prior probability

Does a declared state of emergency trump the principle of liberty of contract embodied in the employment-at-will doctrine? According to this report in The Atlantic by Gillian B. White, the short answer is no. Here is an excerpt (edited by us for clarity):

Almost as soon as government officials started warning residents of many parts of South Florida to get out of Irma’s path, people began seeking advice on social media on what rights and protections workers have during the storm. One of the most common questions surfacing on Reddit and Twitter was whether workers could be fired for not showing up to work because they had left town ahead of the storm. The answer to that question, in many cases, is that they can indeed be fired. Sharon Block, the executive director of the Labor and Worklife program at Harvard Law School and a former Department of Labor employee, says a major storm, even one that yields a state of emergency, doesn’t suspend labor laws. This means that laws that protect workers’ pay still stand, but because in Florida, workers are employed at-will, it also means that (barring a collective-bargaining agreement or contract stating otherwise) workers can still be fired for their absence. “You can be fired for a good reason [or] a bad reason—as long as it’s not an unlawful reason, which is usually discrimination,” Block says.

We would respectfully disagree with Professor Block, quoted above. After all, what about the public policy exception to the employment-at-will doctrine?

Credit: Haris Bin Zahid, via LinkedIn

Is Apple’s new “iPhone X” really worth $1000? Pro and con.

We won’t be blogging during the next few days. (Thanks, Irma.) During the storm, we will be reading “The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought” (available here, via Amazon) by Dennis C. Rasmussen.

On the eve of Hurricane Irma, my wife and I finally got around to seeing Christopher Nolan’s mesmerizing 2017 film Dunkirk at Regal Cinema in Winter Park. This movie is a masterpiece. Among other things, it brought to our mind Ernest Hemingway’s classic sentence in The Old Man in the Sea: “But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

Check out this report by Scott McCartney describing the new Bombadier C Series airplane manufactured in Montreal, Canada. The Bombadier has wider seats and larger overhead bins and makes less noise than most other commercial passenger jets.

Is there a correlation between “Big Data” and the level of fraud? Following up on our previous post on Facebook’s false ad metrics, below are some links on the growing problem of data fraud:

1. “Fabrication in survey data” (Mike Spagot)
2. “The best of retractions” (Retraction Watch)
3. “Data analysis techniques for fraud detection” (Wikipedia)
4. “Research fraud as tort” (Science)
5. “Legal liability for data fraud” (Statistical Journal of the IAOS; ungated version here)

File under “fake it til you make it.” William Turton was the first to report (via Gizmodo) that you can “unfollow” Mark Zuckerberg but you can’t “block” him. On a different note, check out this report by John Glenday describing Facebook’s glaringly fake ad metrics:

“According to Facebook, it can reach 41m 18-24 year old’s and 60m 25-34 year old’s in the US. However, one analyst … has called out the firm for massively overstating the number of people who view ads on the platform, given that census data confirms there are only 31m and 45m people respectively in each age bracket.”

Image credit: spottedtoad.wordpress.com

Why don’t any of the planets or moons in our solar system have their own flags? Calder Hansen proposes a new flag for Mars. More information about this proposed Martian flag is available here. Hat tip: kottke. [Update (14 June 2019): There is some controversy as to the actual origins of the design for the flag for Mars. See the comments section and here.]

Credit: Calder Hansen