Speaker by Various Artists

You've just finished your Uber ride. By the general standards of taxi rides, it was very good.

The driver came fast, the car was newish and in good condition and tidy inside. The driver was courteous and asked how you were. Because you felt talkative, you had a discussion. Because you were having a discussion in a language that they were not native to, they were a little distracted, but not in a way that was particularly dangerous, and since they followed Google anyway, you can be pretty sure the route was a reasonably good one, except perhaps that last bit you had to talk them through as you drove down a long right-of-way that's not on any map.

At the end you jumped out and it was all done. As taxi rides go it was one of the good ones. But you've used Uber many times, and it definitely wasn't your best ride ever. What? No free water, no aux cable, no breath mint? No heated leather seats? The conversation was all right, but they didn't really show that much knowledge or interest in your life. Their banter was only at a canter. So should you 5 star them, or give them an average score?

Tough one. What is an average score? Normally, when the scale is from 1 to 5, the average score would be 3. A 5 would mean exceptionally good. You'd expect on this kind of scale for driver ratings to be normally distributed around a mean of 3. And you'd be half right. The ratings are approximately normally distributed around a mean. The mean just doesn't happen to be 3. It's somewhere between 4.5 and 5. 

I collected the ratings of 25 drivers in our association, and the mean score was 4.8, with a standard deviation of 0.07.

Here's how that looks on the 1 to 5 scale. 

This data is probably on the high side. Uber's own meagre insight is that the top 25% of drivers have an average rating of 4.79. We don't get the actual mean or variance, these are only known by Uber.

So how do you rate an average driver on a scale of one to 5, when the average driver rating is 4.8 (say). If you give:

• 5. Their mean will go up by 0.0004. Effectively this does almost nothing.
• 4. Their mean will go down by 0.0016. Still not much, but 4 times as much movement as 5
• 3. Their mean will go down by 0.0036. This is 9 times as influential on their rating as a 5
• 2. Their mean will go down by 0.0056. This is 14 times as influential on their rating as a 5
• 1. Their mean will go down by 0.0076. This is 19 times as influential on their rating as a 5

For any score below 4 you have to give a reason. Since it will take 9 consecutive perfect scores of 5 to undo the effect of your 3, this is fair, although it might be puzzling to anyone accustomed to 3 meaning "average".

So how do you signal that your driver is good? Currently, there is only one way with the app. You give them a 5 and you also leave a nice comment. The comment won't affect their rating, but it will show up on their main home screen and make them feel good.

Outside of the app you could signal it in two main ways - you could say something nice to the driver (for most people this is less effort than writing a comment), or you could even give them a tip. But this is NZ. Most people never tip, on principle.

Why is it this way? Isn't it rather perverse to have a system in which you can really only signal average, bad, really bad, shockingly bad, and fire-this-person? That depends on what you think the purpose of the system is. Clearly, it's not to reward the driver, because there is no way to reward them with anything other than keeping their job, and perhaps the afterglow of a kind word. Clearly, the whole purpose is to punish drivers to varying degrees.

Drivers are, unfortunately, very much in the dark about the specifics of their own ratings. We never know which trips received bad ratings or complaints. We don't even know how many of each rating value we have. The only numbers given are: How many 5 stars, how many rated trips, how many total trips, and what the mean rating is across the last 500. We can also see the top category of complaint.

What do I mean by punishing? Is a bad rating that much of a problem?

I have received many distressed phone calls in the last few months from drivers who have been disconnected permanently for low ratings. Uber's process is to "deactivate" drivers at will and without warning, and then when they inquire as to what has happened, they are told that they have to go on a course at the driver's expense, after which they are given a chance to improve or face permanent deactivation.

No specific target rating is ever given, the "city minimum average" is unknown, but it would seem that anyone below 4.6 in Auckland is at risk. The subsequent deactivation is given with a brutal message "Your final payment will occur within the next week. There is no need to come into the office, as our decision will stand." Attempts to come to terms with what has actually happened to the rating, what bad trips happened, where and when, are stonewalled. There is no natural justice whatsoever applied to this.

