YouGov/Times “Blue Wall” poll finds six point CON to LAB swing since GE2019 – politicalbetting.com

Broken, sleazy Tories on the slide!

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic

Sean_F said:

That's still a pretty hefty lead in such seats, and the fact that the swing is to Labour, rather than the Lib Dems, would lessen Conservative losses.

Except that polls like this can't take into account the LD campaign effect. Remember punters gave the Tories a 95% chance of holding C&A right up to the final week. I regarded it as a 95% certain LD gain right from the outset

The Swedish discus throwers win the award for the best celebration.

Carnyx said:

Quintus.

In re fili praevii:

Dura_Ace said:

NickPalmer said:

SandyRentool said:

I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.

We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.

My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.

I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.

Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.

It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.

I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?

I wonder if the mixed events in the Olympics are there to troll the anti-wokeists?

Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.

The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall

tlg86 said:

The Swedish discus throwers win the award for the best celebration.

And in one bold leap, Sweden vault over Kuwait, San Marino and the British rowing team in the medal table

MikeSmithson said:

Sean_F said:

That's still a pretty hefty lead in such seats, and the fact that the swing is to Labour, rather than the Lib Dems, would lessen Conservative losses.

Except that polls like this can't take into account the LD campaign effect. Remember punters gave the Tories a 95% chance of holding C&A right up to the final week. I regarded it as a 95% certain LD gain right from the outset

I think that's a good deal easier to achieve in a single-seat campaign than in a general election.

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Carnyx said:

Quintus.

In re fili praevii:

Dura_Ace said:

NickPalmer said:

SandyRentool said:

I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.

We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.

My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.

I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.

Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.

It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.

I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?

Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...

Rachel Johnson (as in sister of ...) suggested rote learning of the classics was a soft route to Oxford.

So why would Tories want more competition for their children's life chances?

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Carnyx said:

Quintus.

In re fili praevii:

Dura_Ace said:

NickPalmer said:

SandyRentool said:

I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.

We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.

My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.

I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.

Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.

It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.

I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?

I wonder if the mixed events in the Olympics are there to troll the anti-wokeists?

They certainly didn't have them in the good old days when they were running around in the altogether at Olympia. No arguments there about what to wear in the sprinting, beach volleyball and handball.

No female competitors either, mind (possible exception being the owners of the chariot racing teams, who IIRC were the ones who got the medals, not the chauffeurs, but I can't recall if they all had to be male owners).

Prior thread very interesting (perhaps not the stuff about roads)

I too have made insane predictions way out of my area of competence - I know this might not come as a shock, but it was a bit of an epiphany for me, just this morning

eg Yesterday I confidently predicted that Team GB would do quite badly compared to reasonable expectations. I said we would finish behind Oz, Russia and maybe another European country. I said we might finish around 9th in the medal table, and get around 40-45 medals

This morning I considered my prediction, and I laughed at my own stupidity

Where was I getting my info with which to make these precise calls? Out of my ass, basically. It is all a hunch, an intimation. In fact it's not even a hunch, it's more like a spasm in reaction to early disappointments. There are people out there - on this site - who know far more about these Games, right down to individual athletes in more obscure sports, and their various chances. Their prophesies are 100 times more valuable than mine.

If my "prediction" turns out to be anywhere near correct it will be nearly pure luck and almost zero judgement.

My only defence is that I never bet on these hunches. I only ever bet after proper consideration and research. Which is probably why I bet very rarely

darkage said:

With regard to this information, it really seems quite insignificant.
The tories still have a massive lead in the south east: and they can encroach further in to the red wall, if they have the right strategy. There will of course be some consequences for them in other parts of the country, but it is inevitable that departing from thatcherite free market policies would mean losing some wealthy southern voters, who were the main beneficiaries of these economic policies. Where these voters turn to is unclear: neither the greens nor the lib dems are a particularly good fit. So there is some movement, but in my view it is unexpected and unsuprising.

On this polling even if the Tories lost say 20 SouthEast seats, mainly to the LDs a la Chesham and Amersham, they would still have a comfortable majority of 40.

To be at serious risk of losing their majority they would need to lose about 20-30 seats to Labour in the Red Wall too as you correctly point out and as Hartlepool and Batley and Spen show Labour are barely able to hold onto all their Red Wall seats they hold now let alone regain them from the Tories.

