Hi everyone, Sean with jaspyscasebrakes.com here doing 2021 Bowman Sapphire 5 box break. Pick your team number 12 where we're giving away a sealed box of Bowman Sapphire as well. How to be entered to win the box. Buy two or more teams and the break get entered to win. No max entries. Two teams. One entry. Four teams. Two entries. Six teams. Three entries. Etc. If you only buy one team you'll not be entered but good luck with that team. And top name wins the sealed box. All cards shipped in the break itself. Here is our list of customers and respective teams from Jernigan Dixon and the Diamondbacks down to Ryan Herald and the Washington Nationals. Ryan Herald their last spot mojo with the Red Sox as well. And here is that list. We'll do the, we'll check the spots, the spot list at the end and do the randomizer for the box giveaway. This is the box we're going to give away. So we're going to set that to the side and here are the five boxes we're going to break. Ryan sold standing ovation for Nolan Aronato at the, in Colorado for his first game back. Glad he got the recognition he deserved. What was I doing before Jaspis? I was in sales Rex. Right before this going into the pandemic I was actually doing business to business sales for business class internet. Very high end business class internet. And I sold to a multi-tenant unit buildings. Well, yeah, that's it, Mumford and the Sons. So yeah, I would go to companies, especially like any banking related trading, anything like that. Companies that were located in multi-tenant unit buildings and stuff. And I would pretty much talk to them about their service, figure out who they were using, what they were doing, if latency was issues or anything like that, if they had downtime or whatever else. I did not work for Bel Air, no, I did not. This was a private company. So we've got two hits in here, I do. This was, yeah, this was a small, much smaller company. Oh, that's a good way to start. Robert Franco, two out of 20, purple for the Reyes and Marcel Garcia, Maximo Acosta for the Rangers and Darren Porter. You did? Woo, congrats, dude. I'm super excited for that. We'll have to have a celebratory cocktail. Brady and Carnacielan, 61 out of 99 for the Marlins. That is Anthony Lu, Robert Hassel for the Padres and Marc Vissette, Blaze Jordan Red Sox, there you go, Last Spot Mojo, Ryan Harold, Aaron Sabato for the Twins as well, Daniel Caniglia. So Stanford, it was actually, it was dish to dish. There was no, pretty much there was no wires as far as, it was a quicker transfer rate. It had a higher guarantee as far as like lower, it had lower guaranteed downtime. Honestly, it's like, it's super interesting stuff. The technology behind it was unreal. So that's why I got on board with them. Yeah, that's a really nice one there for you, Stanford. Maximo Acosta again for the Rangers and Darren Porter and Antonio Gomez first yellow or gold to 50 for the Yankees. That is Darren Porter. I'll explain to you guys more about it in a little bit. Robert Hassel for the Padres, Marc Vissette, Mariel Batista for the Reds. That is Mark Neubauer, Blaze Jordan again for the Red Sox, Ryan Harold. I saw Jared Durand in there for you too, Last Spot Mojo. It's funny is actually I started working for them because I was a customer. Actually, I was selling to them through another company. And they totally took me out from under my company. They were like, hey, just tell us what you need. I was like, sure. You got Austin Hendrick to 50 for the Reds, Mark Neubauer, Maximo Acosta again for the Rangers, Darren Porter, Robert Hassel, Padres, Marc Vissette, and Daniel Montano for the Rockies and Matt Arnold. Blaze Jordan again for the Red Sox. That's three in three boxes for you, Ryan. Last Spot Mojo coming through. An out of five RJ Barrett and the Zion the other day. Actually, you know what, Ryan? I was here when Joe did that. I'm not going to lie. It hurt, yeah. I saw. I was here. I felt it in the plums for you, man.  Wander Franco again for the Rays, Marcel Garcia, and Mario Batista, green to 50 auto for the Reds and Mark Neubauer, and Gabriel Arias auto again for the Indians and Mark Vissette. Yeah, those randomizers are bummed. You have more Jarendra Rannan there. Aaron Sabato, wow. Blue Jays Matthew Shearer, Austin Martin to 99 autograph. There you go, buddy. That's fun. Spencer Torkelson for the Tigers, Jernigan Dixon, Adley Rushman for the Orioles, and Eric Ainge, and Austin Cox auto for the Royals, Eric Ainge. We got three autos in this box. Jefferson Espanyol auto as well for the Diamondbacks, Jernigan Dixon. What a box. You get an Austin Martin auto out of 99 and two other autos. See what else we got in here. We get a fourth auto. Robert Placen for the A's and Joe Medeiros. Can you imagine that as a personal box?  Well, there's the break. We got to give away that extra box. Yeah, that is beautiful. Centering looks really good left to right. Top to bottom also looks really good.  Congrats, Matthew. Well, that was fun. Cool. So let's pop back over here to the lists and copy the customer names from Jernigan and the Diamondbacks down to Ryan and the Nationals. That's what I do best. Let's alphabetize Anthony with one spot. Chad with one. Daniel, thanks for getting in. Darren, thanks for getting in. Darren P with one. Eric with one. Jernigan. Joe. Joseph. Kyle, thanks for getting in. Mark. Marcel, thanks for getting in. Mark. Matthew. Ryan, you get one. We're going to use your last spot, mojo spot. See if that gives you any extra. Tom, thanks for getting in. Yeah, I know. What the heck? At least you could have gotten Jeremy De La Rosa. So let's copy this list over. From Ryan, back up to Anthony. Dice roll. Name on top after two and a one three times. Good luck. Third and final time. Eric. Eric on top. Three times on the randomizer. Three times on the dice. And Eric with the extra box. There you go, man. Congrats. That was 2021 Bowman Sapphire Five Box Break Picket Team Number 12 from jaspyscasebreaks.com. I'm Sean, jaspyscasebreaks.com. Thanks for hanging out. We'll see you next time.


There are, I think, lots of implications for social scientists now in this kind of new data era in terms of the sorts of skills that you need to equip yourselves with and the increasing need to work interdisciplinarily. I mean, when I finished my PhD many, many, many years ago, the main way of approaching your career was to start out and try and publish a single authored paper, maybe using survey data or focus groups and so on. I mean, there's still a lot of mileage in doing that, but I think there are many, many more options open to people and hopefully what we'll see is some of the challenges and the opportunities that are offered now in this new context. So what is this new context? Well, there's essentially, I'm going to sort of play on my sort of longevity a bit here and contrast what the situation was when I was kind of finishing my PhD and sorts of data that were available then to what's available now. Now, I remember, one of my memories is that when I used to work on survey data, British Household Panel Survey, and at that time when I was doing my PhD, it was great that you could send off an email and someone at Essex University would send you a few weeks later a CD with the data set on it. And I remember thinking, this is amazing, you know, we can, this has opened up all these avenues, but I mean, that was only 20 years ago and now the landscape has completely changed. So we've got, of course, social media data, Twitter, Facebook, all sorts of other things that people are now using, both as we'll see in those sessions, both as ways of obtaining data that might shed light on kind of conventional questions that social scientists were interested in, you know, what are the dynamics of public opinion, who are people going to vote for in the election and so on, but also as sites of interest in their own right. These are actually now where people communicate, interact and so on. So this is important not just to use these as a new form of data, but of sites of scientific interest in themselves. Online surveys is what I'll be talking about this and you'll be hearing more about online surveys, but another huge development, you know, the vast majority of surveys now being completed online and that has a lot of implications for the ways in which we can survey people and the kinds of data that we can obtain, the quality of the data, the cost of the data and so on, but another a really huge change in the data landscape. Admin data I think is something that has been around for a while offering a lot of promise.  There was a big push for saying we've got all this data out there. Well, not all of it, but we've got a lot of data on people. Why do we need to keep going and doing surveys, asking questions about how much people earn and so on when we know this from their tax returns and if we can link things up in a smart way, we've got this really excellent data infrastructure that we can use and in many countries, particularly in Scandinavia, this kind of data infrastructure is already well established, but there perhaps we've made less progress in terms of being able to access that data than we might like, but nonetheless that's I think a really big new thing. Admin data has been around for a while, but there's certainly more emphasis and I think more availability despite some of the access problems. Cutting across all of this is the way that we access this information, mobile digital devices. Again, my first mobile phone, I think I got in the year 2000, was one of those knock it black, knockier brick things basically. Battery never ran out because you never really wanted to do anything with it other than take a phone call. Of course, that's again enormously changed and the sorts of things that you can do with your smartphone connecting to the internet is obviously key to that, but once you're connected, there's all sorts of things that one can now do including, of course, completing online surveys, accessing your social media, using GPS and so on. That's something which is transformative in another way, which is that again, there's a big age gradient in the way that people are using these devices. I have kids who are 15 and 11 and they use their mobile devices in completely different ways to me really, ways that I would never think of reading stuff and watching films and so on. So there's an interesting angle which I'll come back to here which is a potential kind of promising angle to our social scientists in the ability to actually access people and collect data from people who are much more comfortable with using these devices than someone of my vintage or older. Another big development is the availability of what are broadly called textual archives, digitized text databases of all various kinds that because they're online and because they're digitized, they are not always, but largely in principle, they are accessible as data sources and we can apply various kind of machine learning, natural language programming and so on to mine into this and to do both quantitative and qualitative data analysis. And another, I mean these are, you can see there's a lot of cross cutting, these are not sharp boundaries between these various dimensions here, but what we can broadly call transactional data, data that sort of arises as a kind of an epiphenomenon, the exhaust fumes of the way that we go about conducting our digital lives these days. So we take taxi rides with Uber and it's actually interesting, I was putting these slides together yesterday and I saw something on Twitter, so there's probably a trail of me doing this, someone could access it, my thought patterns and someone tweeted the thing saying if you really want to know what you're like as a person and what people think of you in business and in your organization, get your phone up and look at your Uber account, see what your Uber rating is from the drivers. And there was then an interesting sort of discussion about this which essentially said that if you've got a low rating, which I think is