This was the fate of Sreeman, a veteran driver of over 1000 trips, on Sunday. Having a rating of 4.49 he had been deactivated and asked to do the training course to give him pointers about how to get a good rating. He accepted that the way he'd been doing it before was not as good as the average Uber standard and set about following the instructions given. His mean ratings over the last three weeks were around the 4.7 mark (he was careful to take some screenshots). But since he was fighting the dead weight of a 4.49 score based on 500 previous trips, it was clearly going to take him quite some time to fight his way back to an acceptable score. He fought, getting steady improvement: 

Despite "Smashing It", on the 17th of September he was deactivated on a rating of 4.53.

No entreaty given to the staff in the office made a lick of difference. It did not matter that he had done their course and that he had significantly improved since then. It did not matter that he had taken on a significant investment in choosing to work for Uber, specifically buying a Prius, and gaining all of the compliance possible, the P Endorsement, his own PSL, a CoF for the vehicle. It certainly didn't matter that this was his only job and that he relied on it to support his family. His reduction to tears and begging made them a little uncomfortable and they tapped away at the screen for a while, before calling security to have him escorted from the premises. Now he can't support his family of 4, and is seeking work.

This, dear readers, is why Ubers are high quality. Because they have a rating system and termination processes that resemble no workplace practices you'd see in NZ. The refusal to ever give a useful mean and variance on driver ratings is not so strange when you consider it could be used to work out just how arbitrary their disconnection practices are. Are they ridding themselves of the bottom 1%? Or 10%?

Uber drivers are no longer called "Partners" – in the last few months that phrasing was quietly dropped.

Is this our model for the grand future of employment? Consider how that might work in your own workplace, for your own job.

PS: Ironically, on the way to meeting Sreeman, Arden MacDonald from the NZUDA used an Uber with a 4.3. I'm a little confused about where the Auckland minimum average rating must be, since 4.53 is clearly below it, but 4.3 doesn't seem to be.

Sergeant Alexander of the 46th Rocket Division buckles me into the commander's chair and wrenches the four-point harness down to the point of discomfort. Two massive blast doors seal the control chamber shut 12 storeys below the Ukraine countryside, protecting us from nuclear attack.

The atmosphere down here feels artificial and far removed from the earth's surface 40 metres above. A stuffy mixture of metal and electronics permeates the sterile, cramped space of the command centre. An impressive array of lights and switches — the pinnacle of '70s Soviet technology — blankets the curved wall of the 3.3 metre wide room. All controls have been kept operational to preserve the fidelity of a launch. 

Three years ago, Clinton Logan sold all his possessions, leased out his house in New York state and set out on his motorcyle. The New Zealander, who had spent most of the past 20 years building a software company, decided "it was time to recalibrate my relationship with the world."

Since then he has crossed the United States eight times and explored Alaska, Canada and Europe. He spent last year riding, photographing, and writing about his experiences in Latin America.

"This season I've been focussing on exploring the traces of the Soviet Union here in Eastern Europe. Next season I'll probably ride into Russia proper. As you can probably tell I'm just making plans up as I go along."

The words and pictures below are adapted with permission from the personal Facebook account where he records his journeys.

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Chernobyl Part I

Exploring the ghost city of Pripyat.

"If we have nuclear weapons why can't we use them?" - Donald Trump

Pripyat was a young municipality, purpose-built to service the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Like other cities that served the technology industry, it was a planned model that stood as a shining example of modern day USSR.

Home to 50,000 people, it was considered a privileged place to live. Compared to other soviet cities at the time Pripyat featured more spacious housing, good schools, well stocked retail stores, effective public transportation, healthcare, and extensive recreational facilities (including a disco!)

The hand-coloured photos of Whites Aviation have become celebrated icons of New Zealand’s mid-century culture – but the story of how each photograph was individually coloured by hand has been almost lost. That's the story Greg Wood and I sought to tell in The Colourist, which is part of this year's Loading Docs film festival.