Starmer has made it safe for some upper middle class Southern Tory Remainers to vote LD maybe but he has yet to make any progress at all in regaining working class Leave voters in the North and Midlands from the Tories

On topic, it’s worth noting that YouGov has been quite picky about the seats it has defined as blue wall (noting also that C&A didn’t qualify!). Most of them sit along a wide band between Gloucester and Eastbourne - in the south it doesn’t go further west than around Southampton and there are only three seats from East Anglia in the sample, compared to at least nine from Greater London.

Even fully fit Dina Asher-Smith wouldn't have got anywhere near the medals.

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic

Never send in a computer to do a job a dog can do.

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2021/bio-detection-dogs-identify-covid-19-94-accuracy

A computer that could smell someone ten miles away and identify which Olympic sized swimming pool has a drop of blood in it would be a remarkable machine. Dogs’ smell is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times better than ours and it occupies between 30-40% of their brain capacity.

IanB2 said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic

Never send in a computer to do a job a dog can do.

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2021/bio-detection-dogs-identify-covid-19-94-accuracy

A computer that could smell someone ten miles away and identify which Olympic sized swimming pool has a drop of blood in it would be a remarkable machine. Dogs’ smell is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times better than ours and it occupies between 30-40% of their brain capacity.

And what does my dog do with this power? Spends as much time as possible sniffing where other dogs have done a wee...

HYUFD said:

Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.

The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall

If the green and LibDem vote deploys strategically, things would look better.

YouGov’s own map identifies nine of its chosen seats that would fall to Labour based on its polling, with LibDems gaining three and a further four that are too close to call.

Sean_F said:

That's still a pretty hefty lead in such seats, and the fact that the swing is to Labour, rather than the Lib Dems, would lessen Conservative losses.

The risk to the Conservatives is that you see a repeat of 2005, and extensive tactical voting.

FPT

Dura_Ace said:

[...]I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.

Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.

It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin [...]

English should be taught so as to help with the learning of other languages later. Teaching the right perspective at the beginning doesn't take long. See what I wrote here. English has almost no declension, but cases can be taught as something functional. In fact the absence of declension can be used to teach the difference and relationship between form and function. Like this:

"In 'He sees sugar', 'sugar' is the direct object of the verb and we say that means it's in the accusative case. In 'Sugar is in the jar', 'sugar' is the subject of the verb and we say it's in the nominative case. In English no special endings are used, and as you can see the two instances of the word 'sugar' take exactly the same form. But many other languages use special endings to tell you the case, i.e. what relationship the noun is in with the verb or with some other clause element. That gives more scope with word order, which you can vary for emphasis more easily because the ending of 'sugar' will tell you what case it's in."

"Nouns can take other forms than these two. For example, you can get a prepositional phrase such as 'to Mary'. In 'He gives the letter to Mary', we say 'Mary' is in the dative case. Functionally 'Mary' is the indirect object of the verb. In English this functional relationship can be expressed using the preposition 'to', but it can also occur without a preposition, in 'He gives Mary the letter'. 'Mary' is in the same case here as it is in 'He gives the letter to Mary': the dative. In languages such as Russian, you just use the ending for the dative case and in this example you wouldn't use a preposition at all." Etc.

Aspect can be introduced in English grammar in a similar fashion. For example:

"There are three simple tenses - past, present, and future. In English you can make each one progressive (or continuous), to communicate that a state is continuing, or you can make it perfect, to communicate that something happened (or a state existed) before the viewpoint time but with relevance that still exists in that time, which may perhaps be because it's still going on. Or you can do both. For example if you do both, you can get 'He had been thinking' (past perfect progressive), 'He has been thinking' (present perfect progressive), and 'He will have been thinking' (future perfect progressive). In English the 'present', 'present perfect', 'present progressive', and 'present perfect progressive', are usually all called separate tenses, giving 12 all told. But in some languages there is the concept of 'aspect', and it would make just as much sense to say that 'progressive' and 'perfect' are 'aspects', respectively showing that something is 'actually going on' and that something 'went on beforehand and has continuing relevance'." Etc.

I.e. actually bring out the concepts of grammar - function, form, relationships, tense. I have given this in accelerated form, but it can be taught in ~10 hours including time allowed for exercises.

The French police are something else...

https://twitter.com/ClementLanot/status/1421446726305652738?s=19

IanB2 said:

HYUFD said:

Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.

The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall

If the green and LibDem vote deploys strategically, things would look better.

YouGov’s own map identifies nine of its chosen seats that would fall to Labour based on its polling, with LibDems gaining three and a further four that are too close to call.

