn't work.

...and yet, here is what they say under "Demographics" Worth noting that the mean BMI was 31.2. A BMI >29.9 is "obese". So, the overwhelming majority of people in this group are either overweight or obese. The people in the group come from a Kaiser-Permanente "managed-care" health care system. It has a major emphasis on prevention yet the population is still mostly overweight or (on average) obese. When you look at their data you find that the odds ratio for active vs inactive is 1.2. (link to their Table https://bjsm.bmj.com...80/F2.large.jpg) It is one of the smallest effects found in this retrospective study.

Speaking of Hamburgers though I just came across this article... https://www.howtogeek.com/720214/what-is-a-hamburger-menu-button/

Well, that's one track better than...

Here is a paper published in one of the British Medical Journals collection of Journals.http://bit.ly/PhysicalCOVID I would be interested to know what our statisticians make of it. The authors seem to be trying to make a case that sedentary people are more likely to die of COVID19. This strikes me as an obvious non-mechanistic correlation. Sedentary people are more likely to be older, fatter, and suffer from all the co-morbidities that make COVID19 a bigger problem. I came across it because it was in a newsfeed.

To be fair though I am a big fan of Garrison Keilor so Minnesota murmurings are of interest and fun for me. Regarding the data. The figure of >$68,000 comes from the US census. It is safe to say that anything that comes from a document produced during the Trump administration is, prima facie, false. This one is no exception. Here is a link to income data from a more reliable source (by which I mean anything untainted by Trump) https://worldpopulat...ome-by-country. Trump census data excludes vast tracts of the population in the USA that work, live and produce in the US economy.

If you want to check that the table is correctly set up quickly, you can bypass the deal source method. Open the folder, click on any hand and look at the three white lines (hamburger) in the box that contains the hand. Not the Table Hamburger. When you click that "hamburger" - assuming you have set up the table correctly - you will see a new option - "upload deal to table" - do that. This also works for any hand in your history area. You don't have to save them to the archive first. Obviously not useful for prepared deals.

You're joking. That's really what you thought! Watch this video http://bit.ly/DuaneDontTalk I also bought his book. I live in Australia. The situation is much worse according to lawyers I have chatted to.

Once again, I don't think that there is much of a relationship between [(ethnicity, gender or anything else) X (money)] and happiness. What you are alluding to is a different question. In medicine, for decades (centuries), there was a problem that goes by the fancy name "homosocialization". This term has appropriated by Wikipedia writers to mean the "process by which LGBT people meet...". What the term was originally used to describe was the process by which people maintained their own community to the exclusion of others. In medicine, this meant that unless you were a white Anglo-Saxon male, it was tough to get into medicine. So bad was the situation that the London School of Medicine was founded. The problem was that Medicine (like the Priesthood) was a secure, well-paying, highly respected sinecure. Nice work if you can get it. It's different in some countries. Medicine in the Soviet Union sucked if you wanted wealth and status, so women were common - except in Senior posts, of course. If you read Mikhail Bulgakov's book "A Country Doctor's Notebook", you'll find out why. Instead of enjoying the opportunity of walking along the beach and meeting charming villagers in Port Wenn (Doc Martin). You had the opportunity to be eaten by wolves and nearly freeze to death (they made a TV series about it starring Harry Potter). (You are interpreting) Ken's question is relevant to the way that the "have's" prevent the "have nots" from getting their fair share - or as David Gilmour wrote (in distinctively 7/4 time): Money, get away You get a good job with more pay and you're okay Money, it's a gas Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash New car, caviar, four-star daydream Think I'll buy me a football team Money, get back I'm alright, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack Money, it's a hit Ah, don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit I'm in the high-fidelity first class travelling set And I think I need a Lear jet If that's what is being discussed, I'm right there with you.

The answer Ken, is that you are asking the wrong question. Your "clear" question: "What family income would be required for a child to grow up as I did?" suggests that your life is the optimal life and that if other people had a particular "family income", they could replicate it and all would be well with the world. The clear implication is that if we could add 'Income=X' to 'Child=Y', then 'Happy life = Z'. It's a wonderful equation. Mr Smith should take it to Washington. Tragically, your relationship is not a physical law. Merely a correlation that worked out well in your case. Nothing that happened to you in your life had very much to do with your family income. Ask Bill Clinton or Lyle and Erik Menendez. A "Happy Life" does not come out of a wallet.

