On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 1:29 AM, Konstantin Kashin
<kkashin@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
Dear all,
Please join us for the Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) this Wednesday, October 12 from 12.00 - 1.30 pm in CGIS Knafel Room 354. Michael Weissman, a Professor Emeritus from the Physics Department at the University of Illinois, will give a presentation entitled "From Fourier to Forensics". As always, a light lunch will be provided.
The abstract for the presentation is:
Although the statistical and systematic problems of public opinion polls are fairly widely recognized, we tend to assume that published polling results reflect some sort of actual poll. In 2009 a prominent blog suggested that the pollster Strategic Vision might be fabricating data, based in part on surprising deviations from uniformity of the distribution of trailing digits of the results.(http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/search/label/strategic%20vision) Objections were raised to the assumed uniform distribution, but we were able to use Fourier analysis together with known polling statistics to show that the results were weird even if that assumption were dropped. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E1DA123AF930A25751C1A96F9C8B63
In 2010 we were contacted by a political consultant who had noticed anomalies in Research2000 poll reports. Using a variety of elementary statistical techniques, we showed that those results could not have accurately represented real polls. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_2000) Unfortunately, we do not know if there are other bogus pollsters, disguising results via a random binary generator (cost $0.01).
Best,
Konstantin
--
Konstantin Kashin
Ph.D. Student in Government
Harvard University
Mobile: 978-844-0538
E-mail: kkashin@fas.harvard.edu
Site: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~kkashin/
Ph.D. Student in Government