That is adding 6 Labour gains in Tory Remain held seats in Greater London to 2 or 3 in the South and East but even if all those 16 identified were lost by the Tories they would still have a majority of nearly 50 if they held all their Red Wall seats

Carnyx said:

Quintus.

In re fili praevii:

Dura_Ace said:

NickPalmer said:

SandyRentool said:

I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.

We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.

My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.

I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.

Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.

It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.

I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?

Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...

Are you kidding?

Latin has neuter, so you can identify as they/them and not he or she. It is therefore perfect for these woke times.

turbotubbs said:

IanB2 said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic

Never send in a computer to do a job a dog can do.

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2021/bio-detection-dogs-identify-covid-19-94-accuracy

A computer that could smell someone ten miles away and identify which Olympic sized swimming pool has a drop of blood in it would be a remarkable machine. Dogs’ smell is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times better than ours and it occupies between 30-40% of their brain capacity.

And what does my dog do with this power? Spends as much time as possible sniffing where other dogs have done a wee...

We did an introduction to scent training last weekend, and there is some more useful stuff you can do with your dog if you give it some time. For example it is relatively easy to train your dog to find stuff like your car keys, and the trainer’s dog is apparently well known for tracking down missing cats near where they live.

IanB2 said:

Leon said:

Prior thread very interesting (perhaps not the stuff about roads)

I too have made insane predictions way out of my area of competence - I know this might not come as a shock, but it was a bit of an epiphany for me, just this morning

eg Yesterday I confidently predicted that Team GB would do quite badly compared to reasonable expectations. I said we would finish behind Oz, Russia and maybe another European country. I said we might finish around 9th in the medal table, and get around 40-45 medals

This morning I considered my prediction, and I laughed at my own stupidity

Where was I getting my info with which to make these precise calls? Out of my ass, basically. It is all a hunch, an intimation. In fact it's not even a hunch, it's more like a spasm in reaction to early disappointments. There are people out there - on this site - who know far more about these Games, right down to individual athletes in more obscure sports, and their various chances. Their prophesies are 100 times more valuable than mine.

If my "prediction" turns out to be anywhere near correct it will be nearly pure luck and almost zero judgement.

My only defence is that I never bet on these hunches. I only ever bet after proper consideration and research. Which is probably why I bet very rarely

The only predictions of yours that ever come anywhere close are those that you have nicked from other PB’ers.

Quite possibly true, but I always have the ultimate solace that, whatever my sins and disappointments, I am not you

LostPassword said:

Labour up 4, Greens up 7, Lib Dems down 6.

If it was the Lib Dems up 5, and Labour/Greens level then perhaps the Tories would have something to worry about.

There will be a limit to the number of seats the Lib Dems can campaign hard in.

It will be very interesting to see if the Greens can manage to become relevant enough to grab the third party spot from the libdems.

In theory, they are in an excellent position to do so, but so far they have made very little progress outside the Euro elections. (And we aren’t getting those any more.)

rcs1000 said:

Carnyx said:

Quintus.

In re fili praevii:

Dura_Ace said:

NickPalmer said:

SandyRentool said:

I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.

We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.

My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.

I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.

Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.

It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.

I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?

Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...

Are you kidding?

Latin has neuter, so you can identify as they/them and not he or she. It is therefore perfect for these woke times.

It/they, to be even better. But I was thinking more along the lines that all sailors are feminine, for instance, as are all tables ...

rcs1000 said:

Floater said:

Super spreader event underway in Paris

It’s appallingly covered here in the US; CNN has a story on Amanda Knox returning to Italy, but nothing on the French riots.

Does the US media ever take much interest in demos in Europe? Or even anything else?

rcs1000 said:

Floater said:

Super spreader event underway in Paris

It’s appallingly covered here in the US; CNN has a story on Amanda Knox returning to Italy, but nothing on the French riots.

It never gets mentioned in our press.

Leon said:

Prior thread very interesting (perhaps not the stuff about roads)

I too have made insane predictions way out of my area of competence - I know this might not come as a shock, but it was a bit of an epiphany for me, just this morning

eg Yesterday I confidently predicted that Team GB would do quite badly compared to reasonable expectations. I said we would finish behind Oz, Russia and maybe another European country. I said we might finish around 9th in the medal table, and get around 40-45 medals

This morning I considered my prediction, and I laughed at my own stupidity

Where was I getting my info with which to make these precise calls? Out of my ass, basically. It is all a hunch, an intimation. In fact it's not even a hunch, it's more like a spasm in reaction to early disappointments. There are people out there - on this site - who know far more about these Games, right down to individual athletes in more obscure sports, and their various chances. Their prophesies are 100 times more valuable than mine.

