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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."
Nobody expects the Daily Kos to be accurate.
It would be like trusting Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or anything ever aired on "Air America" before it went bankrupt.
Those who aren't used to phrases used with "political" centric organizations might mistake the title as saying someone who is on Daily Kos' payroll flubbed the numbers, rather than a company working on contract with them.
Living With a Nerd
For me, the surprising part of this isn't so much that R2K made up poll results, but that the results actually were noticably less accurate than traditional polling, which I like to think of as representing a broad cross-section of people who still have landlines with no caller ID for some reason (or are desperate enough to talk to another human being that they'll answer their landline anyway).
In this case it was Lies, Damned Lies, and "stuff we made up".
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Unlike the many Republican outfits which used partly- or wholly-fabricated polls by Strategic Vision, or the many media outlets which continue to use the horribly flawed Rasmussen polls to create eye-catching headlines, Kos immediately dumped the pollster, did an investigation, owned up to the errors publicly, and is now pursuing legal recourse.
This is exactly how you would expect an honest media organization (if one with a considerable political agenda) to behave. Too bad the mainstream media and those on the other side of the aisle don't seem to want to do the same.
Everyone knows that 78.49% of statistics are made up.
You'd think they would spend Soros money more carefully.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I used to work a different major polling company, and I can assure you R2K is not alone in just making up numbers. Easily 80% of surveys that went through my region were completely falsified, and the remaining 20% rarely matched the demographic they were supposed to be answering for. Survey administrators have quotas, and then get paid extra for additional surveys past that, but there is basically nothing done to verify any of the surveys turned in, and everybody in the company knows it. Don't always trust what you read, especially not statistics.
For headline skimmers, this post would produced a completely inaccurate sense of what the article was all about... at length, the D.KOS are the ones who found out about this and are doing something something about it. That's good... but if you just read the headline, you'd come away thinking that D.KOS were the culprits instead.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
of course this will turn into a "bash the left" and a "bash the right" thread. when ideology isn't the point. polling is the idiocy in question
and the guy who manipulated the numbers is clearly an amateur. the way you do proper poll manipulation is LOAD THE QUESTION. you poll people with a question with the proper turn of phrase to lead them towards the answer you want. then, when you present the answers to the poll, you also cage the results in such a way to lead the audience in the way you want them to interpret the results
polling is fucking joke. all results from the left, or the right, is complete bullshit, and a waste of your time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Or, the polling could be dead accurate, and the election results that are not correct.
Given todays political climate, it wouldn't be too big a stretch to see our 'politicians' rigging results. How many people have been asked outside the polling offices, who they voted for? How was that tracked? It would be interesting to know.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
For actual details on how you can tell that stuff was just made up, start reading here: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/breaking-daily-kos-to-sue-research-2000.html
http://xkcd.com/756/
I think we should take a poll on how seriously we take poll numbers. I mean We already know how we vote in them
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
If you place a statistician's head in ice and his feet in boiling water, then on the average he is quite comfortable!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And when you look at it from another perspective - you will probably exclude the nerd section of the population who never answers calls from 800-numbers (or other known junk callers) by using technology to divert the calls into a tarpit or something.
At least the open source telephony switch Asterisk do have a blacklist function where blacklisted numbers can be stored and used to perform a response like "The number you have dialed is not in use".
I do run that feature myself - and it's a lot more effective than using those "do not call" registries.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
false association is the best sort of poll manipulation
for example, if the poll was
"do you believe obama is the antichrist?"
of course this wouldn't poll very high. even those who oppose obama, the vast majority do so for genuine reasons of policy, not out of some demented partisan bloodsport (although unfortunately, the unthinking zombie partisan hordes seem to be on the rise in this country)
but if the poll was
"if obama were the antichrist, should he be impeached?"
