SU Elections: President 2013

Hey there!

As someone who hasn't been a U of A undergrad for a while, there's really no reason you should actually be interested in what I have to say about the SU race for president. And yet here you are. 

Some of what I have to say here will be repeated in The Gateway's election dissection, but since I did that I've had more time to go over the platforms. And here is what I think:

Anthony Goertz
I fundamentally do not understand what Anthony is trying to do here. In a letter to The Gateway, he mentioned that he is not taking the campaign seriously, and that he is instead running because "the system is allowing [him] to make posters" he doesn't have to pay for. What? I guess he's protesting the fact that any ol' student can run for an election and print posters (the horror....) by wasting students' money printing posters (that haven't been plastered all over campus as far as I can tell).


Saadiq Sumar
I've known Saadiq for about two years now, though I'd known of him for a bit longer than that. He took up the glorious position of Engineering Students' Councillor after I graduated (tiny size 7.5 shoes to fill, there), and after a year of that became the VP Student Life for 2012-2013. Before that his bio says he was involved extensively with Lister.

His website is honestly a bit rough. I know that shouldn't be a focal point, but it contains two pages - one of which is a platform that is long enough that the major points aren't on the first screen you see. His platform itself is organized under three categories:

Protecting Students
His first point here is "accessible and affordable education" which is such a cliche it's not even worth really mentioning. If his best approach to this is showing members of the board the plight of the student, I wouldn't be surprised at all if he doesn't get any further than any predecessor. He also mentions reducing rent increases, which he then admits is something he's already doing. It's also something he has to do under policy. Fighting the mandatory meal plan seems like a good idea, but it's hard to support a mandatory PAW center fee and a mandatory U-Pass, and oppose something else that's mandatory when the reasons for its mandatoriness (ok, maybe that's not a real word) are fundamentally the same.

And lastly, as a member of an executive that has a) liberally used extensive in camera debates on motions that are supposed to protect students, and b) proposed bylaw changes that restricted advocacy efforts of non-Council elected student representatives, I have to question where this sudden urge for student representative empowerment comes from.

Health Initiatives
Here's some more tangible promises. For instance, expanding the campus health week. That's a good idea. I can get behind that. Programming options during reading week is also completely reasonable. Increasing the number of pet therapy days is potentially just a pretty flashy promise, but it's not without its merits (But llamas? Really?), and can probably be fairly easily achieved. Finally renewing the health and dental plan seems is great too.

Though none of these are perhaps revolutionary, they're all solid ideas, they are likely to have some tangible benefits, and it's likely that they can all be accomplished through a term.

Sustainability
I sort of don't understand his first point, which is about the SUB food court waste audit. The bins in the food court are absolutely beautifully labeled as it is, so I imagine there would be a large sense of diminishing returns in actively having volunteers out there educating people. Otherwise, sifting through the trash sounds like a rotten idea (pun). If there's money to be saved then I suppose it's not a bad idea, but simply auditing something just to get a report doesn't seem like the most efficient way to increase sustainability.

The other two points, gender neutral washrooms and a sexual minority and gender diversity service, seem like things that are so perfectly suited to the planned SUB basement renovation that I wonder why they're not already part of the renovation plans. Seriously - why propose demolishing and reconstructing existing washrooms when you could have incorporated them into the renovations you've been a part of planning for the last year? This is literally the perfect opportunity to arrange for the most accessible washrooms the world has ever seen, and without the constraints of existing walls you could easily arrange them in a format that everybody is comfortable with. While we're at it, if you want to add a new service, toss that in the mix for reno plans too.

Horse With a Gun
Horse With a Gun is the funniest joke campaign since Soundwave.

Petros Kusmu
This is now the fourth year I've known Petros. Our friendship could have a Bachelor's degree by now, if only it had applied itself and not skipped all those Sociology classes. In the time I've known him he's done three tours of Students' Council, and most recently this year was the VP External for the SU.

