Zogby said Kerry would win for two reasons: the candidates are essentially tied to within the margin of error, and undecideds usually vote against the incumbent. If you notice, 48+46 doesn't add up to 100.
Where's the transcripts for all his interviews? What other information does he have, that possibly would go against his point of view, that he didn't mention (like he has done many times before)?
This is a ridiculous standard. Do you want to rifle his desk and scan his hard drive while you're at it?
It involves posession of a material which, to be produced, requires that a crime be committed which is frequently harmful to the children involved, and therefore implicitly condones the fact that that crime took place.
Yeah that would be a reasonable definition. You'd think the law ended there. There was a case in 2001 where a law (the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996) banning "virtual child porn"- i.e. cartoons- was struck down by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision on First Amendment grounds. That went close to defining a thought crime. The Child Obscenity and Pornography Prevention Act of 2002 amended the law by adding the words "virtually indistinguishable from" to the statute- creating an exemption for obvious things like cartoons- but still covers "generated images" and "computer generated images" if they're "virtually indistinguishable from" real child porn with real children. That one passed the House but was never considered in the Senate. The Child Obscenity and Pornography Prevention Act of 2003 was included as an amendment to the PROTECT Act (outlawing digitally morphed images, where you paste the kid's head on a naked body). That one doesn't care about whether it's real or fake. It simply outlaws any solicitation to buy or sell child porn advertised as such. See here for details.
It's a lot like flag burning- where constitutional amendments often sit squarely in the way of a desire to be seen as "doing something".
The problem is that since we don't have access to all the information Palast has, the question boils down to whether we can trust him.
Palast got his information from this page containing emails sent to georgewbush.org by mistake.
The footage of the private detective filming people, along with physical evidence of Republican voter fraud provided by Florida elections officials, is available here in RealVideo format.
So now you have enough information to address the substance of what he says, and you don't need to resort to ad hominem attacks anymore.
It is not an ad homienm fallacy, because our opinions of Palast DO matter. If we cannot trust him, we cannot pay attention to what he says, unless fully corroborated.
Even if fully corroborated is more like it. You "cannot pay attention to what he says" only because you're afraid of learning things that might challenge your beliefs.
It's not logically consistant to claim that the whites were going to split their vote evenly but that the "minority" voters were going to vote Democrat. If that was reality, Republicans would never win.
"Whites split their vote evenly" is another strawman of yours. I never said that. They don't split their vote evenly but per capita white people still affect the vote less than blacks do because they tend to split their vote more evenly than do blacks. But there are lots of white people. If white people voted Republican the way blacks vote Democratic we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
I mentioned the movie because it illustrates that this guy (from central America) is Latino. But the government still calls people like him white.
"What the government calls people" should be reflected in the census data. And like I explained even if 9 out of 10 Hispanics on this list were misclassified as white, the chance of randomly picking even as much as 600 Hispanics out of a group of 26,000 whites and Hispanics is 10^1400 to 1. It's a straightforward binomial calculation. If they make up 20% of the population you should expect to find about 5000 on the list. Not 60, not even 600. This won't happen by chance, even with the help of Diego Delgado.
All we'd need is 1. How many lottery tickets does someone have to buy to be a winner? Just 1. I'm not sure if you're intentionally misrepresenting probability or you just don't understand.
Do you even understand the difference between possible and probable?
Why is it that those on the "progressive" side are assuming that criminals who happen to be black were going to vote Democrat?
You are probably not familiar with the controversy. The problem with the list, and the reason it was so controversial to begin with, was that it was full of people who were not criminals, who were put on the list by mistake. Criminality aside, blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic, so it was naturally seen as a very convenient mistake for Jeb to make, especially now that it's 4 years later and many of the same incorrect names are still on it.
So what you're saying, by not actually saying it, is that about 26,000 of those people were white. More than half of the people on the list that you refer to are not black.
Yeah, so? Are you implying that these white people were all going to vote for Bush? Or they would split their votes between candidates any less evenly than any other group of white people?