If my "prediction" turns out to be anywhere near correct it will be nearly pure luck and almost zero judgement.

My only defence is that I never bet on these hunches. I only ever bet after proper consideration and research. Which is probably why I bet very rarely

Very wise. I know relatively little about what's going on; however...

*The British team is currently sat on 28 medals
*Boxing has produced a bronze, three more semi-finalists who now can't do any worse than bronze, and three more quarter-finalists
*Sailing has also produced a bronze and British crews are competitive in six of the eight events that have yet to complete (two in first place, three in second and one in fourth the last time I looked)
*The three-day eventers are doing well at the moment
*The men's golfers are competitive and the women's haven't started yet
*The individual apparatus finals in gymnastics haven't happened yet
*Flatwater canoeing hasn't started yet (and I've not the foggiest whether there are any competitive Brits going in that event, but I'm pretty sure there were medallists last time)
*The whole athletics programme has only just got started (and I know it doesn't look promising from the British POV, but there are a *lot* of events and the team might yet get something out of it)
*AND track cycling has yet to get underway

In medal table terms I rate it as a competition for 5th with Australia, and 50 medals looks achievable. That'd be broadly comparable with Beijing, and a credible overall achievement IMHO.

IanB2 said:

Leon said:

IanB2 said:

Leon said:

Prior thread very interesting (perhaps not the stuff about roads)

I too have made insane predictions way out of my area of competence - I know this might not come as a shock, but it was a bit of an epiphany for me, just this morning

eg Yesterday I confidently predicted that Team GB would do quite badly compared to reasonable expectations. I said we would finish behind Oz, Russia and maybe another European country. I said we might finish around 9th in the medal table, and get around 40-45 medals

This morning I considered my prediction, and I laughed at my own stupidity

Where was I getting my info with which to make these precise calls? Out of my ass, basically. It is all a hunch, an intimation. In fact it's not even a hunch, it's more like a spasm in reaction to early disappointments. There are people out there - on this site - who know far more about these Games, right down to individual athletes in more obscure sports, and their various chances. Their prophesies are 100 times more valuable than mine.

If my "prediction" turns out to be anywhere near correct it will be nearly pure luck and almost zero judgement.

My only defence is that I never bet on these hunches. I only ever bet after proper consideration and research. Which is probably why I bet very rarely

The only predictions of yours that ever come anywhere close are those that you have nicked from other PB’ers.

Quite possibly true, but I always have the ultimate solace that, whatever my sins and disappointments, I am not you

It’s a very bad sign to be down to your argument of last resort so soon.

But I am not making an argument. I am asserting a plain fact, something so obvious it borders on a truism

IanB2 said:

turbotubbs said:

IanB2 said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic

Never send in a computer to do a job a dog can do.

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2021/bio-detection-dogs-identify-covid-19-94-accuracy

A computer that could smell someone ten miles away and identify which Olympic sized swimming pool has a drop of blood in it would be a remarkable machine. Dogs’ smell is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times better than ours and it occupies between 30-40% of their brain capacity.

And what does my dog do with this power? Spends as much time as possible sniffing where other dogs have done a wee...

We did an introduction to scent training last weekend, and there is some more useful stuff you can do with your dog if you give it some time. For example it is relatively easy to train your dog to find stuff like your car keys, and the trainer’s dog is apparently well known for tracking down missing cats near where they live.

Right. I know what I'm going to be doing this weekend - training the dog to find my reading glasses.

Carnyx said:

rcs1000 said:

Carnyx said:

Quintus.

In re fili praevii:

Dura_Ace said:

NickPalmer said:

SandyRentool said:

I can say things in French. But if I ask a question and receive a reply, usually I have no idea what the other person has said.

We should just teach kids how to order a coffee, order a beer and say 'I love you' in a dozen languages and settle for that.

My father said wryly that he learned French for 6 years at Winchester, and then took a trip to Paris;he found he was unable to ask the inspector when they would arrive.

I was educated in French only until I was 12 and couldn't really write English at that age. When I got to English speaking schools in the US and UK I was amazed at how little grammar was taught compared to my Francophone education.

Now that I'm a language tutor I see the same situation among British students. Teaching Latin would help slightly as they would be exposed to grammatical concepts like declension. There is almost no declension in English but it's very important in other languages. I regularly see anglophone students struggle with it in Russian.

