Posts by David Hood
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Hard News: No Red Wedding, in reply to Keir Leslie,
One is whether is whether acupuncture is better than a placebo; the other is whether acupuncture causes pain relief as effectively as a placebo
Whenever I see discussions of acupuncture and placebos, I flash back to a segment the show Brainic did, where (not constrained by the ethical guidelines of research) they set someone with no knowledge of acupuncture up treating people. The only place it seems to be online is here
http://www.tviscool.com/play.php?vid=111
I am adding that I actually found this quite uncomfortable to watch. I have to say the idea of having someone off the street stick needles into me feels oddly worse than a "trained acupuncturist" (though it seems to have much the same effect). -
It sounds like Dango Bates was repeating a fairly common urban legend, maths explained here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16870579 -
Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Farmer Green,
I wonder why modern Western cultures opted to use temperature (?) rather than day length.
Julius Caesar
http://mentalfloss.com/article/29611/why-does-new-year-start-january-1 -
Labour haven't really had "momentum" in the polls. The story of the past 6 weeks has been National down, Greens and NZ First up (Labour up initially along with the Greens in the GCSB debate period, then in a holding pattern while the leadership race was on). I think the best Roy Morgan link is the one that has party support of all the polling periods
http://www.roymorgan.com/morganpoll/new-zealand/voting-intention-summary -
Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to linger,
Not only is the reliability of the "learning style" assignment in doubt, I have seen some pretty convincing evidence that "What person A wants to spend their time doing" (learning style) correlates very poorly with "How to actually improve the understanding of the topic" (learning outcome).
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to BenWilson,
It also sounds more professional, in isolation - the methodical planning etc. But there's nothing professional about someone melting down when their plans come unstuck.
Wait, are you suggesting there are people who think their careful planning will survive contact with the real world unscathed?
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There was an article in The Conversation last year that had a number of relevant links.
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Forbes on the lack of anonymity in Bitcoin (the clustering analysis techniques used are actually pretty straightforward).
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I've read a few arguments along this line, mostly things that can found via wikipedia's sortition page (related to Demarchy).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
I think there is a good case that such systems can help avoid flavoring entrenched interests through the operation of random chance. There are a few game theory kind of details about encouraging doing good for the country as the jurors see it, but that is finer detail rather than broad idea. -
Hard News: Market Wisdom, in reply to Russell Brown,
But a man taking pictures of women's underwear is not generally a good look
Just tell people "It's for putting on the internet".