and of course, this will poll high. when of course the question is completely loaded bullshit. if ANYONE were the antichrist, they should be voted out of office. but this is exactly this sort of false association that goes on all the time with polling questions. albeit a lot more subtle than this, and usually preying on people's preexisting prejudices and simplistic ideological understandings. it leads them to completely useless answers, but answers that can then be twisted when reported upon, with cable news HD graphics and bombastic audio cues and cinematic announcers with heavy gravitas and serious, low voices:
"in a shocking new poll, the idea of impeaching obama polls high among a wide sampling of americans"
polls are nothing but propaganda
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Can anyone give a reasonable explanation for why this story is listed under "science.slashdot.org"? Clearly this is a political story and should have been placed as such.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Tin Hat Alert doesn't begin to cover this.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
In Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, there's a scene early in the book where the Allies are assembling the personnel for Station X (aka Bletchely Park). Statistician, turned Nazi codebreaker Lawrence Waterhouse, points out that his Nazi counterpart Rudy von Hacklheber, would notice something was amiss with the Allied personnel changes based the statistics of people being transfered to Bletchely Park, and then quickly deduce that the Allies are attempting to break the Enigma code. To camouflage the transfers, Waterhouse suggests creating ficticious personnel and have some of them transfered to Bletchely Park as well. However the military can't just make any random fake person, the fictious people must be statisitically drawn from a distribution that when added to distribution of real Bletchely Park personnel, the combined distribution is statistically insignificant (i.e. fail to reject the null hypothesis) than any other large military base.
If Research 2000 did what is suggested, they failed to taint the polls with the right kind of fake data, just like what the novel warned about.
I know, I know, sarcasm, but I just couldn't help think of this:
http://livefeed.hollywoodreporter.com/2009/12/fox-news-120-have-opinion-on-climate-research-pic.html
Let the fools in Washington be suprised come election day, not trying to figure out how to leverage someone who is leading in the polls months before they get elected to an office.
I think polling itself is a travesty as some of the dumb idiot sheep following fools out there will tend to "vote for the winner" instead of voting for their ideals. Why not just stop all polling, the only polling we need is in primaries and in november.
I would really love to see this happen as it would cause people in the news to actually be suprised when the people they help pick by biased reporteing get their pants handed to them. Nothing is funnier than watching a media personality get a nice nasty surprise on election night...
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Considering they call me up while I'm eating dinner, I find the average polling person to be mean.
Seriously, how do they even get polls to work now, given that people try to avoid them like the plague?
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
You've never heard of exit polls? They're pretty much dead on in predicting vote results if done properly. There was some controversy in Bush vs. Kerry about them, it's interesting reading.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Understanding is a three edged sword. Your side, their side, and the truth.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Math outs a fraud. How is that not cool? It's like real life Mathnet!
Can anyone give a reasonable explanation for why this story is listed under "science.slashdot.org"?
Because the statistical analysis used to reveal the fraud is a good examples of how science works: take the raw data and squeeze it for internal and external inconsistencies.
Science is the policy that to be credible an idea must pass tests involving systematic observation and controlled experiment subject to as careful quantitative and qualitative analysis as the subject matter permits. This is a wonderful example of practical scientific technique applied to perfectly ordinary empirical data.
Labelling data "political" doesn't make it any less empirical. It just labels the labeller as someone who doesn't understand science.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It's the name you gave yourselves until you eventually found out to your dismay what it meant.
Now you're stuck with it.
Have a nice day.
Signed:
A traitor scum liberal douchebag going-to-hell-athist communist nazi socialist jew from Canada (or something) as described by the incessant idiocy on the Right.
--
BMO
It's about polling and statistics, not politics.
Wrong. This is entirely political. Read the headline -
Daily Kos Pollster Made Up Numbers
Everyone knows the Daily Kos is a political news site with a liberal sway. If it was about the statistics then an appropriate headline would have been something like
Pollster made up numbers and sold them for money
Instead the headline as written carries a direct implication of Daily Kos intentionally handing out known bogus data.
This story is political, plain and simple.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Because the statistical analysis used to reveal the fraud is a good examples of how science works: take the raw data and squeeze it for internal and external inconsistencies.
While the analysis may be scientific, the story - especially the way it was posted here - is decidedly not. Even the headline itself wreaks of a political vendetta. While science should not carry a bias, it also should not be used to attempt to cloak one.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
n/t
PowerLineBlog in particular is pretty well-respected for being rather calm and fair-minded, so I suspect you're just dumping together a bunch of right-wing sites you don't like because...wait for it...you visit left-wing sites. In other words, politics as usual. You don't even give a single example of anything.
There was a study done that showed a certain part of the brain was stimulated when someone was shown political viewpoints that fit their worldview. Interestingly, being given information that countered criticism of that worldview--even when that information was obviously false and the subject knew it--stimulated that same part of the brain. In other words, people are willing to accept any information that "refutes" criticism of their worldview even when their rational side knows it's wrong.
Don't be so political in your life and you'll see the world objectively. I wish Daily Kos supporters would take that advice.
Shocked, Shocked I tell you!