Assuming that the numbers are accurate and that someone hasn't "cooked the books" so to speak. It still proves nothing. Let us not forget the numbers of hispanics who are counted as white.
Before you try to say that it doesn't happen...Have you ever seen the movie Blow? The very ethnic Diego Delgado is catagorized as "White" by the government.
Starting from the 2000 census data, so that we include the effects of Florida's weird ideas about movie stars from Blow, Florida is 65.4% white (non-Hispanic), 16.8% Hispanic, and 14.6% black. The ex-felon population will have a slightly different racial makeup, but you can estimate it by assuming that the ratios of whites to Hispanics are about the same as for the rest of the state (blacks are obviously overrepresented). What's the probability that out of a random sampling of 26,000 non-black ex-felons, 4745 (18.25%) of which you'd expect to be Hispanic, you'll find exactly 61 Hispanics?
It's (.8175^(25939)) * (.1875^61) * 26000! / (25939! * 61!) That number is so small it's hard to calculate. You can use Stirling's Approximation to get the log of it: 25939*log(0.8175) + 61*log(.1875) + 26000*(log(26000)-1)) - 61*(log(61)-1) - 25939*(log(25939)-1) = -2270 - 18858 + 88789 - 47 - 88855 = -21241. Even allowing for the probability of finding fewer than 61 Hispanics, which changes the result by log(60) at most, you're still left with a probability of a 1 with at least 21240 zeroes to 1 of finding 61 or fewer Hispanics on the felons list by chance.
Maybe you're right and the felons list is full of movie stars from Blow. Even if the list "really" contains 600 Hispanics, ten times as many as are estimated, the log of the probability would be 25400*log(0.8175) + 600*log(.1875) + 26000*(log(26000)-1)) - 600*(log(600)-1) - 25400*(log(25400)-1) = -2223 - 436 +88789 - 1067 - 86482 = -1419, or a one with 1400 zeroes to one. We'd have to hold more elections than there are protons in the universe for even 600 Hispanics to appear on the list, without someone "cooking the books."
Please consider that source. Visit his website and ask yourself if he is capable of unbiased critical thought or is this another hatchet-job.
A biased opinion can still be valid. Why don't you address the substance of what he says instead of issuing a lazy ad hominem?
Does everything and everyone always have to be "fair to both sides"? What if one side is just wrong? Or lying?
Does the concept that one side might be wrong even occur to you?
People recently seem to have had this notion of "balance" and "bias" beaten into their heads. And no wonder- this "balanced" crap gives an enormous tactical advantage to liars, so no wonder you people have all been brainwashed into thinking this way.
Oh spare us the politically correct bullshit, will you? Nobody said "minority equals Democrat". That's your own strawman.
It's perfectly valid to evaluate an attack on minority voting demographic as a partisan maneuver, even if it involves what look like stereotypes when applied at an individual level. "So-and-So is black so he must be voting for Democrats" is a politically incorrect statement. "Blacks tend to vote Democratic" is not, especially if it happens to be true. Politically incorrect assertions about minorities tend to lack statistical validity. That's partly why they're offensive.
Interesting too, from a statistical viewpoint, is how 22,000 Democratic-leaning blacks but only 61 Republican-leaning Hispanics were among the 48,000 people on the 2000 felons list.
Quit pretending to be stupid. Everyone can see what is going on here.
Sorry, this has been debunked.According to contemporary reports the explosives were still there when we arrived, no matter what Drudge would like to have you think during the next few days.
Why don't they concentrate on safeguarding dangerous materials? The plane that crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland (killing 270) was brought down with 400 grams of Semtex, an RDX-based compound.
Gail Fisher, manager of the county's Elections Division, theorizes that after selecting their straight party vote, some voters are going to the next page on the electronic ballot and pressing "enter," perhaps thinking they are pressing "cast ballot" or "next page." Since the Bush/Cheney ticket is the first thing on the page, it is highlighted when the page comes up - and thus, pressing "enter" at that moment causes the Kerry/Edwards vote to be changed to Bush/Cheney.
