polls
gregladen | February 10, 2017The most recent polling indicates that Donald Trump has a 43% approval and 53% disapproval rating. So he is not exactly loved by the American people, which is odd because he seems so lovable. And, he has told us that the American people love him. And his victory in the November election was unbelievably big league. But, that's how it is, according the scientific polling.
Approval and favorability are apparently slightly different, but the pattern holds. The same polling tells us that the American people have a 45% favorable attitude about the president, which would be tremendous for any…
gregladen | January 30, 2017Two Polls came out a few days ago, but I'm afraid that the news cycles have been swamped and they may have been missed. Here are some simple graphics. Plenty more data can be found at Public Policy Polling, and see RM on MSBNC below for more.
gregladen | October 19, 2016It is unfortunate that "all the pundits" are now saying that Clinton will now win no matter what, and that Trump will likely suffer more scandal before the end of the process.
This is unfortunate because a weak get out the vote effort is probably worth a couple of points on election day. It is unfortunate because some Trump scandals increase, rather than decrease, his numbers. He could suddenly gain a couple of points if he says or does just the wright/wrong things. It is unfortunate because, for whatever reason, Hillary "My Middle Name is Target" Clinton has turned into the Teflon…
gregladen | October 10, 2016You can't say who really won the debate, because on Friday, news broke, confirming other news from the prior Monday (and general suspicians) indicating that Donald Trump is not fit to be President in Yet Another Way, and his campaign essentially imploded. So, instead, we'll ask, "who won the weekend?"
As you know, I'm the last person to write off Donald Trump. From the very beginning, without fail, I've been warning you that he'll do well, that he'll win the GOP debates, that he'll win various primaries, that he'll win the nomination, etc. All of it. I have never once been wrong about this…
gregladen | January 14, 2016I'm going to make this simple. The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks. Everything we are doing now is pre-Primary. Not one person has put pen to checkmark in a voting booth.
Once that process starts, everything changes. Suddenly there is more polling in downstream states. Starting before the first primaries, but then ramping up as we head towards states that matter (and no, Iowa and New Hampshire don't matter despite what you may have been told). Same with campaigning. We've seen a few debates, there's been a lot of speeches, but you ain't seen nothing yet. And…
gregladen | November 5, 2015The current polling as shown on the Huffpo Pollster, using only "likely voters" and "non partisan polls" shows that Trump and Carson are neck and neck and have been close for a week. Most of the other candidates are so low it is impossible to imagine any of them rising to a level of significance. On the other hand, there are still so many clowns in the clown car that it is hard to say. If eight or nine of the candidates dropped out over the next few weeks, it is possible that someone will rise up.
On the other hand, there is a thing about how the Republicans pick their candidate that may…
gregladen | October 15, 2015Top candidates only, non-partisan polls only, likely voters only, graphic updated October 15th, most recent polls October 12.
gregladen | October 15, 2015Clinton vs. Sanders, Likely Voters, Non-Partisan Polls only. Graphic last updated October 15th, shows polls through October 12th only.
gregladen | October 14, 2015Here, without comment, is a handful of screen grabs showing the results (at the time I grabbed them, Wed AM) of several on line polls asking who won last night's Democratic Party presidential debate in Las Vegas.
Note: For most polls, I needed to vote first to see the results. I voted alternately for Sanders and Clinton in doing so.
gregladen | August 11, 2015A couple of days ago I assimilated data from a bunch of on line polls where people could informally and unscientifically express their opinion about who won the GOP debate (the big boy debate only, with ten candidates). I suggested a series of hypotheses to isolate the idea that this sort of on line unscientific effort might reflect reality, with the idea of testing the results of those polls with upcoming formal polls.
Now we have a couple of formal polls to test against. I took the raw percentages for the ten GOP big boy debate candidates, recalculated the percentages, and came up with…
gregladen | August 7, 2015Trump went into the GOP debate last night with a roughly 20% poll standing. Everyone will tell you to ignore polls early in this race, they never predict the outcome of a primary or a general election. That, however, is a non sequitur. We do not look at early polls to predict the distant future. We look at them to help understand the present, and to get a handle on what might happen over the next few weeks. The meaning of the polls shifts quite a bit before the first primaries, then they meaning of the polls has to be re-evaluated after every primary. At some point the re-evaluations…
gregladen | February 2, 2015If you are running for office, note that the majority of Americans think global warming is real, important, and can and should be addressed by government.
