Badger!!!!!! Aaaaaargh this feels like a lifetime ago... university would not have been the same without the never-ending badger badger badger mushroom mushrooms!
- Kris-Stella
it is a work-in-progress presentation, so quite preliminary. i am trying to figure out whether political knowledge (or the lack of it) impacts election outcomes in newly democratised countries. i use survey data from eastern europe to run some simulations of elections outcomes if people on the whole had more factual information about politics. results tbc, because my methods need quite a bit of polishing.
- Kris-Stella
from email
Grandmother of World's 23rd Best Economist Posthumously Offended by Sonia Sotomayor's Spending Habits; Will Obama Withdraw Nomination? - http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009...
In case you don't already do this: in Firefox, you can "left-click" and choose "add keyword to search". this gives your address bar the ability to search any search engine directly without going to the main page. for example, i can type in "wiki monkey" to go straight to the wikipedia search results for monkey or "yt monkey" to go straight to the youtube search results for monkey. In Safari, Safaristand should give you the same ability.
- Kris-Stella
Well, I can't guarantee significance but I do think that if the dataset is everyone who ever lived then the standard errors should be very, very small :)
- Kris-Stella
Another possibility is that the significance of all human life is small, and the standard error huge, - but that's probably not valid statistics. The significance of your birthday (and your tweet) on the other hand is valid in every possible way. Philosopher in spe.......
- Nils Reinton
I can't help but imagine what this would have looked like on "West Wing". Think CJ's face as she hears this on TV and turns to look around the room to find the culprit.
- Kris-Stella
daffodils! we still have remnants of snow on the ground, nothing green anywhere!
- Kris-Stella
welcome to the east coast! on long island things didn't turn green until april. but to make up for that, autumn/fall tends to be very beautiful.
- laura
Perfect illustration of how little winter the UK gets (and why I'm so happy with the Boston winter): it snows in Britain, and the London Times liveblogs it!
- Kris-Stella
I mean humanity - it happens to be the Israeli government in this instance, but Hamas are not exactly an image of sanity either. See for example the piece I shared yesterday, 'should Israel talk to Hamas?'
- Kris-Stella
I read it, it suggested that the Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza should have been enough to stop Hamas' rocket fire. It didn't even address the desperate (some would say rocket causing) situation created by the Israeli blockade of Gaza
- Christopher Harris
Do you mean that you believe the hypothetical - Israel lays down weapons, retreats from Gaza and the West Bank, opens borders, and therefore Hamas et al recognize its right to exist and stop attacks - is true? I find it difficult to believe.
- Kris-Stella
If Obama sat down with all sides and carved out a fair two-state solution (including half of Jerusalem for Palestine and massive financial and logistic aid from Israel and the US towards rebuilding Palestinian infrastructure) then yes, I think a lasting peace would have been possible. This is before the attack on Gaza, so maybe we'll never know. What do you think this attack can accomplish?
- Christopher Harris
I have not said I think it can accomplish anything. In fact, you'll find I refer to it as insanity just above. I don't have a preferred side in this conflict, and usually I refrain from commenting at all - should have known better than to share even what I thought were pretty uncontroversial links/comments.
- Kris-Stella