something like a 4.5 out of 5 I think is a low rating, then this suggests that you're probably the sort of person who gets in an Uber, doesn't say hello, gets straight on their mobile phone, talks to people and doesn't give a tip. Now I looked at one, I've got a 4.82, so I'm doing okay, I'm not doing too bad, but you can see there that that's something which is completely new and if we can access that data, it does give us something interesting, something potentially insightful about the way that people behave, the way that they interact with others and the way that people sort of perceive those behaviors and so on. And obviously bike shares, these are connected so you can see, you can get these, they're quite neat looking maps of where the Boris bikes or whatever, they're all over the world these days, aren't they? Where people are going, kind of what sorts of rides people are taking, what the effect of various bike schemes are on real estate prices, these can all be kind of linked up and so on offering new possibilities. Airbnb and all of these are kind of, I was at a meeting last week talking about new ways of investigating trust between people, social trust and so on. And someone raised a really interesting point about Airbnb and similar things where you get ratings, how do you, if someone's only got one rating or no ratings, how do you trust that person, how do you build up trust and the importance of these kinds of reviews and so on in modern life? And again, all of these have barriers to access, some are proprietary data and one of the big things that we know and will hear about in social media analysis is that if it's Twitter data, you can't necessarily access it, archive it, if you, what you access may change if people are able to delete their tweets and so on. So there's all sorts of difficult issues, but there's all sorts of opportunities that present themselves for social scientists. Although one of the things that I will want to pose as a challenge, and we can perhaps come back to this in the discussion, is whether all of this, whether there's a sort of, you know, bit of a hype underlying a lot of this, you know, particularly on the kind of the big data front. Is this something that really is so exciting for social science? I mean, it's certainly exciting, certainly useful in all sorts of ways for the logistics and there's huge benefits to be had from it, undoubtedly, but is there a real social science payoff? Well, that's an interesting question. So, as I said, the focus of my talk and of this afternoon is about actually what's the implications of this, in particular, for survey research. And I thought I used, as a hook for this, a paper that some of you may be familiar with, others not. This is a paper by Mike Savage and Roger Burroughs that they wrote in 2007. It's in sociology, it's open access, so you can easily get hold of it.  It's published in 2007, so it's kind of even before the term big data had any real currency, but that's really what they're talking about. And they're talking about, they're looking forward and thinking, what are the implications of this data revolution, the sorts of things I've just been talking about there, for academic social scientists? They talk particularly about sociologists because they're sociologists themselves, but I think there are wider implications. So, here they say, and I should, they're not just sort of qualitative people having a go at surveys. Mike Savage uses surveys quite a lot himself. They also have a go at qualitative interviews and so on, so they're equally nasty to everyone. But so they say, the sample survey is not at all that stands outside history, it's glory years we contend are in the past. So this is a red flag for someone like me who's steeped in all my career spent doing surveys. And here's something even more provocative. It's unlikely we suggest that in the future the sample survey will be particularly important research tool. And those sociologists or social scientists to stake their expertise of their discipline to this method might want to reflect on whether this might leave them exposed to marginalization or even redundancy. So this is pretty scary stuff. And there's me back in 2007 thinking, Blimey, maybe I'll be out of a job.  So this, you know, I think deliberately provocative, but some interesting ideas, not just saying that surveys are kind of old fashioned, but making the point that a lot of the new forms of data are not sort of held within universities as we saw. These are often kind of proprietary owned by corporations, owned by government and so on. And that where a lot of the interesting developments are actually taking place are not in sociology departments or statistics departments, but in Google or Facebook. And that's where a lot of the smart data scientists and so on are locating themselves. So in some ways that's the, I guess the hook of what I'm going to be presenting for the rest of my talk is trying to sort of say, well, do I believe this? Are we in danger of finding ourselves redundant if we stick with the survey method? I'll give you a spoiler. I think the answer to that is no. Okay. So I'm going to talk about a few things, but I'm mainly going to talk about a piece of work that I've been doing with Rebecca Lough, who's a research fellow at NCRM. It's one of our NCRM research projects. And what we're trying to do is to understand how our patterns of data usage, how our patterns of data usage has been changing over time, what kinds of data our social scientists are using now, and so on. So what kinds of data are we using? How does this vary over disciplines? How has it changed over time? In particular, to address the savage and burrows question, are we witnessing a decline in the use of surveys and a concomitant increase in the sort of nebulous term big data? A parenthetic, although I think an important question is how well are people reporting their survey methods? If they're using surveys, are they reporting response rates, modes of interviews, sample size, and so on? So that's a sort of a parenthetic but nonetheless important concern. So survey research, are we really in kind of crisis mode? Do we need to be thinking about getting new jobs? Well, it's not just the fact that there's all this new data out there. Surveys have their own particular set of problems that we need to deal with. So the big one that has been around for some time now and causes people a lot of headaches is the response rate issue. So again, when I started in survey research, my first job was with the Office for Population Sensuses and Surveys, now the Office for National Statistics. Back then it was fairly standard to get a response rate for a face-to-face survey of 70% or above. That was the kind of, you know, the standard that you would expect to get and a minimum standard as well. Over the ensuing sort of 25 years, response rates have gone down and down. So now I'd say, you know, depending on the design and the topic of the survey and so on, but you would, you'd struggle to reach 50% response rate, even for a sort of relatively interesting topic. It's even worse for other modes of interview. We don't tend to do phone surveys so much in this country, certainly not random digit dialing, that's what RDD stands for, their random phone surveys, we don't do them. But in the US, even for sort of high quality government or academic surveys, it's routine to get below 10% response rates and these are going down. This is, you know, we're getting more kind of problematic legislation, do not dial numbers and this kind of stuff, various data protection laws coming in, making that even harder. So as this is all happening, you know, people who commission surveys, there's the sorts of surveys that would, you know, previously get the 70% response rates are saying, what are we getting for all these hundreds of thousands of pounds that we're spending on this, particularly when we're hearing all this stuff about, we can get this for free from Google and admin data. What's the payoff? And as our response rates get edged down towards this kind of 10%, what's the benefit relative to having a good quota sample, something which doesn't have a response rate at all, something which doesn't use random probability sampling? Okay, so taking us into a, you know, a different and cheaper form of, that's a strange one, sorry. Oh, it's because it's doing this reveal thing. I'll put it all there. So that's the context of response rates, response rates getting worse. At the same time, the costs of doing these kinds of high quality surveys is increasing. And that's, you know, also, it's also worth bearing in mind that we're spending more money as the response rates are going down. So if we were kind of, you know, keeping our costs flat, then that the response rates would be even worse. I went to a presentation by Simon Jackman, who at the time was running the American National Election Study in the US, a longstanding, the kind of gold standard election study in America going back to the to the 50s. And his estimate was that it cost, and this is public money, $2,000 per complete interview for the 2012 American National Election Study. So when you look at your, you know, your data data set of the A and ES, each one of those people cost $2,000 after you've factored in all there. Now I think he deliberately made that number as big as he possibly could. I see Joel not shaking his head. What does that include? It does include two waves of data collection, face to face. So that's a bit of an overestimate. But in the US, face to face interviewing is enormously expensive, much more than it is here, because if you draw a sample point in Wyoming, you have to fly an interviewer there and put them up in a hotel, rent a car and so on for a month. So it's more expensive here. Here's my ballpark estimate for what an equivalent sort of number for a row in a data set might be in the UK. So if you just wanted to go and commission something from Curtis or Joel at Natsen or Cantar and said I want a 50% response rate about 1,500 respondents, 45-minute interview using Cappy, drawn using the standard approach and path sample, I think that would cost you £150, £200, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. We can have a discussion about that. That would be, if you can do it cheaper than that, we maybe can have a chat. So very expensive and in some ways getting worse in terms of quality, certainly in terms of the kinds of quality indicators that we use. And again, there's this point about sponsors saying, what do we get for this? If you compare that, if you went to YouGov and said, how much is this going to cost me for just an opt-in online panel, probably about £5 per respondent, maybe a bit less. There's certainly cheaper operators than YouGov out there. So you really want to know what you're getting in terms of additionality there. What's driving this? What's driving the increase in costs? Well, it's the response rates. Why are the response rates going down? Well, that's a big question. We're not entirely sure about that. It's societal changes. It's more atomized lives that we lead. It's the increasing number of requests that we get to do every time you get on an aeroplane or borrow a book from whatever you get a text saying, can you do our survey? So there are lots and lots of different factors coming together, but they are making people harder to persuade to do a survey. So we send interviewers back to do more and more calls. Each time they call back, that has a cost to it. So that's driving up costs. We also do refusal conversions. If someone says, no, I'm too busy now. Don't want to do it. We'll send another interviewer back another time. Again, very expensive. That's often maybe a more senior or experienced interviewer who gets sent back. Similarly, we're offering more incentives than we used to do in the past for the understanding society survey. This is actually in a kind of experimental part of the study. Found that they had to offer 30 pounds incentives to get people to complete online at the same rate as they had done face-to-face. So where we can make some savings in terms of not using interviewers, that's largely burned up by having to offer people larger incentives. So essentially a lot of these total costs that we're burning are coming from trying to get our response rates up to a sort of reasonable 50%, really working the sample to get a reasonable threshold response rate to get those hard to get ones. And that's after all the logic of what we're doing with surveys. If we just do a quota sample, we don't get these hard to get ones. That's what we think is the benefit. So that makes sense, but it's where the cost really ratchets up. Here you can see this is a bit dated, this graph, but it shows you the basic point. It's from this paper by Curtin et al in Public Opinion Quarterly 2000. And it uses a consistent survey, has the same methodology. And you can see that the number of contact attempts is increasing year on year and the percentage of refusals while the response rate is going down from 70 to 68. And you could pick any number of surveys which show the same trends. More effort, more cost, response rates staying flat or going down. So this is bad from a kind of a cost and a quality perspective. We've also got a few other things that we want to worry about when we're sort of really squeezing people to do our research for us. It's that we may get, persuade people, may give them 30 quid to do the survey, but they'll give us bad data. They'll just straight line through the questionnaire, not give it any thought. We're changing the nature of the social exchange from one where we say this is a worthy thing that we're doing. We're doing research. Can you give your time? And that will benefit other people to saying this is a financial exchange. We'll give you 30 quid.  