Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Maybe I have a less optimistic view of human nature, but I think people's prejudice is more likely to come out in the privacy of a polling booth, than when someone calls them on the phone and says something along the lines of "Excuse me Sir, but as a registered Democrat, would you vote for a black man?"
I think to some extent that's probably true. But I also think that most of the people that think that way, would have voted Republican anyway. They might just now have more reason for doing it.
The groundswell, which seems to be turning into a tidal wave of activist support for Obama, I'm sure that there are some closet racists in the party as you've indicated, but I can't imagine there's millions.
And I think there's a balancing effect. While only a relatively small proportion of African Americans vote Republican, that proportion is going to drop even further, and I'd imagine, their turnout increase a fair bit if Obama is on the top of the ticket.
America's Funniest Pet Renovations Gone Wrong
Seriously, take America out of that, we need it to be eligible for NZ on Air.
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But Roger Douglas is back with them. Don't people love him anymore?
Well see. Now there's no funny left in the room. Completely used up!
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I look forward to your party vote for Act then this year Russell :-).
I wish I could think of a suitably witty reply ...
I think he pretty much had all the funny with the words "party vote for Act" really.
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Are you meaning IT people? Or anyone who works at Parliament?
Everyone's nice to the IT guy.
Hardly anyone is nice to people at parliament.
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The person hiding behind IP address 202.22.18.241 works at Parliament in the IT department.
I have full name, suburb, age, date of birth, photo.
Looks like somebody is going to be fired.
That's a disturbing post. How uncomfortable that people feel it's their role to look up people on the internet and then make threats about their employment.
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From the Herald:
Politicians and staffers "editing" such entries should have to declare their interests rather than remaining anonymous behind the strings of numbers which make up internet "addresses" for individual users, Brown said today in his Hard News "blog".
"I think 202.22.18.241 is doing way too much, and behaving in too political a way, for someone hiding behind an IP address," he said
What's with the quote marks around blog? It feels like Dr Evil is reading it out, and he's done the wee quote marks with the fingers... ooh, Russell has got a "blog".
Good job on getting the Herald to quote you with an IP address as a proper noun. That's funky. Pie for Russell.
So no, I'll accept the opinion of a group of scientists about 42 articles on science as having greater validity than my own opinion on those same 42 articles.
I think you either don't understand, or are misrepresenting peer review. When reviewing an article for a journal, you don't just read it and go "yeah, that looked OK". Reviewers for articles often have access to the raw data and will recalculate it themselves. They're typically experts in the field, and will compare with other studies and literature. Reviewing an article often involves doing your own research. They take it very seriously, and to be a asked to review for Nature you would be at the top of your field.
The story says, that the use of experts related to the scientific topics. So experts in the 42 articles read them and identified errors. Given that they all probably had PhDs in the field, and had spent several decades working in those fields, I'm going to guess that they're a bit more qualified to judge the accuracy of the 42 articles than you Rex.
You've also criticised it for focusing on scientific articles. The first line in the story that Deborah linked to stated that it was only about scientific articles - that was the point of the research. But I'd bet that Encyclopedia Britannica is probably about as inaccurate as wikipedia on a whole heap of topics, because the britannica gets printed and therefore is out-of-date before it even reaches the shops.
What's disturbing is that Encyclopedia Britannica had an average of three errors per article. Wikipedia had four. If a bunch of volunteers can write an encyclopedia that is updated on the fly, free, and almost as accurate as the one you pay people to write...
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Hundreds of different factors go into anybody's political views - religion is simply one of them - and they are certainly not listed ad nauseum on Wikipedia.
Which would all be fine if this was his National Party page, but it's not, it's an encyclopedia. It's about him as a person, not just him as a politician. So his religion and other things from his life that are public, are just as relevant as the fact that he's deputy leader of the National Party etc.
I really don't see why, except in extreme cases where it unbalances an article, we should remove material from wikipedia. It's difficult enough to get information into one central location, why would we take stuff which we all know is accurate out?
Personally I don't view it as an encyclopedia, I view it as a data sink. As long as it's well organised and structured, everything should be dropped in. If it unbalances Bill's article to have his wife's stuff in there, someone make a page for her and move it to there.
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I'm with Craig Young. Surely most people have a fairly good idea of the English's religious beliefs, if not the exact details of how that's played out. I think the fact that it's reported fairly regularly in the media is going to have a much greater influence in the world than removing it from wikipedia.
If it's not inaccurate, why would you bother?
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According to the Florida Democratic Party's website it was the amendments filed in an effort to change the January 29th date to forestall the DNC's sanctions that were turned down by the Florida Republicans.
It's another one of those really weird things in American politics, that republicans - presumably through the state legislature - get to influence how democrats choose their candidates.
It'd be like parliament voting on whether or not MPs from Wellington were able to attend their own party caucus to choose the PM.
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ii) Steve I would urge you to stop and ponder the dilemma for the medical profession of figuring out who can and cannot have a real drug as opposed to a placebo or indeed who would be qualified to make such a determination.
And the moral issue. If doctors were to find that a placebo was as effective as the drugs that they were handing out, then what does that say about what they've been doing for umpteen years, and indeed the medical profession and prescription drugs?
And if depression is the only instance where that's true (or the only major one), then what does it say about the 'depression medical drug industry' that has built up over the past few decades.
If I was a GP I could see a whole heap of "Holy crap that's big" issues in front of me, and I'd sure want scientists (and the media) to be absolutely confident about what they're saying.
downers for your chihuahua anyone?
Seriously, if you get one of those stupid little pretend dogs, it's not the dog that needs help.