State Farm Bank / Mutual Fund ==> Free Turbo Tax

Just putting this out there again:

Quote:

Complimentary* TurboTax Deluxe Online (federal and state) For State Farm Bank and/or State Farm Mutual Funds customers SAVE up to $20 on All TurboTax Federal Products For all other State Farm customers and friends

NOTE: Limited to the first 25,000.

...so, here's how you make sure you're one of the first 25k -- start doing your return (I filled out the personal info (name, address, ssn, etc.)) then skip to the "File" part. That's where you actually "buy" the product, I believe. Go through that until you get an "Order confirmation". Then, you can go back & fill out all the rest whenever you're good & ready.

State Farm Bank / Mutual Fund ==> Free Turbo Tax

Zika Virus and the CDC.

Just in case you're tired of all the Trump blather. ;-)


From Powerline.

Quote:

The Zika virus is ravaging South America and spreading rapidly. Probably you have heard about it: the virus is spread by mosquito bites. It causes terrible birth defects, most notably abnormally small and damaged heads and brains. Already there are around 4,000 such cases in Brazil alone. So far, the Zika virus apparently is carried by just one species of mosquito. As it inexorably makes its way northward, what are our authorities doing about it? ... ... the World Health Organization warned on Sunday that mosquito-borne Zika will soon spread to all countries in the western hemisphere except Canada and Chile... ...The CDC’s Lyle Petersen, director of the Division of Vector-Borne Diseases, predicts Zika will hit the United States, but says “we don’t expect very large outbreaks.”... ...But here is a prediction: as soon as Zika’s appalling birth defects start showing up in the U.S., it will be all-out war. Let’s hope that the relevant agencies are preparing and not dithering.

I think this is more hope than a reflection of reality.

Zika Virus and the CDC.

Lognormal Method of Moments

When doing lognormal method of moments, we would want to set expected value of lognormal = x bar. Let's say we have observations X1..X10. Would x bar be Sum(Xi) / 10, or Sum(LN(Xi)) / 10 ? I'm guessing since X is distributed lognormally, we would just sum the X and divide by 10. Sorry if this is obvious, but I saw a question earlier today that somehow confused my memory of this topic. Is there any situation where we would use Sum(LN(Xi)?

Lognormal Method of Moments