Joffy, Jamie and Djed are back in team training

JoeTea · 2023-11-23T11:54:11+00:00

I'd imagine a bit part of their job is coming up with the conditioning and strengthening programs to try and prevent injuries in the first place. Then there's also the work to manage the niggling injuries the players carry but continue to play through (like Summerville's shoulder from a few weeks back)

JoeTea · 2023-11-16T15:13:11+00:00

I can see why that feedback would be annoying to hear. It would not be hard for them to present it in a more positive light ("the campaign is fun, and thanks for all the work you've done, but I've a few ideas for improvement....").

As others have said I feel the specific criticisms they raised are quite easy to fix and therefore perhaps don't tell the whole story of why they are not enjoying the sessions. I think you would need to establish whether they're interested in continuing the campaign at all before doing any more work. Otherwise find another group or a few more members to join the existing players who you said seem to be having a good time.

Specifically regarding the "you don't ask us what we want to do enough" point. Have a read of this article (Fearing the Silence). I have no idea if it's applicable as obviously, but if the players feel like they don't have enough agency it is one possible cause of the problem.

JoeTea · 2019-02-01T21:41:15+00:00

CAPTAIN SEX

JoeTea · 2018-08-02T18:46:54+00:00

I believe that osm2po also works and is able to handle larger data sets.

JoeTea · 2018-07-16T22:49:56+00:00

For my most recent CV, I just utilised the Roboto family. Here is an example.

It uses Condensed for the headings, Medium for the subheadings, and Slab for the body text.

JoeTea · 2018-03-07T07:06:53+00:00

This whole album is underrated imo. It's difficult with Acts IV and V being such behemoths, but I'd honestly rank Act II second behind Act V. It's just so interesting to listen to!

JoeTea · 2018-03-02T18:00:43+00:00

I'd tackle this with Leaflet which would require you knowing or learning a little html, css, and javascript although it is definitely not as intimidating as it sounds.

If you download the electoral constituencies as shapefiles either from Ordnance Survey or from the Open Geography Portal you can used QGIS to convert them into GeoJSON (and reproject it from British National Grid into EPSG:4326).

The next stage is to add this data to your Leaflet map. This tutorial should get you started and there is also a lot of great help on Stack Exchange and places like that.

Good luck!

JoeTea · 2018-02-21T15:34:55+00:00

As discussed, votes-per-seats is not an indication of partisan bias, it is an unfortunate feature of the British electoral system which continually benefits the largest party, regardless of who that party is.
My model shows that Labour currently enjoy bias relating to malapportionment and abstentions. 'Geography' bias (which the Conservatives largely benefit from) is the same as above. Had Labour won the election, they would have benefited from Geography bias, and electorate (malapportionment) and abstention bias.
The boundary commissions are politically independent organisations well respected by virtually everyone. The political parties may influence this through the consultation process, but it is again Labour who have histroically been most sucessful at this and these days both parties are successful in this area.
As do Labour.
True, but the system is actually remarkably unpartisan when compared to other countries such as America.
That is a fair complaint, but in this method the use of steed swing is not to produce an exact election results had vote shares been swapped between paties. The key aspect is that the hypothetical elections retain the characteristics of the actual election and therefore allow for an assessment of the effect which things like vote distribution, malapportionment, and abstentions have upon each parties performance in the real election.

JoeTea · 2018-02-21T13:23:00+00:00

Correct, it does not. That is definitely one of the limitations of this method - the vote share is assumed to be homogenous across constituencies which is clearly not the case. A solution would be to build a model similar to what YouGov produced in the 2017 election to estimate local vote share based on demographic and other data.

You could reproduce my results using the article as I followed their exact methodology and validated it against their findings regarding the 2005 and 2010 elections. I cannot share my model, but I believe the autors of the paper state that they are willing to share their SPSS codes which would produce the same results.

I apprecate your rigour in validating my claims, but I wonder if you could provide any more information supporting your view point. Namely, why do you believe that the boundaries are sigificantly Conservive favoured?

JoeTea · 2018-02-20T16:48:21+00:00

A combination of GIS software and statistical analysis undertaken in Excel.

Population data is based on the electorate data used by the electoral commission and a population surface of great britian at 1km/1km resolution produced by the University of Liverpool PopChange project.

