Posts by giovanni tiso
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Then when I was 20 I picked it up and couldn't put it down. Read it in one night and my god. What a book!
I you got that right. Heller got so tired of asking how come he never wrote anything that good again, that once he replied that neither has anybody else.
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Hagel announced last year that he isn't standing for re-election
That gives him another year, no? And that's going to be a pretty big year as far as the GOP infighting is concerned. But yes, you're right, insofar as he's marginalised himself by not endorsing McCain and won't be leading any of the factions.
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I tried Tristram Shandy once, managed a page or three.
You guys are killing me here, you really are.
If anybody needs me, I'll be in the bathroom, crying.
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And it's a bloody shame someone like Hagel isn't going to be around to start the fight to take back the GOP.
Do you know something we don't? Have you spoken to his doctor?
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and i'll admit freely that tolkien was desperately in need of an editor. that whole epic should have been *one* 500pager.
Umberto Eco had a nice piece about the often unacknowledged role of editors in the creation of literature's great classics. It was an editor for instance who got Eliot to change the opening lines of The Waste Land, which in the first draft read
April is the cruellest month, and
Don't even get me started on May:
Sheesh, what a jerk! -
Who knows?<quote>
Well, I suppose, but a poll shouldn't be a shot in the complete dark, no? Unless they come out and say it, which they won't.
<quote>I still think we're arguing at cross purposes. I'm not advocating getting rid of the information about undecideds - that's crucial data about the quality. But the extrapolation is not something to throw away either, and it seems to me you are advocating that.
You bet I am. And I really don't see the problem in doing it, since it's done in other countries and the prospective voters there are able to compute the fact that the opinion poll results don't add up to 100 per cent without suffering from brain explosions. Undecideds are an important part of the snapshot of the electorate you're trying to provide, assimilating them to the other parties is lazy and amplifies the MoE. So why do it? I get that they want to tell us how many MPs party X is going to get, and who's best placed to form the next government, but they could still do it while leaving the baseline percentages as they are for all to see. Thusly
Today we found Labour om 42, National on 39, the Greens on 9, small parties bla bla bla and 6 per cent undecided voters. If the undecideds were to split along with the rest of the electorate, the seats in government would be...
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Gio, I would indeed say that. I'd also mention the large error ratio. But in absence of information, and wanting a prediction, what other result would you pick?
Well, you'd be wrong then on election day, wouldn't you? And it's quality of information we're talking about. If a poll has a 20% proportion of undecideds, and doesn't acknowledge the fact but simply factors them out of the calculation, that poll is unreliable far beyond its MoE.
And, as Stephen notes, undecideds have nothing whatsoever to do with the margin of error. The margin of error is what accounts for the fact that you didn't ask every single New Zealander, but a sample of New Zealanders. Undecided voters are people who might vote but haven't made up their minds yet - knowing how many of them are there and what kind of profile they might fit is very interesting information, not only for people in the business of trying to persuade them to vote for them, but also for the public.
David Sedaris had a nice bit recently about undecideds in the current American election:
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
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gio I'm not sure if we're talking at cross purposes. When you take a poll with the intention of trying to make a prediction you have to extrapolate the missing information.
I don't see why. In the US - where the reporting on such things is a lot more sophisticated, it has to be said - the public is fed polls that specify the number of undecideds. There's even talk about which pollsters "lean" on undecideds more heavily to make them fall one way or the other. But an undecided voter is an undecided voter. Can New Zealanders not be trusted with that kind of information?
Suppose that you had 1000 respondents 997 of whom said that they are undecided (which is very different from a refusal to answer the poll question), 2 of whom said that they're voting Labour and one of whom said that she's voting National. Would you publish a poll saying that Labour is on 66% and National on 33%?
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Some of his preoccupations and stylistic tics lose their gloss in other novels, but White Noise alone is enough to justify his reputation IMO.
I'd be happy to have a temperature of 37.5C for as long as I live in exhange for being the guy who wrote White Noise.
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And I've never been able to finish "The Sillmarillion"...
You and he both.