Posts by BenWilson
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Feed: Saints Preserve, in reply to Lilith __,
I think grapefruit’s divine fresh
Grapefruit has been contraindicated for at least 3 different medications I've been on.
I did used to juice it and add something sweeter to it, like sugar or orange juice. But I do find juicing citrus to be a PITA.
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Had mad oranges last winter. It's pretty awesome to have such a tasty fruit that comes ready right then. 2 months of 1-2 per breakfast, depending what fell.
Why couldn’t it have been a lemon tree?! Why?!
Yes, good for nothing grapefruit. Graft onto it maybe? Cut it to a stump, put lemon cuttings all the way around the bark ring, and hope for the best. Of course you could end up getting what I got - a grapefruit that comes back from the dead but never bears fruit again.
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Hard News: Poll Day 2: Queasy, in reply to Bart Janssen,
If a party has anything other than 50% the number quoted is worse than meaningless because it implies there is some meaning where there is not.
Well, the meaning is not clear, if what you say is true about what they are doing with the numbers*. Presumably there is a way to map the errors they give back onto the original confidence intervals.
*can you support this with a link? I wouldn't be surprised, but I'd genuinely like to know what their methods are. If the 95% confidence interval is just (for example) scaled up by the relative proportion then finding out the real 95% confidence interval is just a matter of scaling down. Annoying to have to do it, but helpful when trying to understand reported stats.
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Hard News: Poll Day 2: Queasy, in reply to David Hood,
I tend to think the crowd-sourced corpus tend to work better for assembling facts than assessing opinion, as they are two susceptible to where the crowd is coming from.
Yes, I'd agree. I guess there's a blurry line between fact and opinion when it comes to "did he show negative body language?", "does the article disparage her?", etc. Break it down to sentence or expression counts, and maybe it's more fact based, so "how many times did he frown/shake head/interrupt?", "how many sentences were disparaging?". But of course it's also more work.
Well, you must have plenty of time on your hands, being a student and all.
Full time student, full time caregiver. I could probably give up the time I spend squeezing out a post between study stints, just so I could not just watch the news, but actually pore over it, counting Gower's wry smiles. $10 would just be the icing on the cake!
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Hard News: Poll Day 2: Queasy, in reply to Rich Lock,
although everyone would shift to arguing about the detail of the methodology and the position of the base lines
Yes, the devil is right there. But if it were done, then it would at least be data rather than anecdata.
It would be fairly labour-intensive, though – I expect you’d need a lot of warm bodies to watch and data-crunch.
It does depend on how intensively you want to do it - it could be done on only the top 2 newspapers and top 2 highest rating shows. Which would probably just be a full time job for one person. Or it could attempt to do every print newspaper and every show, which would be what? 3 times as much in NZ? Way, way more in the UK.
I could see it working as a crowd sourced thing. A semi open website (like Wikipedia is) dedicated to the collation of such stats. Like Iraq Body Count was.
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Hard News: Poll Day 2: Queasy, in reply to Pete George,
It’s not as if journalists are held to anything like the same standards they insist on from politicians.
No, but there's a reason for that. They're nowhere near as powerful.
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Hard News: Poll Day 2: Queasy, in reply to Myles Thomas,
So how would you measure a reporter’s and newspaper’s left or right wing balance?
You could probably collect some stats on column inches which are favourable to which parties, although of course there's a lot of judgment in deciding if it's favorable, and if so, how much so. For TV you'd have to do it on time rather than inches. The placement of the stories should be recorded too, how close to the front page, or start of the news. Sound like a lot of work. That judgment is especially hard for non-verbal stuff. How many pics of Cunliffe with a silly face, and Key from a flattering angle. How scornful the reporter sounds....
Couldn't do it myself. That would involve watching the news.
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Hard News: Poll Day 2: Queasy, in reply to Hebe,
Last night got me to the point of "why watch any TV news?"
I don't watch it regularly, haven't for a very long time. But I can see at least one good reason to - to become informed about how things are being reported on one of the more popular platforms. In other words, if you want to become informed about what the news is about, there's better ways. But if you want to become informed about how the news is being presented, then it's the primary source. You pretty much have to watch it.
For me, I'm just not that interested in the second purpose. I'm interested in the news itself, not the news reporting, unless that is in itself especially newsworthy. Sometimes it is, and I'll then find the show online and watch it.
This does mean I'm somewhat separated from the political zeitgeist. A true media junkie has to watch the news, there's no choice.
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Hard News: Polls: news you can own, in reply to Hebe,
I wouldn’t like to speculate: there are too many unknowns.
The ones we know about can at least be ringfenced as known unknowns. But this is moving into the territory of unknown unknowns.
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I think the safest conclusion about rising Don't Knows, is that we don't know why. Why don't we know? I don't know.
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