Politicians cooking the numbers? Astor-turfing?
What is the world coming to?
Now my tinfoil hat no longer covers my head you say?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
They did look at it critically. Research 2000 was fired by Daily Kos before anyone noted any impropriety in the figures, simply because the numbers weren't matching up with reality. Shortly after this happened, Grebner, Weissman, and Weissman approached Markos with evidence of deliberate impropriety.
Does Daily Kos have a responsibility to not promote questionable information as truth? Of course, and they've apologized for the situation. But keep in mind that this information is only coming to light because someone with sufficient statistical background took the time to pore over the data. That sort of expertise is hard to come by, which is the reason why smaller media/news outlets contract out to firms like Research 2000 in the first place!
It's only relatively recently that there's been much interest in the science of polling. Before the emergence of aggregation sites like FiveThirtyEight or Pollster.com, it was extremely rare that you'd ever see this kind of statistical analysis of polling data. The traditional method of testing a pollster's reliability was simple trial and error over a period of several elections. Really, that's *still* the primary method. If anything, Research 2000 only got scrutinized in this case because of the issues with their accuracy that led to them being dropped in the first place.
For me, it's not really a partisan issue, despite the highly politicized nature of Daily Kos. It has more to do with the size of the media outlet. I would expect a major news organization with dozens or hundreds of employees, like Fox News or MSNBC, to be able to detect problems like these very quickly. A relatively small blog with maybe a dozen part-time employees like Daily Kos, or Red State, or whatever, I'm more willing to give a pass. At least at first: I'd expect Markos to learn his lesson from this and be more proactive in ensuring that it doesn't happen again.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Well, no. But that makes such a nice l'il hipster story, I'm almost tempted not to correct you.
The "teabagger" epithet was first applied to the movement by CNN's Anderson Cooper (Cue the "well, he should know" snickering...)
Tea Party activists did use the phrase "tea bag" as a verb, on isolated placards, but they never referred to themselves as "teabaggers." That phrase has always ever been a pejorative hung on them by their opposition.
Yeah, no joke. Didn't we just have a financial crisis with roughly the same cause?
Is there some mental defect that requires some non-liberals (e.g. enormouspenis) to make false generalisations?
Unless this is a project to make polling companies look bad, so that Obama can take them over like he did with the banks and car companies, and now the oil and coal companies. Soon, him and his alien invasion forces will be taking over the MMO companies too!
Don't look at me like that, I'm not just some random crackpot, I'm a specific crackpot.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Too damn bad:
But what do you expect from people who start holding anti-tax protests after Obama signed the largest middle class tax cut in history? What do you expect from the kind of geniuses that hold up signs saying "Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare".
Signed:
A traitor scum liberal douchebag going-to-hell-athist communist nazi socialist jew from Canada (or something) as described by the incessant idiocy on the Right.
You forgot "gay unicorn-rapist".
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I saw participants referring to themselves as teabaggers in the beginning, and the idiotic right wing commentators at Faux News picked it up and ran with it before they figured out what it meant. Which is hilarious because the initial Tea Party events were sponsored by Faux News.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
They are the ones who thought it was a good idea to "tea bag the white house" and "tea bag the liberal dems before the tea bag you!" ("Tea Partiers'" words, not mine)
In other words, they are a political group so out-of-touch with mainstream America that they fail to recognize commonplace sexual slang.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
"Teabagging" referring to the American neo-idiot movement was a term coined by the American neo-idiot movement.
I'd go into depth but Olbermann says it much better.
Oh yeah... Asshole.
Someone had to do it.
The pollster was subscribed to by DailyKos, among hundreds of other news organizations, and the results were skewed IN FAVOR OF RIGHT-WING CAUSES, not left-wing, so the assumption that DailyKos was somehow complicit in this is absolutely not true. (And I've rarely, if ever, read DailyKos, so I have no personal interest in defending them.. the headline is just grossly misleading).
I think that's a good sign of well-balanced reporting. Equal numbers of people complaining about left and right bias.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
You have to be careful where you put the hyphen
Gay-unicorn rapist
Gay unicorn-rapist
There is a distinction between the two.
"and live in harmony harmony oh love!!!"
--
BMO
That was Strategic Vision, not R2K.
(Hey, I'd be much happier if people named products with distinguishable proper names rather than generic sounding word combinations and worse yet, acronyms, so you have my sympathies for getting them mixed up.)
Someone had to do it.
