Research humor!

https://xkcd.com/1798/

https://www.statslife.org.uk/health-medicine/3181-remembering-hans-rosling

Professor Hans Rosling, a statistician and public educator who was committed to sharing the joy – and importance – of statistics, died yesterday. In a statement posted on the Gapminder website, his son and daughter-in-law, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, explained that Prof. Rosling had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year ago and that he had passed away early Tuesday morning, surrounded by his family in Uppsala, Sweden.

Will You Graduate? Ask Big Data https://nyti.ms/2jYBTAJ

Georgia State is one of a growing number of colleges and universities using what is known as predictive analytics to spot students in danger of dropping out. Crunching hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of student academic and personal records, past and present, they are coming up with courses that signal a need for intervention.

https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-tweets-are-now-presidential-records-71973

The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014 may be where Trump runs into trouble. The law, passed to modernize the PRA with respect to electronic records, provides that the president should not use an unofficial “electronic messaging account” for presidential records unless he or she copies or forwards a complete copy to an official account. While there is no specific language regarding social media, past presidents set up auto-archiving so that deleted tweets were also saved. It is unclear whether the Trump administration has done the same.

https://daily.jstor.org/what-are-executive-orders-anyway/

An executive order is a “presidential directive that requires or authorizes some action within the executive branch.” These orders have the force of law. Every president has signed such orders except for William Henry Harrison, who only served for 32 days. President Obama, much criticized by his opponents for the practice, issued 279, compared with George W. Bush’s 291, Bill Clinton’s 308, and Ronald Reagan’s 381.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-computer-just-clobbered-four-pros-at-poker/?ex_cid=story-twitter

And, indeed, some robot can now etch heads-up no-limit Texas Hold ‘em (2017) alongside checkers (1995), chess (1997), Othello (1997), Scrabble (c. 2006), limit Hold ‘em (2008), Jeopardy! (2011) and Go (2016) into the marble cenotaph of human-dominated intellectual pursuits.

Ha!!!

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1919

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2017/01/24/driverless-cars-are-coming/

Here are analyses and data about driverless cars drawn from recent Brookings research.

William Julius Wilson has done some really good work on this topic…

https://daily.jstor.org/inner-city-myths-and-realities/

Not "alternate facts".

http://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/federal-employment-at-record-lows-as-a-share-of-employment-populationyet