Posts filed under Politics (193)

Attention conservation notice:  if you’re not from NZ or Germany you probably don’t understand the electoral system, and if you’re not from NZ you don’t care.

Assessing the chances of the new Internet Mana party from polls will be even harder than usual. The Internet half of the chimera will get a List seat if the party gets exactly one electorate and enough votes for two seats (about 1.7 1.2%), or if they get two electorates (eg Hone Harawira and Annette Sykes)  and enough votes for three seats (about 2.5 2%), or if they get no electorates and at least 5% of the vote. [Update: a correspondent points out that it’s more complicated. The orange man provides a nice calculator. Numbers in the rest of the post are updated]

With a poll of 1000 people, 1.2% is 12 people and 2% is 20 people.  Even if there were no other complications, the sampling uncertainty is pretty large: if the true support proportion is 0.02, a 95% prediction interval for the poll result goes from 0.9% to 2.9%, and if the true support proportion is 0.012, the interval goes from 0.6% to 1.8%.

Any single poll is almost entirely useless — for example, if the party polls 1.5% it could have enough votes for one, two, or three total seats, and national polling data won’t tell us anything useful about the relevant electorates. Aggregating polls will help reduce the sampling uncertainty, but there’s not much to aggregate for the Internet Party and it’s not clear how the amalgamation will affect Mana’s vote, so we are limited to polls starting now.

Worse, we don’t have any data on how the polls are biased (compared to the election) for this party. The Internet half will presumably have larger support among people without landline phones,  even after age, ethnicity, and location are taken into account. Historically, the cell-phone problem doesn’t seem to have caused a lot of bias in NZ opinion polls (in contrast to the US), but this may well be an extreme case. The party may also have more support from younger and less well off people, who are less likely to vote on average, making it harder to translate poll responses into election predictions.

I usually don’t bother with bogus polls on news stories, but this one (via @danyl) is especially egregious. It’s not just the way the question is framed, or the glaring lack of a “How the fsck would I know?” option. There are some questions that are just not a matter of opinion. After a bit of informed public debate, and collected in a meaningful way, the national opinion on “This is the impact on farming: is it worth it?” would be relevant. But not this.

While we’re on this story, the map illustrating it is also notable. The map shows ‘Predicted median DIN’. Nowhere in the story is there any mention of DIN, let alone a definition. I suppose they figured it was a well-known abbreviation, and it’s true that if you ask Google, it immediately tells you. DIN is short for Deutsches Institut für Normung.

PS: yes, I know, Dissolved Inorganic Nitrogen

There seems to be a view that the Roy Morgan political opinion poll is more variable than the others, even to the extent that newspapers are willing to say so, eg, Stuff on May 7

The National Party has taken a big hit in the latest Roy Morgan poll, shedding 6 points to 42.5 per cent in the volatile survey.

I was asked about this on Twitter this morning, so I went to get Peter Green’s data and aggregation model to see what it showed. In fact, there’s not much difference between the major polling companies in the variability of their estimates. Here, for example, are poll-to-poll changes in the support for National in successive polls for four companies

And here are their departures from the aggregated smooth trend

There really is not much to see here. So why do people feel that Roy Morgan comes out with strange results more often? Probably because Roy Morgan comes out with results more often.

For example, the proportion of poll-to-poll changes over 3 percentage points is 0.22 for One News/Colmar Brunton, 0.18 for Roy Morgan, and 0.23 for 3 News/Reid Research, all about the same, but the number of changes over 3 percentage points in this time frame is 5 for One News/Colmar Brunton, 14 for Roy Morgan, and 5 for 3 News/Reid Research.

There are more strange results from Roy Morgan than for the others, but it’s mostly for the same reason that there are more burglaries in Auckland than in the other New Zealand cities.

Following up on the “net tax” tangle, Keith Ng has a step by step explanation of how income tax and income distribution has changed over recent years in NZ.

You can also play with the visualisation yourself. Or, if you want to see the arguments about it, they’ll be on his Public Address post.

Attention conservation notice: I have to write this post because I’ve spent too much time on it otherwise. You don’t have to read it.

There was an episode of “Yes, Prime Minister” where the term “Human Resource Rich Countries” was being posed as a replacement for “Less Developed Countries”, meaning “poor”. “Resources” is a word that can mean lots of different things, which is why I spent more time than was strictly sensible investigating the following graph

The graph appeared in my Twitter feed last Monday. It’s originally from a campaign to give Australia a school funding model a bit more like NZ’s decile system, as recommended by a national review panel, so it is disturbing to see New Zealand almost at the bottom of the world.

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From One News and  a Colmar Brunton poll about Judith Collins and the Oravida affair

Which of these statements best describes how the issues will influence your vote in the upcoming election?

23% These issues will be a factor in your decision about who to vote for 
75% These issues will not have much influence on your vote 
1% Don’t know/won’t vote

Graeme Edgeler pointed out on Twitter that it matters what starting position people are being influenced from.  That information wasn’t in the Colmar Brunton summary, because reporting it would also involve reporting the split of party affiliations in the sample, and the poll wasn’t designed for that split to be a reliable estimate.

