When will they have 2008 on the file? With any luck, early in 2009!

Happy New Year from the guys and girls of Overdetermined!

Admin

Hey, everyone,

Our great Christmas present to everyone is the week off. Relax, drink some egg nog, fight with your families and try not to think too hard about voter files, polling, statistics and data.

Admin

Hi, everyone.

Dirty D has emailed to let me know that due to family related travel, he is going to be thirty-six to forty-eight hours delayed in posting his update to his ongoing series, Building a Poll. He is currently in East Asia, where he is removed from us by several, several time zones.

Ah, the life of a blogger.

Admin

Hi, everyone,

We're going through a few changes here at Overdetermined.  HummuSoft's series, Cool Tools, will be moving to Tuesday morning, and Pluribus's new series, An Introduction to R, will be appearing on Thursday morning.

Texas Toast will soon be contributing a series on implementing all of these ideas in the field, and translating all these models into plans for knocking on doors, making phone calls, etc. Exciting stuff!

I'm looking forward to all of this, and I hope that you will find these changes as interesting as we do.

Admin

Hi, everyone. I know that you were expecting a post in the Building A Poll series, but I managed to somehow lose my entire post. I'll have to start from scratch and repost over the weekend.

Sorry to disappoint.

DD

Hi, everyone. I'd like to take a second to introduce you to our new contributor, Pluribus.  We are pretty lucky to get a guy with his experience and talents. He's worked as a data consultant for state governments and NGO's, he's done pretty interesting programming stuff, and he's going to be writing a pretty kickass series on programming some of the various things that we discuss on here using an open sourced statistics environment called R.  I'm really looking forward to seeing what kinds of tools he can bring to the environment.

Admin

Sorry, guys, those of you looking for us to give you everything you wanted to know about this election were a bit disappointed over the last few days. We've all been doing GOTV work.

By the way, OBAMA!

We'll be back tomorrow.

Hello, to our readers, new and old.  For those of you just discovering us, let me tell you a little about what we're trying to do, here.  All of us have worked in some combination of journalism, blogging, data, analytics and polling for the last fifteen years.  We know a lot about how things have been done to date and have some pretty zinging ideas about how things could  be done if people had the willingness and ability to try out some new things.  To that end, we've been publishing series in which our individual authors describe the concepts that go into status quo methods and how to start exploring other ways of doing things.   We try to have an update into each series on every weekday.

So where's Tuesday's series? Well, the series that we have scheduled for Tuesdays is temporarily suspended for the last two weeks of the election.  Our contributor, Texas Toast, is off in the field, trying to turn a red state blue.  When he gets back, he'll be writing a column for us called Notes From The Field, in which he describes practical implementations of everything that the rest of us talk about, whether it's desgining a field plan to coming up with metrics by which to evaluate its success.  It's going to be heady stuff.

So, till November 5, 2008, you'll have to just look forward to it. To tide you over, we're going to feature non-series content from our stable of talented writers on Tuesdays. Enjoy!

Admin

Welcome to Overdetermined.net.  We hope to start a conversation with activists, journalists, bloggers and fellow members of our analytics communities.   The fields of data, analytics and polling remain unfortunately opaque.  Our initial inspiration came from Mark Blumenthal, who writes primarily about polls.  Mark's site is a fantastic resource for people who already understand the basics and complexities of polling,but there isn't too much on there that can demystify the whole thing for someone who doesn't really know too much about the fields.  Similarly, when Nate Grey launched his site, we were excited to see how someone would aggregate data and regress them.

This brings us to where we are now: Overdetermined.net.  We think that we should make the processes transparent and intelligible to the world at large.  Call this the first shot across the bow.

What is analytics?

Analytics is that area of undertaking that uses data to acquire data, analyses data, synthesizes data and derives data.

This sounds pretty straightforward, right? The devil, of course, is in the details. And let's hope that we can expose those details.

Enjoy!

The Authors