The various PIPA studies have been torn apart by people from both sides of the political spectrum. PIPA itself it essentially a left wing organization used to push 'news' like this through funding from other more openly liberal groups.
They repeatedly use overly subjective words like "substantial" in their questions to which they determine the acceptable answers as well as selectively choose their topics to try and maximize their results. It's simply a feel good type questionnaire to which they have already determined the outcome. On some sites their surveys are even compared to Push-polls which any fan of Karl Rove knows, are great political tools but of relatively no scientific value.
Way to refute my points. I bow to your master debating skills.
BTW these numbers are from SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
But of course, if you were interested in finding the truth of the matter you would know that since it's either the first or linked to by the first entry in almost every Google search on the subject.
Most terrorists are hypocritical in that they only choose to follow those Islamic tenets that agree with their positions and tend to ignore all those that don't; this is exactly what Saddam did. In later years he used Islam as a tool to motivate and control the populace. Whether people outside of Iraq thought he was a good Muslim is really beside the point.
Ok I tried to separate the links to make them understandable but I guess that didn't work for everyone.
For clarification when I wrote "The Original Study" I was referring to the Lancet study from 2004. When I said "Their Latest Study" I was referring to the 2006 one. Both use the same flawed methodology as explained quite clearly by the links provided. The WSJ piece especially shows the shoddy polling technique used by Johns Hopkins for the latest study.
And despite what you may think anecdotal evidence is not proof unless Riverbend happens to know all 25 million people in Iraq, although I'm pretty sure the researchers from the Lancet would have no problem accepting it as such as it fits quite cleanly with their selective clustering techniques.
The Wall Street Journal's take. This covers the main problem with both studies, ridiculous clustering methodology. It also points out another important aspect as to how poorly the respondents were documented.
A little on the political bias of the 'impartial' researchers:
The Political Pitbull. Lancet editor at an anti-war protest. Notice his circular reasoning that since his new report using the same flawed methodology confirms his original report that he is completely vindicated.
And that was just from the first page of my Google search.
Saddam was also very willing to use religion whenever it convenienced him. He just didn't like it mixing with his formal power. Who knows if it was because by submitting to Islamic rule he would be beholden to a higher power or if he truly wanted a separation of church and state, but by 1994 even that changed. It was around then that he began to use Islam as a tool to keep the populace under control and motivate them when the sanctions against him were beginning to have profound affects on internal moral.
He began training imams, forcing mandatory Qur'an lesson in schools and opened Saddam College and Saddam University of Islamic Studies.
You see, on the right we like to read while enjoying our Kool-Aid.
Saddam has killed that many Kurdish Iraqis in single operations.
By most estimates his death toll was in the neighborhood of 80-120/ day making the number of Iraqis that would have died under Saddam's continued rule over this 3 year period approximately 130,000 give or take. As Iraq Body Count has the current total of deaths for the war at 50k that would mean about 80k Iraqis are alive today that otherwise wouldn't have been if the war did not occur.
But more important than just the numbers is the method of death. Saddam's death squads did not generally care about guilt or innocence of it targets. Even children were considered viable targets. The US on the other hand tries to limit civilian casualties even at the expense of their own men and women. The majority of deaths in post invasion Iraq have been due to insurgent attacks, which like Saddam, often target indiscriminately or worse, intentionally, civilian populations.
The re-writing of history and head burying that takes place to attempt to make George Bush out to be a soulless killing machine is simply amazing. Almost no commenter trying to pin all the Iraqi deaths on the US ever mention that very few of the civilian deaths, after the initial attack phase, were even done by the Americans but by foreigners or other Iraqis who don't like the idea of a free and independent society.
Both Lancet studies have been so widely discredited by statisticians as to make their only purpose to help point out the far left anti-Bush/war people in the room.
The first study was so fraught with sampling errors that the could only come up with a possible range of between 9000 and 190,000 deaths. The 100k was just a nice round number in the middle with no more or less support according to their own report.
Their latest is on about the same level with a sampling procedure that would fail the test for a population the size of your average high school let alone a country of 25 million and their estimated range of deaths has even gotten larger than their original report, which seems almost impossible. Once again the 400k number is just selected out of the air because it's nice and round and somewhere in the middle of their outrageous estimate range.
