Posts by mpledger
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to Russell Brown,
Russell Brown, in reply to Angela Hart, About 11 hours ago
AH: They have many disadvantages including excluding people without access to research libraries.RB: Yes, very much this. I'm one of those people and I am regularly stymied by this fact.
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All the university libraries I have been to are pretty much "walk in and use". Even the computer don't need a login/password unless you want to reserve something. Most academic search engines allow you to e-mail a paper to yourself so you can hop on a computer, search and e-mail pdfsI've used the UoA science and engineering libraries and VuW's library while neither staff nor student.
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Hard News: Garbage in, garbage out, in reply to Matthew Poole,
mpledger said:
One of the things I wish RNZ would do would count the number of times a minister didn’t come on air when asked. Something like “since the last election the the Minister for Justice has been unavailable for interview X times”.Matthew Poole said
Or, “Since first becoming Prime Minister in 2008, John Key has never appeared on this station despite repeated invitations.”I think it has more meaning with numbers, especially day after day after day e.g.
PM has not been available for comment 20 times since the last election. -
One of the things I wish RNZ would do would count the number of times a minister didn't come on air when asked. Something like "since the last election the the Minister for Justice has been unavailable for interview X times". Once people start realising how ofter ministers/pollies are ducking being asked questions by journalists they pollies might start fronting up.
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Hard News: TVNZ: Emptied out, in reply to Dan Horne,
Yea, my daughter is a little older and I would guess in the last year she has watched less than 10 hours of terrestrial tv - youtube/fan fiction is what she heads for.
It's quite good in a way because she's avoided a crap load of in-your-face advertising - youtube's ads are not targetted at her and are not too intrusive.
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The Press Council website seems to be down so you can't get to the link Deep Red posted. However, the Frank Macskasy case made it in to google's cache and the link is here
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:klG2eH5OtUYJ:www.presscouncil.org.nz/display_ruling.php%3Fcase_number%3D2391+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nz&client=firefox-a -
Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to Russell Brown,
Who ever redacted the e-mail address didn't do a very good job. Just "alt-tabbing" between program windows makes the redacted part visible for a while.
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John Key gushed thanks to his pollster Farrah for all his work - it may have been DPF's work but it was based on our information - we can't give it to them. If Curia rings you up wanting info you just have to say No. If you want the left to win you can't hand feed National strategic information like that.
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Hard News: A call from Curia, in reply to Howard Edwards,
"but how do you come up with estimates of variance (i.e. margin of error)?"
In polls they don't care about the variance. The margin of error that is quoted is a fiction where the pollster pretend they have a simple random sample, every estimate is 0.5 and the only source of error is from not sampling enough people. They also ignore the fact that the error of margin should go up when they drop people out of the analysis e.g. the don't knows.
Thomas Lumley used a model based approach over at Stats Chat to estimate the observed sampling error.
http://www.statschat.org.nz/2014/07/02/whats-the-actual-margin-of-error/ -
Polls should be anonymous to protect your privacy.
Never do a "poll" if they ask for you by name.
For all you know they could have saved your information to use at a later date in some kind of smear campaign or to use against you when applying for a govt job (e.g. "We don't want him, he supports the Greens"). On page 114 of Dirty Politics, Slater says that David Farrah "is the keeper of the dirt" so in this case I'd be very wary.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Russell Brown,
RB said:
A list of all the things Cameron Slater has deleted from the Whaleoil blog since August 18thI gather they’re all still available on the Wayback Machine.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The first one on the list is in google's cache.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EfDRV3YcuxIJ:www.whaleoil.co.nz/2006/04/dumbass-judge-puts-away-catholic-kiddy-fiddler/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nz&client=firefox-aAnd the national library has been harvesting the whale oil blog every three months (roughly) since 2008 and cactus kate every six months (roughy) since 2008
http://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/content-aggregator/getIEs?system=ilsdb&id=1260618
http://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/content-aggregator/getIEs?system=ilsdb&id=1305677