I have a Malaysian passport, which allows me to visit the UK without a visa for 6 months. I left my job (Fortune 500 company) recently with the intention to travel and explore. Since my sister lives in the UK, I decided to make the UK my choice of travel.  I have visited the UK twice in the past (2-3 weeks each time) with no issue. But since this time my ticket is 6 months, I have been made aware that it raises red flags at immigration (to be honest I just stretched my return, as will likely return sooner). I have reached out to the UK embassy here in KL and the website. So I have prepared for the following:   Bank statement with 30K pounds (including a fixed deposit). But no continued income from the previous employment, only from my partner (see below point 5). SPA of a condo I own here in KL. Car ownership here in KL. Home address of my sister who co-owns a house with her fiance (who is a British citizen). Letter from my partner who is of European origin (has his own business), that he will be sponsoring me. Full travel insurance coverage.   Is this sufficient? If this would be a problem then should I just change my ticket to something sooner? Please advise. Thanks.
I am a Saint Lucian and will be traveling to Manchester, UK soon about which I am a bit nervous.  Run Down:   I own a small business in my country (in the Caribbean), I have a certificate mentioning the details of the business from my Government. I pay rent in my country, but I do not have any loans (I hate owing). I pay life insurance in my country. I have a US B-1/B-2 visa (Visitor &amp; Business). I have visited the US once (last year November) on my US B-1/B-2 visa.   What I will be doing in the UK:   I plan to spend three months out of the six months which would be granted if I get leave to enter stamp. I plan to skydive in the first week and spend a few nights at an Airbnb. I plan to visit the Manchester Football Club stadium, I'm not the biggest of football fans but since I'm in Manchester, why not! I plan to do some more sightseeing and enjoy my time there. After the first week I will be staying with my female friend who owns an apartment for the rest of the time showing me around and helping me experience the UK lifestyle until June.   Why I'm leaving in June:   I am a WordPress enthusiast (I'm a Programmer) and WordCamp EU will be happening in France this year so I plan to fly from the UK to Paris where I will spend three days then take another flight from there to my country.   How my flights will be:   I will be taking a one-way Thomas Cook flight from my country to Manchester but will be purchasing my ticket for Manchester to France ahead of time so I could show Thomas Cook as well as Immigration that I don't plan to stay.   My concerns, could someone address them point by point please?:   I have a bank account but I just use it for collecting easy payments from my clients and pay for expenses. I store my savings in a credit union because of higher interest rates paid than the bank. When I applied for my US visa I showed a credit union statement showing my total balance. I'm seeing online that I should provide statements but these statements would look very bad since I my bank account is just for expenses... I mean it sometimes gets as low as $30 then, when my monthly earnings come in from clients, I withdraw savings to the credit union and leave what I need in the account for expenses. I read another post and it said people with bank statements showing poor spending might have difficulty but it's simply because the account is used for expenses not savings. For the later stages of my visit (after the first week) I will be staying with my friend. I will simply be staying with her to save on cost of Airbnbs for the next two months three weeks, even though they could be cheap, free is better right? I will be booking the Airbnb, skydiving and tours prior to traveling to the UK, will that help? Is my stay too long for staying with someone? I won't be depending on her for anything since I have my own funds...it's just convenient that she has a place where I could stay. If it is then I don't have a problem shortening my stay to 1-2 weeks and just head back to my country and take a separate flight to Paris in June.   I am nervous because I really want to visit the UK and see my friend, I am also not sure if the minimum amount of time that could be given to a visitor is six months? What if I get a round trip for two weeks and the Immigration officer gives me exactly two weeks stay, is that possible? Or is the minimum they could give six months?  Your help is very much appreciated, I want soon to try backpacking (nomad life) but I don't think my poor heart could take the stress of worrying about immigration :(  Update  Since people in the comments are asking about my relationship with the friend I plan to stay with even though she's from my country originally but now a UK citizens and we are simply friends.
