Statman Says

I didn’t start out wanting to write a blog. But the space was here on my new web site so I thought I would do something fun and interesting with it. Fun and interesting and statistics! Aren’t those terms oxymorons! We’ll see.
  For example, I wrote a brief article years ago when Jesse “The Body” Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota. The election pollsters completely missed Jesse as a factor in the election let alone did they find him to be a challenger. The reason of course was that the pollsters were using old polling technology – phone calls. Well by that time younger voters were already exclusively using cell phones and the pollsters didn’t have access to those phones. So, they completely missed the young demographic in their polling and it was that demographic that went for “The Body”.  The pollsters are doing a better job these days but they are still lacking accuracy. And still that lack of accuracy is because it so hard to get a truly random and representative sample.
Sorry, I got a little technical there but that’s the nub of it. So, going forward I will try to address topics that are of general interest and I hope that they will be engaging and fun – and if they are not you’ll let me know.