A tale of three types of cheating. If you are going to fudge the numbers, you’d better be very clever. Last December’s Annual Year in Ideas issue of the New York Times magazine included an idea titled “Forensic Polling Analysis” describing how Nate Silver analyzed results published by a polling firm called Strategic Vision. Silver decided to take a look at the results because Strategic Vision had been censured by the American Association for Public Opinion [...]

SurveyMonkey is being acquired by an investor group.  Dave Goldberg, who previously led Yahoo's music business, will take over as CEO, but founders Ryan (current CEO) and Chris Finley will remain with the company according to the [...]

As a tea-drinking Brit I was fascinated by a study about tea drinking in Northern Iran concluding that drinking very hot tea is strongly associated with higher risk of oesophageal cancer. Digging in further, I was struck by a number of points: The article I first noticed, by Karen Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times, was very clearly written and didn’t mangle the facts or interpretations. Such clarity is unusual and deserves a commendation. [...]

I had decided not to comment on political polling during this election season. Although this post concerns the election, it isn't about polling. It isn't directly about research, but it does show the problems that can happen when numeric results are reported imperfectly, and, even more important, when reporting on the report confuses instead of clarifying. Today (10/7/08), I read a snippet from the Puget Sound Business Journal "Washington State Voter Registration hits 3.5 [...]