It could be fixed much more effectively by teaching Linguistics rather than Latin but that would not stimulate the desiccated G spots of Telegraph readers with type 2 diabetes in the same way so the tories won't do it.

I wonder if the Latin is because its full of gender to troll the wokists?

Also - because it gives those parents with money to send their brats to private schools an advantage? At the moment Latin can't seriously be used as an educational criterion. It's like an O level in sheep-farming - only the Welsh, etc., have a hope of doing it. But make it a general educational qualification ...

Are you kidding?

Latin has neuter, so you can identify as they/them and not he or she. It is therefore perfect for these woke times.

It/they, to be even better. But I was thinking more along the lines that all sailors are feminine, for instance, as are all tables ...

I believe that Latin has an exception if the table chooses to self identify differently.

Leon said:

IanB2 said:

Leon said:

IanB2 said:

Leon said:

Prior thread very interesting (perhaps not the stuff about roads)

I too have made insane predictions way out of my area of competence - I know this might not come as a shock, but it was a bit of an epiphany for me, just this morning

eg Yesterday I confidently predicted that Team GB would do quite badly compared to reasonable expectations. I said we would finish behind Oz, Russia and maybe another European country. I said we might finish around 9th in the medal table, and get around 40-45 medals

This morning I considered my prediction, and I laughed at my own stupidity

Where was I getting my info with which to make these precise calls? Out of my ass, basically. It is all a hunch, an intimation. In fact it's not even a hunch, it's more like a spasm in reaction to early disappointments. There are people out there - on this site - who know far more about these Games, right down to individual athletes in more obscure sports, and their various chances. Their prophesies are 100 times more valuable than mine.

If my "prediction" turns out to be anywhere near correct it will be nearly pure luck and almost zero judgement.

My only defence is that I never bet on these hunches. I only ever bet after proper consideration and research. Which is probably why I bet very rarely

The only predictions of yours that ever come anywhere close are those that you have nicked from other PB’ers.

Quite possibly true, but I always have the ultimate solace that, whatever my sins and disappointments, I am not you

It’s a very bad sign to be down to your argument of last resort so soon.

But I am not making an argument. I am asserting a plain fact, something so obvious it borders on a truism

Having nothing in your locker other than making the same point again is another very bad sign.

rcs1000 said:

Sean_F said:

That's still a pretty hefty lead in such seats, and the fact that the swing is to Labour, rather than the Lib Dems, would lessen Conservative losses.

The risk to the Conservatives is that you see a repeat of 2005, and extensive tactical voting.

Sure, but that's been a risk at every election, and most of the time it doesn't happen. On the headline figures there's even more fracturing of the anti-Tory vote, with the increase in the Green Party share, which makes tactical voting harder to organise and less likely to be successful.

IanB2 said:

HYUFD said:

Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.

The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall

If the green and LibDem vote deploys strategically, things would look better.

YouGov’s own map identifies nine of its chosen seats that would fall to Labour based on its polling, with LibDems gaining three and a further four that are too close to call.

Major tactical voting is becoming pretty standard down here in Surrey. The LibDem candidate in my area (Jeremy Hunt'ds seat) took the County seat with a vote increase of 38%, and I know a lot of them were Labour and Green voters who could see he was obviously the best non-Tory bet in that election. I voted Labour but we put out zero leaflets in the division since we felt our money was better spent elsewhere.

The problem is only in seats where more than one non-Tory candidate can reasonably claim to have a good chance. I don't think there will be an election pact, but a sharp word with constituency parties to concentrate on geuinely winnable seats ought to be possible.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic

Doesn't surprise me at all. There's a lot of feeble research applying machine learning algorithms to medical problems, which just involves sticking data into an existing black box and trying to make predictions without understanding any of the underlying mechanisms. Some of the weakest science out there, imo, and a waste of funding.

--AS

rcs1000 said:

Floater said:

Super spreader event underway in Paris

It’s appallingly covered here in the US; CNN has a story on Amanda Knox returning to Italy, but nothing on the French riots.

She returned to Italy back in June.

Stuartinromford said:

IanB2 said:

HYUFD said:

Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.

The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall

If the green and LibDem vote deploys strategically, things would look better.

YouGov’s own map identifies nine of its chosen seats that would fall to Labour based on its polling, with LibDems gaining three and a further four that are too close to call.

