Australia votes for a shag
It’s time for StatsChat’s favourite bogus poll: Forest & Bird’s Bird of the Year.
In contrast to most bogus online polls, Bird of the Year doesn’t pretend to be anything more than a publicity stunt, and no-one seriously believes the huge year-to-year variation in the results has any real meaning in popular opinion
Bird of the Year still has more quality control than most bogus polls. They require a unique email address per vote, and this year have monitoring by Dragonfly Data Science.
Dragonfly noticed an apparent attempt to hack the vote last night, with a large number of votes from a single Australian IP address for the cormorants or shags, kawau in te reo.
Yes, Bird of the Year is a joke. But any other online clicky poll is at least as much of a joke.
(PS: for the sake of people whose tolerance for this sort of thing is lower than yours, if you tweet about Bird of the Year, use the hashtag)
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 »