Posts by Keith Ng
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OnPoint: The Whaledump Saga: Scooby-Doo Edition, in reply to tussock,
What? No! Nobody's been hacked here (except Slater, by Rawshark). Those pictures were *sent* by Rachinger to Slater, and by Slater (directly or indirectly) to the other blog.
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OnPoint: The Whaledump Saga: Scooby-Doo Edition, in reply to Mark Sibly,
TBF, *Ben* actually proved this from the get-go.
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OnPoint: The Whaledump Saga: Scooby-Doo Edition, in reply to Don Christie,
Well, the hacking of The Standard is pretty illegal. But beyond that it's a little hazy. Ben claims to have hacked my email, for example, and Slater didn't explicitly ask for it... so, I dunno. Ask a lawyer.
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Soz for the slow replies, everyone. Especially the thoughtful comments from Steve Black, and the good questions from David Hood.
I get kinda sucked into detailed answers on PAS, which takes up a lot of time and brainspace, so I don't do it as much as I should.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to David Hood,
Keith, could you elaborate on what you see as the seasonal effects on name frequency?
So there are some seasonal patterns to house sales in general. What drives those seasonal changes, and might it affect the ethnic distribution of house sales?
For example, do migrants from a particular part of the world come at a particular time of year? Such as coinciding with school years here or school year in country of origin? Or maybe with specific holiday periods?
Is there a sudden rush of house-buying before the uni term starts, by parents of international students?
Or maybe there's a house-hunting season when the weather is nicer or the kids are at school where leisure-buyers (without time constraint) dominate and overwhelm urgent-buyers (such as immigrants).
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to Steve Curtis,
It would be good to hear more people who work in everyday statistics
Steve. I work most days in statistics. I sometimes even work in Statistics, as in Statistics New Zealand, as a contractor on data visualisations.
I can assure you that seasonal variations is not a thing I made up.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to Russell Brown,
What did people like former Helen Clark advisor Keith Ng and economist Shamubeel Eaqub say when Maori rights were breached during the Tuhoe raids by the police in 2007 or when Labour rolled out their shameful foreshore and seabed act in 2004?
I may have written some super biting satire about it in Salient. Maybe.
But pretty sure I covered the hikoi.
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The data sets are robust, and so the imputation of ethnicity is robust.
The data is not robust. It's for one company over a period of three months. It doesn't take variations between companies or seasonal effects into account.
in the absence of other data, it might be easily acceptable to say that there are no conclusions that can be drawn, but there is other evidence.
What is the other evidence?
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
But this assumes we should want the media "to persuade" their audience about news stories.
I made this point quite explicit in the post - this is what journalists already do. I think the format of news hides that, but it's always there. When a politician does something which a journalist thinks is bad, they don't go find a supporter to get a "yeah, it's not that bad" quote from; they find an opponent to get a "THEY MUST RESIGN!" quote. They know exactly what that person is going to say, and they go to that person because of that. They are simply using that subject's voice in place of their own, because that's what the format demands.
And as I said - if they broke Dirty Politics and Key lost, of course they'd claim credit for having brought down a government.
As I wrote in the post, I'm not saying that they *should* persuade, I'm saying they do, but they failed.
And I'd like a bit more guidance of what it'll become instead before I sign up to that vision ... because how do I know that the campaigning, crusading, judgmental institution you're wanting to unleash is only going to do things that I like?
Of course not! Of course they're going to be occasionally dicks about it. But we're not talking about handing everything over to the fourth estate. I'm just saying the fourth estate is entirely powerless at the moment - and we should be really bloody worried about that. Regardless of whether I have a solution or not, I'm just asking people to recognise that fact that the fourth estate is getting its ass handed to them.
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Why isn't it the voters or the people of New Zealand that failed?
I don't see it as an issue of agency or responsibility in a philosophical sense. Even if it's voters who refused to be persuaded, I think the media still ought to worry that they were powerless to persuade; and if they don't have that power, then they have no leverage to hold those in power accountable - and we ought to worry about that.
Maybe a rephrasing: Media isn't (necessarily) responsible for the failure, but they are responsible for making it work again, because it's their raison d'etre.
maybe it's people like us and what we see as being "correct" who are ... wrong?
But nobody is saying that dirty politics is anything but dirty. It's nearly universally decried as unethical behaviour - the only response has been "that's the way politics is". That's a fundamentally toxic and corrosive idea which we ought to fight - even if the election proved it's a popularly held opinion.
And yeah, I accept that voters deciding Key should remain in power despite dirty politics is a totes legit outcome. But does that mean that Key should not have to answer any questions about Ede? That Collins should (almost) stay a minister? That Katherine Rich should stay on the HPA?
And that the media should be okay with all these things, because Key is Very Popular?