Right at the top of this post, I'd like to take a step back and thank you, our readers, for continuing to stay with us as we evolve and come up with new ideas.  What began with Blue Leader and me ranting about our experiences working in data and analytics is slowly growing into a strong, six person team of people with diverse points of view, ideas and approaches to solving problems. And as we move forward and develop our ideas, we look back at other things that we tried and realize that we may have to tinker with the ideas a bit.

This is one of those moments.

We'd be remiss if we didn't note that we're not the only ones that think open source products are the way to go for stable, usable and powerful systems. The Obama campaign used Ubuntu 8.04 in their campaign offices across the nation. (Though it seems that Barack Obama tends to favor Macs himself.)

Far be it from me to ever, ever think that I could be better at reading data than Steven Levitt. I've been a big fan of his since back when he was putting out studies on crime rates at The Harvard Society of Fellows, and I think that there are few people who are as capable of looking at data without predisposition as he is, and, let's be honest, Freakonomics was the book in 2005. That being said, there are times when I read his NYT blog and wonder what the hell is going there. Today's guest post from Eric Oliver was one of those times.

There's more.

I wish this were humor, I really do.

On the very day I describe how questions can be a source of methodological error in my regular series post, I find out about the new Zogby poll commissioned by John Ziegler.  Nate Silver at 538 has been all over this one, and good on Nate.  But I want to do my own bit of analysis here, just to illustrate my point about questions and methodological error.

There's more...

Normally, I don't like to link to the Freepers, but this is a good example of political humor:

What’s with all these polls? They vary so much that either
they’re crazy or we are. When did this pretentious pseudo-science
become a national obsession and daily news? You’d think we lived
in Poll-land instead of America. Well, maybe a sense of humor can
knock some sense into an American electorate that takes these polls
way too seriously. So, without further ado, here’s an “unbiased sample”
(snicker) of Poll-ish jokes. Enjoy.

How many pollsters does it take to change a light bulb?
None. They didn’t notice it was dark.

What’s the difference between pollsters and meteorologists?
Meteorologists are sometimes right.

What’s a pollster’s favorite candy?
Fudge

What do pollsters eat the morning after Election Day?
Crow

The Freepers are always entertaining, but usually not on purpose. Follow the link for more!

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PPP has an interesting post about some of the subtleties in weighting for party ID, using a comparison between immediate pre-election polls and the exit polling in North Carolina.  It's very much worth a read; there's some stuff in there I hadn't considered about the fluidity of people's self-reported party ID.

Marc Ambinder has a must-read post about the Democrats' use of voter data this cycle.  The whole thing is worth reading, so I won't excerpt here, but you should do yourself a favor and go read it--the glossary at the beginning is worth the click alone.