I wonder if there is a problem related to the amount of variance accounted for by the difference. When you say that there is a "considerable" advantage, you look at the Loss versus Gain data without considering the total. In your simulation (which btw also works for other 1NT trump strengths and shapes), the proportion of the effect compared to the total number of tricks seems very small (below the .05 level). It seems that rather than being a "considerable" effect, it is, in fact, a trivial effect that is likely swamped by the many other factors that come into play, including: Opposition biddingQuality of play by DeclarerQuality of play by the opposition Obviously, an advantage is better than a disadvantage. But, with every upside comes the memory load needed to get it right. This "memory load" is part of the denominator that might wash away any advantage. It is also noteworthy that to generate 1000 hands, the program had to generate more than 1 million hands. Does this mean that the real denominator is several orders of magnitude higher in getting it right? Modern 1NT warfare seems to have expanded well beyond the parameters that you have set (upgraded 14's and downgraded 18's) very misshapen hands (as those of us that play against robots know). I ran your code with different HCP parameters and the results were rather similar: N1NT = shape(north, any 4333 + any 4423 + any 5332) and hcp(north)>=7 and hcp(north)<=10 Frequency of spades tricks: Low 434 8 195 9 171 10 115 11 58 12 21 13 6 Frequency of extra spades tricks due to transfer: -2 0 -1 27 0 945 1 27 2 1 Generated 36760 hands Produced 1000 hands Initial random seed 1618393724 Time needed 74.057 sec N1NT = shape(north, any 4333 + any 4423 + any 5332) and hcp(north)>=14 and hcp(north)<=18 Frequency of spades tricks: Low 112 8 162 9 186 10 222 11 201 12 104 13 13 Frequency of extra spades tricks due to transfer: Low 1 -2 0 -1 26 0 929 1 44 2 0 Generated 71060 hands Produced 1000 hands Initial random seed 1618393854 Time needed 59.343 sec N1NT = shape(north, any 4333 + any 4423 + any 5332) and hcp(north)>=11 and hcp(north)<=14 Frequency of spades tricks: Low 234 8 187 9 220 10 177 11 122 12 47 13 13 Frequency of extra spades tricks due to transfer: -2 0 -1 27 0 942 1 31 2 0 Generated 44029 hands Produced 1000 hands Initial random seed 1618393419 Time needed 65.772 sec

I don't have data off-hand but have heard it reported that there has been an increase in domestic violence. This is a problem that is known to increase during times of powerlessness and helplessness (death of a relative/friend, job loss, etc). The problem is compounded during a pandemic because the ability to flee is dramatically decreased. News reporting has it that this problem was exacerbated during the pandemic. You can also expect stocks in gambling-related businesses to increase. During times of stress, people turn to more primitive coping mechanisms. They are more easily upset by things that would not usually bother them because their ability to feel in control is weakened. It even has a name: "Veneer theory" The quote is from Wikipedia. Obviously, there is not complete agreement, but the concept of a thin veneer in civilisation resonates with me when I think back about current events and the past 100 years. This comes from book chapter:

Yes, suicide and other psychiatric problems increased during the pandemic.There have been a number of publications concerning covid-19 and suicide rates. it is important to note that these studies investigate both suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Hill and colleagues reported last month in the journal Pediatrics that the rates of suicide-related behaviours had increased during the covid-19 pandemic. And And In a review published in The Lancet this month, Gunnell et al., point out that a similar phenomenon occurred during other pandemics. Equally interesting is the question is the excess psychiatric morbidity observed during pandemics greater or less than the excess psychiatric morbidity that is known to be observed during other stressful events. It is not clear to me that this question was addressed in the papers that I have seen so far.

True, they could be an "evil" kibitzer.

Yes, when you are playing a hand click on the "People" tab. A new option is available saying "kibitzers". Click on that.

Well done Mark! Good to see we are both reading the same philosophical treatise.

You can only use Prime with your own hands on a teaching table. I think the reason for this is that if you play with your own hands on a "regular table", they would need to be compared with the way that 15 other people play them to generate a "score". Since you generated the deals, you would be at a little bit of an advantage. Here is a presentation that shows you how to make and import deals for use on a teaching table. http://bit.ly/BBOPractice

The solution to the trolley problem is to move the person that is alone on the track to the other track. That way you can get all of them at the same time.

These 'posts' that you keep dumping here are extremely frustrating. Throwing out numbers without a denominator is a well-known journalist trick to excite readership. It's just clickbait. Dropping slabs of text into a Forum without meaningful analysis is uninteresting - if you want to use them to make a point, fine - otherwise, I don't bother reading them. But, thanks for telling me that other people are thinking. The real question is not "real median income" but purchasing power. Other important factors are access to education and health care. A common metric is to look at the multiple of median income and compare that with median home cost. In 1938 it cost $3900 to purchase a new house with an average income of $1731 - or to put it another way, roughly double. Today the price is about $65,000 compared with an average income of $28,671 - or to put it another way, roughly double. Remember that in 1938 families were larger, women - and anyone that was not a white male from an English-speaking background - were treated like s**t and families were much larger. Do you think about data or just look at it? Would you rather be alive in 1938 or now? The absolute last, bottom of the barrel crisis that we face at the moment in 1st world countries is real median income. In Australia, successive conservative governments have so eviscerated science (and scientific thinking) that nobody here can produce a vaccine - or deliver one. At the same time, I hear the same people on the radio rambling about how we must do more to attract people from overseas who have skills. I find many of these people in Australian Bridge Clubs - they think they know everything because they can play a card game. Give me a break.