Bush appears as the default choice on a screen which should have no default choice selected! This design flaw is a source of systematic error that will give thousands of erroneous votes to Bush, and absolutely zero to Kerry. To get a similar effect with random error from hanging chads, you would need millions of deformed punch cards, and in that case the advantage might go either way- it wouldn't be predetermined to favor Bush.
And then they have the nerve to blame "voter error" when people don't change the default! Incredible!
A high-tech voting system that is properly designed and deployed should be easier to use and more secure then a paper solution.
I put bold tags around your enormous qualifying assumption, which you seem to gloss over as if it's a given. It is extremely difficult to create a properly designed high-tech voting system. The network of bluescreening touchscreens that lie in wait for many of us don't even come close.
Paper ballots have problems with hanging chads (if they're the punch-out type) or improper erasures (did he intend to erase "A" and vote vor "B", or did he vote for both of them?) or faint markings that may or may not have been intended to be votes.
Feh. These are sources of random error, which although undesirable, affects the outcome nowhere near as much as systematic error. In general systematic error has partisan effects, whereas random error in general does not- it mostly cancels itself out. 10000 votes affected by random error affect the election about as much as 200 votes affected by systematic error.
See this post and the reply to it for details. I don't want to keep repasting it in every thread. Maybe I'll start a journal.
And you're going to have errors when you start to count millions and millions of paper ballots by hand.
Like I said before, unless you hire outright partisans to count votes, these will be sources of random error.
Any candidate who lost by a narrow enough margin is going to demand a recount,
Good. I hope they do.
A recount for the Presidential election would have to be completed before January 2nd. Limited time means people rushing, which means more errors...
Not if your Daddy appointed a few Supreme Court justices. They can stop the recount and choose you as president before the outcome is even known.
A) Ballots get "switched" on the way to the counting place. B) Ballots are put into the wrong piles for who the person voted for. C) Ballots are "miscounted". D) Ballots are "lost". E) Ballots are erased and re-inked.
Sorry, all of these can happen much more easily inside a black box than they can out in the open.
F) Your system forgot the write-in ballots which require someone to read anothers handwriting.
So you're saying the election might be stolen from a write-in candidate? Somehow I think democracy might survive if poll workers have to read handwritten names that are kept on record.
Paper ballots are actually much easier to screw around with than an electronic or mechanical system coded by an honest programer or designed by an honest engineer.
Unfortunately, honesty is not a verifiable attribute. There's no way for sure to know that the programmer or engineer really is honest. If the code isn't auditable, we have to take their word for it. Most likely honest is not acceptable in this sorry situation we've gotten ourselves into.
Say all the Democratic voting districts still vote on punchcards while the Republican suburbanites vote on their brand new ultraprecise Diebold machines. This gets rid of the random error in the Republican districts. However it converts the random error from hanging chads in the Democratic districts into systematic error favoring Republicans, since random walks toward Republican candidates in Democratic districts are no longer balanced by random walks toward Democratic candidates in Republican districts. If you're going to use Diebold machines, you'd better buy enough for everybody.
Republicans are dispatching goons to polling places in poor neighborhoods to challenge the legitimacy of every voter who walks in the door. So this entire discussion is a bit academic.
after counting fifty votes, the human vote counters had made several errors versus zero for the voting machine.
Did the humans make random errors (degrading precision), or errors tending to favor one candidate (worse, degrading accuracy)?
This looks like a test of precision, not accuracy, and Maryland is confusing the two. I wrote a long post a few days ago in another story that's relevant to this one, and makes the point I'd want to make here, so I'll be a lamer and paste it. * * * The punch card system proved itself to be a very accurate method of vote counting, even under the extreme condition of a tie- to a precision of several hundred votes. Much attention was paid to the relatively few cards that had chads hanging, but the vast majority of the cards were quite unambiguous in their representation of the voter's intent. Unfortunately they occurred in equal numbers for both candidates. The entire system was at least as auditable as any vote counting system can possibly be.
