Posts by David Hood
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to linger,
In the NZ case, historically, the answer would have to be “not much”, because cyclists and pedestrians weren’t supposed to be sharing paths.
For pedestrians, I think hospital stats show it a pretty major thing at intersections or road crossing- pedestrian risk is very low on the footpath then skyrockets to massive when they have to leave them (basically once a block) and share space with anyone else.
Shared cycle/pedestrian pathways may increase cyclist-pedestrian collisions, but overall are a positive development because they help isolate cyclists – and pedestrians – from motorists
It is not an even impact- older pedestrians (and there is a very big difference in the age profiles between cyclists and pedestrians) are fragile with respect to being struck by cycles in a way that younger people are less so.
I am in the early stages of sounding out getting some data in this area.
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Does the decrease in the number of cyclists also decrease the incidence of pedestrian vs cyclist injuries - These wouldn't get tracked if you were basing measures of injury on NZTA figures via police reports, as I understand it the NZTA figures are essentially "car vs. ..." (for example if you look at hospitalisations I understand the leading injury for cyclists is themselves- falling over when no other party is involved).
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Speculatively, if there was contact between the Trump campaign and people they shouldn't be talking to, and the people they shouldn't have been talking to see there being more value in creating chaos for the administration than supporting it, then they can leak contact information to the degree that suits them.
I am particularly musing about this in relation to today's Roger Stone says he was in contact with the DNC hackers but it was innocuous.
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For the Twitterbots, I would hypothesise that if your primary intent is to cause chaos in the U.S. then you have no particular loyalty to any faction in the US and will boost or attack on the basis of what seems to cause the most friction.
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Hard News: Drugs, testing and workplaces, in reply to Tinakori,
The rate of positive tests for beneficiaries is relevant only to the beneficiary population. What about the positives for non-beneficiary applicants and also those beneficiaries and non beneficiaries who avoid jobs where they know they will be tested?
This imaginary pool of independently wealthy (because they are not on benefits) drug taking people applying for pretty menial jobs- I could see how if hordes of them existed they could distort the figures. Not to mention the magical ability of these hypothetical drug taking beneficiaries to be able to avoid applying for jobs and stay on a benefit.
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According to the NYT, where Uber said their self-driving car was under control of a human when it ran a red light in San Fransisco, it was actually self-driving at the time.
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Oh, so Uber's self driving car project seemed to be built on plans stolen from Google. That's going to end well.
https://medium.com/waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against-otto-and-uber-86f4f98902a1#.cet824g44
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Sort of related, I have been spending this evening playing with this playlist generator toy
http://static.echonest.com/BoilTheFrog/index.html?src=miley%20cyrus&dest=miles%20davis
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Incidentally, about 8% (depending on how you round it) of the movement in countries from 2015 to 2016 was caused by the inclusion of a new source.
Some R code:
https://github.com/thoughtfulbloke/transparency/blob/master/transparency.R -
Legal Beagle: New Zealand rockets up the…, in reply to Lynn Yum,
I’m not sure if it is more biased towards business POV.
for generating the relative placing of countries between sources, they are imputing against the sources with more that 50% country coverage. So the most important sources, in order, are:
Global Insight Country Risk Ratings (covers all countries) 176 coverage
World Economic Forum EOS 141 coverage
PRS International Country Risk Guide 140 c0verage
Economist Intelligence Unit Country Ratings 129 coverage
Bertelsmann Foundation Transformation Index 129 coverage
World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 110 coverage