I'm not sure what a "BBO expert" is, but West is Kemp, East is Gerber, North is Murray (a friend of yours I think) and South is Frey. I don't know what BBO names they use.

Thanks, it was your link that led me to this match.

[hv=https://www.bridgebase.com/tools/handviewer.html?lin=st||pn|pilowsky,pilowsky,pilowsky,pilowsky|md|3SHAT7653DAQJT72CJ,SQT973HJ94DCT8543,SA4HKQD854CKQ9762,SKJ8652H82DK963CA|sv|o|rh||ah|Board%201|mb|1C|mb|1S|mb|3H!|an|Strong%20Jump%20Shift|mb|4S|mb|5H|mb|6S|mb|7D|mb|P|mb|7H|mb|D|mb|P|mb|P|mb|P|pc|C4|pc|CK|pc|CA|pc|CJ|pc|H2|pc|H3|pc|H9|pc|HQ|pc|D4|pc|D3|pc|DQ|pc|H4|pc|HJ|pc|HK|pc|H8|pc|H5|mc|11|]300|300| I'm not much for kibitzing, but I just saw this hand bid and played by 4 experts. Just wondering what you make of the bidding. [/hv] [hv=https://www.bridgebase.com/tools/handviewer.html?lin=st||pn|~~M385165f,~~M11323p8,~~M9108eq1,~~M4652gv2|md|3SHAT7653DAQJT72CJ,SQT973HJ94DCT8543,SA4HKQD854CKQ9762,SKJ8652H82DK963CA|sv|o|rh||ah|Board%201|mb|1C|an|Minor%20suit%20opening%20--%203+%20!C;%2011-21%20HCP;%2012-22%20total%20points%20|mb|1S|an|One-level%20overcall%20--%205+%20!S;%208-17%20HCP;%209-19%20total%20points%20|mb|2H|an|Free%20bid%20--%205+%20!H;%2011+%20total%20points;%20forcing%20|mb|3S|an|4+%20!S;%204-8%20total%20points%20|mb|4H|an|3+%20!C;%203+%20!H;%2011-21%20HCP;%2012-22%20total%20points%20|mb|4S|an|5+%20!S;%208-17%20HCP;%209-19%20total%20points%20|mb|5D|an|Cue%20bid%20--%201+%20!C;%205+%20!H;%20no%20!CA;%20!DA;%2019+%20total%20points;%20forcing%20|mb|P|mb|5H|an|3+%20!C;%203+%20!H;%2011+%20HCP;%2012-13%20total%20points%20|mb|P|mb|P|mb|P|pc|C4|pc|C2|pc|CA|pc|CJ|pc|D3|pc|DQ|pc|H9|pc|D8|pc|S7|pc|S4|pc|SK|pc|H3|pc|H6|pc|H4|pc|HK|pc|H8|pc|HQ|pc|H2|pc|HT|pc|HJ|pc|SA|pc|S2|pc|D2|pc|ST|pc|CK|pc|S8|pc|D7|pc|C5|pc|CQ|pc|D6|pc|DT|pc|C3|pc|D5|pc|D9|pc|DJ|pc|S3|pc|DA|pc|S9|pc|D4|pc|DK|pc|HA|pc|C8|pc|C9|pc|SJ|pc|H7|pc|CT|pc|C6|pc|S5|pc|H5|pc|SQ|pc|C7|pc|S6|]300|300| Afterwards, I gave it to the robots. Here's what they made of it. [/hv] FWIW, it makes 6NT NS so the 'optimal' is 7Sx - Is there a scoring system that rewards bidding the optimal contract? You can see what happened here.

The thing that's unclear to me (from an 'intermediate' perspective) is why, with 12 top tricks AKQ spades AK hearts AK diamonds and AKQJx clubs your bidding system does not allow you to reach 6 or 7NT? Is there something about this hand that makes it more likely to make 7♣ than 7NT? What I'm getting at is what is it in your bidding system that prefers 6 or 7 of a minor to 6 or 7 in one of the higher scoring strains?

How about Vakquos? Voids, Aces, Kings, QUeens Or SIngletons?