Posts by David Hood
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I too hide under my real name
Whereas I am really Spartacus.
Sorry. Nothing actually useful to contribute.
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I've gotten a look the Dunedin results (no time for analysis yet). And let me say, I find it really weird that STV assigns 2 decimal places of votes in the recalculation process. For example in round 57 Stevenson Teresa had 2,526.16 Votes, and in round 58 had 2,522.02.
I'm assuming there is rounding going on somewhere in the process and that it is assigning votes based on percentages, but it sure isn't how I would have implemented the system (I would have thought an array (votes) of an array (candidate order) and deleting excluded candidates from the front of the candidate order array on each pass would be the way to go).
Anyway, while I am entirely comfortable with the theory of STV, the exact implementation leaves me baffled. -
if you had no idea that what you said was offensive
then you are probably not the best person to be ad-libbing in front of the nation.
Julie- I would say that TVNZ is perceived as representing the country (more so than TV3), because of its name, history, and apparent links to the government. I also think this is more perception than reality.
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To be fair, John Key didn't want to congratulate the Nobel Peace Prize winner as he hadn't been briefed. Which is fair enough- you never know what kind of scoundrel this person might be.
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how do you make sure it doesn't become the generic NZ slush pile?
I believe the initial idea was to let publishers do that, and have the later parts of the value chain returning more to the author. The idea did rather hinge on getting the books at trade rate though.
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The marketplace of ideas is the place where we decide that Paul Henry's suggestion that Anand Satyanand isn't a real New Zealander is false, but we do that by attacking the idea, not by attacking Paul Henry.
Paul Henry's suggestion and behaviour introduce, into the marketplace of ideas, the idea that behaviour like this is inappropriate, and would be just as inappropriate coming from someone else.
This particular example has also raised the issue to what extent, in a commercial environment, should those who behave inappropriately be shielded from the consequences of their behaviour. Many of the pro-Henry have a position that reduces down to either that advertisers should be forced to stick with Breakfast regardless of content, or that people who lose advertisers for a T.V. station should not be able to be influenced by station management. -
The principle of free speech is very simple: we either defend opinions that we find hateful, or we do not defend them at all. Public broadcasting or private.
Bollocks. This is conflating Freedom of speech with Obligation to provide a platform. It was tvNZ, rather than Radio Live or running down the street giggling like a loon (in the latter two cases, no one would have cared). TVNZ is after all the state broadcaster (and this is perceived to mean something nebulous about its representing the country).
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Wasn't it Aragorn's Rangers who turned up originally?
That was Pelennor Fields, at least in the books.
Well, they (Northern Rangers aka the Grey Company) did turn up in Rohan, but after the battle for Helm's Deep. The 30 or so of them then hung round in Aragorn's background for the rest of the book, so didn't even rate being in this 2MB XKCD infographic.
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no implication that it's a volcano, which would after all be a fucking stupid place to build a massive mine complex
I blame dwarvish cowboy builders, and lax building regs, for leaky lava problems.
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Which is all very interesting, but doesn't help the Ministry of Health, Education, Police, Corrections, various university researchers, historians etc when they want useful information.
We are getting useful information from it though, because the sort of people who affiliate with x are well understood in terms of demographic background. That said, I have a few (personal) qualms around some categories of analysis about the extent to which they are analyzed because they were collected vs. usefully analyzed because they are a known or suspected direct contributor to the area being studied. For example, if you truly want high quality data for health, education and police you would:
- collect some hair for genetic assay
- ask the question "Do you eat dinner at the table with your children"
- ask the question "Do either of your parents have a criminal conviction"
But in reality, that is what more detailed research on particular topics is for, the census is for very broad demographic descriptions (used for things such as forecasting schools and infrastructure) which is why data is limited to mesh block sizes.