Donald Trump’s widely unexpected victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has raised questions about the accuracy of public opinion polling, the aggregation of polling into probabilistic election forecasts and the interpretation of election polling by data analysts, journalists and the general public. While national-level polls on average proved as […] Read more »
The Death of the White Working Class Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Ever since Hillary Clinton and the Democrats failed to hold the White House last November, some members of the party and friendly elements in the media have suggested that the Dems have to renew their focus on white working-class men if they want to win. In this view, liberals have […] Read more »
Lies, Damned Lies and Partisanship
The latest Economist-YouGov national tracking poll includes a few great questions on public trust in statistics. What’s better is they were previously asked in 2014, which allows for a comparison of public views under the Obama and Trump administrations. Key takeaway: while Republicans views on government statistics have evolved – […] Read more »
Making Voter Pie
There has been a compelling pie chart circulating on Facebook and Twitter, showing the percentage who voted for Trump or Clinton, or who didn’t vote, or weren’t eligible. … The problem is … well, there are a couple problems. CONT. Daniel Laurison (Swarthmore) & Dan Hirschman (Brown), Scatterplot Read more »
Hans Rosling, Swedish Doctor and Pop-Star Statistician, Dies at 68
Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor who transformed himself into a pop-star statistician by converting dry numbers into dynamic graphics that challenged preconceptions about global health and gloomy prospects for population growth, died on Tuesday in Uppsala, Sweden. … Even before “post-truth” entered the lexicon, Dr. Rosling was echoing former Senator […] Read more »
Overcoming ‘End-Point Bias’: Liberals, Fox News and Arctic Sea Ice Trends
“End-point bias” is a well-known psychological tendency to interpret a recent short-term fluctuation as a reversal of a long-term trend. When scientists reported a significant increase in the extent of Arctic sea ice in 2013, a FoxNews.com story evoked end-point bias by contrasting the historically low previous year with the […] Read more »