So we perhaps encourage that. We're similarly placing implicit pressure on respondents. Therefore, there's the same point in many ways to fabricate to just do the questionnaires in order to get the money. If you're doing that, then you don't want to think about the responses that you're giving. Same kind of pressure on interviewers. There's evidence that in a lot of the sort of high quality comparative surveys that the interviewers are just sitting on the curb and making up data so that they get paid. There's an ethical boundary that we can cross. When people don't want to do our studies, ultimately we have to get to the point where we say okay, and sometimes that boundary can be potentially crossed. So there are certainly a lot of pressures on survey research as the kind of premier method of the social sciences. So we might expect as this combines with this new data landscape to see the savage and burrows forecast, if you like, coming to fruition. So that's what we were, well not entirely, a large driver of what we're interested in in this piece of work, which I said is joint with Dr Rebecca Lough. I should also say that this is a work in progress. So these are sort of provisional numbers we're kind of working through. There are a few things. In fact, the first time I've seen these numbers was on the weekend, and so I've spent the last couple of days kind of saying that looks a bit odd Rebecca. Why is that? So there may be a few things that you think look odd here, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this work. So what we're doing is trying to answer this question about how are patterns of social science data uses changing over time? How do they vary across discipline? There are different ways one could skin that cat. How would you approach that question? One way of doing that is to take a sample of journal articles and look at what the data that's being used in those published articles is. So that's what we did. There are other ways of doing it, and this certainly has its limitations, particularly in the way that we've implemented it, and we're well aware of those. Some of these are quite interesting issues, I think. So we weren't the first people to do this as a paper by Stanley Presser, I think in public opinion quarterly in 1983, and a follow-up paper by Saris and Galhoffer. I'll give you the citations for these, but that's in a book chapter, I think, in their book of 2007. So what Stan Presser did was to take these journals, which are the sort of the main, the premier journals in each discipline in 1983, and take all the articles in each of them and code them for what the data they were using. He was particularly interested in whether people were using surveys, not so much in other forms of data, so that was his primary concern. So he looked at these years, 4950, 64, 65, 7980, and Saris and Galhoffer updated this in 94, 95. So we thought, well, that'd be quite interesting now to take this up to 2015. So we looked at 2014, 2015, and I'll show you the results of what we found in a moment. I said there are different ways one could approach answering this question. Another way is to do a survey of social scientists, right, and say what kind of data do you use? And indeed, there's a paper by Katie Metzler and Nick Allam and others published last year. You can find this on the internet. What they do is they have a very large database of social scientists who are contacts of sage in one form or another. It's not exactly clear what this sample frame is, people who've written for sage or signed up in some way. So they sent out this online questionnaire invite. They got 9,500 people, nearly social scientists, to fill in the questionnaire, which is an impressively large number of people. Problem is the response rate is less than 2%. So whether this is representative, whether the sample frame in the first place was representative of the population of social scientists and then the response rate, but what they find, their headline finding is that 33, a third of people, a third of social scientists report having undertaken big data research. Now that strikes me as a surprisingly high proportion and I would say an unfeasibly high proportion. I think part of the reason is to do with this. If you get an invitation to an online survey, which is about doing big data, if you do big data, you're probably more likely to click on it and do it. That's one thing. Also, I mean, we're all aware that big data is a rather nebulous unfortunate term. We kind of sort of think we know what it is, but once you drill down in it, it's slippery and so people were essentially relying on their own definition of what constitutes having done big data research. But that's another perspective on this and another way that one could try and answer this question. We think certainly there are flaws in our approach and we wouldn't want to claim that the percentages that I'm going to show you in a moment would in any way be the correct unbiased population estimate. If we first look at the findings that have already published from the Stan Presser and Saras and Galhofer papers, you can see here that this is the percentage using surveys. The numbers in parentheses is the actual number of journal articles on which this is based. You see two things, I guess. One is that surveys make up a pretty substantial minority overall, but a substantial amount of the data that social scientists were using in this kind of post-war period. There's a trend towards increasing use of surveys. That reflects the fact that we would start doing more surveys, increasing skills, access to the data, increasing so on, but certainly a sort of general trend towards increasing survey research and across disciplines the percentages vary quite a lot. As you'd expect, public opinion research almost entirely based on surveys, less so in political science, certainly in the early days. Political science as a discipline has I think changed quite a lot over that period. If we update this now to 94, 95 in Saras and Galhofer, we see that the trend increases. In sociology, 70% of papers now are using surveys in sociology, increasing in political science, economics. A good high proportion across all disciplines, although some variability. In the pre-big data era, we're seeing this increasing trend towards survey research. This final column here is like the big caveat point, which is that Stan Press' study doesn't give a lot of detail about his methods, how he defined things, how he did things, and some of his definitions are a bit odd of what counts as a survey. Anything that was done by the Census Bureau, for example, would count as a survey, even if on closer examination there was no survey involved. He would just count anything that the Census Bureau did. Saras and Galhofer came up with their own definition of what constitutes a survey in one of these articles. You can see that the rates are still high and similar for some of them, it makes quite a big difference. That tells you something about the way you do this kind of study is that your definitions, unsurprisingly, make quite a lot of difference to what you find in terms of the patterns. Another point to make about this, this is the percentage of all papers. This includes papers that don't have any empirical content at all, theory papers and so on. So, we updated this analysis. I say we. This was actually a team of coders that read all these papers, so we hired a team of coders. We got 1,453 papers across all those journals for those two years, hired seven coders, trained them up, randomly assigned papers to coders and came up with a set of codes that we asked them to apply to each paper that they read. First of all, whether it was a theory paper or a review paper, so no data, then if it was, if there was data, whether it was quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods, then there is other things. I'm not going to report on all of these, we're only part of the way through the analysis, but which kind of data was used, survey data, big data, and so on. So, let's say we're making our way through this and we've found, you know, at the moment we've got, we've found that in terms of the sort of the reliability of the coding, 8% of the papers were flagged by one, at least one of the coders to say there's something ambiguous here I'm not too sure about. There's quite a lot of variability about, in terms of which papers were flagged, so this tells us something, you know, about how difficult this task was. We did a little coder reliability study where we got each coder to code the same subset of papers, so we can get a better estimate of. So we've got pretty good rates of agreement here, 87 is the average pairwise agreement across all codes, that is a bit of variability across coders in that and particularly across the types of data, so that ranges from, for the qualitative codes, very high levels of agreement, lower levels, although still reasonably high levels of agreement for survey and administrative data. Okay, sorry, my slide's not quite fitting on there. The first thing I'm going to show you is the breakdown of empirical and non-empirical papers, so about 14% of papers didn't have any empirical content at all. This varies, again, fair bit across disciplines, mostly in economics, this is the 2014-15. Kind of expect that, there's a lot of formal theory in economics and, you know, macro economics, so it doesn't really involve much in the way of data, but what we're focusing on for the rest of these slides is this column here, this 1251, that did have some empirical component to them. Quantitative, qualitative and mixed, the vast majority of papers are quantitative in these journals. Again, varies in ways that we might expect, virtually no qualitative papers in economics and rather a large number of qualitative, well, large proportion, 11%, still quite a low percentage of qualitative papers in sociology, but still quite high in both social psychology and sociology mixed methods, particularly in social psychology. But vast majority of papers in use quantitative methods, if we break that down a little bit and say what kinds of quantitative data are being used, then 48% using surveys, 47%, sorry, that should point out that these don't sum to 100 because