More on polls

In an earlier post yesterday, I mentioned the ‘house effect’ of polls. These are the size of the effects that a given polling outfit produces in favor of one or the other party. They are not necessarily biases in the sense of the polling firm deliberately distorting the results. It is often the result of methodologies that produce different effects such as sampling only likely voters vs registered voters, cell phones vs. landlines, robocalls vs. human calls, weighting by party affiliation, etc. Simon Jackman has an article explaining it in more detail. [Read more…]

Should doping be allowed in sports?

Every time that there is a major doping scandal associated with sports, like the recent one in which Lance Armstrong was portrayed as essentially a drug kingpin who “didn’t just take drugs: he was the enforcer of a small mafia within professional cycling that moved ruthlessly against anyone who threatened to expose him or his collaborators. He bullied and threatened team-mates, journalists and fellow cycling professionals and officials”, calls emerge that maybe we should simply allow it. [Read more…]

Have we have destroyed our children’s taste for food?

[Sorry about the confusion about the posts! I accidentally posted the text of one post under the heading of the other!]

The comments on last week’s post on some students protesting the new nutritious food guidelines for school lunches were quite lively. So I went back and tried to find some data to see if that might clarify the situation. [Read more…]

Review of the first presidential debate

[Sorry about the confusion about the posts! I accidentally posted the text of one post under the heading of the other!]

So I ended up watching the first debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

I thought the format was much better than previous ones that I have seen. It allowed for much freer exchanges between the candidates and more time for direct exchanges and thus was more like a real debate. In the process, both speakers ended up running rough-shod over the moderator Jim Lehrer and some may accuse him of having lost control. But that was better than in some ‘debates’ from years past when the moderator acted like a circus ring master cracking the whip at the candidates. The less we see and hear of the moderator the better. [Read more…]

The ‘statistical tie’ fallacy

As I said earlier, journalists will use every device to persuade us that elections are closer than they are, in order to keep interest high. One of the things they do is to assert that if the difference between the predicted votes for two candidates is smaller than the margin of error of the poll, then the two candidates are in a statistical tie. This gives the impression that it is a toss-up, i.e., 50-50 chance, as to who is ahead. This is simply not true and worth reiterating during the election season, like I did back in 2008 around this time. [Read more…]