I’m not going to report the split, either, but you can get it from the detailed poll report.  I do think it’s reasonable to note that among people who identified as Labour/Green voters, about 1/3 said it would influence their vote, and among those who identified as National voters, less than 10% said it would influence their vote. The difference is more than twice the margin of error estimated from those proportions and numbers. Looked at the other way, three-quarters of respondents said the issue would not make much difference to their vote, and three-quarters of the rest were Labour or Green voters.

It’s not impossible for Labour or Green supporters to have their votes influenced by the Oravida affair. You could imagine someone with a long-term philosophical or emotional attachment to Labour, who had been thinking of voting National at this election, but who decided against it because of the scandal. But if there are enough people like that to show up in a poll, the left-wing parties are in real trouble. It’s more likely that most respondents said whatever they thought would make their side look good.

Two tweets in my time line this morning linked to this report about this research paper, saying “americans have stopped searching on forbidden words“

That’s a wild exaggeration, but what the research found was interesting. They looked at Google Trends search data for words and phrases that might be privacy-related in various ways: for example, searches that might be of interest to the US government security apparat or searchers that might be embarrassing if a friend knew about them.

In the US (but not in other countries) there was a small but definite change in searches at around the time of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. Search volume in general kept increasing, but searches on words that might be of interest to the government decreased slightly

The data suggest that some people in the US became concerned that the NSA might care about them, and given that there presumably aren’t enough terrorists in the US to explain the difference, that knowing about the NSA surveillance is having an effect on political behaviour of (a subset of) ordinary Americans.

There is a complication, though. A similar fall was seen in the other categories of privacy-sensitive data, so either the real answer is something different, or people are worried about the NSA seeing their searches for porn.

From Cathy O’Neill, at mathbabe.org

By contrast, let’s think about how most big data models work. They take historical information about successes and failures and automate them – rather than challenging their past definition of success, and making it deliberately fair, they are if anything codifying their discriminatory practices in code.

That is, data mining approaches to making decisions are blind to the prejudices attached to characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, age, so they will readily look at historical data, note that women (gays, immigrants, Maori, older people) haven’t been successful in positions like this in the past, and fail to wonder why.

There’s a new report “Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values” from the Office of the President (of the USA).  Here’s part of the conclusion (there are detailed recommendations as well)

Big data tools offer astonishing and powerful opportunities to unlock previously inaccessible insights from new and existing data sets. Big data can fuel developments and discoveries in health care and education, in agriculture and energy use, and in how businesses organize their supply chains and monitor their equipment. Big data holds the potential to streamline the provision of public services, increase the efficient use of taxpayer dollars at every level of government, and substantially strengthen national security. The promise of big data requires government data be viewed as a national resource and be responsibly made available to those who can derive social value from it. It also presents the opportunity to shape the next generation of computational tools and technologies that will in turn drive further innovation.

Big data also introduces many quandaries. By their very nature, many of the sensor technologies deployed on our phones and in our homes, offices, and on lampposts and rooftops across our cities are collecting more and more information. Continuing advances in analytics provide incentives to collect as much data as possible not only for today’s uses but also for potential later uses. Technologically speaking, this is driving data collection to become functionally ubiquitous and permanent, allowing the digital traces we leave behind to be collected, analyzed, and assembled to reveal a surprising number of things about ourselves and our lives. These developments challenge longstanding notions of privacy and raise questions about the “notice and consent” framework, by which a user gives initial permission for their data to be collected. But these trends need not prevent creating ways for people to participate in the treatment and management of their information.

You can also read comments on the report by danah boyd, and the conference report and videos from her conference’The Social, Cultural & Ethical Dimensions of “Big Data”‘ are now online.

Labour want to prevent animal testing of legal highs. That’s a reasonable position. They are quoted by the Herald as saying “there is no ethical basis for testing legal highs on animals”. That’s a completely unreasonable position: testing on animals prevents harm to humans, and the fact you don’t agree with something doesn’t mean it lacks an ethical basis.

More important is their proposed legislation on this issue, with the key clause

Notwithstanding anything in the Psychoactive Substances Act 2013, no animal shall be used in research or testing for the purpose of gaining approval for any psychoactive substance as defined in section 9 of the Psychoactive Substances Act 2013.”

Assuming that the testing is done overseas, which seems to be National’s expectation, this legislation wouldn’t prevent animal use in testing.  The time when a drug dealer would want to use animals in testing is for initial toxicity: does the new drug cause liver or kidney damage, or have obvious long-term neurological effects that might reduce your customer base unduly.  The animal data wouldn’t be sufficient on their own, because there’s some variation between species, especially in side-effects mediated by the immune system (don’t Google “Stevens-Johnson syndrome” while you’re eating). But animal data would be relevant, and many plausible candidates for therapeutic medications fail early in development because of this sort of toxicity.

Whether animals were used for toxicity testing or not, it would still be necessary to test in humans to find the appropriate dose and the psychoactive effects in people. Depending on the regulations, it might well also be necessary to test moderate overdoses in humans — especially as it appears most of the adverse effects of the synthetic cannabis products are in people taking quite high doses.  That’s the sort of data that might be required in an application for approval of a psychoactive substance.

Labour’s proposal would mean that the animal test data could not be used for gaining approval, and would also mean that the regulations could not require animal data.  But I can’t see much reason it would discourage someone from using animals in initial toxicity testing, which is the only place animal testing would really be relevant.