Thursday, February 18, 2010
Romney and Rapper fight on plane
Rapper Sky Blu from LMFAO didn't put his seat up, so Morman Republican Mitt Romney let him have it.
Hanson in the USA
BELLA COUNIHAN February 19, 2010 - 8:51AM
Comments 6
Pauline Hanson was going. Then she was staying. Then, according to her real estate agent, she was going to the UK just for a holiday, stating "she does not want to become a Pom". But phew, the real estate agent was wrong and Hanson confirmed again that she was to leave Australia indefinitely. But Pauline has made a mistake. No, I'm sure she knows where she's going better than her real estate agent. Hanson made a mistake in choosing her destination - the motherland Britain as her new home. Not just because, as Goanna pointed out, their might be too many brown faces and burkas for Pauline's liking but because she's missing out on political opportunities elsewhere.
Let's just say we put Pauline, single mum and ex-fish shop owner in the global context, one can see an obvious home for her. A place where the right wingers are marching in the streets? Where else but the good ol' US of A. After suffering the indignities of jail, a fake nude photo scandal and failure to be re-elected four times, where better to start over and get some political purchase but the land of opportunity itself.
This is especially true when you consider that in the US right now the Tea Party movement with ex-McCain running mate Sarah Palin as sponsor is really gaining ground, with millions marching in the streets. A strange amorphous organisation, the Tea Party (not actually a political party) is collecting up all those voiceless and often exclusively white masses from the right and letting them speak their conservative minds on a range of issues including debt, big government and health care. Pauline herself talking to Woman's Day about her plans to emigrate complained of Australia's "overregulation, increasing taxes and lack of true representation." These are the very same issues expressed by her political soul mates in the US.
The other affinity Pauline and the Tea Baggers (no irony to its slang meaning) have is a vehement denial of prejudice. This is despite Pauline's stance on migration and the Tea Baggers' personal attacks on Barack Obama, which would say something to the contrary. After all, comparing Obama to an African Witch Doctor or holding up a sign that says "Obama's plan=white slavery" does not scream tolerance.
In many ways these are the American version of Hanson's people. The same that got her up and running as a local member for Oxley way back in 1996 on a platform of fear. The Tea Party movement is in many ways a clothed One Nation with less focus on immigration and more focus on the scary black president who, didn't you know, is a "socialist," a "Muslim" and a "thug"
The only comparable far-right organisation in Britain, the British National Party, a strongly anti-immigration party, has welcomed Hanson. But she's not going to get the same political mileage out of those guys. Griffin has even declared that she is not a "sponger", as good a job offer as you are ever likely to get. But the BNP only has about 11,000 members and has even stopped discriminating with its membership. A recent vote at a general meeting means they now let non-whites into the organisation. One Sikh man has even joined the party worried about Muslim migration - a previous concern of Hanson's in her 2007 Senate election campaign. But the point is when discriminatory organisations in Britain can no longer discriminate, the political future for Pauline with the Brits does not look good.
A dream of her running for the BNP or as a sponsored candidate for the Tea Party is in the end unlikely - there are of course rules about how far you can get politically in American when you weren't been born there. And she has confirmed only this week that she will never again enter the world of politics. But imagine for a moment that it was Pauline who ran with McCain in the 2008 US electoral campaign. Palin and Hanson do have a fair amount of cross over - they both pandered to grass roots conservatism, neither were the sharpest political tools in the shed but both had mass appeal. Palin flourished in US conservative soil, where as Hanson's political energy in Australia petered out. An idea emerges - if US citizen Pauline had entered into American politics then maybe she would be in Palin's place.
All I can say is I don't like the idea at all, I just don't like it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4tZRZSGxcE&feature=player_embedded
Comments 6
Pauline Hanson was going. Then she was staying. Then, according to her real estate agent, she was going to the UK just for a holiday, stating "she does not want to become a Pom". But phew, the real estate agent was wrong and Hanson confirmed again that she was to leave Australia indefinitely. But Pauline has made a mistake. No, I'm sure she knows where she's going better than her real estate agent. Hanson made a mistake in choosing her destination - the motherland Britain as her new home. Not just because, as Goanna pointed out, their might be too many brown faces and burkas for Pauline's liking but because she's missing out on political opportunities elsewhere.
Let's just say we put Pauline, single mum and ex-fish shop owner in the global context, one can see an obvious home for her. A place where the right wingers are marching in the streets? Where else but the good ol' US of A. After suffering the indignities of jail, a fake nude photo scandal and failure to be re-elected four times, where better to start over and get some political purchase but the land of opportunity itself.
This is especially true when you consider that in the US right now the Tea Party movement with ex-McCain running mate Sarah Palin as sponsor is really gaining ground, with millions marching in the streets. A strange amorphous organisation, the Tea Party (not actually a political party) is collecting up all those voiceless and often exclusively white masses from the right and letting them speak their conservative minds on a range of issues including debt, big government and health care. Pauline herself talking to Woman's Day about her plans to emigrate complained of Australia's "overregulation, increasing taxes and lack of true representation." These are the very same issues expressed by her political soul mates in the US.