you can use more than one kind of data in a paper. So, actually quite high rates of admin data, not much in the way of, you know, overtly big data, but this is from a base of, you know, zero from 94, 95. So, we're certainly seeing evidence of the emergence of big data, particularly if we're kind of expanding that to include, you know, some forms of admin data, depends on what our definition is here of big data. Certainly a no real decline in survey data. In terms of mainly qualitative data, these are pretty small percentages here, but mainly using interview focus group or kind of observational study, quite a lot of, you know, text analysis and surprisingly high number of visual methods papers in social psychology. But here we see the kind of, the sort of qualitative big data, some evidence but less than on the quantitative side. So the direct comparison, we can't compare all of those backwards because essentially we've, you know, we've come up with new codes in our data set, which we can't, which aren't published in the previous studies. For the ones that we can make a comparison, here we're looking at the proportion of empirical papers that you surveys across disciplines and the red line is the 2014-15 and the blue is 94-95. So you can see not much change really. There's some decline economics, sociology, a small drop-off, an increase in political science, quite a big increase in social psychology. So broadly, I'd say on average staying stable, but with a bit of variability across disciplines. Where there is more of a change, I think it's interesting, is in experimentation, where across the board we're seeing a big increase in experiments. Social psychology 46 up to 72, public opinion. My theory here is that what we're seeing is partly the fact that it's very easy to load experiments into surveys, particularly into online surveys. There's been a kind of quite an explosion and so I think what we'll see is once we put the parts of this together that there's a lot of papers that are doing surveys and experiments. But that's the biggest sort of clear shift over this period is a big increase in experimentation. Probably also, I think, reflects the greater focus on causal inference that we've seen over this period, the need to be able to demonstrate causal effects rather than just saying, you know, we're not interested in causality. Yes, yes, yeah. So if they mentioned doing an experiment and doing a survey, they would get ticked in each of those categories. So we'll be able to sort of combine these eventually, but at the moment we've just got the sort of, you know, the univariate versions at the moment.  So this is something that we want to go and kind of truth check this, any of these really big ones. But that kind of rings true a bit. Political science has become a lot more quantitative over this period. And so we kind of, you know, you see some increase of small increases, social psychology, sociology, zero in public opinion. That doesn't surprise me either. Text analysis is another one where we see quite a big increase. As I said, I think that sort of accords with my intuition. We're seeing a lot more text analysis where there's a lot more availability of textual archives and so on, although one small drop-off in text analysis. In terms of the transparency and quality of the reporting of surveys, unfortunately, we haven't seen much of an improvement. A lot of presses, and that was what a lot of what he was doing in his original paper was kind of saying, you know, what's the quality of reporting like. Basic reporting is often absent. There's a lack of detail about response rates and so on. A third of papers lack something really basic like the sampling method or the mode of interview. And a new thing that's emerged since press' day is a lot of journals now refer you to all sorts of online appendices where all this information is available. That's fine, but there's a question about quite how much people are actually able to access or indeed accessing that information. It's there, but not as part of the paper. So the story on transparency and quality of reporting is not great. What we want to take this next is to carry on doing our analysis, looking at the sort of combining of methods and so on, checking some of the strange or the surprising results. More ambitiously, what we want to do is to use this as a training data set because we're not very happy with the sampling, if you like, of journals. If we were doing this study from scratch, I wouldn't have started with that sample of journals and that timeframe. I would have designed, defined my population, drawn a stratified random sample of all stratified across journals and so on. And that's what we'd like to do. That may be feasible, it may not. We can come back to this, hopefully I'll finish in time for some questions, but one of the obvious limitations of our approach is that we're sticking with the same journals over time. Now, there's been an enormous expansion in the number of journals over this same period and one would expect, I think, that new kinds of science, new kinds of data, innovation probably happens in more kind of niche types of journals. The journal of so big data in social science or something, doesn't find its way into the American journal of political science until these are more established. So I think the nature of the set of journals, which are the premier journals in each discipline, probably mitigates against, militates against finding these new kinds of data. So if anything, these may be sort of lower bound estimates. If we were looking across a proper random sample of journals, we'd see more evidence. So, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, are the reports of the death of surveys greatly exaggerated? I think they are. We've seen in the data that I've just shown you that there's no real evidence of any decline in the rate of surveys being used in this kind of set of published journals, despite those caveats that I just gave. Here's another chart from some work that I've been doing on opinion polls and so on. This is the frequency of opinion polls in Great Britain since 1940. Each dot represents more than one, more than one poll. But you can see the key thing here is there's an enormous increase in 2001 and onwards. If we carried this on end of 2015, carried on to 2017, we'd see the same effect. First, YouGov poll was published in 2001. So we are doing lots and lots and I think we're probably doing many more surveys, different kinds of surveys, but doing many more surveys than we did in the past. Here are some numbers to go with that. Between 1945 and 2010, there were three and a half thousand published polls on who's going to win the election. Between 2010 and 2015, nearly 2000. So we're seeing a real huge increase in the rate of surveying of people. Here's another way we can see this global spend on online research in market research. Again, not quite the same thing, but up to 2014, seeing this huge and growing increase in online research. That's the direction of travel. So the future, as I see it, and this is slightly a plug for our next speakers, the survey future will be about doing lower cost online surveys, means that we won't be doing fewer surveys, we'll be doing more, less costly surveys, different kinds of surveys. Why is that? Well, one of the key things here, I think, is that population inference is still really key to an enormous amount of social science. And by that I mean we need to make inferences to the whole population. It's not okay to make inferences just to the people who are on Twitter or on Facebook to some undefined pool of respondents in a YouGov signed up panel and so on. So there are real problems with moving away from the model of having samples of a well-defined target population. So I think that that is going to be a persistent issue, which will mean this remains true. I said at the start, I've got a bit of a bugbear about, I don't really see, I hear a lot of talk about big data, but I rarely see a decent social science paper which addresses an interesting social science question that uses big data. So I'm very happy for people to challenge me on that, but I think that's another reason why we're going to carry on doing surveys, because being able to design questions that address your hypotheses and so on remains a key benefit of surveys. We will see surveys changing. We'll have shorter questionnaires, probably more frequent time intervals. People are going to rather than sort of interviewing every year as you do in the sort of standard repeated cross-section model, you'll see more regular intervals. Device agnostic questionnaires, so you can answer a short questionnaire on your smartphone. Maybe a question that only asks one question, or maybe a questionnaire which asks you five questions throughout the day. How are you feeling now? How are you feeling now? How are you feeling now? And so on. So once we're doing surveys in that way, it opens up all sorts of new possibilities. We don't have to do a 45-minute interview. We can do a 10-second interview, ask people to take pictures, so on. And we'll potentially see this kind of more passive data collection, as I said, rather than doing the national travel survey and trying to ask people, how long does it take you to get to the nearest bus stop? You just either look at that on a map, don't bother asking the question at the first place. If you want to know where people are actually travelling, get them to agree to turn on their GPS and collect that data, get their Facebook feeds and so on. Big problems with that. I'm going to finish very quickly on an example of this, which is where I think there's reasons to be cheerful for the future of even the random survey. This is my own experience of working with the Wellcome Trust on a survey of young people, Wellcome Trust interested in young people's views of science, whether they want to be a scientist, get a study science at university, that sort of thing. So for the first two waves of this survey, they spent an enormous amount of money doing it in the standard way. So it was part of a survey of adults, and that was a survey of the standard face-to-face random probability thing with a cappy interview, very expensive, very slow. In this adult sample, of course, if I was in this sample, my daughter would be eligible, she's 15, so they could just interview her part of a random sample of children, but there are not many in a sample of this size. So I had to do this additional screener on adjacent houses next door, very complicated, error-prone. What they ended up with was a sample of about 450 kids aged 14 to 18. Response rate about 50%, really expensive, and let's face it, not much used to anyone. That's why no one ever analyzed it. So in the most recent wave, we thought about doing this differently, and actually with Kantar, who should take the credit for this, not me, but totally different design, the sample was drawn from the National Pupil Database rather than as being done as the post office address file sample. That meant that we had their name so we could send a letter directly to this young person, asking them in a postcard, go online, here's the URL and a password, do this short interesting questionnaire, and we'll give you a tenner if you do it. Lo and behold, we were hoping that we would get a response rate of about 20 odd percent for this. We ended up with a response rate of 50% within about three weeks, and because of the lower cost of doing this, we were able to get 4,000 achieved interviews. 25% of the kids, the young people, completed the questionnaire using a smartphone or a tablet. So now, this is a really useful, this is informed policy, there's been a recent initiative about ethnic minority kids in London and STEM and all this kind of, it's been a really useful study, and part of that is because these are digital natives, and this is maybe the future holds out this kind of promise rather than the sort of apocalypse that I think a lot of us in survey research when all this started happening once feared.