People don't understand the difference between precision and accuracy. Precision means that, given a measurable X, your measurements are sharply defined. But that is not the same as accuracy- which implies that the measurements actually reflect the true value of X, and not the influences of other sources of systematic error- like air resistance, or the thermal expansion of the ruler you're using, or the political affiliation of the manufacturer of your measuring equipment. A measurement is only accurate if sources of systematic error have been minimized. Sources of random error- like hanging chads- merely degrade precision.
The outcry for computerized voting that followed the 2000 election- to "bring our elections into the 21st century" and similar nonsense- was most unfortunate. We are making the transition from an accurate but slightly imprecise system to a new system that promises only extreme precision with no guarantees of accuracy. What is worse, we are about to trade susceptibility to random error for something far worse- susceptibility to systematic error- which is fundamentally different from a human perspective since it introduces a huge motive for people to screw with the accuracy of the electoral process.
The 2000 election had its share of systematic error. There was that butterfly ballot, which confused both Gore and Bush voters alike, but had the effect of transforming Bush votes into Bush votes and Gore votes into Buchanan votes. There was the Florida felon purge, which knocked thousands of blacks but only dozens of Cubans off the rolls. The 2000 election is still bitterly disputed, but very few people still complain about the hanging chads, which were sources of random error with relatively nonpartisan effects. The sources of systematic error had a much more corrosive effect- they cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the outcome, since they gave the election the appearance of having been stolen.
I have no doubt that we have an ultraprecise election ahead of us- computers are good at being deterministic, after all- but as far as accuracy goes- we'll see. There are many who would love to insert some systematic error into those Access.MDB files. Election Day hasn't even arrived yet and already people have been busy introducing systematic error into the pool of registered voters. Even if the 2004 election involves pretty blinking lights, and is the most precise ever, it will undoubtedly be a less accurate measurement of the desires of the electorate than the election we had in 2000. This is what Stalin meant when he said that those who cast the votes decide nothing, and those who count the votes determine everything.
Fullerenes conduct electricity, so its refractive index is most likely negative and it would be opaque if it were thicker. But the skin depth is on the order of a micron so individual fullerene sheets are transparent.
One of the VP's at my company has a luxury car (forget what make it is) that has Windows CE embedded. He's always complaining about it because the car is so unreliable. The typical failure mode is that he'll go to start it, and it refuses to start because some diagnostic code has malfunctioned. We're always seeing the loaner cars from the dealer in his parking space because they're applying patches to his car at the shop.
I think there may be something to this study. I have noticed that when I raise my body temperature by drinking six cups of coffee a day I experience a rise in productivity.
Your comparison is like saying DOS 6 is better than Linux 2.6 because it is the less bloated x86 operating system.
Oh I wasn't being down on Gravity Probe B. I even know someone who worked on it. It is a really sophisticated, incredibly complex and ambitious experiment, and like you said it's going to provide much more accuracy than this. (Just like pens are better than pencils.) But this does remove a bit of the suspense about what Gravity Probe B will find. The ideal situation would be if it produced a result outside the margin of error of the GR prediction. That way new physics comes out of it. This preliminary result somewhat reduces the chances of that happening.
Wow, my hat's off to you sir. That's the easiest 5, Informative I've ever seen someone pull off on this Internet or any of the Internets for that matter.
Hey, I said the story was apocryphal. It may be BS but it persists because it captures a grain of truth about the way Americans approach major technical problems.
Graphite is a conductor, so you don't want its dust floating around in a spaceship where it might short something out. Russian reactors (some of them) use graphite as a moderator, to slow down neutrons without absorbing them. We use heavy water. And there you go- that's another example. We go through all this trouble of separating isotopes, and the Russians just use the graphite from the pencils that they take into space! (Although there was that fire that one time, but never mind.)
Slashdot Mirror
Zogby said Kerry would win for two reasons: the candidates are essentially tied to within the margin of error, and undecideds usually vote against the incumbent. If you notice, 48+46 doesn't add up to 100.