Yea, my understanding is that they, being the class acts that they are, wanted the name because they intended to "teabag them damn liberals".
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
And, what a surprise, even Wikipedia backs that up (with a picture and everything)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement#Use_of_term_.22teabagger.22
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Or, the polling could be dead accurate, and the election results that are not correct.
Don't Stop Believin'
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
What do you expect from the kind of geniuses that hold up signs saying "Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare".
Sadly, realism.
It's like comparing aids and gonorrhea, but at least one is mostly curable. Furthermore, it's absolutely true that Obama's sabotaging medicare by expanding it. Here's the argument : we can't pay the rent for the smaller house, and Obama just forced us into a mansion (certainly it's priced like a mansion). Needless to say, this will merely lead to eviction.
Those who make up numbers.. ...and those who don’t get caught. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yes. Our blacklist attendent plays this: http://www.payphone-directory.org/sounds/wav/bell/disconnected.wav then disconnects.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Yeah, because it has never happened.
Oh, wait...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Daily Kos frequently posts the results of several polling organizations, in addition to those they commissioned. Rasmussen almost always shows Republicans several points higher than the other polls.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Sorry, I realized that after I posted and went back to fivethirtyeight to read what he was saying. It looks like Silver's analysis this time around uses different methods, and again he's received a C&D to stop commenting.
you'd see that a lot of mainstream media outlets use the same polling company...and none of them realized they were being defrauded. They're not some fly by night outfit, they had a good rep in the industry.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
The people who were investigating these anomalies were able to do so because The Daily Kos made sure that the crosstabs of all the poll data were made available when each poll was published.
So I *do* give them credit, because they made sure that the information behind the information being presented was available for people review in order to determine its accuracy. It sort of sounds like... I don't know... providing the source code along with the application and letting the users submit bug reports and patches.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Self Reference Tin Foil hats.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
When you are attempting to do as little work as possible and still get the million dollars a year kos spends on polls, mocking with the data in such a way that nothing amiss can be detected is rather counter productive: You might as well do the polls right anyway.
You have to be careful where you put the hyphen
Gay-unicorn rapist Gay unicorn-rapist
I meant the one I typed, which is a gay who rapes unicorns. But that did make me grin, and I'm sure the right wing would gladly accuse you of both in a heartbeat.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
In Popular Culture
Mal detects fraud in an episode of Firefly.
In Dark Horse Expanded Universe Star Wars Comic Centered on Background-Character-with-Back-to-Camera-Seen-at-43-Seconds-in-to-the-Tatooine-Cantina-Scene-of-the-Special-Edition-of-SW:ANH detects fraud during a Dejarik game.
Super Miroki-chan detects fraud while negotiating for the return of her panties in the anime OAV Tentacle Monster Love 3000.{dubious}} In the original manga, Miroki-chan instead detects fraud from Harumi-kun {{original research?}}
As any grader can tell you, cheaters are intrinsically lazy. Because they are lazy, they will inevitably fail to sufficiently cover their tracks, most often because the coverup is harder than the original task.
But my point is that there aren't equal numbers. Slashdot has always leaned one way--left. In this one case where a left-wing site is the topic of discussion, the accusation is being made that Slashdot is a conservative site.
By the way, the Kos supporters with mod points are out in full force abusing the -1 Overrated moderation.
Every Single Health Care Reform Idea is... ... a Republican idea.
You seem to forget that the National health reform model is modeled after the Massachusetts one, instigated by Mitt Romney, a Republican.
The Republican Party is only out for itself. If it's their idea,
Oh fuckit. I'm not writing this for the billionth time. Fuck the GOP, Fuck the Teabaggers, and Fuck you and your fucking short term memory.
--
BMO
... but my fellow Tea Partiers complain pretty loudly, e.g., here: here.
Paul B.
Dude, the mods are constantly on the lookout for C4L folks posting on here. If you keep that signature (
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/
), be prepared for quick "Troll" or "Offtopic" mods, regardless of what you may have to say.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
And, what a surprise, even Wikipedia backs that up (with a picture and everything)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement#Use_of_term_.22teabagger.22
Weird... misinformation on Wikipedia disparaging a conservative movement. Whodathunkit?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Did you know the original Teabaggers were protesting the fact that the wealthy British lowered taxes on their own tea below the taxes on the colonial tea?