The film highlights the vocational alchemy and the love of creating a hand-coloured New Zealand. The depth of friendship amongst the ‘colouring girls’ was so great they even went on holidays together. One of them, Grace Rawson, even planned  her honeymoon to visit the locations of Whites Aviation scenes.

'Ohau Road', 1953, 560x1010mm, Collection of Peter Alsop, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL) Negative WA-32638-F.

The idea was this: could Grace Rawson, at a spritely 83 years of age, have another go at hand-colouring a photograph, 53 years after giving up the craft when she left Whites Aviation?

Grace at work in The Colourist with her cotton wool brush. Photo courtesy Samuel Montgomery.

To fully understand the story, let’s wind back the clock.

In 1963, a rare behind-the-scenes account was published of life in the colouring studio of Whites Aviation, showing the studio as a well-lit room in Darby’s Buildings on the corner of Darby and Elliot Streets in downtown Auckland. Inside, a group of about eight women loved their work; using cotton wool to create the best-known examples, then and now, of hand-coloured photography in New Zealand. 

Interestingly, the article didn’t appear in a photography magazine or any publication related to art or design. Instead, the article graced the pages of none other than the Women’s Weekly. It was a good fit; all the members of the colouring studio were women, as they were through time, and the hand-colouring craze was on a public high.

The article was matter-of-factly titled ‘Steady Hand, Keen Eye and a Retentive Memory Needed for Tinting’. In the art paradigms of the day, these women weren’t "artists" and nor, for that matter, were those who took the photos. But the women were devoted to their art form, proud of their achievements and immensely happy in their work.

Grace at work in the 1950s in Whites Aviation’s production division in Auckland’s Darby’s Buildings. Photo courtesy Grace Rawson.

 

A wonderful photo of the "colouring girls" in company uniforms in 1948, working on large-format hand-coloured photos (ATL, WA-16074a-F, L to R: Joyce Chapman, Pat Poole, Colleen Beaumont (with uncertainty), Jocie Baker (with uncertainty) and Ray (with uncertainty and unknown surname).

The article provided insight into the delicate and intricate nature of the craft:

The sea was washed with blue, highlights were added in green and a darker blue. Rangitoto was a combination of green and mauve for the base and blue and mauve at the top. Highlights were of raw sienna. The yachts were mainly scraped up with shadows on the sails and the hulls brown. The tree in the foreground was washed with a darkish green with the highlights of a paler tone of the same colour. The flowers were done last … For bush, four shades of green were used, several tones of yellow, browns and pinks.

One gets the picture that it was complex work but, like most hard things, made to look easy by people at the top of their game.

'Rangitoto Island from Bastion Pt', 1954, 500x750mm, Cropped for display, Collection of Peter Alsop, ATL Negative WA-34549-F.

Grace was born in Auckland in 1933. At the age of three, she was asked that quintessential childhood question: "what do you want to be when you grow up?" Her answer was as unusual then as it would be today: "I will be an artist!"

Grace’s artistic vocation would soon become even clearer. Aged four, she was a flower girl and looked after by the bridesmaid who hand coloured a photo of Grace in her pretty wedding dress. In reflecting on that time, Grace said she ‘understood right then that there was a branch of art that maybe was possible later’.

 

Grace as a young bridesmaid, when she recalls getting her interest in hand-colouring. Photo courtesy Grace Rawson.

Later, like many of Epsom Grammar girls, Grace was hand-coloured in her ball gown; her photo worked on by Crown Studios opposite Smith & Caughey. The photo was displayed in Crown's front window – and it was the final inspiration for Grace to apply for a colouring job. For £1 10s a week, Grace was taught by Shirley Davies, a real hard-case character, and quickly fell in love with painting portraits and groups.

A portrait of Grace hand-coloured by Grace herself. Photo by Auckland’s Crown Studios.

After a trip to England, where her hand-colouring continued, Grace returned in late 1953 and heard of the growing reputation of Whites Aviation. She recalls meeting Leo White like it was yesterday.

