tax increase
Contributor: Rob Reiner reshaped how California understands and invests in children
Things to Do in L.A. Hollywood director Rob Reiner engineered Proposition 10, a 1998 tobacco tax that created First 5 California, generating more than $11 billion for early childhood programs statewide. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . After his tragic death Sunday, the world remembers Rob Reiner as a cinematic force -- and he was one, as an unforgettable presence on the ambitious 1970s sitcom "All in the Family" and later as the director of beloved films. I came to know him differently: as a restless thinker who transformed his own life story into bold public policy, reshaping how California understands and invests in its youngest children.
Chris Mason: Starmer could have scrapped child benefit cap last year - why did he wait?
Starmer could have scrapped child benefit cap last year - why did he wait? I can't remember when I last heard Sir Keir Starmer sounding so passionate. The prime minister's critics regularly lambast him for what they see as robotic or emotion-free communication, but you could not accuse him of that as we spoke on a post-Budget visit to a community centre in Rugby, Warwickshire. I could see it in his eyes and hear it in his tone. I have repeatedly said that I want my government to drive down child poverty.
Nonparametric Deconvolution Models
Chaney, Allison J. B., Verma, Archit, Lee, Young-suk, Engelhardt, Barbara E.
We describe nonparametric deconvolution models (NDMs), a family of Bayesian nonparametric models for collections of data in which each observation is the average over the features from heterogeneous particles. For example, these types of data are found in elections, where we observe precinct-level vote tallies (observations) of individual citizens' votes (particles) across each of the candidates or ballot measures (features), where each voter is part of a specific voter cohort or demographic (factor). Like the hierarchical Dirichlet process, NDMs rely on two tiers of Dirichlet processes to explain the data with an unknown number of latent factors; each observation is modeled as a weighted average of these latent factors. Unlike existing models, NDMs recover how factor distributions vary locally for each observation. This uniquely allows NDMs both to deconvolve each observation into its constituent factors, and also to describe how the factor distributions specific to each observation vary across observations and deviate from the corresponding global factors. We present variational inference techniques for this family of models and study its performance on simulated data and voting data from California. We show that including local factors improves estimates of global factors and provides a novel scaffold for exploring data.