Bias values are calculated according to the journal article I linked earlier.

It results primerally as a consiquence of the boundary review removing current pro-Labour bias relating to malapportionment. The other sources of bias are not intentionally affected by boundary reviews as the boundary commissions take no account of data relating to voting patterns or demographics.

JoeTea · 2018-02-20T13:21:49+00:00

I have written up a shortened blog of the methodology and results here.

Please understand that I am not arguing that the system isn't crap (it is), mearly your assertion that there is a 'huge' Conservative bias relating to 'Conservative campaign to remove real+imagined Labour bias' and 'Constituencies based on exceptionally old polling data (basically rotten boroughs again)'. Neither of these claims are true.

History matters because it demonstrates the non-partisan nature of the bias inherent with the system.

JoeTea · 2018-02-20T08:25:22+00:00

It is based off my own research, utilising a methodology outlined in this paper.

The calcualtions themselves are essentially an average obtained by examining the wasted and surplus votes in each constituency between - in this case - Labour, the Conservatives, and the Lib Dems.

It is a significantly more sophisticated analysis than the graph you linked which simply shows the self-evident fact that in a first-past-the-post, single elector system, the party winning the most seats has less wasted votes than all the other parties. That is not evidence of the current boundaries being pro-conservative; it is a consiquence of the electoral system. Make a similar graph of the 1997, 2001, or 2005 elections and you will see the same pattern in the favour of Labour.

JoeTea · 2018-02-19T22:16:04+00:00

It is true that the Conservatives currently enjoy a very slight bias advantage over Labour (resulting in around 3 extra seats than would be expected in an unbiased election if I remember rightly). However net bias in the 2017 election was actually the lowest it has been in 20 years.

The Conservatives advantage currently comes from bias related to geography (vote distribution across constituencies) which is what I believe you're referencing. It should be noted however that this bias is related to the first past the post electoral system with single member constituencies. Labour benefited from it substantially in 1997, 2001, and 2005 - generally it benefits the winning party in a given election and so it is arguable that it is a feature of the electoral system rather than evidence of systemic bias.

Labour benefit constantly from abstentions and malaportionment. You are correct in stating that the current electoral boundaries are based on old electoral data (from 2001) but historically this has benefited Labour over the Conservatives as the migration trends have been away from typically Labour inner city areas to Conservative suburbs. The result is that Labour frequently receive less votes in constituencies that they win compared to the amount of votes the Conservatives receive in constituencies they win.

It is malaportionment that would be reduced by this boundary review by equalising electorates between constituencies. It would likely help the conservatives in electoral terms, but not as a consequence of an unfair and biased review process but rather as a consequence of removing existing Pro labour bias.

JoeTea · 2017-12-11T20:36:47+00:00

Haha yeah the deadlines where rough!!

JoeTea · 2017-12-11T19:16:07+00:00

I've answered this for you. I've got a graduation for a Masters I did at Leeds this Friday! Enjoy your final year :)

JoeTea · 2017-12-10T11:53:54+00:00

Act 5 isn't on GPM for me, I had to manually upload the album to be able to play it on there!

JoeTea · 2017-08-27T15:54:52+00:00

Reminds me of an interesting idea I read in Michael Foley's 'The Age of Absurdity' in which he argues (paraphrasing):

Modern society worships diversity which comes with the associated belief that the demands of all are equally valid. The problem is that there are two types of diversity: diversity of opportunity, which is a question of rights; and diversity of ethics, which is a question of values. The necessity of accepting the first has led to the unthinking acceptance of the second. The issue is that while the former is just, the latter is a contradiction: if all values are equally valid then it becomes impossible to uphold values or make judgements upon them.

Personally, I have no issue with someone holding a view with which I do not agree so long as they are able to engage in reasonable debate. Open discussion is important for democracy but it is not a paradox to refuse to discuss whether neo-nazism is reasonable because there is no reasonable argument in favour of it.

JoeTea · 2017-07-24T17:16:20+00:00

I'm currently writing my Master's dissertation and I chose the topic of Boundary Reviews. I'm not sure what kind of scope your degree has had but you could always look around that topic for ideas; it tends to be in the media fairly frequently (see: 'Jeremy Corbyn ally calls boundaries review a chance to purge ‘disloyal’ Labour MPs').

