Statistics

Still a few days left to guess who will win Presidential race

If you haven’t already, please guess who will win the 2008 Presidential race. If you have voted, please do not do so again.

We’ve been running the poll for a couple of days now and have over 500 guesses!

It would be nice to see more diversity in the voting, so if you have friends or colleagues who think the opposite of you, send them this link:

I tried posting this on DemocraticUnderground.com, and I was able to initially, but after one of their members visited my main site, I was banned from making future posts. I was able to post on LiberalForum.org. If anybody knows of other similar places, either post the link or let me know.

Thanks again everybody!

Categories: Statistics

6 replies »

  1. Yup, the DUnces are concerned about ideological purity over at their DUmp. I passed the link to the poll too several friends. Can’t wait to see what you do with the data.

  2. I just emailed PZ Myers, of Pharyngula, to see if he would post about this. While I’m sure he disagrees with you (Briggs) on all things political, he may be willing to mention your experiment on his blog, which would, in all likelihood, get you boatloads of liberal participants.

  3. Noahpaoh,

    That’s very sweet of you, thanks very much. I’d be particularly happy to have those who disagree with me cast guesses because, of course, those people’s guessing abilities might be better than the guessing abilities of those who agree with me. Only way to find out, naturally, is to look.

    Thanks again.

  4. It’s really a pretty little survey in it’s simplicity. And I appreciate that surveys that are simpler get more participation. Still, I can’t but help but wish that you had more demographic factors included (age, sex, internet usage level, some proxy for IQ perhaps education, awareness of tradesports).

  5. Just a heads up: You probably shouldn’t let your form submit that data as HTTP GET, since that’s attached to the submit URL, it’s pretty easily manipulated. You might also watch out for injections, if you haven’t already.
    Also, just hitting submit without changing anything currently yields a MySQL-error, which you may want to change.

    Another thing: Why does your blog software want to set a cookie and JavaScript enabled before admitting a post? :/

  6. AnonCoward,

    Yeah, you’re right about the form post method. Too trusting (I so screen for injections; but still). Pure laziness on my part; also the error on all blanks.

    I use a WordPress plugin to require Javascript and Cookies to stop spam. Idea is that spambots won’t have these set and so can’t post spam. True, the spam filter catches most of that, but that still requires you to look through the list to find false positives. And since I was getting a couple hundred spam a day, it was getting wearisome.

    It’s a comprise, of course, because, as you know, some people like to remain anonymous.

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