Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Lies, damned lies, and lying statistics
This is not physics, but it is interesting. According to fivethirtyeight.com (a blog run by Nate Silver that specializes in statistical analysis of political polls), a major polling firm is being sued for fraud by liberal blog DailyKos. The grounds for the suit: this report, which details a number of statistical anomalies suggesting that the polling firm was either cooking their numbers, or outright making them up. Bonus: one of the guys who did this analysis is Mike Weissman, a condensed matter physicist who retired from UIUC. Weissman is an expert on noise measurements, author of this highly cited review article. He's a guy who knows statistics.
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2 comments:
Okay, that was an interesting read. My bet, after reading some of the commentary, is that they hired a cheap computer programmer. Someone who tried to save space by using "int" instead of "double".
This is a really good read for me. Must admit that you are one of the coolest blogger I ever saw. Thanks for posting this useful article.
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