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Re: Statistics and Polls
Posted By: Howard, on host 68.211.33.251
Date: Wednesday, October 11, 2006, at 15:05:54
In Reply To: Statistics and Polls posted by Crystal109 on Monday, October 9, 2006, at 21:57:09:

> I never realized how much learning something could make you look at the world differently. Strange, I know, but I've only started to learn that correlation lately. First with Social Psychology (awesome course), then with Statistics.
>
> In Statistics we're learning how polls can be skewed one way or another, stemplots and histograms and bar graphs and all that, and I was just looking at the results for the poll on textiles (I chose other, by the way, for "I know mostly nothing of the above") and realized how much more those results meant. Now I'm thinking in terms of skewed left or right and symmetrical, and I'm wondering what the mean, median, and standard deviation is.
>
> This is probably too much detail to be interesting, but I figured I'd let you all know that once again, Rinkworks is one of the only things in which I can apply what I've been learning. And now I think I'm going to look at all the past polls to check out how unusual the results are. (The more people responding means an even distribution theory will be put to the test.) Yay for Rinkworks!
>
> ~Crystal"Let's not go into the self-justification processes I've witnessed once I took social psych"109

In case you find flaws, keep in mind that the RinkWorks Poll is mostly for fun. I've noticed for years that some polls stay up longer than others. Very scientific polls would stay up exactly the same length of time. Better results would result from something like exactly one week, always beginning at the same time on the same day. But who cares? It's entertainment.

I still think Sam is going to write a book about it someday.
Howard

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