Posts tagged politics

• Comment on the Treaty Principles Bill

  I submitted this comment today at 1 am to Parliament.
  15 Dec, '24

• Impartial

  “Who gets to have an opinion on the hīkoi and who must remain ‘impartial’?” I enjoyed reading Madelaine Chapman’s column…
  24 Nov, '24

• Thinking of my diet and climate

  I like food. I mean well beyond eating to survive: I do enjoy flavours. Thai is my favourite cuisine but…
  25 Aug, '24

• Are PhDs a pyramid scheme?

  If you are a professor in academia you are supposed to form/train new PhDs. In the past, those new PhDs…
  6 Jun, '24

• Lecture on enshitification

  Cory Doctorow’s My McLuhan lecture on enshittification. How we got to the current dystopia and how we can fix it.…
  30 Jan, '24

• Calculating parliament seats allocation and quotients

  I was having a conversation about dropping the minimum threshold (currently 5% of the vote) for political parties to get…
  3 Oct, '17

• Where are New Zealand’s bellwether electorates?

  I was reading a piece by Graeme Edgeler who, near the end, asked “Where are New Zealand’s bellwether electorates?”. I…
  13 Sep, '17

• Mucking around with maps, schools and ethnicity in NZ

  I’ve been having a conversation for a while with Harkanwal Singh and Aaron Schiff on maps, schools, census, making NZ…
  8 Dec, '14

• Back of the envelope look at school decile changes

  Currently there is some discussion in New Zealand about the effect of the reclassification of schools in socioeconomic deciles. An…
  27 Nov, '14

• A couple of thoughts on biotech and food security

  “What has {insert biotech here} done for food security?” This question starts at the wrong end of the problem, because…
  27 Feb, '14

• Should I reject a manuscript because the analyses weren’t done using open source software?

  “Should I reject a manuscript because the analyses weren’t done using open software?” I overheard a couple of young researchers…
  15 Dec, '13

• Protectionism under another name

  This morning Radio New Zealand covered a story (audio) where Tomatoes New Zealand (TNZ, the growers association) was asking the…
  1 May, '13

• A word of caution: the sample may have an effect

  This week I’ve tried to i-stay mostly in the descriptive statistics realm and ii-surround any simple(istic) models with caveats and…
  27 Sep, '12

• Some regressions on school data

  Eric and I have been exchanging emails about potential analyses for the school data and he published a first draft…
  26 Sep, '12

• Updating and expanding New Zealand school data

  In two previous posts I put together a data set and presented some exploratory data analysis on school achievement for…
  25 Sep, '12

• New Zealand school performance: beyond the headlines

  I like the idea of having data on school performance, not to directly rank schools—hard, to say the least, at…
  24 Sep, '12

• New Zealand School data

  Some people have the naive idea that the national standards data and the decile data will not be put together.…
  24 Sep, '12