If you want a more accurate number rely on Iraqi Body Count; still anti-war but more more scientific and unbiased in their approach.
You should really travel outside of the echo chamber every once in a while, it does a body good.
At the height of US arm sales to Iraq the value reached a whopping 125 million a year for a total sales of, wait for it, 200 million dollars over 20 years. And for the record, those sales consisted mostly of light helicopters.
In comparison, France, every liberals shining paragon of virtue, in that same time period had a total sales of 5.6 Billion (yes, that's with a "B"), with no such limitations as those sales included tanks, armored vehicles, fighter craft, etc..
On the list of who sold what to Iraq, the US is actually closer to Canada for total sales than any of the other major arms producing countries of the world.
The only people claiming that number are the highly partisan and discredited Lancet.
There original estimate of 100k a couple years ago came up with a range between 9k to 190k deaths, making the entire report statistically useless but that didn't stop them from shouting "100,000 deaths" from the rooftops. Their latest study, where the multi hundreds of thousands number comes from is a little better managed but still has a admitted estimated inaccuracy in the hundred of thousands.
Iraq body Count, another anti-war organization but one which is accepted as fair, on the other hand, uses hard data collected from news stories and coroners reports. There estimate is in the neighborhood of 50k, still a very high number but no where near the astronomical figure the far left like to trot out. They've even debunked the latest Lancet study on their own site.
Interestingly enough, the only trait shared between the Lancet and IBC studies is their lack of separation between true civilian deaths and those of insurgents.
You may disagree with the war but at least be honest about the facts of the case.
But buying Republican can get you into trouble as well as your political partner. With all the press out hunting for any dirt they can find on any conservative that even looks in the direction of 1600 it would be much better to just buy a Democrat.
Whether it's 55K from Buddhist monks, 60K from the Chinese, or 95K stuffed in a freezer, when Dems get caught with their hands in the cookie jar no one cares and no one loses their jobs. Hell, you can just ask one to walk out with the top secret papers you want stuffed down their pants and the most they'll get is a temporary suspension of clearance and no one will even bother asking questions about what happened to the docs. What kind of sweet deal is that.
The best part, you can even bypass the actual officials and go straight to their staff members. If they're willing to risk ongoing terror investigations and divulge national secrets to a newspaper just to try and embarrass the opposition, who knows what they'll due when you flash a few $50's in front of their eyes.
You may want to get your 'bids' in quickly though because if you wait too long you just know the lines may be too long to get anything done before spring.
That blogger is a well known and self described antagonist who just moments before the video was caught on film fighting his way through a crowd and himself assaulting people in order to get to Allen.
IMHO, his actions and the fact he had an unchecked backpack warranted a lot more action then he received.
And Allen's ex-wife herself has refuted his claims.
If anything, this video is a prime example of how YouTube can be used to mold perceptions without even the most basic of factual checks that one would expect from the MSM at large. Not that I'm calling on any form of political censorship for YouTube, just that people have to take what they see there with a grain of salt and be willing to look further into the story than the 60 second sound bite that the videos there provide.
It's hard to convict anyone, even a Bush administration official, for not acting on Tenet's "sixth sense", which is all this story is about. Sure they had a meeting to discuss the threat of an attack from Bin Laden but even Tenet himself admits that all he had to go on was increased radio chatter and his feelings, with no clear targets or plans.
The biggest governmental problem leading to the 9/11 attacks was not people ignoring some generic "attack emminent" type memo or meeting but the wall set up to prevent interagency communication. Army Intel couldn't talk to the CIA who couldn't talk to the FBI and so on. This was an ongoing policy (slightly reinforced during Clinton's term but originally created years earlier) when terrorism was considered a criminal act as opposed to an act of war. In hindsight it may have been a dumb policy, and many people thought so even then, but it was meant to allow for the prosecution of captured terrorists which couldn't happen if information gathered from the wrong agencies were used in making the arrests. So sadly, while there was probably enough information out there to have prevented, or greatly reduced the events of September 11th, the bureaucracy of Washington made it near impossible for anyone to put the pieces together.
It didn't matter who was in office, the system was just not well designed to handle this type of situation. If any good has come of this tragedy, it's the policy shift that has begun the process of tearing down the walls. There are still some communication problems but at least now the agencies are talking to each other. And sure this may lead to some problems with criminal trials later on (which is already a problem with the GITMO detainees) but I think preventing another attack is far more important.