If I was a bit harsh on Saadiq's website, then I have to tear Petros's to bits. It's a facebook page. It's not only just a facebook page, but it's a facebook page with last year's platform still on it. It's a facebook page where, whenever he updates a status or responds to a comment, his platform sinks lower and lower down the page and becomes harder and harder to find.

Once you finally find his platform, it's in the form of a gigantic pdf. It is also broadly organized under three general categories:

Ensuring Stability
Right off the bat Petros mentions that he wants to work with the SU General Manager. Thank goodness - it would be really awkward otherwise. Joking aside, he wants to have open and constant communication with stakeholders during the SUB renovation project. Fascinatingly enough, he mentions that the renovations are a good time for gender neutral washrooms and a sexual minority center. This leads me to the inescapable conclusion that this is likely to happen anyway and isn't really much of a promise for either candidate...

Then he mentions continuing to assist advocacy efforts of residence students. And then he mentions continuing to advocate against MNIFs. I guess not deviating from current advocacy efforts is lovely, but making a campaign promise out of continuing to do the same is really not all that clever. Really this should be assumed until he proposes something new - otherwise any candidate could just list their job description as a platform and have a massive one.

Exploring New Ideas
Petros wants to conduct a feasibility study on creating a service that would assist students in entrepreneurial pursuits. Feasibility studies unfortunately sound like a bit of a cop-out - you write a report, and regardless of if anything comes of it you can still count it as a victory. Also, doesn't the U of A already do something like this?

Similarly, "re-evaluating ways to better support student groups" falls under a similar category of possible cop-out, and continuing to have CASA advocate for anything is, by definition, not a new idea.

Ignoring the language of 'beginning a dialogue', exploring the idea of block courses is at least a new and tangible promise. It could be interesting to see where this goes - having taken a one-week course over the summer at the U of A before (oh wait, that sometimes already happens?), I can see the value in offering new education options to students. This would need to be a long-term project, but it will be cool to see if anything comes out of it. Also, it's something different between Petros and Saadiq, which is nice to see.

Improving the Culture within the Students' Union
"Seeking feedback from past and current Councillors on ways to improve Students' Council." Though Petros has admittedly made attempts while a councillor to change Students' Council (two particular student/councillor groups come to mind, for instance), it seems a bit weird that after 5 years he's still promising to fix council.

Expanding SUBtv and Infolink to Augustana and Campus Saint-Jean is a decent idea though. I'd be really interested in seeing where that goes.

Fundamentally my major problem with Petros's platform, though, is that the majority of his promises involve starting a consultation on something or continuing to act in a way the SU already does. While these are likely the best way of going about anything as SU president, the language comes across as so watered-down that it's tough to tell how much is actually new and creative.


So
What do I think will happen? I had that model thing from before, but it's still waiting for a few election campaign parameters (the most important being spending patterns in the campaign budget). I'll come back at you with a prediction when those get released!

Also, sorry if this comes across as mostly cynical. I have a great deal of respect for both significant candidates (and a healthy respect for Horse), and was honestly hoping for more creative and original platforms. They both have a few concrete promises in there, though, so I hope this was at least moderately helpful. Also, 1,562 words? Sorry about that.

What the candidates really think

Now that the SU elections have officially kicked off, candidates are running around campus trying to secure votes. One of the earliest features available to potential voters is the Candidate Bios page on the SU website.

Instead of telling you what I think of the bios just yet, I'd like you to take a look at these pretty word clouds I made of the bios.

The first one is just for the presidential candidates:

(click to zoom in)

And the second one is for all candidates:

(click to zoom in)

So what do the candidates care about? STUDENTS. Wow do they ever. They also seem to like "campus", "university", and "year" a lot.

What do candidates seem to forget about? Voting. On the first cloud you can barely see it between the S and T of 'Students', and on the second one it's hiding on the far right. Seeing as the language used when soliciting votes can apparently significantly effect the outcome, this is maybe a bit of a missed opportunity for our candidates here.

Come back for more election stuff in the near future!

