Posts by Nathaniel Wilson
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Hard News: The Wogistan form book, in reply to Deborah,
Ta. Viva National Radio huh?
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I'm disappointed that no-one (that I know of) has challenged Prosser's assertion that "most terrorists are Muslim". It's a very myopic, quasi-US-centric, view and ignores goings on in all sorts of places, including Spain, Northern Ireland, the drug-war related terrorism in Mexico etc...etc...etc...
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Hard News: Environmental league tables…, in reply to Farmer Green,
I meant that discussion of population levels appears to be a taboo subject. It is the very obvious elephant in the room isn’t it?
If it's an elephant, it's a rather monstrous one. Population control is only ever mentioned by people who intend it to apply to everyone but themselves (and perhaps their friends and family).
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Hard News: Environmental league tables…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Which is pretty much the conclusion of the post.
...and it's an obvious enough point I'm puzzled why the response from the Government hasn't been a little clearer. But, and I in no way mean to post-jack, at least they're consistent with their response to other issues (i.e. intentionally befuddling). It's also disappointing there's been little response from MfE or the Regional Councils, but given how heated things have been about such a "treasonous" topic, I suppose I'm not that surprised.
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Part of the problem when determining "best" quality water is that you have to come down to some selection of what "good" water should look like, which is stupidly subjective. In NZ, we've typically focused on what we think ideal aquatic biologically communities should look like, which is a little tricky at the best of times - but the relationship between these communities and measurable parameters isn't always well-coupled. We have pristine natural geothermal communities living in water choc-full (naturally) of things like arsenic, and we have the old thorny issue that a lot of our remaining native species like the water however it comes (eels as the very best example). From a fish perspective, we've ended up in the somewhat awkward predicament that introduced trout species are our "canary in the mine" species.
It also doesn't help that parameters like water clarity aren't so sensible in a country in which alpine streams can be clearer than anyone can measure while even un-impacted lowland muddy streams can be practically solid. It also doesn't help that the analysis of our State of the Environment monitoring data (and I know this from experience) can be massively skewed because the criteria are based on 95th percentiles, but the data you're analysing might be restricted to only a handful of samples - you end up with things appearing really bad due to one off events.
This isn't to say it isn't worth striving to improve things. Just that we should be focused on what we're doing on a local level, and not how we compare to Burundi or whereever.
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Hard News: Environmental league tables…, in reply to Alistair McBride,
There's no shift - the indices are different (our number 2012 is based on a 2010 number and hasn't changed between 2000 and 2010 apparently).
In short these indices are a mess, which isn't that surprising. Part of the problem is that "national" water quality is a weird, weird thing in the first place, given the massive diversity of water ways, usages etc.. It's also a little cruel to compare so-called developed countries to so-called undeveloped countries, as by definition things should be much rosier in the latter.
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I thinks it's a pity the official response isn't just " Yup, we've got some problems, and we're working on them" (and then actually commit to working on them). You know, like an adult might if they had a mind to act mature.
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I'm pretty sure "r value" is slang for R^2. They are the same thing
They're really not. Very roughly speaking, r gives you an indication of whether the two variables have a relationship, r^2 provides an indication of how much variance in the data can be explained. r^2 =1 means the line explains all the variance, r^2 of 0.074 means the line explains 7.4 % of the variance; sweet FA in other words. You could probably plot number of cars per household or number of badminton players per school on the x-axis and get just as good results.
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Hard News: And so it begins, in reply to Adrian Humm,
Fast forward to the brave new world of league tables and charter schools. Multiply our experience by the number of small rural towns with single, medium-sized high schools. I see more problems ahead than opportunities. How about you?
Doom, doom doom is what I think.
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Hard News: And so it begins, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But if past behaviour is a predictor of future behaviour, then no matter how worthless the data is, parents will do anything to send their children to the highest ranked school they can manage.
So what's going to change then? 'cause it's not like anyone's going to be surprised the the outcomes are they?