They myth of the infallability of exit polls is just that, a myth.
In fact 4 out of the 11 federal elections that have used exit polling have shown signigigant discrepencies (1988, 1992, 200, 2004) as well as at least 2 primaries (and this was from a proponent of exit polls, Steve Freeman). So In the US their barely hitting the 50% mark for accuracy on a federal scale.
Exit polls themselves, while usefull indicators, are not perfect and can be greatly affected by all types of social/political/technical issues. Because of that it's almost impossible to directly compare exit poll results from one country to another as they all use their own techniques.
Check out Pollster.com for a thorough breakdown of the pros and cons of the polling system
There are serious questions about both Freeman's conclusions and his methodology used.
Most his argument is based upon the use of the early release unadjusted numbers and not the final release values, which were much closer. For those not acquainted with exit polling systems, the numbers are adjusted to coincide with the actual voter turnouts and remove disproportionate representation within the sample group. I.E. if your sample is made of 55% but actual voter turnout has a percentage of only 35% women than the polls are adjusted to compensate for the over representation.
He also tries to use mathematical comparisons where they simply don't work. For example, his comparison of response rates in Blue districts to Red Districts. According to his conclusion, if a GWB supporter has a 56% response rate in Texas they should also have a 56% response rate in L.A. As almost any Conservative living within a Liberal bastion can tell you, vocalizing your Conservative beliefs invokes about the same response as insulting someone's mother or worse, and in terms of vocalizing support for GWB, well you'd probably receive a more favourable response if you just hit someone.
And from his own book (thanks to the review at TPM Cafe):
"In addition to the 1988, 1992 and 2004 presidential elections and the 2000 vote for president in Florida, the only other significant unexplained US exit poll discrepancies on record are the Republican presidential primaries in New Hampshire in 1992 and Arizona in 1996."
As the reviewer points out, exit polling has only been used in the US since the 60's, so out of 11 or so federal elections, 4 have produced questionable results, that's hardly a great confidence builder in their accuracy. But even though Freeman clearly states this, he ignores any implications that may have and continues with his "exit polls are always accurate" argument.
The fact his co-author is the editor of a 'Progressive' magazine also does not help his image as a independant arbiter for truth much.
Overall, I'll stick with Mark Blumenthal's work when it comes to impartial polling analysis.
"Exit polls were the gold standard of election forcasting...until 1990".
Since that time exit polls have routinely favoured Democrats above actual vote totals. So even when Clinton was winning the numbers never truly reflected actual vote totals.
According to the pollsters themselves it appears methodology and political ideology seem to be the main culprits. In the last election there was admitted problems with the methodology used, sometimes due to lack of training and some times due to the law (minimum distances from polling stations). As distance between the pollster and the actual polling station increases the reliability of the results decreases as it becomes more of a matter of the voter seeking out a pollster which greatly skews the results. For whatever reason, according to the polling companies themselves, Republicans are less likely to volunteer to take part in an exit poll so would logically therefore be even less likely to make an actually effort to seek out an pollster.
Timing also plays a major factor. For example women, who vote predominantly Democrat, tend to vote earlier and therefore make up a larger percentage of exit poll results than their actual numbers would dictate.
The Mystery Pollster does a pretty good job of explaining all the issues, pro and con, of exit polls.
At least I was sure it started with a 'K'. I knew it sounded wrong when I typed it but I was tired and had no interest in Googling her and accidentily seeing her face just before climbing into bed. There is just something very off putting and unnatural about the way she looks.
I believe the analysis of the votes determined that under two of the 3 most likely vote counting standards Bush would have won. Since all three were perfectly in line with the law at the time the actual result results could have gone either way. The most interesting part was that under the rules Gore sought to perform a recount Bush would have won cleanly while under the rules Bush sought a recount Gore would have won.
The biggest limitation, legally speaking, was the Florida laws limiting timelines. I don't know why exactly, but Florida laws dictate exactly when the official counts must be presented and don't seem to leave a lot of wiggle room for special circumstances. People tried to demonize Kathleen Harris (and with her makeup choice that wasn't a hard thing to do) but legally speaking, her actions were pretty much dictated by state law.
