Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Why Electing Bizlall is Voters' Next Logical Step

To understand this we have to recall how they arrive at their decisions. In its most basic form that depends on two things: one is the information they have and the other is their ability to process that info. For sure they make very complex decisions. Which makes electoral data absolutely fascinating.

The First 60-0 Was The 
Optimal Decision, in 1982
It was the optimal for voters to keep every candidates of the outgoing Labour government -- which many consider as the best we ever had -- out of Parliament given the paucity of information that was available then and their sophistication level. Still if you dig a little bit you find out that there was some kind of order in the way they voted. This is apparent when we see who among the unreturned candidates grabbed the highest percentages of votes in their respective riding. As Table 2 shows SR got the highest, followed by SB and Duval. KJ who implemented free education after he came up with the idea was sixth. This table may be familiar to you. It is the same one we used to propose that best loser seats should have been allocated to these people as they had the highest ratings among voters -- Nicol Francois, a candidate from Rodrigues, actually came in right after Duval but doesn't appear here as our proposal wouldn't have granted him an additional seat to reflect the relative sizes of the voting pools of the two island. So what we can note here is that voters seemed to have said "Ok, we're booting all of the guys out but we have decided not to treat everyone of you the same way."

Friday, November 17, 2017

Extended Street Festival Puts More Lives At Risk

We don't seem to have learned enough lessons from the 30/3 tragedy when 11 people lost their lives in 2013 after 15 centimetres of rain fell on Port-Louis. We still have time to wisen up and move the Porlwi by Nature festival elsewhere. So as not to look stupid after the event. More bad things can happen over five days than over three.
  • It's a wonderful idea to organise a street festival. There's not a lot that happens after 18h00 in Mauritius so the organisers definitely need to be congratulated.
  • Thing is we've seen what happened on 30/3 (March 30, 2013) when 15 centimetres of rain killed 11 citizens (10 in Port-Louis) during the day -- see clip below from Antenne Reunion (https://youtu.be/ppVz408B-ps) and a report by Euronews (https://youtu.be/h62tjRYI0jo). It's appropriate at this time to remember that the two o'clock rule teaches us how things become a lot less manageable after sunset and that there's a given amount of time to retreat to safety.