Posts by David Hood
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Kumara Republic,
From what I know, nothing has topped the Rajneesh cult’s poisoning attempt during Oregon county elections. And it didn’t even involve Republicans or Democrats.
I vaguely remember reading an article in 2008 or 2010 on voter intimidation in early America (esentially when it was an East Coast country. To paraphrase my hazy memories of the article and an early politician "If a man isn't prepared to dodge a bit of musket fire to cast his vote, it is not worth having"
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to BenWilson,
I bet T is very common, Z very uncommon.
Based on my sample size of one year (and that is all the full fields I'm willing to invest time in looking up on this) I conclude Z is exactly as common as T, making Z horses a particular bad bet.
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to BenWilson,
What if there's three in there with a T first?
Ahah. I just checked and there is (or at least was) only one horse starting with T. Anyway, disaggregating it to the second letter would lose the statistical significance and the signal would get lost in the noise :)
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Who won the Melbourne Cup?
An aggregate analysis of results suggests it was most likely to be a horse with a name starting with T [edit, I should have captioned that graph as Melbourne Cup winners by initial]
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Russell Brown,
And lots of lovely liberals are posting their voting pics at TPM.
In theory, they should be a bit careful about what the state rules are about cameras at polling places.
I mention this because prominent camera use was one of the tactics the Texas Tea Party based "True the Vote" was training in volunteers in which were illegal in many places. -
A good who's who article about the poll stats people.
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I see fivethirtyeight are now at 92.5% chance of an Obama victory with a "most likely" result of 315.3 Electoral College votes.
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Capture: BOTY Potty., in reply to Nora Leggs,
are they all as lovely?
There are a lot that are very nice, but not all.
for those that have been following my scanning, I am looking at using exiftool and some scripting to bulk add information to the picture metadata, so it is part of the picture. -
Hard News: The Watching World, in reply to Sacha,
Actually that’s wrong – think it’s the one currently in govt at state level. Sorry.
In most states the Secretary of State is the chief election official. In a large number of States this is an elected position, in some it is appointment by the Governor, and in a few it is appointed by voting within the state legislature.
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Hard News: The Watching World, in reply to Paul Williams,
FWIW, sometime ago I listened to a lecture given by Carne Ross in which he suggested our system of representative democracy was illegitimate and could be replaced with tech-enabled direct participation.
I think most of the technical issues are solvable, the main issues to me are "the tyranny of the majority" issues (though it is argued how much a problem this would be under a direct democracy system).
I have seen some reasonable compelling arguments that one can get a pretty "good" government (one interested in the good of the entire country) through a representative democracy that is a mix of elected politicians (for continuity of knowledge purposes) and the ancient greek drawing citizens by lot to be part of the government (thus free of beholden influences).
In the modern world, the recent developments by Iceland with it's constitution and Finland with it's law making are, I think, really interesting. But Finland does regard broadband access as a human right in it's modern society, so this flows from the assumption all citizens can contribute.