This study aimed to establish a relationship between cervical vertebral maturation stages, hand-wrist ossification events, and the timing of peak statural and mandibular growth in a group of Indigenous Australians during adolescence. This article was authored by Grave Keith and Townsend Grant.


is a between seven pitchers being used, the offense starting, installing, going to extras in the way it finished. What did it take for this team to pull out a win like this? Just find a way. I got dudes win by one, and we were able to find a way and keep the game close enough to have a chance to fight back. And yeah, that's all you can ask for. Just, you know, we gave ourselves a chance to win at the end of the game, and we were able to score one more than the other team. The pair of doubles tonight, what was the key in that 5-1 third in terms of breaking down their starting pitcher? Just waiting a mile. Trying to get a good pitch to hit, and just getting my swing off. Yeah, just ran out and seen the ball. OK, so yeah, I felt good to come through for the team, and it was a big spot. Did you see the Sabrina was struggling a little bit early on? He looked good.  We all have off days, and it just, things, it happens. It's going to happen to everybody, and it's, you know, he's been one of our work horses all year, so we were able to back him up and put some runs up there.  And yeah, that's all you can ask for.


This paper discusses the principles of multi-component alloys with high entropy, providing examples and discussing various manufacturing techniques and microscopic structures. This article was authored by Brian Cantor.


This is Counterculture with Marie Buske, Wednesdays at 10am on Reality Check Radio. You're with Reality Check Radio and I am Marie, your host for Counterculture. And this morning, my guest really doesn't need much introduction. You hear him on the political panel on Fridays. It is Cam Slater. Good morning. Good morning. How are you, Marie? I'm very good. Thank you. I wanted to talk to you this morning about firearms, because it is something that got brought up in the interview I did with Naomi Wolfe. And I think it's one of those elements of New Zealand life that doesn't get talked about. And I think we do need to talk about it. Gun ownership in New Zealand. Give us a rundown of perception versus reality. Okay, there's a perception that we've got really, really strict gun laws in New Zealand. And to a certain extent, that's true, but it's also not true. Up until the Christchurch massacre, we had a licensing regime that focused on allowing people to have firearms if they met a fit and proper person test. Now, I say that it's a test, but it's not actually a test. This is the whole thing about firearms law in New Zealand. It's almost like it's asked backwards.  And if you look at the Arms Act 1983 and all of the amendments that have been done to that since, there's no test on what a fit and proper person is. There's only a list of what a fit and proper person isn't. And so, exactly. So if you go through the Arms Act and have a look at it, it says you can't be a fit and proper person if these things are true. If even one of these things is true. And there are a little bit of morphists as well. Like one of them is if you don't follow regulations. Now, this is fraught with danger because regulations, though technically a law, they're actually not in the law. They've been passed by an Order and Chancellor by Cabinet and haven't yet had Parliament agree to them being a law and put into the Arms Act. And the chances of you finding what those regulations are as a layperson are very slim. And there's all sorts of regulations that have been passed, especially recently. Now, and we had Stuart Nash as the police minister. And he was in the 2017 election saying that he wanted to end this arms regulation via the Order and Councils and to put it through the Parliament, which is what should happen.  And he never questioned them. He just took them straight to Cabinet and had them approved. And a good example of this is the rules. I call them rules. The rules and regulations around transportation of firearms have been changed substantially. So if you were going hunting, you'd have a gun in a gun bag or a case. You'd chuck it in the back of the Ute with all your gear. You'd drive off to where you're going hunting.  Well, now you have to have that firearm secured within the vehicle. And the suggestions from the police are that you have a chain somehow securing it to the chassis of the car. And it's nonsensical because if you've got, say, four people going hunting and I often do go hunting with four or more people.  And then we may have our hunting rifles for shooting deer. And we could end up with four people having something like 20 guns on board the Ute. Well, you can't chain all of those to the chassis. You can't lock all of those up. So what is the purpose? So whoever suggested this, what is the purpose of that? Is it because they're wanting, if the vehicle was breached in, say, a robbery, that those guns would not be able to remove? Is that what the goal of the regulation is? Well, that's the thought process. But you can see that a single-minded person has come up with this thought process. What we've got is this new firearms authority, which is essentially a business unit of the police. And it's key to know that it's a business unit. It has a profit incentive. And that's why they're looking at ratcheting up the fees and everything. But they've got this bunch of wambles down there who really don't know how ordinary people use firearms. Coming up with cockamamie scenarios of alleged crimes with no evidence that such a crime has even happened, or if it has happened, has caused considerable harm. And passing regulations using order and counsel to regulate this new event that may or may not happen. Now, what the police have been doing in some districts is unconscionable. What they've been doing is waiting a kilometer down the road from a gun club and then stopping every vehicle that was at the gun club as they leave it. And then saying to them, we'd like to inspect how you stored your firearms in the vehicle. And most people don't understand the law. And the law says that the police can't... That's not a proper reason for them to inspect inside your vehicle. And the regulation allows them to do this sort of, except the regulation doesn't trump the law. And the law says that they have to give you seven days' notice of a time that's suitable to you as the firearms owner, not the police. So if they pull you up on the side of the road and say, can we have a look at your firearms in the car, you're perfectly entitled under the law to say no. And there's nothing they can do about it. And so you've got these regulations that are operating in contravention of the law and the police essentially bullying people or relying on people's goodwill to comply with the regulation in the first place. And another example of that is for collectors, for example, like myself, we can buy and sell pistols and machine guns and submachine guns and hand grenades and artillery pieces and all of that sort of stuff.  This is the ludicrous thing. There's so much paperwork. You have to fill in an application for a permit to possess that weapon, right? So you've got to apply for the permit to possess. You fill out what it is you're buying, who you're buying it from, what their firearms license number is, all of those sorts of details, and you fill in yours. You then send that to the armed officer who then farts around. Now, I'm lucky I get them done within 24 hours because they're scared of me. But what happens is you get mucked around and then eventually they say, oh, it's okay, you can come and pick up your permit to possess, right? So you then go to the police station to pick up the permit to possess and it's got exactly the same details on it for you as you put in your application. All they've done is handwrite what you put into the application form, transfer it into the permit to possess, but left the bottom part, who you're buying it from, the seller's details, completely blank, even though you've already provided it to them in the application. You then take that permit to possess to uplift the firearm, fill in all of their details, and then you've got to take the firearm and the permit to possess back to the police so that they can expect that what you've bought is in fact what your permit is allowed. Then they take a copy, you take a copy, and you leave with the firearm. But it's different if you, say, buy something at a gun auction or at a gun show. There's usually police officers there who won't even do the application for a permit to possess. They'll just provide a permit to possess right there and then on the spot.  And I sold that at a gun show and a police officer was there who'd given the permit to possess to the new person and taken it off my license, except they never processed the paperwork from that. And so it was still on my license and technically I was in breach of the law because I couldn't present the firearm to them that I still owned it, even though I'd sold it. And then, after they accused me of all of that, and I said, well, why don't you ask what actually happened and instead of accusing me from the get-go. And that's the problem is the police just accuse you. They treat all gun owners as potential criminals rather than remembering that they had to approve us as a fit and proper person, bearing in mind that list of things that you can't do. And one of those is break the law. So we are law abiding people because if we weren't, we would be a fit and proper person. But the whole premise of their attack on us is that we're criminals. And so we need to have these regulations to the billers. So this arms officer says to me, well, do you have a copy of the paperwork to prove that? And I said to him, yes, I do. And he said, well, well, can I have a copy? And I said, no. He said, well, why not? I said, because I'm not required under the law to give you that piece of paper. I could voluntarily give it to help you out, but I don't see why I should help you out because you've just accused me of committing a crime. And so therefore, it's not in my interest to help you out. It's in my interest to protect the information that will give me a good, solid defense. And if you knew the law and you're a police officer, you wouldn't have done that. So no, I'm not going to give you the paperwork. And this is the thing. If you know the law, then you're in a much better position than just accepting what the police say. And we've seen during the pandemic that police are willing to break the law. ENDS justifies the means for them.  They are against you. They are the enemy. They're not there to help you. They're there to hinder you. And all these regulations that have been passed have been dreamed up by people who know nothing about how people actually use firearms. And they're creating a legal morass for themselves and for shooters. That's not based on any law. And this is the real problem that we have. And there's no constitutional right to bear arms in New Zealand. So... No second amendment here. No second amendment here.  