But that all leads to another interesting quirk in American elections, that each state sets it's own rules governing federal elections. I know it's a whole 'states rights' issue but I seriously think it's time for someone to draft a federal elections guideline paper and start lobbying for states to sign up. With a single standard for voting it's much easier to monitor the process not to mention train volunteers.
With a national set of guidlines you would also rid yourself, or at least severly limit, the problems associated with the dividing of individual districts between the individual parties. That has got to be one of the strangest aspects of the American electoral system, allowing one of the parties involved to have direct control over any part of the process.
I'm just shocked the system works as well as it does given it's apparent ad hoc style.
From a Canadian perspective, where Elections Canada run the whole show accross the country, with no direct involvement of any party, American elections are a very odd thing to watch. For us, trouble usually means waiting till morning to get the final totals and since everyone accross the country follows the same rules, there is usually not much ground for anyone to complain about the outcomes.
No one forgets about Gore's winning of the popular vote it's just that it's immaterial to any argument as to who won. The American system is specifically designed to not require a majority vote to win a Presidential election so while the good and bad points of the Electoral Collage can be debated from now till the end of time, those were the rules in place in 2000 and you got the President that the rules dictated you'd get.
And please don't try the 'disenfranchisement' and 'voting irregularities' roads because as most reports show, most of those were non-existant, self-inflicted (i.e that ridiculous 'butterfly ballot' was a Democratic design in a Democratic district) or self correcting (a lot of people were mistakenly excluded as criminals but many districts simply ignored the exclusion list anyway).
Deal with it and get over it.
If it makes you feel any better no matter what how bad of a Democratic nominee they can dig up (and honestly, was Kerry the best they could find last time round) there is no chance of Bush win in 2008.
and apparently your never heard that the failure rate of pretty much all contraceptives is five times higher amoung teens than non-teens.
All Shanho and the others are advocating is taking some reasonable precautions as opposed to simply releasing your child into the wild and hoping for the best. The exact types of precautions to be used are more of a case by case basis. Where I grew up speeding was not a major issue so a GPS unit would be overkill but teenage drinking on the other hand was a very regular occurrence so in some cases I could see a parent installing one of those breathalyser units instead. It's all a matter of individual circumstances.
That's not to say that many parents don't go too far but simply requiring the bedroom remain open is hardly a case of extreme parental control.
I'd be interested in hearing your opinion on allowing your child, when you ever have one, to have a computer with internet access in their room.
This ruling will stand about as long as it takes to get an open slot on an appeals court docket. Not because of any government interference, or a conservative judge over ruling a liberal one, but because few legal experts can muster any defense for the judges reasoning.
I've already read several comments along the lines of "without much reasoning or even explicit arguments", and those are just from those who agree with the outcome.
All in all it appears that the Judge had a preconceived outcome in mind and merely wrote a half hearted decision to try and justify it. You can google for expert opinions on both sides of this issue and hear their reasoning both for and against the program but the one thing they all seem to agree on is that this ruling will not, and can not stand based on what this judge wrote.
You are both totally off topic but you still managed to provoke the most interesting discussion in this thread.
I just wish I could say I even the slightest bit surprised by all the lame attempts at comebacks against yours and SpectheIntro's comments but they're just the standard emotional driven responses that are a staple of Slashdot discussion whenever certain topics come up (evo/creation anyone? Just kidding, please don't)
Of course, I'm still wondering why this post even exists. To me it seems more like one of those stupid cases from the patent office that every always rallies against. Someone takes a relatively simple process and puts it on the web and suddenly someone thinks it's a big deal, or in Slashdot's case, 2 years later someone thinks it's a big deal. No great breakthrough in computing, just a simple web page that sends an email to a city councilor. Even the numbers involved are relatively minor (69% of 0.6% or 5.25 million people used this site).
Slashdot Mirror
The various PIPA studies have been torn apart by people from both sides of the political spectrum. PIPA itself it essentially a left wing organization used to push 'news' like this through funding from other more openly liberal groups.
They repeatedly use overly subjective words like "substantial" in their questions to which they determine the acceptable answers as well as selectively choose their topics to try and maximize their results. It's simply a feel good type questionnaire to which they have already determined the outcome. On some sites their surveys are even compared to Push-polls which any fan of Karl Rove knows, are great political tools but of relatively no scientific value.
