Posts by Keith Ng
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I actually liked 'Fuck Earth Hour' better as a title.
Well, the reference to the Dimmer Brigade in the first draft read: "Fuck you you shiteating fucknuts. Fuck you to hell and then fuck you to hell some more."
A literary gem, really. But it broke the narrative stride, I thought.
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The idea being that the reduced heat output from bulbs (powered by hydro) will be replaced by increased central heating (powered by burning natural gas).
Interesting. I can see the fuel replacement argument, but surely, a lightbulb on the ceiling (with 50+% of the heat going straight up) can't be that effective as a heater, right?
Besides, the answer is to just get blimmin' electric heaters.
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It sounds like the people who understand the gravity of the mistakes aren't allowed to speak to the media.
No, I don't think that's true. There might have been a statistician behind the scenes who was going ape-shit, and true, the comms guy wasn't going that far, but he knew how wrong it was. Well, the first story, anyway.
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Don't just phone up the editorial desk - respond quickly and officially to the inaccuracies in the comments under the story, issue your own press release which will be picked up by Scoop.
In this case they did. And they got it wronger.
But a little sympathy here: Public sector comms people are not in a position to rip into the Herald, or to embarrass them the way that we can.
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I also thought the paper's "correction" was inadequate. It was buried at the bottom of the online version of the original story, where very few people were likely to see it.
And wronger!
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I run on this principle: make it very VERY simple to read. The problem, I feel, tends to be caveats and definitions. Nearly all data comes with them and they aren't the easiest things to make palatable.
On a constructive note, it might be helpful to make actionable caveats. i.e. Instead of saying "these figures also included universities", say "You cannot use them to describe schools."
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I wonder if "Recorded Offences in Schools and Other Educational Institutions" includes arson attacks and vandalism?
Yes, but they were not requested in the OIA.
The Herald only asked for Drugs, Sex and Violence.
Ahem.
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And Keith: are there any crash-courses in stats I can take to avoid being this problem in the future? I don't want to be the journalist who makes a fuck-up like this. And my maths is terrible. I did touch on stats in journalism school, but we touched on them in much the same way as the reporters/senior Herald staff did in this case.
What Haydn said. The problem here was that they took the numbers and decided that they meant whatever they hell they needed it to mean. When there was a definition right there, if they'd just looked. There's no excuse in not reading it to understand *exactly* what you're looking at.
And then, you can do this journalistiky thing of asking people. There are plenty of people who can and will explain this stuff.
Instead they call Bob fucking McCroskie for a rent-a-quote. They really should stop doing that.
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And if you put three experts on economic stimulus in a room, you'll get three totally different solutions to the problem, all of which will contradict. How many people are at the summit?
Heh, depends on what you mean by contradict. The three opinions that you're likely to get are: 1) We need to spend money on everything. 2) We need to spend more than that. 3) We need to do both.
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It is if they pay third-world wages. $2.50 an hour? Is that the fat-cats future vision of New Zealand?
I think it's a bit premature to use those back of a napkin figures to construde wages. The 3,700 jobs figure (probably) doesn't mean that they'll hire 3,700 burly men with shovels and pickaxes. It's "will provide 3700 new jobs", which (probably) counts all the cafe owners and backpacker operators who'll set up on the trail, plus some magical credit-creation multiplier which will generate positions for 30 new telephone hygenists and calligraphy consultants "downstream".