Despite showing White her British portfolio – old mills, bridges and thatched roofs – Grace was also asked to paint some of White’s own photos to further prove her worth. Clyde Stewart (or "Mr Stewart" to Grace) was her manager. Stewart ran the colouring studio for 37 years and signed out each and every photo with the flowing ‘Whites’ signature.

The photos were printed on a special semi-matte, fibre-based paper, striking just the right level of absorption to allow the colour to cure without bleeding. The photos were painted in oil, thinned with turpentine to allow the paint to be translucent, creating a wash-like effect. For application, paint brushes were only rarely used and, instead, a small amount of cotton wool was wrapped around the end of a thin grapevine to create the ‘brush’. Cotton wool had the advantage of being able to create a thin film of colour, and in a uniform, streak-free way.

 

A set of Winsor & Newton paints for hand-colouring photographs. A bottle of turpentine can be seen on the right of the tray, with cotton wool and sticks in the bottom to be used as the "brush".

For landscapes, Grace recalls Mr White describing the right colours, always ensuring clarity in the New Zealand light. The 1963 article also refers to photographers frequently bringing back samples, "such as the time Mr White returned from the South Island high country with a handful of tussock."

A photo about 35x50cm would take about one morning to colour. When the girls painted large murals, it wouldn’t be uncommon to work as a team, standing, sitting or climbing up on stools. Even then, big pieces could take many days to complete, nine in the case of a large Lake Taupo photograph worked on by four "girls" in 1963.

Grace Rawson, Lorraine Sutton and Nola Mann work on colouring a large photographic mural for H & J Smith’s store in Gore in 1955 (ATL, WA-39940). Large murals like this took a number of days for a team of colourists. Nola Mann worked as a colourist at Whites from around 1955 until around 1998, likely making her – given the popularity of Whites’ work – the most extensive hand-colourist in New Zealand’s history.

Speaking to us, Grace explained her theory on the Whites sensation and the orders that came in thick and fast:

"It was very important for people to have photographs of New Zealand on their walls in those days. And once Whites started selling, they went berserk everywhere. In my view, everybody bought them because there was nothing else like them at the time. There were some prints of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Brugal’s paintings, Constable’s hay wain – but suddenly Whites was different. It was real, and the country we lived in,  and hand coloured. It absolutely took off."

One of the early hand-coloured ventures for Whites was also the capturing of farms, tapping into a strong sense of national pride in rural land.

Seventy one years since Whites Aviation was started, Grace still sees the hand-colouring legacy.

"I love to come across the photos: a majestic mural of the Remarkables in a Queestown café and many in Replete café in Taupo."

All, it so happens, locations of special significance in Grace’s life. Wherever she goes, the popular Whites Aviation scenes are never far away  – not least among them, the photos that she coloured with her own hand.

Grace with her completed hand-coloured photo of Queenstown created for The Colourist in 2016. Photo courtesy Peter Alsop.

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The Colourist

 

The Colourist from Loading Docs on Vimeo.

Peter Alsop co-directed The Colourist with Auckland-based filmmaker Greg Wood. Loading Docs is funded by NZ On Air and made with the support of The New Zealand Film Commission.

Peter’s beautiful book on Whites Aviation, Hand-Coloured New Zealand, will be released in October (Potton & Burton, hard cover, 416 pages). A sampler of the book is viewable here. The book can be ordered now with an attractive pre-release discount: 20% off and free postage within New Zealand (Coupon code WHITES).

The data for the 2014 New Zealand Election Survey was recently released for the general public to make of it what they will, which in the modern world of home data analysis is like parachuting a gazelle into a pride of lions.

One thing I decided to explore is how representative the ideas of "Left" and "Right" are in the New Zealand of today. They are terms that get bandied around, and people and parties get pinned into place with, but do they actually matter?

One of the questions in the survey asks people to rate themselves on a spectrum of Leftmost (0) to Rightmost (10) with 5 being the centre of the spectrum. We can join that tidbit of information to information about what political party did the person declare voting for with their party vote, and so check the self-identified Left-Rightness by party preference.

