Now that the ballots for the 2018 House of representatives election have been counted, how badly was the vote gerrymandered?

Gerrymandering is the creating of political districts to maximize the number of representatives a political grouping gets per vote.

The degree of gerrymandering can be approximated by calculating the difference between the outcome of a proportional voting system and the actual districted representatives each party gains.

Here's a look at the last 5 elections to the House of representatives.

In this congress, the Democrats have 235 representatives, the Republicans have 199 and there's 1 other representative.

Voter turnout was 50,3%, the highest for a midterm election since 1914.

The Democrats got 53,5% of the popular vote and 54,0% of the seats. The Republicans got 44,8% of the vote and 46,0% of the seats. Others got 1,8% of the vote and a single seat.

Since the Republicans are no longer getting vastly outsized representation, is gerrymandering dead?

If the US would have had a proportional voting system, 7 of the 435 seats would have been distributed differently in 2018.

The Democrats would have had 3 fewer representatives, the Republicans would have had 4 fewer and others would have had those 7 seats.

Here are the similar figures for the last five elections.

The change from getting 27 seats "wrong" in 2016 to 7 seats "wrong" this year is large and changes the historic trend.

Turns out that higher turnout led to more accurate representation in 2018. Who would have guessed.

(There are many other additional possible explanations for why this has changed too)

If we just look at the two major parties, what does this mean in real terms?

Here's an overview of the average difference in the number of voters the Democrats have needed for each seat they actually got in the last five elections compared to the Republicans.

There are other ways of trying to engineer specific election results.

This basic overview only looks at people who actually vote. Therefore it obviously doesn't consider those who are prevented from voting in the election process, whether that's from voting requirements, accessibility of polling places, registration requirements, etc.

It will be interesting to see what happens in 2020.

Is this a trend that'll continue?

Is it just a blip because those gerrymandering haven't been able to predict what party voters vote for in today's political climate?

What about turnout?

hi folks, billy mays here.

after getting some new music equipment for christmas, i finally sat down and spent the last 15-ish of the last 20 hours working on my first instrumental.

it's not super polished, and kinda rough in parts (as things usually go with first projects)

but hey - it's mine and it's a point to grow from.

so here ye go peeps - "Elk Song" x Bishop

(no vocals obvi, it's just instrumentals and lyrics for now until i find someone with a studio in the area.

...and money.)

as always, any thoughts/feedback are more than welcome. cheers

bishop

An article from the Sydney Morning Herald: Fact: Calling out political furphies works, in Australia at least (with some local flavour)

An article from New Scientist: Australians care if politicians tell lies, but people in the US don’t (from a non-Australian point of view)

The study itself in Royal Society Open Science: Does truth matter to voters? The effects of correcting political misinformation in an Australian sample.

I saw these things originally on Reddit that extracted the average colour of frames from films and put them together to make a colour palette for said film, the original creator has a site called The Colors of Motion. I thought it would be cool to try and create a simple PowerShell script that does the same thing.

Here are a few examples:
Finding Nemo: https://i.imgur.com/8YwOlwK.png
The Bee Movie: https://i.imgur.com/umbd3co.png
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: https://i.imgur.com/6rsbv0M.png

I've hosted my code on GitHub so if anyone wants to use my PowerShell script or suggest some ways to improve it feel free. You can use pretty much any video file as input as it uses ffmpeg to extract the frames.

GitHub link: https://github.com/ArkadiusBear/FilmStrip

It's usually a question with a two word answer, but I'm sure there's more that could be said - that you wouldn't normally say because you don't want to waffle on.

Either way, I'm elated and excited. I revised a few hours for a test instead of watching a TV show, and my result went from shit to actually pretty bloody great. I'm really happy about it, but I'm not going to revise until GCSE's because it's made me absolutely knackered.

I'm pretty excited because I've got work experience next week. I haven't the foggiest about what it'll be like (fearing a very, very boring week), but I'm looking forward to it. It'll probably be a bit awkward without my friends around, but I'll get used to it.

So, onto you. How are you?

I bought a starter pack in 2015, played a few dog fights and races at 25fps, and then forgot about it. I reinstalled it today and was amazed at all the progress. There's some really cool stuff, like having your own expressions mapped onto your characters face with a webcam, or how you can get on your ship, jump to another planet, descend through the atmosphere and land at a camp, get out of your ship, and go inside, all seamlessly with no load screens.

The game looks fantastic, and runs a lot better too (I did upgrade, my pc, but not that much. I have a ryzen 5 2600 and a radeon 570)

Do any of you play? What do you think about the game?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something!

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure if I'm just now noticing something that has always been that way, or if something has actually changed.

Post tags aren't clickable on the main page, or on any group page. I can click on tags inside a topic, but I can't click on tags on the main page.

I feel like I used to be able to do this. I'm pretty sure I must have been able to do this, because I've done some work in the past making tags consistent, and that's how I obtained lists of posts with certain tags.

Has something changed? Or am I imagining things?