Posts by Peter Green
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to David Hood,
Does that need a library(gtools) at the top?
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Hard News: Polls: news you can own, in reply to BenWilson,
My understanding is that they would prefer to reduce the error by improving their sampling techniques rather than using an adhoc fudge factor like we do.
It's entirely possible that they're measuring accurately, and that people are consistently having a last-minute change of heart on election day. An arbitrary adjustment would mask that sort of effect.
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Commissioned polls are news you can can own. They are exclusive at the time of publication and if they’re sufficiently interesting they may then be picked up and quoted by other media organisations. The natural approach to maximising the value of your investment in a poll is to make a compelling story of it – to make it look at much like news as possible.
You could make the same argument about a news item that's complete fiction. That wouldn't justify misleading your viewers.
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to George Darroch,
The graph in that second link was made with my script here. Brad disagrees with some of the assumptions used (e.g. fixed "house effect" and constant smoothing parameter), so I don't want to tar him with any of my simplifications.
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Sacha,
Using the term 'hack' to describe what was done is fundamentally misleading
'Hack' seems reasonably descriptive ... oh, wait you're not talking about the journalism are you?
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I realise that sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, but I'm finding it pretty hard to believe that the story reflects a lack of "basic understanding". At some point you have to wonder if maybe the author is just flat out lying to the public, because they know their job is selling advertising not reporting news.
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom: We need an Inquiry!, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
If Russel Norman wishes us to believe that his police complaint is about upholding the rule of law, and isn't a political stunt, he should stop publicly talking about it
Without public pressure, the police will just sweep this under the rug. Dr Norman is totally correct to keep this in the public eye.
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I'm not convinced that R^2 is a useful measure of goodness of fit in this case, especially with the ridiculously prescriptive interpretations given by this textbook.
The real problem here is confounding variables.
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I suspect our reactions might be coloured by whether or not the police got it right. With Bradley Ambrose it looked like they were smearing an innocent man, whereas Banks is quite obviously guilty, so it's a bit harder to feel any sympathy for him.
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What does this mean for Key's "complied with the law" test? Presumably "avoided scrutiny until the time limit expired" passes somewhat under that bar?