The other affinity Pauline and the Tea Baggers (no irony to its slang meaning) have is a vehement denial of prejudice. This is despite Pauline's stance on migration and the Tea Baggers' personal attacks on Barack Obama, which would say something to the contrary. After all, comparing Obama to an African Witch Doctor or holding up a sign that says "Obama's plan=white slavery" does not scream tolerance.
In many ways these are the American version of Hanson's people. The same that got her up and running as a local member for Oxley way back in 1996 on a platform of fear. The Tea Party movement is in many ways a clothed One Nation with less focus on immigration and more focus on the scary black president who, didn't you know, is a "socialist," a "Muslim" and a "thug"
The only comparable far-right organisation in Britain, the British National Party, a strongly anti-immigration party, has welcomed Hanson. But she's not going to get the same political mileage out of those guys. Griffin has even declared that she is not a "sponger", as good a job offer as you are ever likely to get. But the BNP only has about 11,000 members and has even stopped discriminating with its membership. A recent vote at a general meeting means they now let non-whites into the organisation. One Sikh man has even joined the party worried about Muslim migration - a previous concern of Hanson's in her 2007 Senate election campaign. But the point is when discriminatory organisations in Britain can no longer discriminate, the political future for Pauline with the Brits does not look good.
A dream of her running for the BNP or as a sponsored candidate for the Tea Party is in the end unlikely - there are of course rules about how far you can get politically in American when you weren't been born there. And she has confirmed only this week that she will never again enter the world of politics. But imagine for a moment that it was Pauline who ran with McCain in the 2008 US electoral campaign. Palin and Hanson do have a fair amount of cross over - they both pandered to grass roots conservatism, neither were the sharpest political tools in the shed but both had mass appeal. Palin flourished in US conservative soil, where as Hanson's political energy in Australia petered out. An idea emerges - if US citizen Pauline had entered into American politics then maybe she would be in Palin's place.
All I can say is I don't like the idea at all, I just don't like it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4tZRZSGxcE&feature=player_embedded
Politician caught playing with phone in Parli
Northern Territory MP denies he was playing games on his phone during a parli session.
Westpac "oh so very over it today"
Accidental Tweet by Westpac "Oh so very over it today". Or maybe this was intentional. Maybe this is Westpac's cry for help?
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Nailing our happiness colours to the wall
BELLA COUNIHAN
Happiness. Love. For most of us these are all lovely notions, floating in balloons of abstraction in the stratosphere; limited to art more than science. Measuring these thing looks like too hard basket material. But more and more that's exactly what we try to do. We want to know who is happier? When are we happier?
Just when this is about to give us a headache, social media comes once again to save the day. The USNational Happiness Index, landed on the shores of Facebook, will let us know for certain the peaks and troughs of positivity and could be a new frontier in "happiness science". It analyses anonymously the words used by US users in Facebook status updates and assesses their positivity and negativity, giving us a pretty graph of how the US is feeling on any given day.
The Facebook data team is even using the index to assess who is happier. After Valentine's day, the team analysed questions of love, including whether people in relationships are more likely to be positive. According to Facebook, the result, sadly enough for those lonely hearts, is that those partnered up are generally more happy, and those in a marriage are even happier than those simply "in a relationship". Curiously those in "open relationships" - whatever that means - are the least happy of all, sadder than even those who list themselves as widowed or "it's complicated". If you don't disclose your relationship status at all, then heaven help you
The science of happiness is actually an already established field. In economics and social research there have long been efforts to quantify and qualify our feelings. In Bhutan there is even a Gross National Happiness Movement, a philosophy and policy hybrid where the king and the Bhutanese government keep an eye on a gross national happiness index (as opposed to gross domestic product). The Bhutanese know that to improve national happiness you need to know how to measure it.
To a scientist of happiness, Facebook updates are a wet dream of data with 100 million posted words a day. One can analyse these to find who, where and when and how we are feeling. The creator of the index, Adam Kramer, a social psychology student at the University of Oregon (who happens to be 72 percent happier than the average American Facebook user) explains on his blog; "every day, through Facebook status updates, people share how they feel with those who matter most in their lives. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing." From this angle it looks like social media could be the brave new frontier of the science of happiness.
But there might be a few problems with using this kind of social networking data to assess "happiness".