You can't refuse to leave a private event because you want to shout at the featured speaker, ticket or not.
Four words for you:
Protect Our Civil Liberties
Where's the transcripts for all his interviews? What other information does he have, that possibly would go against his point of view, that he didn't mention (like he has done many times before)?
This is a ridiculous standard. Do you want to rifle his desk and scan his hard drive while you're at it?
It involves posession of a material which, to be produced, requires that a crime be committed which is frequently harmful to the children involved, and therefore implicitly condones the fact that that crime took place.
Yeah that would be a reasonable definition. You'd think the law ended there. There was a case in 2001 where a law (the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996) banning "virtual child porn"- i.e. cartoons- was struck down by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision on First Amendment grounds. That went close to defining a thought crime. The Child Obscenity and Pornography Prevention Act of 2002 amended the law by adding the words "virtually indistinguishable from" to the statute- creating an exemption for obvious things like cartoons- but still covers "generated images" and "computer generated images" if they're "virtually indistinguishable from" real child porn with real children. That one passed the House but was never considered in the Senate. The Child Obscenity and Pornography Prevention Act of 2003 was included as an amendment to the PROTECT Act (outlawing digitally morphed images, where you paste the kid's head on a naked body). That one doesn't care about whether it's real or fake. It simply outlaws any solicitation to buy or sell child porn advertised as such. See here for details.
It's a lot like flag burning- where constitutional amendments often sit squarely in the way of a desire to be seen as "doing something".
... when you establish thought crimes.
If times were different the threat might be to send Communist propaganda.
The problem is that since we don't have access to all the information Palast has, the question boils down to whether we can trust him.
Palast got his information from this page containing emails sent to georgewbush.org by mistake.
The footage of the private detective filming people, along with physical evidence of Republican voter fraud provided by Florida elections officials, is available here in RealVideo format.
So now you have enough information to address the substance of what he says, and you don't need to resort to ad hominem attacks anymore.
It is not an ad homienm fallacy, because our opinions of Palast DO matter. If we cannot trust him, we cannot pay attention to what he says, unless fully corroborated.
Even if fully corroborated is more like it. You "cannot pay attention to what he says" only because you're afraid of learning things that might challenge your beliefs.
It's not logically consistant to claim that the whites were going to split their vote evenly but that the "minority" voters were going to vote Democrat. If that was reality, Republicans would never win.
"Whites split their vote evenly" is another strawman of yours. I never said that. They don't split their vote evenly but per capita white people still affect the vote less than blacks do because they tend to split their vote more evenly than do blacks. But there are lots of white people. If white people voted Republican the way blacks vote Democratic we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
I mentioned the movie because it illustrates that this guy (from central America) is Latino. But the government still calls people like him white.
"What the government calls people" should be reflected in the census data. And like I explained even if 9 out of 10 Hispanics on this list were misclassified as white, the chance of randomly picking even as much as 600 Hispanics out of a group of 26,000 whites and Hispanics is 10^1400 to 1. It's a straightforward binomial calculation. If they make up 20% of the population you should expect to find about 5000 on the list. Not 60, not even 600. This won't happen by chance, even with the help of Diego Delgado.
All we'd need is 1. How many lottery tickets does someone have to buy to be a winner? Just 1. I'm not sure if you're intentionally misrepresenting probability or you just don't understand.
Do you even understand the difference between possible and probable?
Why is it that those on the "progressive" side are assuming that criminals who happen to be black were going to vote Democrat?
You are probably not familiar with the controversy. The problem with the list, and the reason it was so controversial to begin with, was that it was full of people who were not criminals, who were put on the list by mistake. Criminality aside, blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic, so it was naturally seen as a very convenient mistake for Jeb to make, especially now that it's 4 years later and many of the same incorrect names are still on it.
So what you're saying, by not actually saying it, is that about 26,000 of those people were white.
More than half of the people on the list that you refer to are not black.
Yeah, so? Are you implying that these white people were all going to vote for Bush? Or they would split their votes between candidates any less evenly than any other group of white people?
