Letters to the Editor
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be-bop-o
Good morning.
Please tell us your leg is better today than it was yesterday and we of the antibiotic police will leave you alone. I am concerned if you woke up feverish. If so, don't go to Wal-Mart, go to your doctor or your emergency room, and do it now.
We have lots of sand hill cranes in our area these days. I wish I could share them with you. They are a joy to hear as they honk and fly.
Now I will shut up and listen to the cranes.
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damaged goods and richhein @ 4:30. Thanks. Yes. discern the days we all share. Care.
I say, 'Send the entire GOP Rove Boy Club to the good 'shrink' Cart Tennis'...They are truly real crazy.
As they sit there, or rather curl-up in a fetal ball on the couch, hush.
Spend no less than 3-days and 3-dark nights bawling.
Open the mouth. Hush, GOPS. Just be filled with salty tears.
Say nothing even remotely 'intelligible, gops. Only open the
empty VOID...nothings, open-up to what is out times and true.
Quiet, and peek inside, open the foul
mouth-trap and weep!
Cry for three days!
THEM are such brats.
In the beginning was the 'logos'...
The GOPS need to be hidden from view.
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Jim White. okay.
Today is the deceased former White House "Quacker" duck, the former dirty war-monger bomber, Mr. Nixon's birthday? I think.
I've a signed book-copy about Vietnam that Nixon wrote when he left the White House to propagandize and lie even more. gads.
Well, he's not here to speak for himself but, he left the White House in shame. (Thanks Jim White) You encourage us. THEY
begin their decay and end a rotten career.
John Baca (MOH) has a birthday today too?
It's goofy. Who don't get darn confused.
Baca flopped a steel pot on a grenade.
I blame that pot-flopper Baca, dang ya!
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bop
Yep. My dad used to answer the phone "White House". Good sense of humor. I want Bushie out of my house now.
Tell me "okay" means you are going and then I will shut up.
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@Ondelette (on the poll discussion from yesterday)
No, it wouldn't average out, but its effects would be minimized by it being short w/resp to the window width.
Yes that minimization must occur if the rapid changes are impulsive in nature, or similar to a delta function. That is, some event causes support for a candidate to change quickly , and then that event tends to lose control, and support returns to its previous level.
But is that the right model? A very different model would use a step function. This model says that some event changes the support for a candidate, and that change tends to "stick". But then other events happen, and they can make changes of different magnitude and direction. And then the effects of these multiple events tend to cancel out over the length of the poll window, or perhaps over a much longer time.
The advantage of the step function model is that it can explain long term trends. The step functions of one sign tend to be bigger or more frequent on average than those with the other sign, and so support tends to move in one direction on average.
The disadvantage of the impulsive or delta function model is that it does not explain trends. You need to add something else to the model, a different kind of event.
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Nature of Polls
I am currently in the process of watching a remarkable series of videos over the last few days at YouTube presented by a science teacher named Eric Sodomka, username “Wonderingmind42” (just google the name and select the link with his username at YouTube or go to www.wonderingmind42.com), that discusses global warming in a more logical and at least as compelling manner as “An Inconvenient Truth.” For those who don’t have much time, the following YouTube video (titled “How It All Ends” - ten minutes) summarizes his overall risk-assessment approach to the issue at
http://www.wonderingmind42.com/.
The summary is supported by a voluminous “expansion pack” videos that are generally just under ten minutes in length and total about six hours. The “Nature of Science” section, which consists of three such videos (approximately thirty minutes total) familiarizing us with the open-ended, non-biased, skeptical approach to research, interpretation of evidence gathered, and peer review and criticism of conclusions reached to which the professional scientific community aspires, is what really grabbed me; because it relates not only to matters scientific but also to much of what we discuss here.
It directly relates to what Jay Rosen has described as the “Escape from Empiricsm” we have seen in Bush/Cheney’s faith-based, ideological approach to governing for the last seven years as well as the mindset of the authoritarian leaders and followers discussed here at length by Glenn and others, that have facilitated this disastrous approach, which can certainly claim global warming action, even its very recognition, among the many victims of this administration’s neglect and malfeasance.
But the currently-relevant application has to be polling, what it does and what it does not do - how it’s being used and how it’s being misused. Polling techniques have been developed and refined over the years by using these scientific methods, particularly in the areas of statistics, human behavior and language. A major point stressed in the videos is that science never reaches absolute certainty on anything; it can only try to make the uncertainty as small as possible and draw a conclusion as to how close the science comes while, as Sodomka puts it, “Acknowledging that you’ll never get there.”
The fact that science never “gets there” should temper our expectations of polling. If science is doing what it is supposed to do, polling should tell us how likely a particular candidate is to win or lose, not whether they will win or lose. Sodomka summarizes how the scientific profession is constantly seeking to identify and minimize “confirmational bias,” or pre-conceived notions and beliefs in absolutes that can taint overall results, courses of action and valuation and interpretation of underlying evidence. It goes without saying that conformational bias has been a major problem for Bush/Cheney.
While much of the mainstream media can be faulted for the same thing in assuming Clinton had lost, we must also look at such bias within ourselves. I know I didn’t need the media to interpret the polls for me - they were well outside the margin of error and it seemed that the only question was how handily Obama would win. In fact, I was going to write a comment regarding the effect that Hillary’s campaign was humming along pretty nicely until Bill became more visible and vocal, which may have garnered the added pleasure of possibly running into Glenn’s buzz saw. (This may be more correlation than cause-and-effect - see the video - but I still think there is a lot of concern out there in the electorate regarding dynasty issues) I was able to avoid this predicament thanks to the actual vote not cooperating with the polls.
I don’t fault the establishment media for misinterpreting the polls as much as I do for them misinterpreting the results. Chris Matthew’s confirmational biases are legend, but I don’t think Rachel Maddow or others have escaped this trap. It seems that all the explanations - "Bradley effect,” sympathy for Hillary for various reasons, no Obama coronation, etc. - meticulously avoid one thing: giving Hillary credit for a good campaign and organization. The only thing the exit polls tell us is that it appears a lot of women voted for Clinton, but do we even know that with 100% certainty, and especially, do we really know why?
A lot more to say, but gotta go …