Way to refute my points. I bow to your master debating skills.
BTW these numbers are from SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
But of course, if you were interested in finding the truth of the matter you would know that since it's either the first or linked to by the first entry in almost every Google search on the subject.
Most terrorists are hypocritical in that they only choose to follow those Islamic tenets that agree with their positions and tend to ignore all those that don't; this is exactly what Saddam did. In later years he used Islam as a tool to motivate and control the populace. Whether people outside of Iraq thought he was a good Muslim is really beside the point.
Ok I tried to separate the links to make them understandable but I guess that didn't work for everyone.
For clarification when I wrote "The Original Study" I was referring to the Lancet study from 2004. When I said "Their Latest Study" I was referring to the 2006 one. Both use the same flawed methodology as explained quite clearly by the links provided. The WSJ piece especially shows the shoddy polling technique used by Johns Hopkins for the latest study.
And despite what you may think anecdotal evidence is not proof unless Riverbend happens to know all 25 million people in Iraq, although I'm pretty sure the researchers from the Lancet would have no problem accepting it as such as it fits quite cleanly with their selective clustering techniques.
Peer reviewed by who exactly.
The original study:
Slate's review.
Another useful breakdown of problems with their methods.
Just one more for flavor.
Their latest study:
The Wall Street Journal's take. This covers the main problem with both studies, ridiculous clustering methodology. It also points out another important aspect as to how poorly the respondents were documented.
Iraq Body Count's review.
A little on the political bias of the 'impartial' researchers:
The Political Pitbull.
Lancet editor at an anti-war protest. Notice his circular reasoning that since his new report using the same flawed methodology confirms his original report that he is completely vindicated.
And that was just from the first page of my Google search.
Saddam was also very willing to use religion whenever it convenienced him. He just didn't like it mixing with his formal power. Who knows if it was because by submitting to Islamic rule he would be beholden to a higher power or if he truly wanted a separation of church and state, but by 1994 even that changed. It was around then that he began to use Islam as a tool to keep the populace under control and motivate them when the sanctions against him were beginning to have profound affects on internal moral.
He began training imams, forcing mandatory Qur'an lesson in schools and opened Saddam College and Saddam University of Islamic Studies.
You see, on the right we like to read while enjoying our Kool-Aid.
Saddam has killed that many Kurdish Iraqis in single operations.
By most estimates his death toll was in the neighborhood of 80-120/ day making the number of Iraqis that would have died under Saddam's continued rule over this 3 year period approximately 130,000 give or take. As Iraq Body Count has the current total of deaths for the war at 50k that would mean about 80k Iraqis are alive today that otherwise wouldn't have been if the war did not occur.
But more important than just the numbers is the method of death. Saddam's death squads did not generally care about guilt or innocence of it targets. Even children were considered viable targets. The US on the other hand tries to limit civilian casualties even at the expense of their own men and women. The majority of deaths in post invasion Iraq have been due to insurgent attacks, which like Saddam, often target indiscriminately or worse, intentionally, civilian populations.
The re-writing of history and head burying that takes place to attempt to make George Bush out to be a soulless killing machine is simply amazing. Almost no commenter trying to pin all the Iraqi deaths on the US ever mention that very few of the civilian deaths, after the initial attack phase, were even done by the Americans but by foreigners or other Iraqis who don't like the idea of a free and independent society.
If I had read this 5 seconds earlier I would be sending you a bill for a new keyboard.
=)
Both Lancet studies have been so widely discredited by statisticians as to make their only purpose to help point out the far left anti-Bush/war people in the room.
The first study was so fraught with sampling errors that the could only come up with a possible range of between 9000 and 190,000 deaths. The 100k was just a nice round number in the middle with no more or less support according to their own report.
Their latest is on about the same level with a sampling procedure that would fail the test for a population the size of your average high school let alone a country of 25 million and their estimated range of deaths has even gotten larger than their original report, which seems almost impossible. Once again the 400k number is just selected out of the air because it's nice and round and somewhere in the middle of their outrageous estimate range.
If you want a more accurate number rely on Iraqi Body Count; still anti-war but more more scientific and unbiased in their approach.