Assuming that the numbers are accurate and that someone hasn't "cooked the books" so to speak. It still proves nothing. Let us not forget the numbers of hispanics who are counted as white.
Before you try to say that it doesn't happen...Have you ever seen the movie Blow? The very ethnic Diego Delgado is catagorized as "White" by the government.
Starting from the 2000 census data, so that we include the effects of Florida's weird ideas about movie stars from Blow, Florida is 65.4% white (non-Hispanic), 16.8% Hispanic, and 14.6% black. The ex-felon population will have a slightly different racial makeup, but you can estimate it by assuming that the ratios of whites to Hispanics are about the same as for the rest of the state (blacks are obviously overrepresented). What's the probability that out of a random sampling of 26,000 non-black ex-felons, 4745 (18.25%) of which you'd expect to be Hispanic, you'll find exactly 61 Hispanics?
It's (.8175^(25939)) * (.1875^61) * 26000! / (25939! * 61!) That number is so small it's hard to calculate. You can use Stirling's Approximation to get the log of it: 25939*log(0.8175) + 61*log(.1875) + 26000*(log(26000)-1)) - 61*(log(61)-1) - 25939*(log(25939)-1) = -2270 - 18858 + 88789 - 47 - 88855 = -21241. Even allowing for the probability of finding fewer than 61 Hispanics, which changes the result by log(60) at most, you're still left with a probability of a 1 with at least 21240 zeroes to 1 of finding 61 or fewer Hispanics on the felons list by chance.
Maybe you're right and the felons list is full of movie stars from Blow. Even if the list "really" contains 600 Hispanics, ten times as many as are estimated, the log of the probability would be 25400*log(0.8175) + 600*log(.1875) + 26000*(log(26000)-1)) - 600*(log(600)-1) - 25400*(log(25400)-1) = -2223 - 436 +88789 - 1067 - 86482 = -1419, or a one with 1400 zeroes to one. We'd have to hold more elections than there are protons in the universe for even 600 Hispanics to appear on the list, without someone "cooking the books."
Don't you think you might be wrong?
Please consider that source. Visit his website and ask yourself if he is capable of unbiased critical thought or is this another hatchet-job.
A biased opinion can still be valid. Why don't you address the substance of what he says instead of issuing a lazy ad hominem?
Does everything and everyone always have to be "fair to both sides"? What if one side is just wrong? Or lying?
Does the concept that one side might be wrong even occur to you?
People recently seem to have had this notion of "balance" and "bias" beaten into their heads. And no wonder- this "balanced" crap gives an enormous tactical advantage to liars, so no wonder you people have all been brainwashed into thinking this way.
Oh spare us the politically correct bullshit, will you? Nobody said "minority equals Democrat". That's your own strawman.
It's perfectly valid to evaluate an attack on minority voting demographic as a partisan maneuver, even if it involves what look like stereotypes when applied at an individual level. "So-and-So is black so he must be voting for Democrats" is a politically incorrect statement. "Blacks tend to vote Democratic" is not, especially if it happens to be true. Politically incorrect assertions about minorities tend to lack statistical validity. That's partly why they're offensive.
Interesting too, from a statistical viewpoint, is how 22,000 Democratic-leaning blacks but only 61 Republican-leaning Hispanics were among the 48,000 people on the 2000 felons list.
Quit pretending to be stupid. Everyone can see what is going on here.
Read the article. The source is NBC News. Drudge is just the messenger.
Drudge is the only source, now that NBC has pulled the plug on their story.
Sorry, this has been debunked. According to contemporary reports the explosives were still there when we arrived, no matter what Drudge would like to have you think during the next few days.
Why don't they concentrate on safeguarding dangerous materials?
The plane that crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland (killing 270) was brought down with 400 grams of Semtex, an RDX-based compound.