That's a pretty inaccurate depiction of the Tea Act and why the colonists opposed it. In essence, the British government was protecting it's own favored company (East India Company), in favor of other traders (and smugglers, because tea carried a hefty tax). So actually the colonists favored free trade instead of crony capitalism (or fascism, if you prefer), and when the British government tried to pass laws that provided monopolies for East India, the colonists rebelled.
I think that's a pretty good analogy with motivations of the modern-day Tea Party protesters.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
They are the ones who thought it was a good idea to "tea bag the white house" and "tea bag the liberal dems before the tea bag you!" ("Tea Partiers'" words, not mine) In other words, they are a political group so out-of-touch with mainstream America that they fail to recognize commonplace sexual slang.
I had no idea that tea-bagging was commonplace practice in mainstream America.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-12-10/
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Are you kidding?
I answer nearly ever pollster that calls me. Note that I tell telemarketers to fuck off, but pollsters can have 15-20 minutes of my day almost any time -- and if I'm busy, they'll call me back at whatever time I tell them I'll be free next.
I think it's important to have my opinion counted, especially when they're asking me what kind of food I want in my local supermarket. You know those nutritious, tasty, inexpensive frozen dinners we've been seeing more and more of? Yeah, you're welcome.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
But keep in mind that this information is only coming to light because someone with sufficient statistical background took the time to pore over the data. That sort of expertise is hard to come by
According to those Daily Kos folks, all climate scientists have sufficient statistical background to do these things. This quality, according to them, is easy to come by. People not even specialized in the field can do the most difficult statistics of all.
"His name was James Damore."
Thanks for support, dude! And for your informative other comments -- I was just so disgusted with that bmo character that decided not to feed this troll!
And I have had my C4L signature since it replaced my "Ron Paul 2008" one, and still have karma to burn, so I guess I'll keep it for now! ;)
Of course we both know who were the original (modern) Tea Party folks, and, for the record, I am not that happy to see likes of Sarah Palin try to highjack that movement, and GOP "establishment" infiltrating it, but this fine point does not necessarily fit simple black and white view of our liberal friends here. This is why they prefer to use slurs instead of, say, reading the link I've posted and questioning the simplicity of left/right division.
Paul B.
That $663.8B figure is the President's request for FY2010. Congress increased that amount to $680B, and that's now law. But the budget is still short for Iraq and Afghanistan, so there's another $33B supplemental pending for FY2010. (Although Representative Lowey trimmed that to about $30B, so let's go with that.) That brings the total to $710B. And that's just the Department of Defense. Defense-related spending outside the DoD budget is a minimum of $200B. Let's round that total down to a total of $900B. And there you have it: defense spending is about two thirds of discretionary federal spending. The previous poster is correct.
Given the fact that nearly every time I mention this problem I'm slapped with a troll mod, as well as some of the other issues mentioned here (most of which I've also seen) I suspect that somebody (or more than one somebody) with unlimited or nearly unlimited mod points has a stick up their sphincter about this issue. There's a theoretical foundation for understanding why somebody slaps Trolls down on stuff they don't agree with, but why on Earth would they slap them down so reliably on "fix the damn moderation system" posts? Only if they're an Slashdot Editor, I suspect.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The polling company also could have fallen afoul of Benford's Law.
From Wikipedia: "Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty. This distribution of first digits arises whenever a set of values has logarithms that are distributed uniformly, as is approximately the case with many measurements of real-world values.
This counter-intuitive result has been found to apply to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature). The result holds regardless of the base in which the numbers are expressed (except for trivial bases), although the exact proportions change."
There have been plenty of other examples of this happening as well. Just one blatant example was a few months ago in the Accidental Wii Suicide article. Anyone who knows anything knows that a 2-year-old kid does not commit suicide as the article headline and summary claimed. But because the conservative nutjobs were working so hard to turn the lunacy up to 11 to avoid the imagined possibility of gun control laws, they completely overlooked the real problem - bad parenting. Anyone who reads the actual article (and not just the conservative spin posted here) realizes that some idiot left a loaded weapon, ready to fire, within easy access of an unsupervised toddler. The gun is no more at fault than the Wii, or the shoes the kid was wearing. The gun owner should be tried for homicide.
Slashdot is left-leaning on almost every position it reports on
Except slashdot rarely reports on anything, you should know that slashdot doesn't have any reporters, they just pass on news stories from other sites most of the time. And the only slashdot employee I know of who calls himself a "journalist" is so conservative he makes Pol Pot look like Mother Theresa. So it is unlikely you would see a "report" from slashdot that was left-leaning.
from copyrights
Are you saying that conservatives want copyrights to extend for all eternity? I was not aware of that...
to environmentalism
Has it occurred to you that the earth is occupied by people from all realms of political persuasions?
