i am...

...reading news when i should be learning statistics.

i am also thinking about what i will say tomorrow when i am asked about the male workforce in developed countries in a class that i am taking on labor.

i think i'm going to say that it is fucked up that i have to talk about that stuff when most people who do "labor" don't live in the United States or Sweden or Japan or Germany. And talking about that stuff means I don't talk about stuff like this. (From a very interesting New York Times Article)

"Our interviews and perusal of the data available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children (2 percent). If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries. Girls, since they are the ones kept home from school now, would be the biggest beneficiaries. Moreover, one way to reallocate family expenditures in this way is to put more money in the hands of women. A series of studies has found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier."

Data can be interesting. That doesn't change the fact that I wish I weren't in a 3 hour lecture about using power transformations to make regressions more interpretable.

*shud-d-d-er*

-log(kevin)