Here’s another illustration of the listicle sorting app I’m putting together. For now, I’m still making images by hand. But I’m also moving ahead on building tools for automated assembly. This 4×4 grid is a draft for the top level of the Sygnol namespace, presented in alphabetical order. When the system goes live, you’d be…
I’m setting up an experiment on ranked choice polling via Twitter. It lets you rank your preferences for the upcoming Oscars. To use it, you would tweet your ranks using the list below. You can use the link to see a trailer for the film. The tweet would start with #syg to announce you’re intending…
Ben Carson now averages close to 20% in national polls… A lot of voters will be shopping for a new political champion if he falters. There’s no sign of that now, but no one is immune from the inevitable weeding out process in the GOP contest. The dataset collected by Civinomics.com allows us to consider…
Scott Walker’s departure from the crowded GOP race probably won’t have much impact on candidate standings. His support had fallen to 5% or so before he dropped out on September 21. There weren’t many supporters left to spread around. But every edge counts. It’s reasonable to ask who might benefit from his withdrawal and whether…
Just as ranked choice voting offers a better way to run multi-candidate elections, it promises a boon to public opinion research. Here’s a demonstration of how data collected by a recent online ranked choice survey could have been used to anticipate Carly Fiorina’s and Marco Rubio’s recent surges in the GOP race. The source data…
I attended the Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research — AAPOR. It was a great experience, and I used the opportunity to pitch the virtues of ranked choice polling to folks at NBC, CNN, et al, and even Nate Silver. But nothing came of it. The Iowa Straw poll was cancelled.…
Exceptionally wealthy donors and professional fundraisers are rapidly gaining influence in American Presidential elections, and they’re doing it at the expense of voters. The constant task of raising money is clearly driving our “democracy,” even if we can’t predict where. There’s no doubt, however, that candidates are putting more and more of their very scarce time into dialing for dollars. The…
Users of previous ranked choice straw poll sites I created are being invited by email to try AimsPoll. The message I’m sending out has a short description of what’s going on. I wanted to say more, but the initial draft got way too long. So, anyone interested in the full thought process can read it here.…
The Media Ecology Association (MEA) is a group comprised of folks who know something of the work of Marshall McLuhan. (Not everyone will get that oblique reference. It hints at a scene in Woody Allen’s film, Annie Hall, where McLuhan plays himself in a cameo role, and puts down a pontificator with the line “You know nothing of…
Here’s a handy formula that expresses a key virtue of ranked-choice interfaces over head-to-head pairwise evaluations… N(N-1)/2. Head-to-head interfaces are typical of “Whose hotter?” sites such as candobetter.com. The point is to simplify the task of evaluating a long list of options. Users view a randomly selected pair of images from a large set, and…