For those not used to box plots the rectangle is where the middle fifty percent of voters for the party rate themselves. The black line in the centre of each rectangle is the median voter. The red-blue dashed line is the "centre" of the spectrum. The vertical thickness of the rectangle is the number of votes.

The smaller the number of voters (the thinner the rectangle) the more the results become sensitive to what one or two voters chose on the eleven-point scale. So, for this post, I am making the arbitrary decision to not bother talking about the parties with less than 0.5% of the vote in the survey responses (that is 14 people in the survey). Bye-bye for now to United Future, ACT, ALCP, and similar.

There are some not too surprising things on view here: not many people view themselves as extreme, people who vote Labour tend to see themselves on the left, people who vote National tend to see themselves on the right. New Zealand First and Māori Party voters see themselves as the generally most centrist. I do want to draw attention to the way that Labour voters tend to see themselves as closer to the middle than National voters.

We can build on this by comparing what people think of themselves with what people think of the party they voted for.

I dropped Internet/Mana for this graph, as I had separate ratings for Internet and Mana and that just made it complicated. The Green party, while having the same median as its voters, is given support by those that consider it to the left of their positions. Labour has an almost freakish match between its voters' self-perceptions and the perception of the party (I actually went and checked for mistakes due to that. Didn't find any). Māori party voters see themselves as slightly more centrist than the party. New Zealand First, while having the same median as its voters, draws support is given support by those that consider it to the right of their positions. Both National and Conservative voters tend to view the party as being to the right of the voters.

Rather than looking at it as bar graph summaries, we can look at the cloud of individual points of the self-rating on the x axis and the voters rating of the party they voted for on the y axis.

Putting aside the few isolated very odd results that may indicate people may have misunderstood the question, there are a number of observations about general patterns.

Conservative voters mirror National voters. Conservative and National voters tend to be centre to right, and see the parties they are voting for as more rightwing.

New Zealand First voters cluster at the centre and spread to the right, while the centrist NZF voters see the party as to the right, the right NZF voters see the party as to the left.

Māori Party voters and party form a central clump, with a tendency to rate the party near to themselves (most of the points are near the diagonal).

Labour voters are spread through the spectrum and concentrated in the centre left. Whatever Labour voters think of themselves tends to be around what they think of the party – if you are left and vote Labour then you describe Labour left, if you are right and vote Labour then you describe Labour as right. Green voters tend to centre to left, while rating the party left of where they are.

This does raise the (to me) interesting point that some people are voting a party they see as long way from themselves on a left-right spectrum. So how relevant are traditional left/right models in MMP New Zealand- clearly people understand them and can place themselves and parties- but to what extent does this actually matter in voting behaviour.

We can check this by rearranging the data a bit, and asking the question "What percentage of each parties voters voted for the party that they rated closest to them on the left/right spectrum?". The core idea here is that if you are skipping over a party that it is most in your "class interest" to vote for, then that suggests class interests are not your motivating factor.

Before revealing the results I'm going to preemptively say this is not an either/or- you might still be voting for a nearby party in left/right terms, just not the most nearby party or parties. But as you are not voting for the party that is, by your own opinion, the closest fit in left right terms so there is presumably other motivations at work.

I am bringing back ACT and United Future for this, as we have ratings for them, but still need to exclude Internet/Mana because of the whole ratings for both Internet and Mana confusing matters. So, the percentage of each party's voters that rated the party they voted for as closest to them (of the voters that rated all of the parties in the group, and answered the questions who they voted for, their self-rating, and the party best to deal with the most important issue in the country):

Party	% of voters closest	Sample size
National	74.26	571
ACT	66.67	3
Māori_Party	66.67	33
Labour	56.77	266
NZ_First	56.57	99
Green	56.11	180
Conservative	52.08	48
United_Future	0.00	4

There are some pretty big differences there (putting aside the handful of United Future zealots who voted from far along the spectrum). The concept of Left vs Right seems most important to National voters, then less important as you move left.

