Is there bias in BBC Question Time panel selection?
Update: This analysis was referenced in The Economist.
The BBC has been fighting back against accusations of bias in the selection of political guests. Such accusations are not new, but do they have merit?
In an attempt to defend the impartiality of the show the BBC Press Team recently published a graphic reflecting the political alignment of panellists.
Unfortunately the graphic is a bit scarce on the specifics of what the sources and the beeb have declined to elaborate on it or provide the underlying data.
Without the underlying data, it’s hard to know exactly what the graphic actually represents. …
How and why to use custom error types in JavaScript
Handling errors well can be tricky. How Error() historically worked in JavaScript hasn’t made this easier, but using the Error class introduced in ES6 can be helpful
Throwing errors in JavaScript
JavaScript supports try/catch/finally but the Error object it uses works differently from Exceptions in other languages and it doesn’t provide a way to catch Errors by type in the same way you can with Exceptions in Java or C# so it’s quite common for all Errors thrown in a project to be instances of Error.
Some vendors have implemented a conditional catch clause but it’s not a standard and not widely supported in browsers. …
Working around Cross Origin restrictions during development
Making requests to HTTPS APIs from HTTP sites running on localhost can be a pain, especially as browsers keep changing how they expose the option.
Browser Settings
The only way to turn off Cross Origin Restrictions in Chrome is to turn off the feature completely when starting the browser by passing arguments to it.
e.g. --disable-web-security --user-data-dir=~/.chrome-disable-web-security
On my Mac, I have the following in my .bash_profile so I can just type chrome at the command prompt so I can quickly start an instance of Chrome with web security disabled for development.
alias chrome=”/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --disable-web-security --user-data-dir=~/.chrome-disable-web-security”This saves me from having to remember the flags needed and allows me to easily test things in Chrome, although it doesn’t work in *every* case as some servers also require header re-writing (keep reading for more on this). …
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