Kerry voters in Texas were complaining that their votes were read as Bush votes. An elections official blames it on "voter error": Bush appears as the default choice on a screen which should have no default choice selected! This design flaw is a source of systematic error that will give thousands of erroneous votes to Bush, and absolutely zero to Kerry. To get a similar effect with random error from hanging chads, you would need millions of deformed punch cards, and in that case the advantage might go either way- it wouldn't be predetermined to favor Bush.
And then they have the nerve to blame "voter error" when people don't change the default! Incredible!
A high-tech voting system that is properly designed and deployed should be easier to use and more secure then a paper solution.
I put bold tags around your enormous qualifying assumption, which you seem to gloss over as if it's a given. It is extremely difficult to create a properly designed high-tech voting system. The network of bluescreening touchscreens that lie in wait for many of us don't even come close.
Paper ballots have problems with hanging chads (if they're the punch-out type) or improper erasures (did he intend to erase "A" and vote vor "B", or did he vote for both of them?) or faint markings that may or may not have been intended to be votes.
Feh. These are sources of random error, which although undesirable, affects the outcome nowhere near as much as systematic error. In general systematic error has partisan effects, whereas random error in general does not- it mostly cancels itself out. 10000 votes affected by random error affect the election about as much as 200 votes affected by systematic error.
See this post and the reply to it for details. I don't want to keep repasting it in every thread. Maybe I'll start a journal.
And you're going to have errors when you start to count millions and millions of paper ballots by hand.
Like I said before, unless you hire outright partisans to count votes, these will be sources of random error.
Any candidate who lost by a narrow enough margin is going to demand a recount,
Good. I hope they do.
A recount for the Presidential election would have to be completed before January 2nd. Limited time means people rushing, which means more errors...
Not if your Daddy appointed a few Supreme Court justices. They can stop the recount and choose you as president before the outcome is even known.
A) Ballots get "switched" on the way to the counting place.
B) Ballots are put into the wrong piles for who the person voted for.
C) Ballots are "miscounted".
D) Ballots are "lost".
E) Ballots are erased and re-inked.
Sorry, all of these can happen much more easily inside a black box than they can out in the open.
F) Your system forgot the write-in ballots which require someone to read anothers handwriting.
So you're saying the election might be stolen from a write-in candidate? Somehow I think democracy might survive if poll workers have to read handwritten names that are kept on record.
Paper ballots are actually much easier to screw around with than an electronic or mechanical system coded by an honest programer or designed by an honest engineer.
Unfortunately, honesty is not a verifiable attribute. There's no way for sure to know that the programmer or engineer really is honest. If the code isn't auditable, we have to take their word for it. Most likely honest is not acceptable in this sorry situation we've gotten ourselves into.
A company endorsing open source and President Bush at once? I wonder how many Slashdotter's heads just blew the fuck up...
You know, you really have to break out of the "alternative reality" you live in. The Times endorsed Kerry.
You can degrade accuracy by increasing precision.
Say all the Democratic voting districts still vote on punchcards while the Republican suburbanites vote on their brand new ultraprecise Diebold machines. This gets rid of the random error in the Republican districts. However it converts the random error from hanging chads in the Democratic districts into systematic error favoring Republicans, since random walks toward Republican candidates in Democratic districts are no longer balanced by random walks toward Democratic candidates in Republican districts. If you're going to use Diebold machines, you'd better buy enough for everybody.
Republicans are dispatching goons to polling places in poor neighborhoods to challenge the legitimacy of every voter who walks in the door. So this entire discussion is a bit academic.
after counting fifty votes, the human vote counters had made several errors versus zero for the voting machine.
.MDB files. Election Day hasn't even arrived yet and already people have been busy introducing systematic error into the pool of registered voters. Even if the 2004 election involves pretty blinking lights, and is the most precise ever, it will undoubtedly be a less accurate measurement of the desires of the electorate than the election we had in 2000. This is what Stalin meant when he said that those who cast the votes decide nothing, and those who count the votes determine everything.
Did the humans make random errors (degrading precision), or errors tending to favor one candidate (worse, degrading accuracy)?
