Slashdot Mirror
Don't Read My Lips
scitex writes "Two economists, Rasa Karapandza and Milos Bozovic, from University Pompu Fabra, Barcelona wrote a very interesting paper "You Can Fool Some People Sometimes..." They say that on all US Presidential Elections from 1960, when presidential debates were held, won the candidate that used less future tense in the debate. First debate was televised in 1960. They predict that these elections will be won by George W. Bush. They used a similar approach to analyze performance of US companies and found that companies that use less future tense in their annual reports perform better. Will this change the way companies write they reports and presidential candidates speak?"
Usually speaking the incumbent is going to talk about what they've done over the last couple years, and usually speaking, it's the incumbant's race to loose. That would account for the majority of the time that this happened, and the remainder is probably just coincidence.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
You can't apply them to an individual case in an attempt to predict the future.
For example, the divorce rate in North America is very high. Pretend that it's an even 50% of marriages that end in divorce.
If you get married, you are not beholden to that statistic. Whether or not you get divorced cannot be predicted by the statistic. You do not have a 50/50 chance of breaking it off with your partner. The conditions may exist that cause a 50% divorce rate, but they may not apply to you, for whatever reason.
Predicting things from past results is interesting, and sometimes something to talk about, but they don't mean anything. Up until a couple of weeks ago, nobody had ever come back from being down 3 games to 0 in the World Series.
People are more interested in what you've done rather than what you say you're going to do which may or may not happen. Everybody knows that campaign promises tend to be broken so what you say you're going to do is going to be taken with a grain of salt.
This campaign really is about what GW did and whether you like it or not. Not so much about what either candidate plans to do the next four years.
I invested in my current stock AVN because they've done interesting things in the past, their stock history is good and because they had interesting current projects. I paid $1.76 a share and it's now above $3 a share. Their current project at the time is now showing real promise and getting some attention.
Work Safe Porn
I think this is the most awkwardly written slashdot submission that I've ever read, and that's saying a lot.
Read carefully: scitex writes "Two economists, Rasa Karapandza and Milos Bozovic, from University Pompu Fabra, Barcelona wrote a very interesting paper "You Can Fool Some People Sometimes..." They say that on all US Presidential Elections from 1960, when presidential debates were held, won the candidate that used less future tense in the debate. First debate was televised in 1960. They predict that these elections will be won by George W. Bush. They used a similar approach to analyze performance of US companies and found that companies that use less future tense in their annual reports perform better. Will this change the way companies write they reports and presidential candidates speak?"
This is about as meaningful as correlating election success with sports term performance, combined length of last names, weather, or astrology.
43 presidential elections (much less the 11 since 1960) are just not enough data points from which to extract any remotely significant analysis.
I can't help but notice that a sample size of 8 is not statistically significant. You could probably find correlations with the colors of their ties, the number of times they blinked, or the position of the moon with a sample size that small.
(11 elections since 1960, minus 3 for which there were no debates.)