Interesting Links for 24-01-2015

[andrewducker]

• We do not have a proportional voting system, something a lot of people find strangely hard to fathom
  (tags: politics voting )
• I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love.
  (tags: relationships internet funny )
• Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others
  (tags: efficiency intelligence effectiveness work teams )
• Poor boys fare

Comments

Wikipedia bans feminists from updating articles about Gamergate or feminism.

[drdoug]

The Grauniad is a little misleading here - these are, at the moment, proposed sanctions. But it doesn't look good.

[kalimac]

On the voting system: the writer says that essentially, there'll be 650 by-elections. As a way of curing the perception problem he writes of, that's how one could look at it, but there's one big difference, which is that voters at GEs are strongly influenced by the fact that choosing the government is on the agenda, which it is not at an actual by-election.

On the possibility of a Jewish PM: Article seems to be entirely based on asking people if they'd vote for one in the abstract. My snarky answer would be, "Depends who it is." (Ed Miliband, perhaps; Michael Howard, definitely not.) It also doesn't take into account the possibility of an equivalent of the Bradley Effect, a peculiar US phenomenon in which white voters tell pollsters they'll vote for a black candidate (a specific candidate in a current election), but then they don't. Polls are consistently skewed from voting results here in that way.

[harvey_rrit]

"...Wikipedia bans feminists from updating articles about Gamergate or feminism...."

MICMA: Miraculously I Conceal My Astonishment.

They are, after all, directly involved, which makes them wikiunreliable. I mean, my God, it'd be like correcting your own bio-- which is what I was stalked and banned for by one of the Admins.

[andrewducker]

Not every feminist is directly involved in Gamergate.

Unless by "involved" you mean "lives in the same society as, and thus has an opinion on"

[harvey_rrit]

I do, with the added proviso that they will have to live in a society affected by this; which is sufficient for the Wikianointed to ban them.

[quirkytizzy]

The Vanderbilt woman makes me so sad. What a world we live in, where a woman can wake up with every piece of physical evidence of having been assaulted, and yet feel so compelled to protect those who likely assaulted them. She didn't even CONSIDER that something bad might have happened.

Thinking of what it must have been like for her to watch that video, of all those people she'd been valiently SO SURE about...god, poor woman.

[soon_lee]

As a country we switched to a PR system in 1995? and it took a whole lot of public awareness & education campaigns to get people to understand how the new system works. Even now not everyone fully understands it.

FTPT is by far the simplest system to explain.

[andrewducker]

Although, not, apparently to anacronymise :->

I think it varies a lot. We use AMS in Scotland, and that seems to be pretty well understood.

And we use STV for local elections, which took a bit of explaining, but now seems to work very well.

[snarlish]

maybe soon-lee means...

First To Preen Triumphantly.

Fixed The Postal Tickboxes.

For Those Past Thirty.

Finally Taking Promises Truthfully.

Feeding The Proletariat Tears.

Fear-mongering Tactics Probably, Too.

[soon_lee]

First Past The Post.

Stoopid typo.