January 5, 2012

Polling terminology

We’ve commented before on the annoying tendency of newspapers to claim that self-selected website polls actually mean something.  The media usually refers to the results as coming from “an unscientific poll”, but a better term would be “a bogus poll”.  In the interests of openness, democracy, and giving you something to do over summer, we are conducting a bogus poll ourselves, to find out which terminology is better.

 

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

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