Are you an angry Kos reader
Nope. I don't read Kos at all.
But I won't let that get in the way of your rant (not that I would expect you would, either).
... who hates seeing this story on the front page or something?
Hate is an awfully strong word. Although based on the way you write I suspect you use it fairly often.
But no, I do not "hate" seeing this story. I do, however, strongly disagree with the partisan conservative wording of the summary and headline. It could have been presented in a much more even manner, but someone intentionally chose to word it this way.
Even your own post contradicts your position by stating there haven't been any pro-conservative stories lately
Has your anger muddied your reading comprehension? Let's go back to my post that you couldn't seem to be bothered quoting directly, shall we? I stated
Hell, it's already Tuesday afternoon in the US and this might be the first pro-conservative story they've run all week; in which case they have a lot of catching up to do in order to make their quota...
I don't make a habit of counting the pro-conservative stories because I often don't have the time to discuss them. This one was so blatantly obvious that I thought I would check in on the discussion to see what people were saying - I was not surprised when my posts were down-moderated for pointing out the conservative leanings of the summ
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
you're just dumping together a bunch of right-wing sites you don't like because...wait for it...you visit left-wing sites
Wrong. But thanks for putting so much independent-minded thinking into the matter.
In other words, politics as usual.
An excellent summary of your previous wild-assed guess.
You don't even give a single example of anything.
So says the person who can't come up with an example of the "left-leaning slashdot" that they moaned about in another post. So says also the same person who attempted to paraphrase a study that they couldn't be bothered to cite.
Don't be so political in your life and you'll see the world objectively
Have you looked in a mirror, or read your own posts, recently? I suspect not.
I wish Daily Kos supporters would take that advice.
So kind of you to be so thoroughly impartial, non-judgemental, and unassuming.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Have you read the link that I have posted? Do you have anything better to say than calling people names?
Do not you realise that there is a rather large chunk of what one would call libertarians (or which I am one) willing to work with both Left and Right to solve the immediate problems that we are having right now, and try to resolve our differences later, maybe "agreeing to disagree", maybe just finding a better social order and using it to step up as species? ;)
I was offering the GP guy my hand, and now you seem to refuse to take it for pure ideological reasons, without stopping to think -- do you think it's right? What happened to 'question the authority?" thing, is it irrelevant now that Your Guy looks like he is holding the strings, and you are willing to support *whatever* he is up to?
Do you really support continuation of both wars (one somewhat declared, another one not), continuation of executive power special privileges, *new* PATRIOT act, absence of any move to de-criminalize recreational drugs, bailouts of huge corporations, making people pay through their nose for their health insurance, printing trillions of dollars of new money (if infusion of money into economy is *really* a solution, why not cancelling income tax for a year, instead of giving your buddies those trillions to "distribute", while taking a percentage off it? :) )?
Anyway... I think it was wrong of me to try to convert you (and yes, I did mean *you*, BMO!) Now play by play:
> A traitor scum liberal
What people used to be call "liberal" is now "libertarian", for the last century and half or so... What is not called "liberal" is more like a "socialist". And, if you have ever read my posting history, I come from *Soviet Russia*, really, so I know what happens under those rules, and I do not like it!
> douchebag going-to-hell-athist
Totally agnostic here, but when filling out forms and questionnaires (in Soviet Russia we used to call them "anckettes") offered by *your* government, I wrote in "Taoist" in religion section.
> communist
See above
> nazi socialist
Do you mean Nationalsozialismus, or the International Socialism? Do you think there is really that much difference between them?
> jew
Hmm, funny -- I thought it's the "left wing" that have problems with Jews (and take side of Palestinians), me, personally, have no opinion on that ancient struggle and would just leave people to resolve their difficulties themselves.... Agreed? ;)
> from Canada (or something)
Funny that I am typing this from Canada, but I am not here for political reasons, only job-related ones...
> as described by the incessant idiocy on the Right.
Do I still sound like an idiot? or do you want to find out how it is possible for me to have a consistent set of views without resorting to "Obama is always right!" thing? (Which would contradict the above-mentioned "question authority" thing, but it's apparently OK for you, not for me).
Willing to down-mode, or engage in real discussion?
Paul B.