And under New Zealand law, if you've got a firearm, you have to have a lawful, proper and sufficient purpose. Right? Those are the legal terms needed to use, discharge or carry the firearm. And self-defence is not... One of those. A lawful, proper purpose and sufficient purpose. Self-defence is not one of those. What are some of those? Well, if you're doing pest control, if you're going hunting, if you're going to the pistol club, if you're going to target practice, that's a lawful purpose is for you to carry a firearm. That is, it's on your person and under your control. Right? It doesn't mean transport. Transport's different. And that's where the police get in trouble when they're stopping you. And the firearms in your car, you're not carrying it. It's not on your person. And so they have no legal basis to stop you to inspect how you stored something in your car. That then comes under a premise or a house or a vehicle. And they have to give you seven days notice. So you can't possess a firearm in anticipation that you might even need to use it in self-defense. Right? So if you say, I'm going to get a firearms license because I need to defend my family. You won't get it. Right? You have to have a lawful purpose to get that firearm. But the Crimes Act, the Crimes Act's slightly different. And it says that you're allowed to use reasonable force to defend yourself, right? Against assault or entry into a dwelling house. But it needs to be proportionate to any force that's been used against you. Right? So you have to make an assessment that the person trying to break into your house is going to give you do harm. Is carrying a firearm. Is prepared to use that firearm before you can even make the decision to go and get your firearm out of the safe. And then use it to defend yourself. And even then, the police will probably charge you, put you through the hoods, and cost you $90,000 to defend it. Yeah. But some people have successfully defended themselves in that way. And Greg Carvell at SAI Guns is one of those people. But he was put through the ringer by the police. You know, there was a guy who came into his shop armed with a machete or a large knife who was trying to harm the suspect. And Greg shot him. But the police still charged him. But he got off. Right. Well, a few questions that I have is firstly, how many people in the last 12 months died in a firearms-related incident, do you know? I don't know the number. But it's a small number. We're passing regulations for much less deaths than there are people dying on the roads. So that was the bow that I was going to draw. Because, well, 300-odd people die on our roads every year in a motor vehicle accident, one form or another. The regulation in terms of exchanging ownership of a motor vehicle or of any sort is a fairly straightforward affair without all of the hoo-ha. And yet gun ownership is applied with this level of convoluted complexity that benefits no one. Yeah, it used to be easy. It was straightforward. And then Christchurch happened. And the police used that for an ideological reason to clamp down on gun owners. Because the police have imported a lot of English police into the police force. And in Great Britain, the gun laws are very restrictive. And they don't see a reason why we shouldn't do the same thing here.  You know, there was a need to hunt. There was a need to provide food. There was a need to do all of these sorts of things. And that's all been strictly controlled, you know, by the aristocracy in the UK for thousands of years. But we had to provide for ourselves and defend ourselves.  The land wars, et cetera. And firearms ownership was quite less up until about the 70s. You know, when I first started work, I started working in the National Bank. And I worked with a guy who was like 400 million years old. And he was telling me about how they used to go and collect the money from the Reserve Bank on a flatbed truck with big chests. And they were issued revolvers. And they would sit on the back of this truck with revolvers in their hands and some banks actually had revolvers in the bank. You know, in my younger days, there used to be a gun shop on Queen Street called Tisdall's. And you used to go, it was a good gun shop. It had a good gunsmith's there. And you used to walk down the street with a gun over your shoulder, down Queen Street with a gun over your shoulder to take it into the gun shop, to have some work done on it. And now you'll have 57 police and sort of swat deer trying to shoot you because you're preparing a firearm in public, even though you're actually allowed to do that. Yeah, look, I'm from a rural community and it was just normal.  And that's... So you're not allowed to do that now. You're not allowed to have them in a cradle on the back of the ute. You're not allowed to have them visible. They have to be locked and secured and all that. Now, you know, either if someone's a drive-round on the ute or they're a motorbike, they've got a .22 handy, they see a rabbit, it's dead, right? They just shoot it right there in the end. And now if it's locked up and it's... and they have to stop and get it, well, the rabbit's gone.  So, you know, the legislation in 1983, which I actually helped write, was quite good. It was focused around mental health. It was focused around licensing the person, not the firearm. The police had actually recommended that firearms registered be abandoned except for restricted and prohibited firearms. And that's pistols and collectors, items and things like that. So we kind of have a gun registered now, but as I explained earlier, it's got holes in it. Things that are on my license that I don't have anymore that I legally sold and did with the proper paperwork, but the police lost the paperwork, but I'm the person who's at fault. So the recommendation was to carry on with that and tighten it up around certain aspects. But they've gone completely overboard now and spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to bring in a gun register on the premise, the false premise, that having a registered is going to prevent criminals getting guns. I don't know what world they live in, but criminals don't follow the law.  They're criminals. So it's not going to stop criminals getting guns. So let's cycle back to the buyback. So, I mean, all of this Christchurch was the catalyst of all of this. Well, it wasn't a buyback because the government never had the guns to give to you that they could buy back, right? It was a confiscation with compensation. Because the Arms Act actually said, if you're going to confiscate somebody's firearm, you have to pay fair market value for it. So they changed the law rapidly. They couldn't have done that. They have to pay money for it, you know? So, sorry.  And we grew up with it.  Literally shooting rabbits on the farm. So I, for me, it was part of everyday life. I look at that now. Or is all of this the cost that we're paying, that gun owners are paying for the virtue signalling from our former Prime Minister to look good? It's worse than that.  Which was appalling it in the worst aspects. But the biggest gun grabbers ever in the world, in the history of the world are communists and socialists. They're the biggest gun grabbers because the last thing that they need is to have people with firearms who can rise up and say, you know, we don't like what you're doing. And so they confiscate guns and take them away. Totalitarians, whether they're fascists, they're fascist socialists. Anyway, you know, they're the corporate version of socialism. But they want the general public disarmed, vulnerable, and then the apparatus of the state can grind you down with their application of force. So at the same time that the police were passing all these new regulations and rules and changing the arms act and doing all this in the wake of Christchurch, at the same time as they were doing that, they were buying up an armory of advanced weaponry that includes replacements for their 223 or 5.56mm assault rifles, which they banned everybody else from having, but they've got them. They then upgraded a large number of weapons that were used in the early days of the war. And so they were able to buy weapons and they then upgraded a large number of those with 7.62mm or 308, which is a much bigger caliber, leaves much bigger holes. They've got a whole lot of those, and they haven't told anybody that they've got those. They let me know by mistake when I answered a official information act request when I asked about magazines. Because the rifles that they bought all came with 20 round magazines. And the waker of Christchurch, the police were all on the streets, but they had 30 and 40 round magazines. And I wondered where they got those from and why. And then asking the question about the magazines, they admitted to owning all of these other firearms with much bigger hot firepower. And then of course we saw in Wellington the use of baton rounds, grenade launchers. These are military weapons that the police have obtained. They kept it on the down low. It's only when there's something like that that we saw them come out. So when you say the police have obtained, are we saying that they have been obtained, they've gone out and purchased those? Yes. Because where did all the guns that they confiscated go? Well, that's a good question because I happen to know of some guns that were confiscated, paid out to the owner and then were suddenly on the license of somebody else. And there was supposedly a lot of them destroyed, but what I'm talking about the police have got are new. They have bought those in, including the Hickler and Cotton. So that didn't appear in our budget deal, did it? No. So they've bought grenade launchers. They have fire 40-millimeter grenades and a variety of rounds that are available for those. Now, we've seen them use the baton rounds, which is essentially a hard plastic, which will knock you over and leave you with a bad bruise. And if it gets you in the face, it could cause permanent damage to your eyes or whatever, knock your teeth out, whatever. But the police have these weapons. These are military-grade weapons. They're assault rifles and military-grade weapons. But at the same time, they've been disarming people from having similar firepower. So you kind of look at it from a philosophical point of view or a political agenda point of view. The police are arming up while they're disarming citizens. That would normally cause a little bit of consternation. It used to be the police armed offender squad with the only ones that were armed, and then they had Sarko treble II rifles. Well, now they've got military weapons. They've got, you know, they have Americanized the police. They've got ballistic armor. They've got ballistic helmets. They've got vehicles with bulletproof doors and windows. So they're militarizing the police and raising their capability at the same time as taking guns off people. And that's a concern at the moment. But the more the government pursues a divisive agenda where they're separating society into groups. You know, we saw this with vaccinated, non-vaccinated. Now we're seeing it with Maori and non-Mauri. Co-governance, which 15% of the population get 50% of the say. These things create division in society and increase, especially when you apply racial divisions, increase the likelihood of seeing civil unrest and potentially civil war. Now, you mentioned the Second Amendment in the United States. And you have to understand that the Second Amendment supports the First Amendment, right? So the right to free speech is the First Amendment of the US Constitution. And the Second Amendment, in order to protect the First Amendment, is that free persons have the right to bear arms, form militia and protect themselves from the excesses of the government. Now, the US Constitution was written by a group of people immediately after the Revolutionary War where they seceded from United Kingdom and fought a war against the best army in the world. This is the army that then went on to defeat Napoleon. So it's only a few years before that that the British