"A lot" of the data wasn't sourced from Open Elections. Derek's claim is not true. As far as I know one user used Open Elections data for a portion of their total contributions (and attributed it in their PR).
"Many" of the contributors (myself included) used primary sources for their data.
The one contributor that used OE data cited it and it was a small portion of their overall contributions.
New York allows candidates to be the nominees even if the candidates aren't in that party. So you had Joe Biden as the nominee for the Democratic Party and then Joe Biden also listed as the nominee for the Working Families party.
Just weirdness like that abounds in the data in almost every state.
In addition a lot of the reporting for precincts was county level, so states wouldn't have a csv that contained all precinct level voting data so you have to go to each county to get that data. Some states have a lot of counties. PA for example has 67 and each county publishes data in a different format with different values.
It's tedious and honestly impossible to automate (at least in the case of PA).
> So you had Joe Biden as the nominee for the Democratic Party and then Joe Biden also listed as the nominee for the Working Families party.
I’m confused how this works. The candidate themselves doesn’t have to claim they are from a particular party to be listed as such? That seems wrong or misleading but what is the point? Is it some kind of hack to garner enough votes for a party to trigger some kind of funding?
Parties don't get votes (at least in most elections), the candidates do. The candidates can be members of a party and may be endorsed by them. in NY it sounds like a party can endorse a non-member. This doesn't sound fundamentally wrong or misleading to me.
Hospital data bounty is the only one they have running right now but that one is still early so there's lots left to do and plenty of data left to source.
They are launching another bounty later this week for college course data.
The maintainer will review a PR and either accept the PR or ask you to modify it to better fit their requirements or reject it.
For example one of their requirements were no 0 vote rows. So that's a pretty simple SQL query on the database and can be checked before the maintainer does a merge.
All data was required to be sourced. I got most of my data from state and county websites so those links were included with the comments in the PR.
In addition I was in communication with the team via their discord so they would ask for changes to PRs from there also.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. So for the latest one where they have a bounty for assembling the largest healthcare dataset -- how do they determine who gets what portion of the bounty? It's not just winner takes all right?
This data looks cool too, I'll have a look in the Discord...
It's divided based upon total additions to the final data set I believe. They have github repo for their bounty board that shows that calculation I think.
I think the final calculation is based on the percent you've added to the final dataset.
Do they require you to "show your work" or somehow demonstrate that your methodology is sound? Is there any requirement that it be repeatable (e.g. let's say they find a minor issue in data you sourced. If you were required to provide code that does the work, rather than just the data, it could be fixed and re-run).
I'm kind of fascinated by the process, but I am having a hard time figuring out how this can really work. It can't really be as simple as paying people to shove arbitrary data of unknown value in their dbs, can it?
Thoughts about Epiphenominal explanations of the mind?
I'm a former philosophy student that had general interests Philo of Mind and that always stuck out to me as the most reasonable explanation for consciousness.
As a former psychology student (lol) I have to point out that an epiphenominal mind is perhaps the least parsimonious thing imaginable. It's also been effectively disproven since the cognitive revolution at least. Since we can understand ideas, take in / generate perceptions, and act in meaningful ways based on what we've understood - some kind of raw behavioural conditioning is not a valid explanation for our behavior. Nor the behavior of most higher animals.
Can you elaborate on why you think epiphenominalism is the most reasonable explanation for consciousness?
My point of confusion with the epiphenominal view point is if mental states aren't at all causal, why should they exist at all? It seems like a clever way of compromising on the ontological question ("your mind is _kind of_ real"), but if mental states can't _do_ anything, then why should physical life develop them?
The comparison I've always liked is the "steam whistle set off by a locomotive". The steam whistle has no causal efficacy on the locomotive but is a waste byproduct of a steam engine.
Consciousness shouldn't have any causal effect on physical processes (assuming a strictly materialist framework), if it's explained as a byproduct of functioning physical processes it tends to deal with the issues 'consciousness' has that are in inherently in conflict with strict materialism.
I'm still confused. The steam whistle is built intentionally, alongside the locomotive, and together the train serves a clear, externally imposed purpose. The whistle doesn't impact the function on the engine, but a train with a whistle was decided to be a better train, because it does casually interact with the train's environment.
I get the ontological claim that mental states are real but cannot cause effects on physical states. But it seems unsatisfactory to claim that these rich, real but non causal states just happen to arise, without purpose, in only some physical systems, without further explanation.
As someone who likes sites like reddit for the content sharing but hates the time sink the comments section becomes I love Pocket for delivering me highish quality articles and news that I don't have to worry about gettin sucked into some flame war over.
Just very generally speaking, a friend of mine works in a nursing home and is part of a nursing union. They work in PA where we had the same kinds of orders.
Generally their working conditions have been safer than I've read about in other homes and hospitals. They did not allow staff to interact with patients unmasked, as opposed to non-union work environments that required nurses to work unmasked or with insufficient PPE (often times forced to work with covid positive or suspected positive patients)
They established isolation units for covid suspected patients and provided proper PPE for those units (as opposed to other nursing homes that did not do this and allowed covid suspected cases to interact with other patients). Additionally the union worked independently to attempt to acquire PPE for their union members above what nursing homes/hospitals provided.
While that's only one example of a union environment my impression is that these things were not the norm during the start of the pandemic and existed primarily in union nursing environments.
All that said it wouldn't surprise me at all if the effect found in the study was caused by having a union.
This is way more interesting because (if true at scale) it's an example of a union working to protect their members in real, practical, day to day ways.
> union working to protect their members in real, practical, day to day ways.
Unions are normally really good at this.
One of the standard responses to managers asking for something stupid in a steel mill was "Get the book". "The book" defined the procedures, equipment, and training required for most tasks. This is fairly normal for most union shops.
It's a lot easier to tell a manager to pound sand when he asks you to do something stupid when you know the union will back you up.
Collective wage and benefit bargaining tends to be the main focus of many unions. I'd say in the instance of this particular Nurses Union the union also advocated well and often for the safety of their nurses. So yes they do ensure worker safety but I don't think it's thought of as much as collective bargaining.
Worker deaths have halved since workplace safety came into play in 1970, this wouldn't have been enacted if left up to companies as it is much cheaper to find an uninjured worker than it is to implement safe working conditions (I'm generalising obviously but I think it holds). It would have been heavy collective bargaining from unions that made this happen.
Also thank you for sharing the original story it was a really interesting anecdote.
I mean... I'm not sure why that would be surprising? That's been a thing since the dawn of unions; for early industrial unions it would have been one of the biggest concerns.
I considered upgrading but it’s hard to care to cause my M1 is just so good for what I need it for.