A bunch of ideologues made some shit up? Wow. Color me astonished.
Did replied to BMO dude here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1702634&cid=32740516 -- as much as I hated it, maybe it still has a chance to change someone's mind, or at least crack it open just a little bit. However minuscule... :(
Good luck!
Paul B.
P.S. Since I like you, here is my e-mail: p-b;u=n*y'kATgmail.cammm :)
Sure bmo, like most Republicans supported Romney Care. Romney's probably taken himself out of contention as a future Republican nominee because of Romney Care. Are you claiming the Tea Parties supported Romney Care or Obamacare? Was this post from you even for real, or was it a joke?
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
You mean that hiring someone to write a program that will generate truly random polls and paying at most a few hundred dollars and then just clicking a button every week is more work than doing them by hand?
I'm not sure that's true. If anything, I think Slashdot has always leaned libertarian, which doesn't fit into the mold of either right or left, as they are often defined. Of course, I see how to get the data necessary to decide the question. Can you?
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
For what it's worth, that was one of the issues that finally pushed me away from the party. I couldn't stand listening to alleged conservatives backing Romney's health reforms when they were blatantly anti-conservative.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This is late but...
The fact is that the "tea party" and those that back it were utterly silent.
They were utterly silent when GWB enacted the PATRIOT Act and people like me are *traitors* for opposing it.
They were utterly silent when GWB suspended Habeas Corpus. Hello?
They are *utterly blind* when a Republican does something that is supposedly against their principles, but when a Democrat adopts a Republican idea, woe be unto him. He's a TRAITOR to the US.
They're just a branch of Republicanism and nothing more.
--
BMO
They are the ones who thought it was a good idea to "tea bag the white house" and "tea bag the liberal dems before the tea bag you!" ("Tea Partiers'" words, not mine) In other words, they are a political group so out-of-touch with mainstream America that they fail to recognize commonplace sexual slang.
I had no idea that tea-bagging was commonplace practice in mainstream America.
It isn't and nobody said it was. The term, however, is.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I had no idea that tea-bagging was commonplace practice in mainstream America.
Only since the introduction of the Halo games really.
Ah ha! Proof that video games really are corrupting our youth!
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
While I am deeply disappointed in Kos over this, to argue that both sides are just as bad in this regard is fatuous just on the face of it. Call me back when MSNBC argues in a court of law that it is their constitutional right to fire reporters for refusing to lie.
Most of the time that argument is used, it is to imply that ALL data that involves statistical analysis must be false (unless they happen to agree with whatever swill FOX News is pushing), and that we should only trust in anecdotal evidence provided it comes from a sufficiently extremist right wing blowhard.
Statistical analysis is the more reliable means of getting at the truth precisely because it is possible to uncover misleading and inappropriate things like what happened with this Kos pollster. That's why science relies on statistical analysis instead of "'cause Rush said so".
If someone provides you an answer that is the result of statistical analysis but refused to provide enough information for you to verify their conclusions (data, analysis methods used, etc.), then you can assume the conclusion is bad.
I'd wager your average climate researcher has a fair bit more knowledge about the science of statistics than your average political blogger or politician.
My sig will be released in 2015 third quarter. Rating pending.
By your standards the democrats are in favor of restarting the holocaust, using hamas as the new nazis. After all, some are (just read dailykos for a bit).
And generally, none of them say anything when hamas makes statements about restarting the holocaust. And everytime anyone suggests that maybe hamas should be taught a lesson "democrats" (let's throw everyone in one basket like you so seem to enjoy) rant on and on about how "victimized" those poor genocidal maniacs are.
And let's not pretend that the lunatics of, say dailykos or democratic underground, don't know perfectly well that what they're saying about gazans is simply a lie.
Thanks for providing evidence that there is intelligent life, on Earth. I appreciate it.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Slashdot has always leaned one way--left.
I suppose you could see it that way, if you're a fascist.
You missed the point entirely, but I don't expect much.
Not after 15 years of this crap.
The difference between random lunatics on Kos and elsewhere is that the Tea Party has money and is a political force. Random lunatics on Kos don't have any.
But thanks for playing the "false equivocation" fallacy. Just more of the same.
--
BMO
I see nothing in your post disproving the references given in that article. As such, your post is worthless.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Except your logic sucks. Dr. Dre wasn't the person who started referring to black people as "niggers". Whereas the teabaggers decided on the term teabagging of their own free will.
Nice try.