army was getting beaten by a bunch of hunters and trappers and civilians that had armed themselves to protect themselves from the excesses of, in this case, a world-est army. And it comes out of having that war, a civil war, a Revolutionary War. It comes out from being oppressed. And we haven't had that in New Zealand. We haven't had a full-on civil war. We haven't had a Revolutionary War. The Treaty of Waitangi, a lot of people criticize it, but it actually stopped civil war. And we haven't got that background that would lead us to having smart and well-read people coming up with a written constitution that protects free speech and supports that protection of free speech by allowing people to have firearms. And so we're not in the same boat constitutionally as the United States. But we're getting close to having that civil unrest happening and we're already seeing the start of that with increasingly violent crime and where people are rebelling against society. But also too with the increasingly violent crime, the police almost appear to be bystanders in this. So they've armed themselves up to the teeth and yet they don't appear to be doing anything in order to prevent it or stop it. No, but as society breaks down and crime becomes more rampant and people then make the next step and they start to defend themselves and they'll start with using baseball bats and iron bars and things like that. And when that doesn't work, then they'll step it up. It's a matter of time before some little ram raiding scumbag in a car gets shot by a guy who had his 15th robbery and has had enough and has gone and got himself... The hockey stick's no longer doing the trick so let's go with something a bit stronger. That's right and then they just blow them away. And then you're going to see it all clunk down on the victims of the crime, not perpetrators of the crime, which just go back even to the Christchurch situation. We've had all of these laws come in to stop what was an aberration and an aberration that was allowed for through mistakes by the police and including changes to the legislation that allowed people like Tarrant to buy ammunition and firearms willy-nilly online and Jacinda Ardern himself was the one who pushed that law change through. So what we've got is an ass-covering situation with these laws to protect something happening again, which will happen again. There's nothing we can do to stop it. People want to go and kill lots of people. They'll find a way to do it, whether it's a truck or a bicycle bat in a movie theater or a bomb or a firearm. They'll do it. They'll drive a car through a crouch. If they want to kill lots of people because they're crazy, you can't stop crazy. There's no law that you can use to stop crazy. And so what they've done is victimized 250,000 innocent Dan-owners who bear in mind that we are fit and proper people. We have to be law-abiding because if we're not law-abiding, we're not a fit and proper person. The police gave Tarrant a firearms license on the basis of people that he met online being referees after being in a country for next to no time. And they made the mistakes. They made the mistakes in the vetting. They made the mistakes in giving him the license. They made the mistakes in having a system that allowed him to buy large amounts of ammunition. They made all those mistakes and it's us as firearm owners who are paying the penalty for that, not the police. In terms of having an effective opposition when any of these sorts of things happen, I know it's an oxymoron, why then is it that so often when these convoluted pieces of legislation come down and you do have a change of government that those who are coming in don't do anything about it. They just leave it in place. Is it because it is too much effort? Why? It's called political inertia. It's easier to do nothing than to do something. And unless there's a political will to do this and the political will usually manifests itself after a tragedy.  In 1983, when the Arms Act was written, there was no cause for that to be written. They realised that the existing Arms Act was out of date. They needed to modernise it. They needed to simplify it. And they actually wrote a really good piece of legislation. And Peter Hilt was involved in a lot of that. He's now passed. Then we hit there on the Weiner Massacre, which then led to the creation of additional regulations and rules around what they called military-style, semi-automatic firearms. But it was bizarre. They said if it's got a bayonet lug on the barrel and can carry a bayonet, then it qualifies as a military-style semi-automatic. What is a bayonet lug going to do that a bullet's going to do less? It's just ludicrous. If it had a pistol grip.  So what usually happens is there's a massive event and then something happens and they change the law and then you get bad law and then it just compounds. Or they're trying to amend the act in such a way that renders it unfit for purpose. And that's what we've got now. We've got so many regulations, so many amendments that the Arms Act is not fit for purpose anymore and it requires a political party or parties who have got significant strength to actually say, no, we need to rewrite this law. We need to start from the ground up and we need to get people who understand firearms to write the law, who understand how people use firearms and how they use them, how they collect them, how they store them, how they transport them and write the law so that it's sensible not being run by a committee controlled by the police whose default premise is that firearms owners are potential criminals and we need to cut down every avenue we can dream up to have one. And going back to that transport thing, I actually asked the police how many guns have been stolen from vehicles that would not have been stolen if they'd been secured in accordance with the new law. And they came back with a number and then I said to them, okay, now exclude the police from that and the number was zero. So all of the guns that have been stolen from cars in the last 10 years and then subsequently used in trying to have been police weapons stolen from police cars. So they've passed the law to inconvenience the shotgun shooter who belonged to the local shotgun club on the basis that there's actually no crime that's ever been committed amongst the general population. And then you asked about shootings. You know, it's a small number but there's a significant amount of that small number of people who have been shot by the police. So if you exclude that, the number's even smaller. You're with Counterculture. I am Marie. I'm talking to Kim Slater discussing the state of firearms and firearms legislation here in New Zealand. I'm going to pivot slightly. Last week, the radio New Zealand did a piece around police staying tight-lipped in regards to the preparation towards the election. I thought this was an exceptionally bizarre story. What on earth are they expecting to happen? This is the problem with the police, with the disinformation project, with politicians in general, right? If you are always looking for monsters, everything you find is a monster because it's what you're looking for. If you've got a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. And this is what the police do. You've got the disinformation project that's talking about political discourse. There's herty words and mean things and stuff like that. This is polarising people. They don't look at why people have been polarised. They don't look at how people are reacting, why they're reacting like that. It's the politicians that cause the polarisation, but it's our fault when we react against it. They create these scenarios and then the police buy into that and start talking about the risks of politicians. It's bollocks. It's complete bollocks. I mean, we saw in the budget yesterday that the politicians have voted themselves $14 million for increased protection for themselves. You know, because it's terrible, people are saying heady things and they might act on it. Well, in my experience in New Zealand, people don't act on very much at all. Just look at the vaccine mandates. Nobody said, you know what, that's against the Bill of Rights. How many people said that? You know, I can name them. That's how few they were that were saying that. And everyone else just went along with it to get along. And then Kiwis are their own worst enemy, and especially the firearms community. People will get along to get along. You know, they'll comply with things because they think if I don't comply, well, then it'll go badly for me. And we've got people in our club at Antique Arms that think that the police walk on water and that, oh, no, it's only reasonable. And this is the problem that the arms community has had. You've got organisations like Colfo and some other people like Pistol New Zealand.  They only care about what affects them. So when all of these bans on firearms and things came in, the Pistol New Zealand said, I know, we agree with that because that doesn't affect us in our pistol shooting. And I said to them at the time, and I said to Colfo, you've got to stop complying. It's just like the pandemic. You can't comply yourself out of tyranny. And it becomes a slippery slope. And you agree, okay, we'll agree to that. And then next week, they're coming at you with another regulation and they'll say, oh, well, you need to be reasonable about this. And then being reasonable with the police invites them to squeeze you a little bit more. And then they say, oh, no, come on, be reasonable.   And now, of course, the Pistol New Zealand is squawking because the new rules and regulations around ranges and those sorts of things are now hurting them. The new transportation laws are now hurting them because the armour has got all these guns in its car and it has to secure the wall somehow. But they caused that because of their soft compliance on issues that didn't matter to them. But now they're getting squeezed. They're expecting everybody else to come to their aid. Well, sorry, you didn't stand up. You didn't stand up for collectors. You didn't stand up for three gun shooters. You didn't stand up for these people. Now you want to stand up because it's hurting you because you've been squeezed. But sorry, my understanding and caring about your problem has existed a long time ago. For me, all of this always circles back to free speech, always. Absolutely. Because we've been groomed into complacency. We've been groomed into complacency that if you do not push back on this, your comfort, your level of comfort will be maintained. If you do push back on this, because we do not live in an environment where free speech is cherished, you then get cancelled or called out either amongst your peers or in the media or by people in authority or in the public service. And most people do not have thick skins. They're not disagreeable. That's, I mean, New Zealand is a nice people. They're agreeable people. And we actually, in a way, I think, need to go back a bit to our mongrel roots and find a little bit of disagreeableness to actually go back and put our hands up and say, actually, no. And I think that momentum is starting, but it's not, I think, anywhere near fast enough. And it's certainly not reaching the echelons of our political classes. That's for sure. Well, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, too.  They created a situation where people accepted excesses and breaches of the Bill of Rights. Now, no one in the United States accepts breaches of the Bill of Rights. They sue straight away, or they fight. New Zealanders have lost the fight. Now, we used to be such a capable nation. Now we get a weather forecast that says it's going to be a bit of rain. And you've got this grief porn and weather porn being pushed on all the media in it. How it's terrible. People are going to die. We all need to stay at home.  