Thursday, September 01, 2005
A website that lets you see how each MP voted on conscience issues is available at http://votes.wotfun.com/ You can also compare a particular MP against others on various issues. You might be surprised to find that Peter Dunne voted against his party colleagues on many issues, and in fact looked a lot more like a Labour MP than the leader of a supposed family-friendly centrist party.
Many members of Parliament, according to inside sources, pay close attention to newspaper website polls canvassing public opinion on issues of the day, despite the fact that the respondents are a self-selected sample of those with internet access and a thirst for making their opinions known. One New Zealand daily conducts an online poll almost every day, while a national Sunday paper recently did a large reader polling exercise, partly online, on the influence of “morality” on voting intentions. The latest website off the blocks, www.politics.org.nz, has an additional twist: after voting on each statement according to a five-point “disagree/agree” scale, the participant is immediately shown the average of all votes cast so far and a histogram of the number of votes to date at each point on the scale. Voters are also free to change a vote on any question at any time. The theory behind allowing changes is that a voter who feels ill-informed on the issue and unsure about the way he or she voted will be likely to change their vote in the direction of the average, while a voter who feels well-informed will be more likely to stick with the way they voted the first time. Thus the technique supposedly gives more weight to the better-informed, or at least the more confident, voter.
Sometimes the newspaper reporting of the polls is most unhelpful. I had to phone the Sunday Star-Times press gallery office to get their latest figures straight. Three of the last four polls have straddled the National tax cut announcement. The post-announcement portions of the polls indicate that the public generally responded favourably to the tax cut policies. But has the election become a straight out bidding war? Well, yes. "Asked if the recent release of the party's tax policy caused them to vote National, 24 per cent said yes. However, it is possible some of these voters had already factored the tax cuts policy into account because National's total vote did not rise by this much." I despair that the public doesn't seem to be able to consider anything beyond the surface. The other major factor, which few have commented on, is that Winston Peters is looking less and less like kingmaker. John Armstrong has given us the best explanation of what's going on in that quarter.
The Law Commission wants the Government to act over "enormous inconsistency" in the granting of name suppression. The acting president of the commission, Dr Warren Young, said it had recommended changes to the Government which would mean everybody appearing in court was granted name suppression pre-trial.
Telephone users will finally own their numbers - and the price of making calls may drop as a result. The Commerce Commission yesterday ruled that phone companies must allow customers to keep their existing number when switching service providers. Observers say the ruling removes a key obstacle to competition, and provides incentives for big telcos and smaller providers alike to poach customers with better deals.
A Vancouver woman has gone to court to fight for a divorce after her husband's gay affair was not recognised by the judiciary as adultery. Shelley Pickering, 44, had been married nearly 17 years when she found out last year that her husband was having an affair with a man. Her spouse admitted to the fling in an affidavit, but a provincial Supreme Court judge refused to grant them an immediate divorce as Canada, despite allowing gay marriage, does not recognise homosexual relationships in adultery law. [A certain sector of society seems to want to have their cake and eat it.]
Something that those campaigning to end child poverty should consider. A new study led by Sutherland Institute Scholar and Head of the Department of Economics at Utah State University, Dr. Chris Fawson, shows that while income is an important factor for families, family structure is more important in the success of children.
Government success at persuading Afghan farmers to voluntarily refrain from poppy cultivation, farmers’ apprehension that the official ban on opium cultivation could be enforced by eradication, and relatively low farm-gate prices have led to a 21 percent decline in Afghan opium cultivation, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said today. But Afghanistan is still the largest supplier of opium to the world, accounting for 87 percent of the world supplies. In terms of opium cultivation, the country’s share in the global total dropped from 67 percent in 2004 to 63 percent in 2005.
New cell phones and ID chips help parents keep a virtual eye on their children anytime, anywhere. But is Big Mother good for society?
A new report on the "state of spyware" includes an in-depth review and analysis of the impact of spyware on home computer users. The results show that over 80% of all computers scanned are infected with spyware, averaging more than 27 pieces per machine. Alarmingly, spyware writers ahve begun to switch their focus from click-through revenue generated by pop-up ads to targeted attacks against bank accounts. One respondent said he discovered 2,500 pieces of spyware on his computer - it had effectively been completely taken over.
Did PowerPoint make the space shuttle crash? Could it doom another mission? Preposterous as this may sound, the ubiquitous Microsoft presentation software has twice been singled out for special criticism by task forces reviewing the space shuttle disaster. Ruth Marcus says the software may be as much of a mind-numbing menace to those who intend to remain earthbound as it is to astronauts. Edward Tufte, a specialist in the visual display of information, argues that the program encourages "faux-analytical" thinking that favors the slickly produced "sales pitch" over the sober exchange of information."The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America -- the PowerPointing of the planet, actually -- is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese."