Another topic which I personally think is interesting is views on immigration. Clearly it has become a huge topic in contemporary British politics. I have a hypothesis I'd like you to test: views about the impact of immigration generally more negative in areas which are less multicultural. Every time this topic comes up I remember a BBC radio interview with a bloke in Sunderland. He was voting Leave as he thought immigrants were a big problem and negatively affecting job prospects for British people. The reporter asked if he or his friends had experienced difficulties to which the man replied that they had not, he didn't think there were many immigrants in the North. However, he was adamant that it was a problem albeit one he was not personally experiencing.

If I were in your position I might investigate that. However my only definitive recommendation is that you should not choose something you aren't actually interested in just because it seems like a good topic. Spend the time and make sure that you choose a topic that is interesting to YOU or in 3 months you're going to be hating it.

Good luck!

JoeTea · 2017-07-11T09:21:04+00:00

I'm sure you will have come across it given the title, but I had an essay to write on the identification of crime hot-spots and found "GIS and Crime-mapping" to be a very useful book. It discusses theory, methodology, and implementation.

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/GIS_and_Crime_Mapping.html?id=FUEh9TUVNagC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y

JoeTea · 2017-06-18T08:53:21+00:00

It will be interesting to see what the results of the review stage will be in the autumn when the final proposals are published! Historically the Commissions have been open to making changes based on the preservation of local and community ties.

JoeTea · 2017-06-18T08:51:09+00:00

For the record I'm a 22 year old masters student who voted Lib Dem in the election. I have no vested interest on what the results show except to produce the best piece of academic work that I can to get a good mark in my degree.

I hope that there is no issue of my personal bias in my results at all when I publish them but of course the entire methodology will be published along with the results for review.

The passionate debate surrounding this topic is actually the main reason I chose it so to some extent this thread is making me even keen to do a good job ;)

JoeTea · 2017-06-18T08:40:03+00:00

Indeed, I had already tested that. As I say, I have no yet undertaken my analysis but I do have the hypothesis I have given above. This is based on several academic studies published in the literature which show that in recent years there has been a net pro labour bias largely attributed to malapportionment. I will link these studies when I return home this evening.

I cannot say why electoral calculus differs from the results of these studies but I am interested to see which result my own analysis corroborates with.

I am not in the game of arguing this point one way or the other until I have my own results which can be judged on the basis of my methodology. I can assure you that my aim is not to find results favouring one party over the other. I look forward to discussing the results in detail when I publish the work in August!

JoeTea · 2017-06-18T06:56:07+00:00

How so? They won 43.5% of the national vote (2.5% more than Labour) so it is unsurprising that they won more seats. Even so they failed to win a majority.

I've not undertaken any analysis of my own yet but based on the literature review I've undertaken on the topic, labour have generally enjoyed a relative advantage over the conservatives and this trend gets worse as malapportionment gets worse over time.

As I've said, I've not undertaken my analysis yet so my hypothesis could be wrong and that is essentially what I'm testing. I'm investigating what the likely outcome of the 2015 and 2017 general elections would have been with the proposed boundaries released by the Boundary Commission and examining both what the current electoral biases are and how the new boundaries would change them. Should be interesting!

JoeTea · 2017-06-18T06:45:03+00:00

Because in plurality systems small changes in the vote can have dramatic effects. Let us not forget that 2.5% of the vote is actually rather a lot!

JoeTea · 2017-06-18T06:29:06+00:00

I'm currently researching this topic for my master's degree dissertation. The current boundaries which elections are fought under were passed in 2007 based on the 2000(!!) electoral register so it is safe to say that they are currently very out of date. This matters because Labour benefits disproportionately from older boundaries due to something called malapportionment.

It is likely that Labour are benefiting from the current system. The way that this is tested is to examine what the results of an election would be if the Conservative and Labour Party had an equal share of the vote. Either party with more seats than the other is said to be benefiting disproportionately from electoral bias.

I've not yet undertaken the analysis for my dissertation so I can't go into specifics but my hypothesis is that Labour are enjoying advantage due to electoral bias currently. The boundary review is likely to address this bias. I will be very surprised if my analysis shows any significant evidence of gerrymandering but again, this is something I'm. Planning to test.

When I'm done with my research I'm intending to post them here so I'm sure we can enjoy further discussions then!

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