The Economics of Roll Up the Rim to Win

Roll up the Rim is a great Canadian tradition. Once a year Canadians flock to Tim Horton's to buy their coffees in the hopes of winning something wonderful.

According to this year's statistics, just by buying a cup of coffee at Tim Horton's you could win one of:

• 40 2013 Toyota RAV4 Vehicles
• 100 $5,000 MasterCard Prepaid Cards
• 1,000 Napoleon Gourmet Grills
• 25,000 $100 Tim Cards
• 10,873,327 Donuts, or
• 32,619,980 Coffees

This is out of a total of 260,959,840 printed RUTR cups, making the odds of you winning something just slightly higher than 1/6.

Looking at the numbers, you have about a 1/8 chance of winning a coffee on any given cup you buy (ignoring regional variation). With these odds, you would need to buy 6 cups of coffee before expecting a greater than 50% chance of winning one. Assuming, then, that you got the largest size coffee you could as your freebie, and the smallest sizes possible for each attempt, this whole adventure would cost you a net $2.08. Six cups of coffee would gain you an expected $4.52 in winnings (including the chance of donuts and Barbecues, etc.), but would cost $6.60. Fascinatingly, as the largest coffee costs $3.89*, you may actually end up ahead after trying this.

What if your goal was to win a donut? You would expect to buy 17 cups of coffee before having a 50% chance of getting one of those. During this adventure you'd expect to win at least 2 coffees, and your net cost to try this would be $8.04.

Let's ramp it up. How many coffees would you need to buy to get a $100 Tim's Card? 7235. Oof. Not impossible, but a team effort would be required - that's 107 cups of coffee per day of the contest. You'd expect to win about 900 coffees and 300 donuts, but including winnings this would cost a net $3,646.27.

I like Barbecues. I don't think I'd like them enough to buy 180,883 cups of coffee just for the chance to win one, though. Sure, I'd likely get 17 of the Tim's Cards, 22,600 free coffees, and 7,500 donuts, but at a cost of $91,597.23 I think I'd rather just buy one...

It would take 1,808,833 cups of coffee before you'd have more than a 50% chance of winning one of those elusive $5000 MasterCards. In that time you'd likely win 7 barbecues that you could sell for $5,000. I really don't know why you'd bother past that... Anyway, this would lose you $917,747.41.

And what if you really like cars? You'd have to buy at least 5,522,083 coffees to have a reasonable chance at one of those Toyotas. This process would get you 2 MasterCards, 21 Barbecues, 530 Tim's Cards, 690,260 free coffees, and 230,100 donuts, but would cost you $2,801,508.19. For that price, you could just buy 85 of the cars yourself.

More importantly, this would involve you purchasing about 1.3 million liters of coffee over two months. If you think that sounds like a lot, just remember that's only about as much as the amount of oil spilled in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill every three hours.

So is Roll up the Rim worth it? Sure. If you already like Timmy's coffee, then go for it. If you're in it for the prizes, though, you may want to re-think things...

*Values for coffee and donuts based on ranges given in Tim Horton's website, and may not reflect prices at your local store. If you try anything mentioned above and it's more/less expensive than I say, don't blame me*

Female Candidates (Part 1)

There has recently been a lot of discussion recently regarding females being under-represented in SU elections on campus.

Quite a lot. All over the place. Honestly. Well, ok, mostly at the Wanderer and all over Facebook.

Frankly, yes, this is an issue. While there are no established barriers to female candidates, we cannot deny that there simply aren't any female candidates this year, and I would further venture that we can't deny that this is a bad thing - this really ought to be addressed.

Unfortunately, everyone seems to have wildly differing opinions as to why this phenomenon is occurring. While y'all can go debate fancy things like sociology, I'm thinking of (over the next little while) taking a look at it from a statistical point of view. Who knows - perhaps this could be similar to the Berkeley Sex Bias case I wrote about earlier, and the problems are more fundamental and basic. Who knows indeed...

In the meantime, here's a fancy thing I learned how to make after looking around on the internet. Enjoy! The size of each block is the size of the faculty, and the colour represents the faculty fraction that is female (with green meaning overwhelmingly female, and red being overwhelmingly male).