This looks like a test of precision, not accuracy, and Maryland is confusing the two. I wrote a long post a few days ago in another story that's relevant to this one, and makes the point I'd want to make here, so I'll be a lamer and paste it.
* * *
The punch card system proved itself to be a very accurate method of vote counting, even under the extreme condition of a tie- to a precision of several hundred votes. Much attention was paid to the relatively few cards that had chads hanging, but the vast majority of the cards were quite unambiguous in their representation of the voter's intent. Unfortunately they occurred in equal numbers for both candidates. The entire system was at least as auditable as any vote counting system can possibly be.
People don't understand the difference between precision and accuracy. Precision means that, given a measurable X, your measurements are sharply defined. But that is not the same as accuracy- which implies that the measurements actually reflect the true value of X, and not the influences of other sources of systematic error- like air resistance, or the thermal expansion of the ruler you're using, or the political affiliation of the manufacturer of your measuring equipment. A measurement is only accurate if sources of systematic error have been minimized. Sources of random error- like hanging chads- merely degrade precision.
The outcry for computerized voting that followed the 2000 election- to "bring our elections into the 21st century" and similar nonsense- was most unfortunate. We are making the transition from an accurate but slightly imprecise system to a new system that promises only extreme precision with no guarantees of accuracy. What is worse, we are about to trade susceptibility to random error for something far worse- susceptibility to systematic error- which is fundamentally different from a human perspective since it introduces a huge motive for people to screw with the accuracy of the electoral process.
The 2000 election had its share of systematic error. There was that butterfly ballot, which confused both Gore and Bush voters alike, but had the effect of transforming Bush votes into Bush votes and Gore votes into Buchanan votes. There was the Florida felon purge, which knocked thousands of blacks but only dozens of Cubans off the rolls. The 2000 election is still bitterly disputed, but very few people still complain about the hanging chads, which were sources of random error with relatively nonpartisan effects. The sources of systematic error had a much more corrosive effect- they cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the outcome, since they gave the election the appearance of having been stolen.
I have no doubt that we have an ultraprecise election ahead of us- computers are good at being deterministic, after all- but as far as accuracy goes- we'll see. There are many who would love to insert some systematic error into those Access
Fullerenes conduct electricity, so its refractive index is most likely negative and it would be opaque if it were thicker. But the skin depth is on the order of a micron so individual fullerene sheets are transparent.
One of the VP's at my company has a luxury car (forget what make it is) that has Windows CE embedded. He's always complaining about it because the car is so unreliable. The typical failure mode is that he'll go to start it, and it refuses to start because some diagnostic code has malfunctioned. We're always seeing the loaner cars from the dealer in his parking space because they're applying patches to his car at the shop.
I think there may be something to this study. I have noticed that when I raise my body temperature by drinking six cups of coffee a day I experience a rise in productivity.
Your comparison is like saying DOS 6 is better than Linux 2.6 because it is the less bloated x86 operating system.
Oh I wasn't being down on Gravity Probe B. I even know someone who worked on it. It is a really sophisticated, incredibly complex and ambitious experiment, and like you said it's going to provide much more accuracy than this. (Just like pens are better than pencils.) But this does remove a bit of the suspense about what Gravity Probe B will find. The ideal situation would be if it produced a result outside the margin of error of the GR prediction. That way new physics comes out of it. This preliminary result somewhat reduces the chances of that happening.
Wow, my hat's off to you sir. That's the easiest 5, Informative I've ever seen someone pull off on this Internet or any of the Internets for that matter.
Will these dumb myths ever die?
Hey, I said the story was apocryphal. It may be BS but it persists because it captures a grain of truth about the way Americans approach major technical problems.
Graphite is a conductor, so you don't want its dust floating around in a spaceship where it might short something out. Russian reactors (some of them) use graphite as a moderator, to slow down neutrons without absorbing them. We use heavy water. And there you go- that's another example. We go through all this trouble of separating isotopes, and the Russians just use the graphite from the pencils that they take into space! (Although there was that fire that one time, but never mind.)