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1. Comment - The red/blue split for online voters is not 50/50, survey finds

   (Jun 17, 2008 - 5:59 PM)

   2,251 Americans polled representing every American-internet users. Right!
   
   You need 400 randomly chosen samples to get within 5% 95% of the time.
   
   More samples improve your accuracy.
   
   The problem is randomly selecting your subjects.
   
   2,251 Americans is a large enough sample. The question is how were the 2,251 people selected?
   
   Did they use phone numbers from the voter rolls? If so then you can expect that people that value there privacy are disproportionately excluded.
   
   Did they use random phone number selections? If they skipped cell phone numbers they under counted the under 30 crowd, if they only used cell phones they under counted the over 60 crowd, and if they sampled all numbers they double counted baby boomers.
   
   Sort of sad that there is this level of mathematical ignorance.

2. Comment - Google tries to make its spreadsheets more like wikis

   (May 18, 2008 - 5:18 PM)

   well it will be used by at least one phisher for storing credit card numbers of their victims So they can just swoop by and pick them up or sell off the url to the spread sheet.
   
   I am sure that someone can come up with a use that does not involve fraud.
   
   But that is the distributed data gathering that I see today.