EDIT: Source

Voting Behaviour

Hey bloglodytes,

I realize it's been a month since my last post, and I apologize profusely. Not too much, though, since I can check the stats and you have not, by-and-large, been impatiently checking for regular updates. Shame.

On a related note, привіт to the randomly high number of readers from Ukraine!

This is just a short post discussing some of the preliminary results of an analysis I've been interested in doing for a while now. When it comes to SU voting on campus, people often talk about the "Lister vote" or the "Greek vote" as though they're massive and important voting blocks that need to be either wrestled with or courted. (Let me be clear here - when I say "people" talk about it, I really mean about six people, including me, who have nothing better to do and go out for beers altogether too infrequently)

If it turns out that there is any sort of consistency within these voting groups, that would certainly be cool to know as a potential candidate. Unfortunately, the only way to find this out would to look at anonymized versions of full ballots, and compare voting trends within a ballot. For instance, if a significant number of voters clump Lister or Greek candidates together on a ballot, it would be very easy to identify a trend.

Unfortunately the CRO is reluctant to share this sort of information (cough cough), so the closest we can come to this sort of analysis is by attempting to recreate ballots based on the results read-out that's provided following the elections. This is annoying.

With all that being said, the initial (VERY PRELIMINARY) results from last year's election suggest two cool findings about trends within voting.

The first one isn't really that surprising: voters who vote None of the Above as their first choice have virtually random subsequent vote selection. Any given ballot that ranked NotA first and a candidate second was evenly split between all remaining candidates (within 4%). When comparing these subsequent votes to the distribution of first round votes, they aren't even close.

The second one truly only comes from one datapoint, so I'm hesitant to say anything firm on it quite yet. However, an analysis of the Presidential race shows that voters who ranked Farid (Greek) higher than both Colten (Greek) and Adi (not so Greek) were more likely to vote for Adi than voters choosing their first round picks.

Don't get me wrong, in both cases voters choosing only between Colten and Adi preferred Colten by a ratio of about 3:2, however instead of seeing lots of Farid voters subsequently go on to prefer a fellow Greek (The "Greek Hypothesis"), Colten actually got 7% less of the vote share than when looking at first-round votes.

So that's cool.

The Downsides to Hockey Betting

Hey, have you ever "registered or recorded bets or [sold] a pool"? Or have you ever disseminated any information likely to "be of use in gambling, book-making, pool-selling or betting on a horse-race, fight, game or sport"?

If you have, welcome to the dark side of Canada's criminal underworld.

Yum!

Turns out that, under Section 202 of the Criminal Code of Canada, those things are illegal. I'm not an expert by any means, but it kinda sounds like having any sort of unregistered group of people who bet on things, and who discuss information pertinent to their outcome, is illegal. Welcome to two years in jail!

Looking deeper into the Criminal Code, there's another fun point that even if you're betting with a legitimate lottery corporation (like, say, SportSelect), you cannot bet on the outcome of a single game (Section 207 (4) (b)). This was recently debated in the House of Commons where they tried to scrap the rule, but apparently the Senate might be fighting back on this one for a change.

These rules force legitimate lotteries and betting houses to combine bets. SportSelect, for instance, specifies that gamblers have to bet on a combination of between 3 and 6 games, where they will only win if they get all of their predictions correct.

This has a severely negative effect on the gamblers, because even if they are perfectly correct about the probabilities of an event happening, it will happen so much less frequently that they may not be able to afford to keep playing.

For example, let's take a look at the odds that SportSelect is offering for this weekend's hockey games. There are 13 games going on tomorrow, representing the vast majority of teams in the league. Taking a look at these games shows that the average payout for a team to win away is 2.28, win at home is 1.83, and for the games to go to a shoot-out is 5.73. In fact, 11 out of the 13 games were predicted to be won by the home team (but that's not important right now).

