Posts by bmk
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Muse: OFF TOPIC: This Is What Your Brain…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
A wider issue is that polling companies appear not to have discovered cellphones yet.
Apparently as yet this hasn't been a significant problem as they have found the people who don't have land-line phones vote similarly to the people who do have land-lines and match their demographic. So by weighting the votes of that demographic who do have land-lines more heavily to compensate for the missed people (those with cell phones only) they end up with a fairly accurate result.
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Muse: OFF TOPIC: This Is What Your Brain…, in reply to BenWilson,
If it's "eight out of ten people surveyed said they thought gay marriage was already in law" then you might get a good enough answer to that out of calling up 30 people.
Problem is with thirty people you'd have a margin of error of around 18% if the sample were perfect. So that would mean 'somewhere between 6 and 10 out of 10 people thought gay marriage was already in law' and in reality the gap would be much higher as the odds are there would be biases introduced through just ringing up 30 people without taking care to weight for demographics and randomising the answer person. So a genuine answer would be something like 'between 3 and 10 out of 10 people thought gay marriage was already in law'.
A too small sample is practically useless. I remember a scientist once telling me the most common mistakes people make are incorrect cause-co-relation assumptions and making assumptions based on an insufficient sample size. This is really born out when you talk to people and there reason for believing in something is an anecdote they heard from a friend of a friend and to their mind this is conclusive proof.
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Muse: OFF TOPIC: This Is What Your Brain…, in reply to BenWilson,
Heh. Or ring up a few hundred people randomly and just ask the question. Polling isn't rocket science
Well it isn't rocket science but you should also record demographics of the person and weight accordingly, you should also try to randomise the person being asked (otherwise this introduces bias as some people are more likely than others to answer the phone) which is usually being done by asking for the person in the household who will have their birthday next to answer the questions.
So while not rocket science it takes a bit of care and work to get reasonable results - you should also try to get at least 500 answers which would probably involve ringing at least 5,000 numbers (pure guess as to response rate - but I can't imagine getting more than one in ten).
Polling companies to reduce costs often combine several polls on the one person which makes the process more economic.
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Legal Beagle: Mana update, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I thought the BORA basically had no significance to other laws. So that if the BORA grants you the right to free speech but another law prohibits certain acts of speech then those certain acts of speech become illegal.
But I'm not a lawyer so am probably wrong about this but I remember something like this being explained to me by a lawyer once (though I could well have remembered it the completely wrong way around).
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Legal Beagle: Mana update, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Considering I was concentrating on driving I couldn't say decisively either. Though I do remember seeing a word at least one of them.
So could a party use a plain colour as a form of legal advertising on an election day? For example when they take their billboards down could they just replace them with a billboard that is a solid colour?
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Interesting as I drove through Whangarei this morning three different cars had a party flag being flown from them. Is that allowed?
But I don't care either. I don't really understand the rationale behind the whole 24-hour thing.
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The only thing that I can be certain of is that turnout will be low. Who this will favour I wouldn't know.
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This is a horrible situation. I think it might be a little unfair of people to suggest that all insurance companies are this bad - I am sure there would be some genuine ones.
In my own experience for example either myself or family members have had four or five different claims with State each one wasn't technically covered in the policy and we didn't expect to get anything. In each case they paid out in full with no arguments - in the one case though they wisely suggested I change my insurance policy so there wouldn't be a repeat (I was using my car for commercial insurances and only had private cover). For that reason I have always stuck with them even when other companies have offered cheaper policies.
However, no doubt there are plenty of people out there with bad experiences of State as well - it may just come down to the luck of the draw of who the claim assessor is.
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I love commas and find the idea of them not being there a little distressing. The only exception I can think of is where the writer writes, like James Ellroy, in short, snappy sentences.
I suppose text may still be understandable without the commas but I imagine it would make it a lot harder work to read - which I think is true of all punctuation. Punctuation almost exists as a courtesy which makes the reader's job of understanding the author's words easier.
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I mean NIN hated a lot of their own fans ('March of the Pigs') yet built a cult following. I can see authors who likewise shun their fans, live in obscurity Thomas Pynchon style developing a far committed fan base than some author who appears on every talk show and turns up at every fan signing. Cult following is tied up with the object seeming unobtainable or obscure.