In GLM regression I have always been told to set the reference level of categorical/ordinal/dummy variables to the level with the most exposure (level with most data), because this somehow makes the model more stable. Is there any statistical reason behind this, or just historical practice without statistical reason?  I can understand that one wants a "baselevel" (reference level) in the model that are most likely to be correct, but if you are not sure about the other levels, then they surely should not be included in the regression in the first place? Dual boot Ubuntu (14.04) with Windows 10 How to calculate what this power series converges against? (double factorials) Associated elements in a ring Please help me to find elements $a,b$ in a ring $R$ such that $a\mid b$ and $b\mid a$, but there does not exist any unit $u$ in $R$ such that $a=ub$. How to completely remove Notepad++ in Ubuntu 18.04 terminal?  I can't find it in Synaptic package manager, and don't know where is on system, but I can see an icon in Activity. It is probably not completely installed, because I can't open it. I need to read a properties files that's buried in my package structure in com.al.common.email.templates.  I've tried everything and I can't figure it out.  In the end, my code will be running in a servlet container, but I don't want to depend on the container for anything. I write JUnit test cases and it needs to work in both. So many interesting questions get asked on Stack Overflow and then immediately closed (or worse yet, closed and re-opened for days on end) because they're subjective, argumentative, and fundamentally unanswerable due to our lack of omniscience: without the ability to see into the future and/or know the secret motivations of companies and their developers, we are left to make wildly varying (un)informed guesses. The obvious solution to this is to add a  feature to the Ask a Question page. Similar to the current &quot;Related Questions&quot; feature, this could be used to answer otherwise-unanswerable questions before they're asked, thus saving everyone time and frustration. I propose a simple system whereby a web cam is aimed at an ordinary  device, long recognized as one of the most accessible and accurate fortune-telling mechanisms available to modern society. A simple  could be placed under this rig and triggered in response to the user's typing. Once focus leaves the Title input field, a short delay will be triggered, followed by a bit of logic to capture the 8-ball's result and feed it through a simple OCR routine to produce the result.  So far as I'm aware, SO would be the first major Q&amp;A site to implement such a feature...  Examples:            ...another UV resurrection... Is there any problem if the last name prints first than the first name on an air ticket? Is there any problem if the last name prints first then the first name in international air ticket? Use of var keyword in C# From my understanding it's not prime because it's not greater than $0$. So my followup question is why did mathematicians exclude $-1$?  The definition of prime is having only two factors.   $-1 \cdot 1 = -1$ Often in my papers I want to mention theorems in the introduction that are introduced in more detail and proved in a later section.  I'd like to include the statement of these theorems twice over, each time numbered as the theorem would naturally appear in its later section.  My current solution (using amsthm) is, e.g.  %(in the introduction) \newtheorem*{thm:associativity}{Theorem \ref{thm:associativity}} \begin{thm:associativity} Lorem ipsum ... \end{thm:associativity}  %(in a later section) \begin{thm} \label{thm:associativity} Lorem ipsum ... \end{thm}      Can anyone think of a cleaner solution? Is Checksum to file back decoding possible? So, I was having this weird thought. If the checksums(MD5 or SHA...) are unique to any file and are modified if any part of the file is edited, why cant the checksums be decoded back to get the original file? That is if I want to send a large(say 700MB) video, instead I could send just the hash and the file be decoded locally in my friend's computer. I know the thought is stupid, but is it possible by any chance? Or am I missing some thing here? And forgive me if I'm wrong, I ain't a professional. If you have two envelopes, and ... Suppose you're given two envelopes. Both envelopes have money in them, and you're told that one envelope has twice as much money as the other. Suppose you pick one of the envelopes. Should you switch to the other one?  Intuitively, you don't know anything about either envelope, so it'd be ridiculous to say that you should switch to the other envelope to maximize your expected money.   However, consider this argument. Let $x$ be the amount of money in the envelope you picked. If $y$ is the amount of money in the other envelope, then the expected value equals  $$E(y) = \frac{1}{2}\left(\frac{1}{2}x\right) + \frac{1}{2}\left(2x\right) = \frac{5}{4} x$$  But $5x/4 &gt; x$, so you should switch!    The Wikipedia article says that $x$ stands for two different things, so this reasoning doesn't work. I say this is not a valid resolution.   Consider opening up the envelope that you pick, and finding $\$10$ inside. Then you can run the expected value calculation to get $$E(y) = \frac{1}{2} \cdot \$5+\frac{1}{2} \cdot \$20 = \$12.50$$  This means that if you open one of the envelopes and find $\$10$, you should switch to the other envelope. The $\$10$ doesn't stand for two different things, it literally just means $\$10$.   But you don't have to open up the envelope to run this calculation, you can just imagine what's inside, and run the calculation based on that. This is what "Let $x$ be the amount in the envelope" means. The problem with the argument is not that $x$ stands for two different things.   So what is the problem?    Previous questions on stack exchange have given the resolution that I just said I wasn't satisfied by, so please don't mark this as a duplicate. I want a different resolution, or a more satisfying explanation of why $x$ does stand for two different things.  Apparently there is still research being published about this problem - maybe it isn't so obvious?    I think there's something subtle wrong with the premise. Because there's no uniform probability distribution on $\mathbb{R}$, statements like "random real number" are not well-defined. Likewise, I think "one envelope has twice as much money as the other" assumes some probability distribution on $\mathbb{R}$, and perhaps our expected value calculation assumes that this distribution is uniform, which it cannot be ... Journals selection - alternative criteria to impact factor While trying to select the journals I can submit my present work and future work, I realize the time between the date the authors send the article to the journal and when the revised article is submitted. Usually this is something between 6 months and more than 12 months.  Althought I am focusing on the Impact Factor (IF) to select journals, I think that 12 months to have a feedback that might include "add more variables analysis","this article will be more valuable if you test also model x,y and z", can have a huge impact on you work. It will make you stop what you are currently doing and possible spend up to 2 months making the changes. This might make a big mess on your work if you have deadlines to respect, however this happens to everyone in academia.  My question is, besides the IF journal based selection, how can we select a journal with enought quality with lower IF? What alternative criteria should one use to select the journal? Should we choose newly created Journals? Solving linear congruences by hand: modular fractions and inverses How to create a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive from terminal? Is the function strcpy always dangerous? How to efficiently partition a single Windows-Ubuntu dual boot disk? This is not a question on  or  but is a question on access rights and how not to let them bite you in the lower abdomen...  ;-) This question will not help you how to make partitions on your disk, but will tell you what to do in , depending on your personal use case, so choose one of the following:      Note: The above questions can also be used with multiple disks, but the examples in the answers are given for one disk. Is my model any good, based on the diagnostic metric ($R^2$/ AUC/ accuracy/ RMSE etc.) value? Why is there no plural 's' after "hundred" or "thousand" in cardinal numbers? Let's say we have the numeral "12,345". Why is it pronounced as "twelve thousand three hundred and forty five" as opposed to "twelve thousands three hundreds and forty five". Are 's's omitted while pronouncing numerals to make the whole thing more succinct and easier to pronounce?