However, these results are strongly affected by how people space out the rating of parties. If you rate the Greens 3, Labour 4, and New Zealand First a 5, then to be closest to Labour you must rate yourself a 4 to be closest to the party. But if you rate National, the Conservatives, and ACT as 7 and New Zealand First as 5, any self-rating of 6 or better puts you closest to National (and ACT and the Conservatives). So these particular results, while interesting, shouldn't be read as too exact.

The party closeness can also be read in relation to the question that boils down to "what is the party you think is best suited to dealing with the most important issue facing New Zealand". We can consider if this was the party the person actually voted for (this is why I was including this question when making the previous graph).

Party	% voters think best	Sample size
National	88.44	571
Labour	61.28	266
Green	60.00	180
NZ_First	39.39	99
ACT	33.33	3
Conservative	22.92	48
Māori_Party	12.12	33
United_Future	0.00	4

The ability to deal with the most important issue seems to be broadly in line with party size (putting aside those with a handful of voters giving overemphasised weight to their opinions) and thus being able to have policies on stuff. But it is also broadly in line with electoral success (which is, after all, tied very much to party size).

If you look at both the left right spectrum and the best at dealing with issues in combination, if you explain people's behaviour with the left-right spectrum, then you also need to use best for issues, but If you use best for issues, that explains everything the left right spectrum does and more. So a minimalist explanation only needs to pay attention to issues.

Finally rather than comparing closeness and best party for the key issue as completely unrelated, we can work out for each party how many voters for the party were both closest and thought the party was best to deal with the key issue, how many were closest and thought it not best on issues, how many were not close and thought it best on issues, and how many were neither close to the party nor thought it best to deal with the key issue.

Of these final divisions the bestClose group who both see their chosen party as closest to them in left/right terms and feel that the party is best at dealing with the most important issue, I would imagine these people were very comfortable with their choice:

metric	Party_Vote	percent
bestClose	ACT	33.33
bestClose	Conservative	14.58
bestClose	Green	37.78
bestClose	Labour	36.09
bestClose	Māori_Party	6.06
bestClose	National	66.90
bestClose	NZ_First	26.26
bestClose	United_Future	0.00

The bestNotClose voters have reached across closer parties to vote for the party best able to deal with the most important issue, I'm thinking of these as issue voters:

metric	Party_Vote	percent
bestNotClose	ACT	0.00
bestNotClose	Conservative	8.33
bestNotClose	Green	22.22
bestNotClose	Labour	25.19
bestNotClose	Māori_Party	6.06
bestNotClose	National	21.54
bestNotClose	NZ_First	13.13
bestNotClose	United_Future	0.00

The closeNotBest voted for a party they see as close to them but this was not a party they thought best at dealing with a particular issue, I'm going to imagine these as being the voters of class interest.

metric	Party_Vote	percent
closeNotBest	ACT	33.33
closeNotBest	Conservative	37.50
closeNotBest	Green	18.33
closeNotBest	Labour	20.68
closeNotBest	Māori_Party	60.61
closeNotBest	National	7.36
closeNotBest	NZ_First	30.30
closeNotBest	United_Future	0.00

The notBestNotClose group are giving their support to a party not closest to them which they do not think is best at dealing with the most important issue, these are people whose voting reasons are not well represented by these questions.

metric	Party_Vote	percent
notBestNotClose	ACT	33.33
notBestNotClose	Conservative	39.58
notBestNotClose	Green	21.67
notBestNotClose	Labour	18.05
notBestNotClose	Māori_Party	27.27
notBestNotClose	National	4.20
notBestNotClose	NZ_First	30.30
notBestNotClose	United_Future	100.00

One possible reason is that these are representation voters- that people are voting to have the party in parliament even though the party does not specifically align to them or is the best to deal with issues. If that is the case, I think it is kind of heartening for democracy in a multiparty system.

I have moved the processing code (in R) into another document so that those that want to check the technical steps can do so.