Politico has a story today on the Employee Free Choice Act, and how the numbers each side is citing aren't matching up very well:

• “Nearly three-quarters of the public — 73 percent — support the Employee Free Choice Act,” crows the AFL-CIO on its website.

• “Seventy-four percent of voters oppose the Employee Free Choice Act,” concludes research cited by the pro-business Coalition for a Democratic Workplace.

First things first: the joke. If Pluribus were writing this post, it would read as follows:

1. Don't.
2. Install R.

I, however, have nothing like the massive kung fu that he has. In fact, one would say that if he is Master Shifu, then this is me:

That being said, as much as I like R, I'm still dependent on SPSS to do what I want to do, and while I love Ubuntu and Linux at large, I still have some massive mis-steps. This is a how-to built out of one of those mis-steps.

From an extensive New Yorker article on movie marketing:

Executives’ testing stories take divergent paths to the same punch line. Either they decided not to tamper with a “Pulp Fiction,” despite testing results invariably described as “the lowest scores in the studio’s history,” or they were confounded when an “Akeelah and the Bee” faltered commercially despite “the highest scores in the studio’s history.” In both scenarios, the numbers lied. “Testing is a sham,” one marketing consultant says. “All you’ve learned is what people thought of a movie they didn’t have to pay for. It does not mean they’re going to go pay for it.”

Read the whole thing; it's got a lot of interesting details about the guts of marketing.

I've been meaning to write about this all day, but I'm only just now getting around to it.  Apparently, the Battle For EFCA has escalated to the point that different groups are going to Ambinder and leaking their polling. Of course, it would be nice if they would leak the datasets, sampling information, etc., but what can you really expect?  Anyway, it looks like this post has some nuggets in here that make for interesting commentary on how to poll.

Hi, everyone,

We're going to be testing out a lot of things over the weekend as part of our redesign process.  Please don't be surprised.

Admin

Earlier today, a friend showed It Died,  a graveyard for web applications, open source applications and free applications.  A lot of people I know are using this as a way to crow about how proprietary and closed source stuff is better and more secure...Their arg is basically that when you buy from a company that sells the software itself, it's much more likely that the product will last, and that you won't have invested a lot of time and effort in developing your solutions around a product that's likely to disappear.

Bullshit. Total. Utter. Bullshit.  There are all kinds of products and services that people sell that simply don't make it, and the fact that they don't let you see their code is no guarantee that they'll survive.  Think about Eudora or Novell Netware.  Seen anything running those lately?

God, the stupidity just overwhelms me sometimes.

Texas Toast 

I cannot help but wonder how many tight jean and retro t shirt clad Oberlinites are going to spit out their green tea when they discover that they and Mike Huckabee like the same technology.

DD

Apparently, Iceman wants to be New Mexico's Governor. Let the lulz begin.

Texas Toast

Okay, I don't know if I'm the only one here dorky enough to read Andrew Gelman and have strong feelings about Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, but I have to tell you that I'm pretty shocked to discover that Gelman's blogging at New Majority.

While I get that his work is transformational in understanding how we look at the electorate, I had hoped he was one of our guys.

DD

see Sarah Palin pictures