Since these are the first games of the season, it's likely that these odds are pretty much more or less pure speculation - lots of these teams haven't even played together yet. That makes it not inappropriate to compare the odds to, say, an average of historical games, and may represent an 'average' set of games.

Which I did.

Last year, which was a regular season, had 1,230 games played over the season. Of these, 24.4% went into overtime, and 60.3% of those went to a shoot out - meaning in total 14.7% of games went to shoot out. Of the rest, an impressive 57.7% were won by the home team (oh ok that previous thing now does look important...). Similarly, the previous year had 12.1% shoot out games, and 53.7% of the rest were won at home.

So let's say on average any given game has a 13.4% chance of going to shoot out, a 48.2% chance of getting won by the home team outright, and a 38.4% chance of going to the away team. If we pretend that those SportSelect odds represent a more or less 'average' set of games, we can compare them like this:

Outcome	Odds	Payout	Expected Result
Home Win	0.4817	1.8277	-12.0%
Away Win	0.3841	2.2769	-12.5%
Shoot Out	0.1341	5.7308	-23.1%

So there you go - if you knew nothing else about a game other than long term trends, you'd expect to lose between 12 and 23% of your money on any given bet. That would put the SportSelect odds somewhere between a casino game and a lottery in terms of expected money lost.

But wait, it gets worse. Watch what happens when you have to bet on at least three games:

Outcome	Odds	Payout	Expected Result
3 Home Wins	0.1118	6.1053	-31.8%
3 Away Wins	0.0567	11.804	-33.1%
3 Shoot Outs	0.0024	188.21	-54.6%

Oh dear.

So basically, the way it's set up now dooms you to failure. What makes it even worse is that, even if you could overcome the 30-50% penalty by knowing more about the system than a historical average analysis, you'd still only win on maybe about one set of bets out of every eight or so. Even if you did have a good advantage, it would likely take a really long time to ever see any real profits off of it.

Oh well. Enjoy the hockey, I guess.

When Life Gives you Weather Stats...

...make Statsonade!

So here's my dilemma. I have this 'weblog', and it's really cool when people read it. (Not quite as cool as before, because apparently somebody spam-clicked my ads and now I no longer get money. On the other hand - no ads!) By far the most popular posts are when I talk about weather stuff or SU stuff, and as there are no present SU elections to write about and I've been doing weather posts at the end of each season, I may have nothing good to offer for this week.

Instead, I'm going to make statsonade from the stats that life tossed me. Yum!

In my last post, I presented the weather forecast comparison I had for six weather stations in Edmonton during autumn. It was pretty fun, and only one of the six forecasters outright told me I was wrong.

One of the accuracy measures I used in that analysis was the percentage of time that a forecaster was within three degrees of the true high temperature. An alternative way of presenting these results would be to just outright plot the predicted vs. actual temperature results for each station. Maybe it would look something like this:

There are some wicked fun facts from these graphs. In all of them, the red line is perfection, where what you predict is exactly what you end up with. The data was only presented for autumn, and stations are all quite close to perfect, as well as close to each other - the R-squared values range from 0.900 to 0.926. In general it appears as though most of the stations over-predict the temperature when it gets to the higher range

That's all well and good, but what if we wanted to take this a step further? Is there some combination of  stations that gets you better than any individual station? That would be like a weather model or something.

It turns out that you can actually get a marginally better prediction by using a weighted average of the stations. Consider the following:

T = 0.085TAD + 0.301EC + 0.148GB + 0.155WN + 0.483WC - 0.172CTV

After all that work, our R-squared value is a whopping 0.944. Though this method of aggregating weather forecasts is apparently a minor improvement, it's likely not worth it in terms of predicting the weather.

A fun result of the regression suggests that it would be easier to just take a weighted average of Environment Canada and Weather Channel's predictions, as they make up the majority of the formula. What's really strange, though, is that the CTV predictions get factored in as a negative value. CTV itself has a completely respectable correlation between predicted and real temperatures, but for some reason subtracting a weighted version of their numbers improves the overall prediction (when using them and at least two of any other weather station). Mysterious...