Posts by izogi
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Legal Beagle: The Teapot Moan Scandal…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Hi Graeme.
Not for that one. Seriously, if you've evidence that's the plan, then release it. That would be outrageous.
What's the point of difference, given that they both trace back to Party campaigning?
Am I right in thinking that it's that the soundtrack was entirely about a Party campaign ad (so taxpayer not liable), whereas the Teapot case was more specifically about something the PM said outside of a Party campaign stunt?
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Legal Beagle: The Teapot Moan Scandal…, in reply to Sacha,
Backdown. And yeas, that's what I suspected too.
I'm surprised he even suggested it to begin with. If the amount's really as small as is being implied, he could probably have added it to his private grocery shopping list without making a dent in the bank account, and looked better in the process. Maybe the colleagues didn't want that precedent of personal liability being set.
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Speaker: ‘Kiwimeter’ is a methodological…, in reply to Peter Davis,
But ... There is a problem if ethics committees start saying that you cannot ask questions about controversial and/or sensitive issues. You immediately get a whole lot of subjects taken off the agenda
I think it's premature to start suggesting that type of research couldn't take place under more ethical processes, though. Surely part of what an ethics committee will be considering is what's being learned from the research compared with the potential for harm, as well as measures taken to mitigate that potential harm.
Considering the "Maori special treatment" question, what is being learned from it?
One class of respondents will say they agree. Some may just respond without effect. Another class of respondents will be offended and antagonised by the question, because they find it impossible to answer clearly without compromising the integrity of what they think. (We know this because it's happened.)
Is the intent to find out what people think? If so, the question's unlikely to produce meaningful information, because allowable answers don't fit what people want to say. At the very least if people answer honestly, it's clear to them that their answer is likely to be misinterpreted, hence the frustration.
Or, is the intent to find out how people react to being asked the question? If so, why? How is that reaction being measured to record useful data, if at all? How is the potential for harm to the subjects being mitigated as part of the research process?
In the end, it's almost certainly a poorly worded question which reveals little to no useful information, and deeply offends many people in the process of asking it. Reporting results of this survey as "news" just increases the likely hurt.
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Fair enough! What happened here? I have no freakin’ idea.
TVNZ is subject to the Official Information Act. Perhaps there's room to find out some of the detail.
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Speaker: The real problem with the ‘Kiwimeter’, in reply to Tze Ming Mok,
They're really boasting now about 130,000 respondents? Congratulations, that's 130,000 respondents worth of worthless data that doesn't mean anything!
Wow. At 10 minutes per survey, which is the time it takes as advised by TVNZ, that's nearly 903 continuous non-sleeping days of people filling out a dumb survey.
They could have been contributing that time towards building the economy, damnit!
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Speaker: The real problem with the ‘Kiwimeter’, in reply to Jason Kemp,
Where I did have trouble was in the later stages of trying to choose between say rugby and the All Blacks as a NZ symbol. I know both of those do represent NZ but not the actual NZ I live in.
That part struck me as very similar to a decision-making tool that a former colleague of mine went off to co-develop. https://www.1000minds.com/about/how-it-works You feed in a heap of things that you want to prioritise, then in generates countless combinations of them and asks survey-takers to prioritise them against each other. Chances are people's preferences between the input isn't transitive and there will be a heap of contradictions, but the system takes all that data and ranks things into priorities based on whatever algorithms it uses. (I'm not an insider on this -- it's more my understanding from having seen it in use.)
It's quite taxing on people taking the survey, though. It results in lots of questions and comparisons aren't always obvious. I'm not entirely sure what they're trying to achieve by doing it here, if that's what it is. On the face it's to slot people into arbitrary categories, I suppose. Deeper down, who knows? Does this info get sold?
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Speaker: The real problem with the ‘Kiwimeter’, in reply to Stephen Judd,
There was no acknowledgement that they might have screwed up. They think their questions are neutral.
I s'pose an argument would go that they're more interested in how people respond, not in what they mean.
But where is the value in that? What's being learned, if anything, at the cost of antagonising some people by intentionally giving them an emotionally loaded question that's impossible to cleanly answer? That's the type of thing that some classes of researchers start requiring ethics approval for. Was there any here?
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Alfie,
Photo ID required to listen to Plunker and his team emit government spin? No thanks.
If I interpreted it correctly (can anyone confirm?), then I found Josie Butler's account of photographs being taken of attendees even more disturbing. Surely security cameras would be enough in the modern world of paranoia about crowds a TPPA presentation might attract. Do they need mug shots of everyone just in case any individual attendee does something "bad"?
I guess it's part of a thing to help identify potential troublemakers at future roadshows, and probably any number of other events for the next 30 years. Is it too much of a conspiracy to think there could be a security firm somewhere, contracted to document people's comments and dissent in a file against their identity and mugshots?
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Speaker: The real problem with the ‘Kiwimeter’, in reply to EJ,
My own thought was that it certainly doesn’t seem too different from that dreadfully worded and highly criticised referendum question a few years ago, which did more to declare smacking kids was a good thing than to clearly ask if it should be legal.
How can you possibly answer a question like that, without feeling a certain amount of disgust or at least discomfort, unless you already agree with the assumptions of the questioner?