Since politics seems to be rearing its ugly head here, I would like to
recommend a book: Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, by
Andrew Gelman. He is a well-respected statistician and political
scientist at Columbia University. To quote from his web page: " Andrew
has done research on a wide range of topics, including: .. why campaign
polls are so variable when elections are so predictable".
Joe
On 3/14/12 12:52 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
Very nice aggregation .. and interesting. Agreed bias does show through.
I looks like a potentially very close general election. Especially if
the former article is right: once a republican candidate is chosen,
the gap closes. This sounds like a reasonable hypothesis.
-- Owen
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:09 PM, glen <g...@ropella.name
<mailto:g...@ropella.name>> wrote:
Personally, I find polls confusing. I like this page:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/president_obama_vs_republican_candidates.html
that projects multiple polls down to a simpler space. Best I can
tell,
the error for the ABC/WaPo poll is is 4 points, the Pew poll is 3
points, and Rasmussen's is 3 points. Even ignoring how the questions
are worded and asked and their domains (RV/LV, demographics,
geography,
etc.), we see a lot of wiggle from poll to poll. The most interesting
thing to me are the correlations between who's responsible for the
poll,
their political bias, and the results of the poll. It would be
interesting to see how much and in what direction each wiggles over
time. E.g. does Rasmussen wiggle _more_ than Pew? Or do WaPo polls
wiggle with a skewed distribution?
It's obvious that statistics are lies. But perhaps the statistics of
the statistics would show patterns in they lying that would allow
one to
spot lying trends.
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"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1913.
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