You should really travel outside of the echo chamber every once in a while, it does a body good.
At the height of US arm sales to Iraq the value reached a whopping 125 million a year for a total sales of, wait for it, 200 million dollars over 20 years. And for the record, those sales consisted mostly of light helicopters.
In comparison, France, every liberals shining paragon of virtue, in that same time period had a total sales of 5.6 Billion (yes, that's with a "B"), with no such limitations as those sales included tanks, armored vehicles, fighter craft, etc..
On the list of who sold what to Iraq, the US is actually closer to Canada for total sales than any of the other major arms producing countries of the world.
The only people claiming that number are the highly partisan and discredited Lancet.
There original estimate of 100k a couple years ago came up with a range between 9k to 190k deaths, making the entire report statistically useless but that didn't stop them from shouting "100,000 deaths" from the rooftops. Their latest study, where the multi hundreds of thousands number comes from is a little better managed but still has a admitted estimated inaccuracy in the hundred of thousands.
Iraq body Count, another anti-war organization but one which is accepted as fair, on the other hand, uses hard data collected from news stories and coroners reports. There estimate is in the neighborhood of 50k, still a very high number but no where near the astronomical figure the far left like to trot out. They've even debunked the latest Lancet study on their own site.
Interestingly enough, the only trait shared between the Lancet and IBC studies is their lack of separation between true civilian deaths and those of insurgents.
You may disagree with the war but at least be honest about the facts of the case.
But buying Republican can get you into trouble as well as your political partner. With all the press out hunting for any dirt they can find on any conservative that even looks in the direction of 1600 it would be much better to just buy a Democrat.
Whether it's 55K from Buddhist monks, 60K from the Chinese, or 95K stuffed in a freezer, when Dems get caught with their hands in the cookie jar no one cares and no one loses their jobs. Hell, you can just ask one to walk out with the top secret papers you want stuffed down their pants and the most they'll get is a temporary suspension of clearance and no one will even bother asking questions about what happened to the docs. What kind of sweet deal is that.
The best part, you can even bypass the actual officials and go straight to their staff members. If they're willing to risk ongoing terror investigations and divulge national secrets to a newspaper just to try and embarrass the opposition, who knows what they'll due when you flash a few $50's in front of their eyes.
You may want to get your 'bids' in quickly though because if you wait too long you just know the lines may be too long to get anything done before spring.
That blogger is a well known and self described antagonist who just moments before the video was caught on film fighting his way through a crowd and himself assaulting people in order to get to Allen.
IMHO, his actions and the fact he had an unchecked backpack warranted a lot more action then he received.
And Allen's ex-wife herself has refuted his claims.
If anything, this video is a prime example of how YouTube can be used to mold perceptions without even the most basic of factual checks that one would expect from the MSM at large. Not that I'm calling on any form of political censorship for YouTube, just that people have to take what they see there with a grain of salt and be willing to look further into the story than the 60 second sound bite that the videos there provide.
It's hard to convict anyone, even a Bush administration official, for not acting on Tenet's "sixth sense", which is all this story is about. Sure they had a meeting to discuss the threat of an attack from Bin Laden but even Tenet himself admits that all he had to go on was increased radio chatter and his feelings, with no clear targets or plans.
The biggest governmental problem leading to the 9/11 attacks was not people ignoring some generic "attack emminent" type memo or meeting but the wall set up to prevent interagency communication. Army Intel couldn't talk to the CIA who couldn't talk to the FBI and so on. This was an ongoing policy (slightly reinforced during Clinton's term but originally created years earlier) when terrorism was considered a criminal act as opposed to an act of war. In hindsight it may have been a dumb policy, and many people thought so even then, but it was meant to allow for the prosecution of captured terrorists which couldn't happen if information gathered from the wrong agencies were used in making the arrests. So sadly, while there was probably enough information out there to have prevented, or greatly reduced the events of September 11th, the bureaucracy of Washington made it near impossible for anyone to put the pieces together.
It didn't matter who was in office, the system was just not well designed to handle this type of situation. If any good has come of this tragedy, it's the policy shift that has begun the process of tearing down the walls. There are still some communication problems but at least now the agencies are talking to each other. And sure this may lead to some problems with criminal trials later on (which is already a problem with the GITMO detainees) but I think preventing another attack is far more important.