This has been happening since two elections back, when we started to see candidates threatened, if only to a limited degree, based on an untenable position on climate change. Last election cycle this became even more important as organizations like ClimateHawksVote had remarkable successes in supporting climate hawk candidates -- candidates that place climate change at the top of the list of important issues. Since then even more has…
drorzel | April 25, 2014Via a mailing list, probably via this Tyler Cowen post, an awful statistic about adjunct faculty:
35 years ago there were 44% more tenured faculty than adjuncts. Today there are 76% more adjuncts than tenured faculty, via @chronicle
— Ángel Cabrera (@CabreraAngel) April 25, 2014
This is awful in two ways. First, it's obviously a sad comment on the state of the college teaching profession. More importantly, though, it's a classic abuse of statistics, using a really confusing presentation of the numbers to exaggerate an effect that doesn't really need it.
Here, let's try this as a poll, since…
drorzel | August 2, 2013The Pip is home with coxsackie virus today, and we're having a big party for SteelyKid tomorrow (her fifth birthday is next week), so I'm too busy to do more cold-atom blogging today. So instead, we'll consider one of the great linguistic conundra of modern physics:
The document preparation system LaTeX is pronounced:
This is a purely classical poll, so you can choose one and only one answer, not a quantum superposition of several. And if you choose wrong, everybody will point and laugh. No pressure, though...
drorzel | July 17, 2013It's been a really long time since I've done a Dorky Poll here, but I'm pretty fried at the moment, so here's a kind of mathematical personality test: two numbers that do not uniquely define a sequence, but suggest some possibilities that reveal your innate character type and/or appropriate career path:
Personality Test: What number should come next in this sequence: 101, 1001,...?
Feel free to offer arguments for your chosen answer in the comments, and/or to speculate about what the hidden meanings of the options are. I'll explain the logic some other time.
(This might be too abstract for a…
drorzel | April 24, 2012Over in Twitter-land, there's a bunch of talk about how this is National Physics Day. I don't know how I missed that, what with all the media coverage and all.
I have too much other stuff to do to generate any detailed physics content today, so we'll settle for an informal poll to mark the occasion:
Who is your favorite physicist, other than Einstein, Newton, or Feynman?
The qualifier is just to knock out the too-obvious answers, and force a little more thought. Everybody likes Einstein and Newton and Feynman, but we hear about them all the time. For a major holiday like Physics Day, let's…
drorzel | April 6, 2012I'm killing time waiting for something I can't talk about yet, so here's a silly poll to pass the time, brought to you by a couple of songs served up on the radio this morning while I was running errands:
Which of these awkward song lyrics is the worst lyrical crime against English grammar?
I thought about including "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight," but since it's a deliberate spoof, I don't think it should count.
drorzel | April 4, 2012Over in Twitterland, we have a question from WillyB:
If you had to pick one topic to cover in Physics, which do you think is the most important for the gen. public?
This sounds like a job for the Internet! To the polling machine!
If you had to pick one topic to cover in Physics, which do you think is the most important for the general public?
While several of the options allow linear superpositions of solutions, this is a purely classical poll, so you may choose only one answer. Though you should, of course, feel free to bitch about the choices in the comments.
drorzel | March 23, 2012Back in the summer, I did a post mathematically comparing two routes to campus, one with a small number of traffic lights, the other with a larger number of stop signs, and looked at which would be faster. Later on, I did the experiment, too.) Having spent a bunch of time on this, I was thinking about whether I could use this as a problem for the intro physics class. I decided against it last fall, but something else reminded me of this, and I started poking at it again.
So, I played around a bit with some numbers, and came up with the following possible framing for a question. I'll throw…
drorzel | February 10, 2012Prompted by a number of people using the phrase "vast majority" recently, I wonder where the line between "majority" and "vast majority" is. Thus, a poll:
What is the minimum level of support that constitutes a "vast majority"
Assume for the sake of argument that the issue in question is a simple yes-or-no question, with only a small "no response/ don't know" fraction.
If there are other classes of "majority" that you recognize, feel free to define them in the comments. The poll is just about the term "vast," though.