Many members of Parliament, according to inside sources, pay close attention to newspaper website polls canvassing public opinion on issues of the day, despite the fact that the respondents are a self-selected sample of those with internet access and a thirst for making their opinions known. One New Zealand daily conducts an online poll almost every day, while a national Sunday paper recently did a large reader polling exercise, partly online, on the influence of “morality” on voting intentions. The latest website off the blocks, www.politics.org.nz, has an additional twist: after voting on each statement according to a five-point “disagree/agree” scale, the participant is immediately shown the average of all votes cast so far and a histogram of the number of votes to date at each point on the scale. Voters are also free to change a vote on any question at any time. The theory behind allowing changes is that a voter who feels ill-informed on the issue and unsure about the way he or she voted will be likely to change their vote in the direction of the average, while a voter who feels well-informed will be more likely to stick with the way they voted the first time. Thus the technique supposedly gives more weight to the better-informed, or at least the more confident, voter.
Sometimes the newspaper reporting of the polls is most unhelpful. I had to phone the Sunday Star-Times press gallery office to get their latest figures straight. Three of the last four polls have straddled the National tax cut announcement. The post-announcement portions of the polls indicate that the public generally responded favourably to the tax cut policies. But has the election become a straight out bidding war? Well, yes. "Asked if the recent release of the party's tax policy caused them to vote National, 24 per cent said yes. However, it is possible some of these voters had already factored the tax cuts policy into account because National's total vote did not rise by this much." I despair that the public doesn't seem to be able to consider anything beyond the surface. The other major factor, which few have commented on, is that Winston Peters is looking less and less like kingmaker. John Armstrong has given us the best explanation of what's going on in that quarter.
The Law Commission wants the Government to act over "enormous inconsistency" in the granting of name suppression. The acting president of the commission, Dr Warren Young, said it had recommended changes to the Government which would mean everybody appearing in court was granted name suppression pre-trial.
Telephone users will finally own their numbers - and the price of making calls may drop as a result. The Commerce Commission yesterday ruled that phone companies must allow customers to keep their existing number when switching service providers. Observers say the ruling removes a key obstacle to competition, and provides incentives for big telcos and smaller providers alike to poach customers with better deals.
A Vancouver woman has gone to court to fight for a divorce after her husband's gay affair was not recognised by the judiciary as adultery. Shelley Pickering, 44, had been married nearly 17 years when she found out last year that her husband was having an affair with a man. Her spouse admitted to the fling in an affidavit, but a provincial Supreme Court judge refused to grant them an immediate divorce as Canada, despite allowing gay marriage, does not recognise homosexual relationships in adultery law. [A certain sector of society seems to want to have their cake and eat it.]
Something that those campaigning to end child poverty should consider. A new study led by Sutherland Institute Scholar and Head of the Department of Economics at Utah State University, Dr. Chris Fawson, shows that while income is an important factor for families, family structure is more important in the success of children.
Government success at persuading Afghan farmers to voluntarily refrain from poppy cultivation, farmers’ apprehension that the official ban on opium cultivation could be enforced by eradication, and relatively low farm-gate prices have led to a 21 percent decline in Afghan opium cultivation, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said today. But Afghanistan is still the largest supplier of opium to the world, accounting for 87 percent of the world supplies. In terms of opium cultivation, the country’s share in the global total dropped from 67 percent in 2004 to 63 percent in 2005.
New cell phones and ID chips help parents keep a virtual eye on their children anytime, anywhere. But is Big Mother good for society?
A new report on the "state of spyware" includes an in-depth review and analysis of the impact of spyware on home computer users. The results show that over 80% of all computers scanned are infected with spyware, averaging more than 27 pieces per machine. Alarmingly, spyware writers ahve begun to switch their focus from click-through revenue generated by pop-up ads to targeted attacks against bank accounts. One respondent said he discovered 2,500 pieces of spyware on his computer - it had effectively been completely taken over.
Did PowerPoint make the space shuttle crash? Could it doom another mission? Preposterous as this may sound, the ubiquitous Microsoft presentation software has twice been singled out for special criticism by task forces reviewing the space shuttle disaster. Ruth Marcus says the software may be as much of a mind-numbing menace to those who intend to remain earthbound as it is to astronauts. Edward Tufte, a specialist in the visual display of information, argues that the program encourages "faux-analytical" thinking that favors the slickly produced "sales pitch" over the sober exchange of information."The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America -- the PowerPointing of the planet, actually -- is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese."