They myth of the infallability of exit polls is just that, a myth.
In fact 4 out of the 11 federal elections that have used exit polling have shown signigigant discrepencies (1988, 1992, 200, 2004) as well as at least 2 primaries (and this was from a proponent of exit polls, Steve Freeman). So In the US their barely hitting the 50% mark for accuracy on a federal scale.
Exit polls themselves, while usefull indicators, are not perfect and can be greatly affected by all types of social/political/technical issues. Because of that it's almost impossible to directly compare exit poll results from one country to another as they all use their own techniques.
Check out Pollster.com for a thorough breakdown of the pros and cons of the polling system
There are serious questions about both Freeman's conclusions and his methodology used.
Most his argument is based upon the use of the early release unadjusted numbers and not the final release values, which were much closer. For those not acquainted with exit polling systems, the numbers are adjusted to coincide with the actual voter turnouts and remove disproportionate representation within the sample group. I.E. if your sample is made of 55% but actual voter turnout has a percentage of only 35% women than the polls are adjusted to compensate for the over representation.
He also tries to use mathematical comparisons where they simply don't work. For example, his comparison of response rates in Blue districts to Red Districts. According to his conclusion, if a GWB supporter has a 56% response rate in Texas they should also have a 56% response rate in L.A. As almost any Conservative living within a Liberal bastion can tell you, vocalizing your Conservative beliefs invokes about the same response as insulting someone's mother or worse, and in terms of vocalizing support for GWB, well you'd probably receive a more favourable response if you just hit someone.
And from his own book (thanks to the review at TPM Cafe):
"In addition to the 1988, 1992 and 2004 presidential elections and the 2000 vote for president in Florida, the only other significant unexplained US exit poll discrepancies on record are the Republican presidential primaries in New Hampshire in 1992 and Arizona in 1996."
As the reviewer points out, exit polling has only been used in the US since the 60's, so out of 11 or so federal elections, 4 have produced questionable results, that's hardly a great confidence builder in their accuracy. But even though Freeman clearly states this, he ignores any implications that may have and continues with his "exit polls are always accurate" argument.
The fact his co-author is the editor of a 'Progressive' magazine also does not help his image as a independant arbiter for truth much.
Overall, I'll stick with Mark Blumenthal's work when it comes to impartial polling analysis.
A slight correction to your post:
"Exit polls were the gold standard of election forcasting...until 1990".
Since that time exit polls have routinely favoured Democrats above actual vote totals. So even when Clinton was winning the numbers never truly reflected actual vote totals.
According to the pollsters themselves it appears methodology and political ideology seem to be the main culprits. In the last election there was admitted problems with the methodology used, sometimes due to lack of training and some times due to the law (minimum distances from polling stations). As distance between the pollster and the actual polling station increases the reliability of the results decreases as it becomes more of a matter of the voter seeking out a pollster which greatly skews the results. For whatever reason, according to the polling companies themselves, Republicans are less likely to volunteer to take part in an exit poll so would logically therefore be even less likely to make an actually effort to seek out an pollster.
Timing also plays a major factor. For example women, who vote predominantly Democrat, tend to vote earlier and therefore make up a larger percentage of exit poll results than their actual numbers would dictate.
The Mystery Pollster does a pretty good job of explaining all the issues, pro and con, of exit polls.
Oops, I meant Katherine Harris.
At least I was sure it started with a 'K'. I knew it sounded wrong when I typed it but I was tired and had no interest in Googling her and accidentily seeing her face just before climbing into bed. There is just something very off putting and unnatural about the way she looks.
I believe the analysis of the votes determined that under two of the 3 most likely vote counting standards Bush would have won. Since all three were perfectly in line with the law at the time the actual result results could have gone either way. The most interesting part was that under the rules Gore sought to perform a recount Bush would have won cleanly while under the rules Bush sought a recount Gore would have won.
The biggest limitation, legally speaking, was the Florida laws limiting timelines. I don't know why exactly, but Florida laws dictate exactly when the official counts must be presented and don't seem to leave a lot of wiggle room for special circumstances. People tried to demonize Kathleen Harris (and with her makeup choice that wasn't a hard thing to do) but legally speaking, her actions were pretty much dictated by state law.
