Sunday, October 23, 2016

Science Brings Something to Polls But It's Not Particularly Good

The homogenization of people is moving apace with more sophisticated analysis of poll trends.  (Science Daily:  Analytics developed to predict poll trends)

The specific flaws to any poll are its drawn from a specific audience and it ignores those who choose not to participate for whatever reason in this or any poll.

The results of any poll marginalize the audience of non-participants and further goes beyond the truth of the poll by presenting it to a general audience as if it applies to all of them.  This is fundamental propaganda and now it gets more sophisticated.

As the countdown continues to the Presidential election, new analytical tools promise a quicker and remarkably accurate method of predicting election trends with Twitter.

- Science Daily

What audience do you suppose Twitter represents.


Stand back for some full-scale, high-tech bullshit.

However, by using a large-scale dataset of 73 million tweets collected from June 1 to September 1, 2016, Makse and his associates are able to investigate the temporal social networks formed by the interactions among Twitter users.

"We infer the support of each user to the presidential candidates and show that the resulting Twitter trends follow the New York Times National Polling Average, which represents an aggregate of hundreds of independent traditional polls, with remarkable accuracy (r = 0.9)," Makse said.  More importantly, for the CCNY team, the Twitter opinion trend forecasts the aggregated Times polls by 6 to 15 days, showing that Twitter can be an early warning signal of global opinion trends at the national level.

- Science Daily


They may well be successful but possibly less because of the validity of what they have found than due to the effect of how it is presented, something for which there has been abundant evidence this season.

Five points for bullshit language as 'investigate the temporal social networks' is a prize winner.  Anything is temporal the moment it exists.

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