Archive for January 3rd, 2010
Are The Chillling Numbers For Dems Due To Pollster Bias At Rasmussen?
There’s a big, slow-news-weekend story over at Politico today over allegations made by certain Democrats and liberals that the prolific polling firm Rasmussen Reports is biased toward conservative and Republican causes. I have to catch a flight (weather permitting) in a couple of hours, so I don’t have quite as much time to weigh in on this as I’d like, but let me present the Cliff’s Notes version.
The first thing to note is that there are a lot of different ways in which a polling firm might be biased. Rasmussen is most frequently accused of bias because their results are thought to lean toward Republican candidates. Just to pick a random example, for instance, Rasmussen has embattled Democrat Blanche Lincoln down by margins ranging between 4 and 7 points against three potential Republican opponents in her 2010 Senate race, whereas two other polling firms (neither of which, incidentally, are themselves free of partisan ties) have Lincoln ahead against these opponents by margins ranging from 1 to 16 points. Does this mean that Rasmussen is biased?
For me, it doesn’t — not necessarily.
Read the whole story at FiveThirtyEight.com — >
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See Also:
- 8 Reasons The Democrats Are Now Doomed To Lose The House In 2010
- By The Numbers: Ben Nelson’s Stunning Political Suicide
- DEMS GET 60 VOTES ON HEALTHCARE
Call The Dukes: Deep Freeze Threatens To Destroy Five Months Of Orange Growing
As the cold temperature grinds activity on the east coast to a halt, the mythical commodities trading firm of Duke & Duke might finally be able to profit from its cornering of the Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice market.
That’s because Florida orange growers are expect to suffer from the cold.
Central Florida News: Orange farmers are watching their citrus closely as forecasters have put them on alert with a Freeze Warning.
Farmers at White’s Red Hill Orange Grove said they dodged a bullet Sunday morning, but if it gets much colder this week, the grove could close for the season about five months early.
From the crop to the catelog, Garnett White’s oranges aren’t grown for juice — or to sit on store shelves.
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See Also:
- BLS Postpones Release Of Mass Layoff Report Due To "Weather"
- Chaos Rules At Gatwick Airport, As Passengers Turn Violent During Wintry Weather
- Jim Chanos: We’re Shorting Autos, China, And Commodities But Not Financials
NFL To Investigate Colts For Tanking Game Against Jets
The NFL flaps its gums to appease Colts fans forced to watch their team tank last week’s game against the Jets, blowing their perfect season.
MIAMI (AP) — Commissioner Roger Goodell says the NFL competition committee will review league policy regarding late-season games where teams might be tempted to rest their starters for the playoffs.
Goodell said the league was sensitive to criticism in the wake of the Indianapolis Colts’ decision to use backups a week ago in a game they lost, ending their bid for a perfect season.
”It is something we’ll look at,” Goodell said Sunday. ”We heard the fans loud and clear. It’s something our competition committee has looked at in the past, but we’re going to ask our competition committee to look at it again in the future. We want every game to be competitive.”
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Children to be educated about how to avoid debt
Under a new personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) curriculum, children as young as five will be taught how to look after their money to avoid getting into debt in later life.
The lessons are being ordered by schools secretary, Ed Balls, who said the lessons in personal finance will be compulsory for all pupils from [...]
Google Shuts Down Popular Blogger John Hempton After Publishing Controversial Post
Update: Hempton’s blog is now back.
Original post: On January 2nd, financial blogger extaordinaire John Hempton published a long post with the inflammatory title: “A dark privatised social security story: Astarra, the missing money and how examining a fund manager owned by Joe Biden’s family led to substantial regulatory action in Australia.”
I can read it right now in my Google reader, but if you want check it out, you’re out of luck.
Suddenly Hempton’s blog — which uses Google’s blog platform Blogger — is labeled as spam and unavailable.
The discovery was made by Felix Salmon, who suspects that someone wants to silence Hempton, and is using Google’s report spam feature to silence Hempton’s blog.
Whatever the reason is, it’s embarrassing that a blog like Hempton’s can so easily get snagged, particularly considering the quality of its content and the multitude of inbound links from high profile sites, as Salmon notes.
Hopefully this will be corrected soon, but for an average person, it’s not always easy to rectify Google’s mistakes.
This is another risk of using Google’s cloud — something we recently discovered when our email was hacked — and if you’re a blogger who publishes content that may make people angry, it’s probably worth getting your own domain and hosting setup.
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See Also:
- How A Nigerian Scammer Hacked Our Gmail Account And Spammed Some Of You
- What If Bank Of America Had To Report Numbers The Same Way Fannie Mae Did?
- Brand New SEC Actually Catches A Scam Early