Posts by James Green
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At risk of being a plagiarist, how about as a review.
Absolute Power/Wishart, Ian:
Unnecessarily - even considerably- more than six words -
Rob -- On Speights Distinction. Certainly available at the Staff Club in Dunedin (which is really now a bar not a private club). Unfortunately, during the reign of the last vice-chancellor it got 'updated', which makes is a weird hybrid between airport lounge cafeteria and gentlemens' club. I'm not entirely sure what was wrong with old wooden furniture and red velvet curtains.
Emersons -- Also available on tap at the Robbie Burns (I take Pilsener, and they have at least Bookbinder as well). Certainly has the kind of decor David would approve of, but does feature sports tv, recorded music, and live jazz on thursdays (can't complain about the latter).
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Is there any real need to dig up roads? If chorus were bought on board, my understanding is that they've spent years putting those lovely green duct pipes under every footpath, effectively negating the need to dig holes all over the show. That is, they ought to be able to just shove fibre through the existing pipes.
I don't remember the last street I walked down that actually had a full-blown set of phone wires on the poles. Mostly you have perhaps 10 pairs of copper strands emerging every 3-4 houses down the street, strung below the power lines. Sticking new stuff (ie fibre) seems to be exactly what this was designed for... -
Meanwhile, sadly, Obama and Clinton have joined McCain in paying lip service to pseudoscience with respect to this issue.
Blech. I especially like the bit at the end of that link
'Of course, "calling for more research" is the cop-out that all politicians use whenever there's an issue that is contentious'(onegoodmove)
This is also the default cop-out at the end of an undergraduate student essay. Rather than attempt to synthesise, they call for more research :)
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They had Mike McRoberts talk to Lilian Ng afterwards, and she was... almost scathing. Certainly pissy. My respect level for her went right up.
That's fucking awesome. I'd be very happy to see more of that sort of thing.
(I think I might have seen a spoiler for that, picked up on the not actually autistic bit, and then didn't watch). -
No real justification for posting this... but I hadn't actually looked at a 24 hour animated weathermap for KAREN before.
http://weathermap.karen.net.nz/animations/karen-2008-04-22.gif -
Am I the only one who thinks the money could be better spent on say schools, transport, hospitals, research etc.
I think most of those sort of groups would be quite happy to have better interwebs. The research institutions have steamingly fast interwebs, but it limits what I can get done in the evening sometimes. I think fast interwebs should be transformational on all sorts of levels, and in unexpected ways. Not just more pR0n and movies.
Someone noted yesterday that it would (for example) facilitate data back-ups. Or having remote servers etc. I'm sure that most primary schools would be quite happy to have all of that sort of thing done seamlessly and more centrally somewhere, rather than having to worry about doing their own back-ups.
I also think it could have an amazing impact on business.I should now point out that I'm uber-unqualified to comment on this. (Other than that that KAREN rules)
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I'd like to think professional communicators would display some level of literacy and numeracy (or basic research skills) that wouldn't lead to utter bullshit like the rash of 'anti-depressants don't work - studies show' stories that were doing the rounds a few weeks back.
That is an interesting example -- we printed out a copy of the original research article and left it on a table in the corridor for grazing for a few days. There are a bunch of issues that make it not the whole story (it was only some anti-depressants and only a subset of the evidence - but an extremely interesting subset because it included all the unpublished research as well as the published)... but the biggest thing was not that it didn't show that anti-depressants didn't work (it showed a very large effect), but that the placebo effect was perhaps three quarters of the the size of the drug effect. IE -- the sugar pills worked really fucking well!
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I think part of the problem with this whole debate is that there is not one person - to my knowledge - employed as a science reporter by the daily mainstream media in New Zealand.
Something that makes me gloomy is that TV3 trot out DOCTOR Lillian Ng (their emphasis) on health issues. I think this adds a certain richness to some issues, but I lament her interpretation of health research. I know that we do train our doctors to a certain level of epidemiological knowledge, but mostly they're learning how to make us well, not understanding the nuances of the clinical research in the background.
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It does appear that Williams may have been a little disingenuous, but especially in the light of Clinton's sniper-fire thing, I do wonder if we need to think a little more carefully about the fallibility of memory.
I certainly don't remember the conversations I had yesterday verbatim, let alone last week. And one of things research suggests about memory is that every time you 'remember' something, you are actively reconstructing it, and likely changing it.
It's entirely possible for people to vehemently believe in their 'memory', but for that to be entirely contradicted by objective records (ever more prevalent). I think the problem will be sometimes working out when the bastards are lying, and when their memories are genuinely at odds with the objective truth.