Posts by izogi
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
Mind you, the whole Public Service was getting regular fishing trips from Rodney Hide at the time (late 90’s) so some people may have been getting a bit jaundiced about the OIA thing.
Yeah, I can appreciate the sentiment. Public servants are people too and they can feel annoyed and prevented from doing their actual job like everyone else, especially if it becomes clear that many of the requests they’re receiving are just massive fishing expeditions from journalists taking a stab that 1% of what they ask about might stumble on something interesting at the taxpayer’s expense of gathering the rest… which has good justifiable reasons from the other side of the fence, but if you’re busy trying to get your regular work done and already working late or under stress to try and meet other deadlines, it can also become very annoying.
The agency I worked at now has a team of Research Analysts whose main role is to specialise in the OIA and Ministerial stuff, and understand the different parts of the rest of the organisation to be able to take some of the parallel OIA workload away from staff who frequently and repeatedly get hit by OIA requests as a consequence of working on things of significant public interest.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
I sort of agree, but getting simple semantic templates for document preparation and using styles instead of visually altering headings and the like would go a long way to producing accessible documents.
The entire culture of document management and standards like this really have to be sponsored from the top to get any traction. Otherwise the publications, document and (today) website staff are constantly fighting managers and staff who don't see it as a primary responsibility that they were hired for. You can produce all the templates you like and provide standard filing mechanisms to keep the info in good order (very important for OIA responsibilities), but then it's necessary to convince people and managers, throughout an entire organisation, to use them instead of taking shortcuts that might make immediate tasks easier for themselves, and to file them properly. I think the lack of interest at the top in a few departments is what hinders some of this.
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If I had to pick an agency that did it best, I'd probably say Treasury.
Knowing some of the IT and publications staff within Treasury, I know they'd appreciate that the effort for getting the systems for this in place has been noticed, because it wasn't a small effort. I imagine it's a similar problem for most departments.
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Hard News: Media Mathematics, in reply to Phil Lyth,
Journos seems to have an innate capacity to make a mess of percentages. Typical is ‘numbers have fallen 300%’ when what they really mean is ‘numbers are only 25% of the previous level’. Averages and other stats measures too..
It’s not just statistics and percentages. It’s simple multiplication. What does a phrase like “three times less than” even mean, given it combines multiplication by a positive whole number with a statement indicating a smaller value?
The intended message is probably something like “one third of” and the only literal interpretation I can think of is “-2 times the amount of”, but honestly, who knows?
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But also lean over and push the pedestrian crossing button that way you stop the cars going across in front of you.
As someone who doesn't cycle much but walks a lot, I was also about to ask about that before I noticed this. Would there be a strategically practical way of positioning more manual-triggering buttons so they were easier for cyclists to use? I guess it only really has a chance of working near the edge of the road, though.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to Sacha,
I reckon they know exactly what they're doing - just not being called on it.
I reckon they just focus on introspective experience because it's easier and takes less effort than trying to look at other people in the real world. Provision the leaders with expensive cars (or the means to buy them) and a driver half the time and this is what you get, at least in NZ. Everyone should just do what they do, right?
My other half grew up in Taranaki, and reckoned that SH3 going south to Wellington was always an order-of-magnitude better-a-road than SH3 going north to Auckland. If an MP for Taranaki's going to Auckland, it's probably on a connecting flight.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to knightpfhor,
Being aware of cyclists on the road requires concious effort.
I found it interesting as a pedestrian that I've had to re- train myself for crossing streets over the past decade as cycling's become more popular. Just to get used to how cyclists often slip in and out of smaller spaces at varying speeds to the rest of the traffic. A couple of times early on, I was nearly hit because I was concentrating too much on watching slow-moving cars, looking straight through the almost silent and fast moving cyclists that'd suddenly fold out from a single dimension between them. Really just a matter of getting used to what to look for and not trusting my ears so much, I guess. These days, every time I walk through slow-moving traffic (on a crossing or not), I try to make very sure I look down narrow gaps between the vehicles before stepping out in front of any gap.
Shifting to Melbourne a year ago was also eye-opening, if only because I had to force myself to consciously watch for the trams. And they're giant whirring monsters compared with a car or cyclist, but they follow different lines, and early on I was finding I'd be watching the cars and cyclists and could be completely looking through where the trams might be in the middle of the road.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to Roger,
I was looking for a decent photograph but yes, trams do have indicators and yes, they do turn left (and right as well).
In Melbourne at least, the trams use indicators all the time, and it’s useful as a driver, not only because views of the tracks are often obscured by other vehicles. They also flash as hazard lights whenever the tram’s stopped for passengers, and it’s illegal to overtake a tram when it’s stopped unless there’s a clear divider between the tram and vehicle traffic. The network’s complex enough (including points that aren’t used much) that they can often route trams around problems or road-works without much difficulty, except perhaps out on the very edges.
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OnPoint: Association of Community…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Next time you go with an analogy like this, could you use "the Earth revolves around the Sun", rather that "the Earth is Round"? The later was pretty much known in 2012 BC (okay, 600 BC, but still) =)
Well to get pedantic, we now know it can be approximated as an oblique spheroid, and it's only very recently that geographers, geophysicists and mathematicians have started modelling the Earth to take into account the dynamic nature of its shape. =P
On the GiveALittle thing, I realise that Keith and other journalists need a living, and I've just finished reading James Murray's take on the issue, thanks to all of you in the twitterverse.
Compared with pure un-biased public funding of media, if such a thing even exists, doesn't the model of voluntarily paying for a work after it's written just encourage a situation where journalism most likely to be funded is that which is consistent with what a certain class of people want to hear? Public Address readers are fairly generous. This has been happening for ever, of course, like when buying magazines because of the content, but as I read James Murray's words I thought he was suggesting that quality journalism will attract funds given a frictionless payment system, even if it concludes with something that those with the money don't want to hear. I think that's what I find mildly concerning.
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Thanks for the reference, but is the not-viewable-outside-NZ-due-to-copyright thing intentional this time? :(