Here's the list;

CON TO LAB:
- Chingford & Woodford Green
- Chipping Barent
- Filton & Bradley Stoke
- Hendon
- Kensington & Chelsea
- Milton Keynes N
- Stroud
- Truro & Falmouth
- Wycombe

CON to LDM:
- Cheltenham
- Wimbledon
- Winchester

https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1421178611223121922?s=20

Considering the way that Lab and Lib Dem tore chunks out of each other in 2019, surely some tactical unwind is going to be expected? Take Batley + Spen, where it looks like there was just enough of a Lib to Lab shift for Kim Leadbetter to fend of the catty one. That can fairly easily lead to fewer Lib Dem votes and more seats- look at the history of the Alliance/Lib Dems in the 80's and 90's. What matters for the Lib Dems is getting votes in the right places, not national swing.

More generally, the efficiency of the anti-Conservative vote is at least as important as the size of the Conservative vote. May 2017 got a much higher percentage share of the vote than Cameron 2015, but fewer seats.

In 1997, the libdems did only fractionally better (percentage-wise) than in 2019, but got four-times the seats.

(Or, to put it another way, they got half the vote share of 1983 and more than twice the seats.)

This demonstrates (a) that the absolute level of Conservative vote is very important to them, and (b) tactical voting matters.

rcs1000 said:

LostPassword said:

Labour up 4, Greens up 7, Lib Dems down 6.

If it was the Lib Dems up 5, and Labour/Greens level then perhaps the Tories would have something to worry about.

There will be a limit to the number of seats the Lib Dems can campaign hard in.

It will be very interesting to see if the Greens can manage to become relevant enough to grab the third party spot from the libdems.

In theory, they are in an excellent position to do so, but so far they have made very little progress outside the Euro elections. (And we aren’t getting those any more.)

How much are Greens as a party prepared to do the ruthlessness needed to get a foothold under FPTP, then turn it into a platform? Pick (say) five seats where they have a chance and work them to death, then ten, then twenty... the sort of laserlike Focus that the various incarnations of the yellow team have managed for decades? Have they access to the resources to do that?

MikeSmithson said:

Sean_F said:

That's still a pretty hefty lead in such seats, and the fact that the swing is to Labour, rather than the Lib Dems, would lessen Conservative losses.

Except that polls like this can't take into account the LD campaign effect. Remember punters gave the Tories a 95% chance of holding C&A right up to the final week. I regarded it as a 95% certain LD gain right from the outset

You made it 1/20?!!!! Wowsers

That is the biggest difference between what someone makes it, and what the market is I have ever heard of in my lifetime working in betting, incredible. The maximumest of all maximum bets - like saying something that is 10/1 should be 1/100!!!

Wouldn't the Lib Dem campaign effect be diluted in a GE compared to a one off like a by election though?

I find it pretty amazing the YouGov finds the Lib Dems down on their 2019 vote mind you, cant have that

LostPassword said:

rcs1000 said:

Sean_F said:

That's still a pretty hefty lead in such seats, and the fact that the swing is to Labour, rather than the Lib Dems, would lessen Conservative losses.

The risk to the Conservatives is that you see a repeat of 2005, and extensive tactical voting.

Sure, but that's been a risk at every election, and most of the time it doesn't happen. On the headline figures there's even more fracturing of the anti-Tory vote, with the increase in the Green Party share, which makes tactical voting harder to organise and less likely to be successful.

If the Greens were to get 5-10% of the vote at future General Elections, it would be mana from heaven for the Conservatives as the left of center vote would be split three ways in England (and four in Scotland and Wales).

But history suggests that voters get better at tactical voting, the longer a party remains in power. I suspect that will happen this time around too - not that important in 2024, but a big deal in 2028.

Leon said:

HYUFD said:

Leon said:

The Olympics needs a dramatic new sport

I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)

It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.

it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.

So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?

Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.

MesoAmerican cultures were ridiculously grisly, but that also makes them endlessly fascinating, in a macabre way


Whenever you think you have reached the depths of their depravity, they have the capacity to surprise on the downside. The Moche Culture of north Peru (circa 8th century AD) is particularly good at this. OMFG. They worshipped a tarantula God who demanded they sacrifice their own relatives, they gave the victims special drugs so the blood ran extra slow and the sacrifice took hours. During this process, the family would REDACTED REDACTED

Meanwhile the Aztecs could sacrifice thousands of people in a single day in their capital, Tenochtitlan

Here's a Guardian article denouncing the evil Spanish for destroying this marvellous culture, in particular it complains about