First, data sourced from status updates may well overstate positivity. Our Facebook updates, because of their semi-public nature, may prompt us to appear happier than we might otherwise be; a Facebook face to meet the faces that you meet if you will. Apologies to T.S Eliot there. The other issue is that not everyone uses their Facebook updates to actually say how they are feeling at that very moment. Status updates can also simply be links to other things in the news or quotes from somewhere else. A user, also a hip hop fan, may well pick out lyrics and use that as an update. For example Busta Rhymes' lyric: "Break ya f*ckin neck b*tches" as an update is seemingly negative but this could well be our user appreciating the Brooklyn rapper's confrontational style. Anyway, said user may be in enough trouble having committed one of the cardinal sins of Facebook - lyric updating.
Another issue might be categorising words as positive or negative. A few example of words used in the Facebook happiness index were "yay" and "awesome" for the positive indicators and "sad" and "tragic" for negative. But words depend on context not understood by a computer anonymously searching for terms. A word like "tragic", deemed to be an "unhappy" word, could be used in the context of Bill " is a Depeche Mode tragic" - not necessarily a negative thing. Or the word "yay" could easily be used in the context of Bill "has to go to work today. yay." Sarcasm underlies an unhappy day of work for Bill there.
But it is interesting to reflect on why we want to measure happiness in the first place. This index is a part of a wider trend among social researchers, economist and the Bhutanese, to nail our happiness colours to the wall. We want more and more to quantify, qualify, compare and even attribute a dollar value to abstractions like happiness. Why we are happy? When we are happy? Who is the happiest? It might be wise to remember that the analysed life is not always the happiest one.
http://twitter.com/Becoon
Happiness. Love. For most of us these are all lovely notions, floating in balloons of abstraction in the stratosphere; limited to art more than science. Measuring these thing looks like too hard basket material. But more and more that's exactly what we try to do. We want to know who is happier? When are we happier?
Just when this is about to give us a headache, social media comes once again to save the day. The USNational Happiness Index, landed on the shores of Facebook, will let us know for certain the peaks and troughs of positivity and could be a new frontier in "happiness science". It analyses anonymously the words used by US users in Facebook status updates and assesses their positivity and negativity, giving us a pretty graph of how the US is feeling on any given day.
The Facebook data team is even using the index to assess who is happier. After Valentine's day, the team analysed questions of love, including whether people in relationships are more likely to be positive. According to Facebook, the result, sadly enough for those lonely hearts, is that those partnered up are generally more happy, and those in a marriage are even happier than those simply "in a relationship". Curiously those in "open relationships" - whatever that means - are the least happy of all, sadder than even those who list themselves as widowed or "it's complicated". If you don't disclose your relationship status at all, then heaven help you
The science of happiness is actually an already established field. In economics and social research there have long been efforts to quantify and qualify our feelings. In Bhutan there is even a Gross National Happiness Movement, a philosophy and policy hybrid where the king and the Bhutanese government keep an eye on a gross national happiness index (as opposed to gross domestic product). The Bhutanese know that to improve national happiness you need to know how to measure it.
To a scientist of happiness, Facebook updates are a wet dream of data with 100 million posted words a day. One can analyse these to find who, where and when and how we are feeling. The creator of the index, Adam Kramer, a social psychology student at the University of Oregon (who happens to be 72 percent happier than the average American Facebook user) explains on his blog; "every day, through Facebook status updates, people share how they feel with those who matter most in their lives. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing." From this angle it looks like social media could be the brave new frontier of the science of happiness.
But there might be a few problems with using this kind of social networking data to assess "happiness".
First, data sourced from status updates may well overstate positivity. Our Facebook updates, because of their semi-public nature, may prompt us to appear happier than we might otherwise be; a Facebook face to meet the faces that you meet if you will. Apologies to T.S Eliot there. The other issue is that not everyone uses their Facebook updates to actually say how they are feeling at that very moment. Status updates can also simply be links to other things in the news or quotes from somewhere else. A user, also a hip hop fan, may well pick out lyrics and use that as an update. For example Busta Rhymes' lyric: "Break ya f*ckin neck b*tches" as an update is seemingly negative but this could well be our user appreciating the Brooklyn rapper's confrontational style. Anyway, said user may be in enough trouble having committed one of the cardinal sins of Facebook - lyric updating.
Another issue might be categorising words as positive or negative. A few example of words used in the Facebook happiness index were "yay" and "awesome" for the positive indicators and "sad" and "tragic" for negative. But words depend on context not understood by a computer anonymously searching for terms. A word like "tragic", deemed to be an "unhappy" word, could be used in the context of Bill " is a Depeche Mode tragic" - not necessarily a negative thing. Or the word "yay" could easily be used in the context of Bill "has to go to work today. yay." Sarcasm underlies an unhappy day of work for Bill there.
But it is interesting to reflect on why we want to measure happiness in the first place. This index is a part of a wider trend among social researchers, economist and the Bhutanese, to nail our happiness colours to the wall. We want more and more to quantify, qualify, compare and even attribute a dollar value to abstractions like happiness. Why we are happy? When we are happy? Who is the happiest? It might be wise to remember that the analysed life is not always the happiest one.
http://twitter.com/Becoon
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