You know, in 1944, 18-year-olds were charging off landing craft into German machine guns and artillery and bombings. Across the beaches of Normandy. Now, 18-year-olds can't work out whether they're Arthur or Martha and need safe spaces. We've actually created a society where people like Charles Uppam are not revered anymore. They're despised. And, you know, the Barry Crumps of this world would never get anywhere because he's so politically incorrect. But that is the ethos that we've come from.  And the politicians, if you give them an inch, they'll take 100 miles.  That's the cultural shift in terms of demonising what is called toxic masculinity. I mean, masculinity isn't toxic. It's masculinity that's gotten us to where we are. And you just look at the leadership today.  I don't know about you. Have you ever met a Christopher that's strong? The name's weak anyway, isn't it? I think it just breeds it. You know, Jordan Peterson touches on that. He doesn't call it the toxic masculinity. He talks about dangerous men doing dangerous things. And he says that a dangerous man is a good man, someone who has the ability to be dangerous to other people use extreme violence but chooses not to is a strong man. And we've immaculated society where strength is not a desirable trait that we see in our politicians. And instead we've got wet woats and weak people who are trying to lead us. We've left that ability, that menace just amongst strong men who are disciplined, that if you cross this line that it's going to hurt has been bred out of society, you know, by the wheat and the feeble.  And we're seeing this in society in many, many different things, you know, in relationships where the soy boy type in touch with their feelings you know, soft bloke is held up as the sort of guy that women are seeking. When the reality is women like strong men and they like to be protected and they like to feel safe. And no, you know, stringy, vegan soy boy type, pansy bloke is going to be able to get away when things get tough. No, no, not at all. Have you caught up with any of the shenanigans that's going on in the Deep South at the moment? No, which shenanigans are they? So in the Deep South there's obviously there's stuff that's going on in Goa, but a little further south in Southland they have the public swimming pool there called Splash Planet. There has been a group of locals that called a meeting with I think the chief operating officer Paul around concerns when they realized that the pool were going to now enforce rules that biological males could enter into female changing rooms, so they just needed to identify as female to be there and the locals came across this and were quite concerned and so they called this meeting those at the meeting only expected to have four or five people turn up, meanwhile several hundreds turned up. Now I've heard 45 minutes audio of that meeting and what I heard in there were a lot of very angry fathers and it actually gave me some hope that there are some men, well there's families and there's fathers there's parents out there who are now starting to push back and like we're all so busy as you said there's a lot of complacency and a lot of parents we've actually you've served a lot of that parenting back to the state, to the schools you send the kids off to school get them back at three o'clock and you assume that they have been taken care of whereas now there is actually a level of indoctrination that's going on at schools that most parents are only just discovering, so this meeting it's still evolving down there but they were going to take it to council there's a name for him there for you Nobby Clark he has said that they're not going to bring it in front of council this issue and what they're hoping to do is to say that the family units or unisex changing rooms or toilets can be used as a compromise for people who are biologically one way but identify as another so they're trying to put a bandaid over it for me the hope was seeing a combined anger from a community actually standing up and saying no we're not comfortable with this now but we need more of that across many issues not just this one Well it comes down to terminology really and the manipulation of language yeah correct so you'll always hear corporates and woke corporates you'll hear politicians and they talk about protecting the trans community right so that's presuming that there is in fact a community of such people right it's a lie there is no community now I happen to know a couple of trans people and they've been trans people before it was a thing right so they're brave people they've decided to live like that and that's all good one's a property investor but anyway they tell me there's no such thing as a trans community it's not a community they don't live together they don't socialize together they're just ordinary people just getting on with their lives and that's how they want to live but there's this this woke culture agenda that has seeped into society through woke corporates and you know I'll probably get attacked for this but my experience is that if there are key women in key positions in organizations particularly in human resources particularly in senior management then that company starts to degrade because they start embracing this kindness and woke and they forget about profit and looking after their customers and they start pushing these agendas to be inclusive which is ironic because it's actually exclusive it's like the meme the other day in Australia have decided to embrace the voice there it's all about inclusiveness and all of this and somebody posted a picture and said what about including him right so all of this inclusiveness that they talk about is actually exclusiveness it's if you don't fit in with this then you should be excluded it's a lie and it's a fantasy that there's a community and it's also if you just look at the math right around about 5% of the population give or take a couple of percent and not heterosexual that's the easiest way to say it so they're not heterosexual they're something else and trans people are a tiny percentage of that 5% and we're talking hundreds of people certainly not thousands of people and we've got this massive vocal violent push to promote their wacky ideology on to the vast majority of people and there's going to be pushback and it's starting and it's not going to be pleasant and then they'll shrink a whole lot more and there'll be handbags at dawn but this is the fantasy of all of this you know creation of separate little communities that actually don't exist well it's the devolution of individualism because they don't create strong individuals they want to pop everybody into their little box and woe betide if you're a Rachel Stuart of the world and you get out of you know we've popped you in the rainbow box darling with the ever growing alphabet that's the box that we've put you in and she's like no I'm just who I am I just happen to see you know you know you know they want us to care about who they are but they don't care about who we are you know this whole thing about pronouns is a classic example right that is control of language what these people are saying to us is that they want to control how we speak about them in the third person when they're not there right because when we're speaking to them to the face they say okay Marie right or you're only using pronouns when you're talking about someone in the third person he said that or they did that or whatever and they're trying to control the language about how we speak about someone when they're not there it's bizarre I mean I'm sorry a plural cannot be a pronoun what if I decided I want to call myself killer whale instead of can you know that's the pronoun actually here's a better one what if my pronoun's handsome now I'm not handsome right but I now insist that everybody describes me as handsome because that's my pronoun that's the ludicrousness of it all right that they're trying to control the language about how everybody else speaks and Marie are doing this too with the insidious creep of you know pigeon Marie into into our language on television and radio where you get a situation where the whole idea about language is that information is imparted and they're making it exclusive so you don't actually know what the hell anyone's talking about anymore I spoke to Di Landi last week and she is one of the founders of a group called Manawahini Kaurero and she was talking about exactly that I mean it's not only the English language that has been captured and bastardised it is also the Māori language as she said English alliterations that have been turned into Māori and she said no one she said none of the nannies on the marae understand this they're just like what is this this isn't our language we're at university all those academics that have laundered themselves with multiple papers that claim that they're the greatest things that slice bread you mean a colonial invention called universities you mean that they will argue that no the language is a living thing and it needs to evolve ultimately language is there to communicate and if you're actually going to devolve a language to a point where the native speakers of that language can't even understand it themselves because these words were invented yesterday well then that's not inclusive is it? What cracks me up is this massive insistence that we all use macrons for how we spell things now well you know at the same time the people who insisting that we do that are railing against colonialism well how colonial is it to use a Greek creation a few hundred thousand years ago to describe how we speak Maori in modern society is that not colonialist to use European language constructs to describe Maori now this is the nonsensical logic that these people are employing the same person who is complaining about cultural appropriation of Maori movie studios and songs and designs as a guy wearing a cowboy hat you know in a Bolo tie like what about your cultural appropriation you look back in the years I went in Monty Python 40 years ago was in the life of Brian they were talking about Loretta I want to be called Loretta now why can't I you know it was Lutacris then and it's Lutacris now and then the same thing goes on this colonialism thing what is the Romans ever done for us well there's the aqueducts well okay apart from the aqueducts what are the Romans ever done for us well there's the roads well okay but it's the same thing this colonialism argument is what of the British ever done for us well there's the laws, the hospitals, the society you know all of these sorts of things they want to use all of those things but they want to rail against colonialism it doesn't make sense it's nuts and the more we tolerate it the more we accept it the more farcical it becomes it certainly does and I think I mean we could talk about this all morning but we're not going to I will pick it up on another day Cam I'm absolutely thrilled that you've been able to give us some time this morning thank you very very much if you have any questions out there for us or me at counterculture the address to write your email to is inbox at realitycheck.radio that's inbox at realitycheck.radio or send us a text 2057 is the number stay tuned more to come here with realitycheck and counterculture this is counterculture with Marie Buskie Wednesdays at 10am on realitycheck radio