But that all leads to another interesting quirk in American elections, that each state sets it's own rules governing federal elections. I know it's a whole 'states rights' issue but I seriously think it's time for someone to draft a federal elections guideline paper and start lobbying for states to sign up. With a single standard for voting it's much easier to monitor the process not to mention train volunteers.
With a national set of guidlines you would also rid yourself, or at least severly limit, the problems associated with the dividing of individual districts between the individual parties. That has got to be one of the strangest aspects of the American electoral system, allowing one of the parties involved to have direct control over any part of the process.
I'm just shocked the system works as well as it does given it's apparent ad hoc style.
From a Canadian perspective, where Elections Canada run the whole show accross the country, with no direct involvement of any party, American elections are a very odd thing to watch. For us, trouble usually means waiting till morning to get the final totals and since everyone accross the country follows the same rules, there is usually not much ground for anyone to complain about the outcomes.
(donning asbestos suit)
No one forgets about Gore's winning of the popular vote it's just that it's immaterial to any argument as to who won. The American system is specifically designed to not require a majority vote to win a Presidential election so while the good and bad points of the Electoral Collage can be debated from now till the end of time, those were the rules in place in 2000 and you got the President that the rules dictated you'd get.
And please don't try the 'disenfranchisement' and 'voting irregularities' roads because as most reports show, most of those were non-existant, self-inflicted (i.e that ridiculous 'butterfly ballot' was a Democratic design in a Democratic district) or self correcting (a lot of people were mistakenly excluded as criminals but many districts simply ignored the exclusion list anyway).
Deal with it and get over it.
If it makes you feel any better no matter what how bad of a Democratic nominee they can dig up (and honestly, was Kerry the best they could find last time round) there is no chance of Bush win in 2008.
=)
and apparently your never heard that the failure rate of pretty much all contraceptives is five times higher amoung teens than non-teens.
All Shanho and the others are advocating is taking some reasonable precautions as opposed to simply releasing your child into the wild and hoping for the best. The exact types of precautions to be used are more of a case by case basis. Where I grew up speeding was not a major issue so a GPS unit would be overkill but teenage drinking on the other hand was a very regular occurrence so in some cases I could see a parent installing one of those breathalyser units instead. It's all a matter of individual circumstances.
That's not to say that many parents don't go too far but simply requiring the bedroom remain open is hardly a case of extreme parental control.
I'd be interested in hearing your opinion on allowing your child, when you ever have one, to have a computer with internet access in their room.
This ruling will stand about as long as it takes to get an open slot on an appeals court docket. Not because of any government interference, or a conservative judge over ruling a liberal one, but because few legal experts can muster any defense for the judges reasoning.
I've already read several comments along the lines of "without much reasoning or even explicit arguments", and those are just from those who agree with the outcome.
All in all it appears that the Judge had a preconceived outcome in mind and merely wrote a half hearted decision to try and justify it. You can google for expert opinions on both sides of this issue and hear their reasoning both for and against the program but the one thing they all seem to agree on is that this ruling will not, and can not stand based on what this judge wrote.
Oops, typo. Just for clarity sake the numbers should read:
"(69% of 0.6% of 5.25 million people used this site)"
Guess I should be a little more careful when commenting on the way out of the office for the day.
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Any typos in the above comment are, of course, due to the 'Friday Effect'
You are both totally off topic but you still managed to provoke the most interesting discussion in this thread.
I just wish I could say I even the slightest bit surprised by all the lame attempts at comebacks against yours and SpectheIntro's comments but they're just the standard emotional driven responses that are a staple of Slashdot discussion whenever certain topics come up (evo/creation anyone? Just kidding, please don't)
Of course, I'm still wondering why this post even exists. To me it seems more like one of those stupid cases from the patent office that every always rallies against. Someone takes a relatively simple process and puts it on the web and suddenly someone thinks it's a big deal, or in Slashdot's case, 2 years later someone thinks it's a big deal. No great breakthrough in computing, just a simple web page that sends an email to a city councilor. Even the numbers involved are relatively minor (69% of 0.6% or 5.25 million people used this site).
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Now, try to mod that off topic!
Sadly, that's exactly how my Director sounds when he talks.
Wish I still had some mod points hanging around to bump you up.