"massacres of some of our earliest thinkers such as the Aztec"

SOME OF OUR EARLIEST THINKERS



https://www.theguardian.com/education/commentisfree/2015/mar/23/philosophy-white-men-university-courses

Plus most of them died from disease brought by the Spanish, not mass killing as they practiced themselves

pigeon said:

Leon said:

Prior thread very interesting (perhaps not the stuff about roads)

I too have made insane predictions way out of my area of competence - I know this might not come as a shock, but it was a bit of an epiphany for me, just this morning

eg Yesterday I confidently predicted that Team GB would do quite badly compared to reasonable expectations. I said we would finish behind Oz, Russia and maybe another European country. I said we might finish around 9th in the medal table, and get around 40-45 medals

This morning I considered my prediction, and I laughed at my own stupidity

Where was I getting my info with which to make these precise calls? Out of my ass, basically. It is all a hunch, an intimation. In fact it's not even a hunch, it's more like a spasm in reaction to early disappointments. There are people out there - on this site - who know far more about these Games, right down to individual athletes in more obscure sports, and their various chances. Their prophesies are 100 times more valuable than mine.

If my "prediction" turns out to be anywhere near correct it will be nearly pure luck and almost zero judgement.

My only defence is that I never bet on these hunches. I only ever bet after proper consideration and research. Which is probably why I bet very rarely

Very wise. I know relatively little about what's going on; however...

*The British team is currently sat on 28 medals
*Boxing has produced a bronze, three more semi-finalists who now can't do any worse than bronze, and three more quarter-finalists
*Sailing has also produced a bronze and British crews are competitive in six of the eight events that have yet to complete (two in first place, three in second and one in fourth the last time I looked)
*The three-day eventers are doing well at the moment
*The men's golfers are competitive and the women's haven't started yet
*The individual apparatus finals in gymnastics haven't happened yet
*Flatwater canoeing hasn't started yet (and I've not the foggiest whether there are any competitive Brits going in that event, but I'm pretty sure there were medallists last time)
*The whole athletics programme has only just got started (and I know it doesn't look promising from the British POV, but there are a *lot* of events and the team might yet get something out of it)
*AND track cycling has yet to get underway

In medal table terms I rate it as a competition for 5th with Australia, and 50 medals looks achievable. That'd be broadly comparable with Beijing, and a credible overall achievement IMHO.

I solemnly promise that if my prediction turns out accurate, I will somehow "forget" I said any of this, and I will confidently praise my own remarkable foresight. I give you my word on that

IanB2 said:

Carnyx said:

Cyclefree said:

IanB2 said:

turbotubbs said:

IanB2 said:

DougSeal said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic

Never send in a computer to do a job a dog can do.

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2021/bio-detection-dogs-identify-covid-19-94-accuracy

A computer that could smell someone ten miles away and identify which Olympic sized swimming pool has a drop of blood in it would be a remarkable machine. Dogs’ smell is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times better than ours and it occupies between 30-40% of their brain capacity.

And what does my dog do with this power? Spends as much time as possible sniffing where other dogs have done a wee...

We did an introduction to scent training last weekend, and there is some more useful stuff you can do with your dog if you give it some time. For example it is relatively easy to train your dog to find stuff like your car keys, and the trainer’s dog is apparently well known for tracking down missing cats near where they live.

Right. I know what I'm going to be doing this weekend - training the dog to find my reading glasses.

What breed, might I inquire? Always interesting to see what breeds people pick ...

Mine is a Pumi and we were at a Hungarian dog breed sports event. But most dog breeds can be trained to do scent training (objectively herding breeds should be behind many of the others) and there is some good stuff on YouTube if you go hunting for it. Start with cloves and work toward more useful scents.

How interesting - although I've seen several Vizslas and a friend has one, I've never heard of the Pumi. Sounds rather like a border collie in some ways - intelligence but also need to keep busy.

justin124 said:

HYUFD said:

Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.

The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall

Why would Labour voters be inclined to vote tactically on the basis of a single election result in 2019 which is likely to have been an aberration due to the salience of particular issues and local factors at the time? Very difficult not to see Labour as the main challenger in seats such as Finchley 7 Wood Green and Cities of London & Westminster next time. Wimbledon is also far from clear , given that the seat was Labour-held 1997 - 2005.

There are big constituency changes in London, which muddy the picture further.

