The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #167690   Message #4051952
Posted By: DMcG
12-May-20 - 05:46 AM
Thread Name: BS: UK thread, Politics and political
Subject: RE: BS: UK thread, Politics and political
I think there is a problem with the 'blue clicky' mechanism that it cannot cope with very long links; as in Iains example it truncates the link part way through and you get "page not found". Then your reader is left with searching through the site to see if they can find what you meant ... which is what I did.

This was a survey of 1300 or so Conservative party members. Hardly an unbiased sample, as Iains acknowledged. It is not even demonstrably representative of regular party voters, never mind of those who voted Conservative in the last election. So the value of the survey is at best questionable.

There is a lot of talk about driving the decisions to slacken off lockdown based on the R_value. I must admit to a nervousness about the way this is being bandied around.   There is not really any such thing. There is a single R value that is fed into fairly primitive models, but I would hope the actual models are more refined than that and recognise that you need a granular approach. Just thinking about where I live the R-value (for Southampton) is not the same as the R-value (for Hampshire), or the R-value (for South East England) or the R value (for England) or the R-value (for the UK). The R-value for Bude is not the same as for Southampton. The R value for England is not the same as Wales or Scotland.   The R-value for care homes is not the same as for hospitals, or for the general population. Moreover, the closer you are to 1, the more these distinctions matter.