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Daily Kos Pollster Made Up Numbers
jamie found a story up on Daily Kos revealing that the polling firm they had contracted with for 18 months, Research 2000 or R2K, apparently made up or at least manually tweaked its polling results. The blog published a preliminary report by a team of statistics gurus (Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman), and it is an exemplar of clarity and concision. The team reports, "We do not know exactly how the weekly R2K results were created, but we are confident they could not accurately describe random polls." Daily Kos will be filing a lawsuit against its former pollster. "For the past year and a half, Daily Kos has been featuring weekly poll results from the Research 2000 (R2K) organization. These polls were often praised for their 'transparency,' since they included detailed cross-tabs on sub-populations and a clear description of the random dialing technique. However, on June 6, 2010, FiveThirtyEight.com rated R2K as among the least accurate pollsters in predicting election results. Daily Kos then terminated the relationship. One of us (MG) wondered if odd patterns he had noticed in R2K's reports might be connected with R2K's mediocre track record, prompting our investigation of whether the reports could represent proper random polling. ... This posting is a careful initial report of our findings, not intended to be a full formal analysis but rather to alert people not to rely on R2K's results."
Who marked the parent troll? There are a glut of self serving, biased, and (imo) worthless news outlets in the US, and every one mentioned in the parent post should be on it. It's incomplete, but hardly a 'troll'.
So what you're saying is that R2K is run by ACORN?
/. moderation is srsbzns XD
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Welcome to Slashdot. An assumption that the headline reflects the contents of the article, or that the summary reflects the contents of the article, are things you eventually learn is rarely true around here.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
are rarely true... *sigh* What can I say, I just got up...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
You could have spent a fraction of a second (0.15 seconds) with Google
You must type freakin' FAST!!!!! I can't even say my search terms that fast, much less type them. Hell, I can't ctrl-c, ctrl-v in 0.15 seconds!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.