HYUFD said:

Leon said:

HYUFD said:

Leon said:

The Olympics needs a dramatic new sport

I reckon it is time to reintroduce pok-ta-pok: the Mesomaerican ball game (of the Maya, Aztecs, etc)

It is simple but quite compelling. Two teams of maybe four players each compete on a hard stone ball-court, not unlike a real tennis court. With bats, arms and hips they propel a large, firm rubber ball at each other and also at a stone hoop placed high to the side. Victory is achieved via points, or by slotting the ball through the hoop.

it's not a game for the faint hearted, however. For example, the ball is genuinely hard, and can cause severe bruising, internal injuries - even death in extreme cases. Also, at the end of the game the entire losing team is ritually sacrificed by decapitation, and after that they also sacrifice and dismember the entire winning team. And then the next teams play, for a while, with the severed heads and hands.

So it might not be quite in tune with the Woke agenda in British Olympics, but on the other hand the inquest into TeamGB's performance would be rendered largely pointless, thus saving money?

Maybe Cortes was not too bad after all.

MesoAmerican cultures were ridiculously grisly, but that also makes them endlessly fascinating, in a macabre way


Whenever you think you have reached the depths of their depravity, they have the capacity to surprise on the downside. The Moche Culture of north Peru (circa 8th century AD) is particularly good at this. OMFG. They worshipped a tarantula God who demanded they sacrifice their own relatives, they gave the victims special drugs so the blood ran extra slow and the sacrifice took hours. During this process, the family would REDACTED REDACTED

Meanwhile the Aztecs could sacrifice thousands of people in a single day in their capital, Tenochtitlan

Here's a Guardian article denouncing the evil Spanish for destroying this marvellous culture, in particular it complains about

"massacres of some of our earliest thinkers such as the Aztec"

SOME OF OUR EARLIEST THINKERS



https://www.theguardian.com/education/commentisfree/2015/mar/23/philosophy-white-men-university-courses

Plus most of them died from disease brought by the Spanish, not mass killing as they practiced themselves

It's a genuine moral puzzle. Did these civilisations deserve to survive?

In particular, the Aztecs were basically the Nazis of MesoAmerica. Extremely aggressive, militaristic, ethnocentric, bloodthirsty, autocratic at the top and servile at the bottom, and absolutely obsessed with death and blood. They were so nasty even the other gruesome, human-sacrificing Mexican cultures hated them (which is one reason the Aztec Empire fell so easily to Cortez, he got the Aztecs' local enemies on side)

And yet a unique and remarkable civilisation - for all its hideous flaws - was totally obliterated, and much was lost

Was this ultimately good, or bad? I can never quite decide.

justin124 said:

HYUFD said:

Fortunately for the Tories there are only 2 seats in the top 100 Labour target seats that are Tory held and in the South East or East and which voted Remain ie Wycombe and Reading West. So a 6% swing to Labour in the South and East in Tory held Remain seats is not a big concern for the blues, though it would be for Steve Baker in Wycombe.

The vast majority of Tory held Remain seats in the South East have the LDs as the main challengers but there is just a 1% swing to the LDs on this poll from the Tories, so it would need major Labour tactical voting for the Tories to be concerned at the seats going yellow and even then they should narrowly hold onto a majority if they hold the Redwall

Why would Labour voters be inclined to vote tactically on the basis of a single election result in 2019 which is likely to have been an aberration due to the salience of particular issues and local factors at the time? Very difficult not to see Labour as the main challenger in seats such as Finchley 7 Wood Green and Cities of London & Westminster next time. Wimbledon is also far from clear , given that the seat was Labour-held 1997 - 2005.

Given there is near zero chance of a Labour majority in 2023/24 without regaining most of Scotland from the SNP and huge gains in the Red Wall, it makes little difference.

Whether a Labour or LD defeats a Tory in London and the South they would still make Starmer PM in a hung parliament

The other point to consider is that, if we assume the next election takes place on new boundaries this will also make tactical voting harder to organise. The 2005 GE cited was the last of a series of elections on those boundaries in England & Wales (although new boundaries in Scotland).

Another and contrary conclusion from the poll is that overall the Tories are doing reasonably well at spreading the centre left vote between three parties in the SE and E of England while concentrating the centre right vote on themselves. Whatever happens they are likely to lose some seats, the issue being whether they lose many, and if they gain a few in return. There is not the data here for a massive Tory wobble.

I suspect the whole 'graduate' thing is about certain sorts of graduates clustering in certain sorts of seats. Highly educated Arundel and South Downs looks safe for now. The question to ask is: Why? If all the educated posh are voting centre left?