At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has an in-depth article on the hypothesis that environmental lead is a likely root cause of the increase in crime a generation ago. Even more importantly, removal of lead from gasoline may be responsible for the decrease in crime in the last few decades. Last night, Kevin and I discussed these ideas [...]
Entries Tagged as '2008 Election'
Who are these likely voters, anyway?
September 18th, 2012, 10:00am by Sam Wang
After Labor Day, most pollsters start to apply “likely voter screens,” in which they attempt to identify respondents who are not just registered to vote, but who will actually schlep to the polls (or vote by mail) in the election. Many of you have asked what is in these screens, and whether to be suspicious [...]
Tags: 2004 Election · 2008 Election · 2012 Election
Ryan 2012 v. Palin 2008
August 26th, 2012, 7:05am by Sam Wang
An obvious comparison is to ask how Ryan performed compared with Sarah Palin, another running-mate intended to be a game-changer. As you can see, a major advantage of the Meta-analysis is that it allows high-resolution tracking over time. This kind of precision is hard to achieve even with national polls, probably because there are fewer [...]
Tags: 2008 Election · 2012 Election · President
“Forecasts,” snapshots, and predictions, 2012
June 27th, 2012, 2:51pm by Sam Wang
Over at Matt Dickinson’s Presidential Power, there’s a discussion between him, Nate Silver, and others. I weighed in on the confusion between poll snapshots (what all aggregators do, including Nate Silver’s “forecasts”) and true predictions (what political scientists do). Here’s part of what I wrote… Basically, I think the term “prediction” is used too loosely. I’ll [...]
Tags: 2008 Election · 2012 Election
At TEDxSF – Neuroscience and willpower
November 13th, 2009, 1:00pm by Sam Wang
I’ll be coming to San Francisco next Tuesday for TEDxSF, a spinoff of the famous TED conference. It’s at the California Academy of Sciences. Mayor Gavin Newsom will launch the event. The event will be LiveStreamed – tune in around 4:00pm Pacific. I’m on a little after 4:30pm to talk about the neuroscience of willpower. [...]
Tags: 2008 Election
Orly Taitz gets her court date
November 11th, 2009, 2:17pm by Sam Wang
Back on the false-belief beat…sort of. I’ve previously written about false belief formation from the standpoint of neuroscience. A prominent category these days is the delusion, mostly on the right, that President Obama is thought to be hiding something really big. These days it’s his citizenship: “birthers” claim that he is not a Hawaii-born US [...]
Tags: 2008 Election
Senate race re-cap
June 30th, 2009, 10:08pm by Sam Wang
Last year I recommended a donation strategy that nearly 400 of you followed to give nearly $45,000 to one side (and an unknown amount to the other side). Now that Al Franken is finally on his way to being Minnesota’s junior senator (by 312 votes, a 0.01% margin), was it a good strategy?
Tags: 2008 Election
Obama’s signing…statement?
February 18th, 2009, 2:23pm by Sam Wang
Today at 6:50pm ET, I’ll be on CNN’s Situation Room to talk about left-handed presidents and their brains. It might be re-broadcast tomorrow at 6:50am ET and/or 8:55am. I free-associated a bit – let’s hope nothing embarrassing emerges. Update: here’s the video. Note that Obama curls his hand to avoid smearing ink. A more efficient [...]
Tags: 2008 Election
Lunchtime talk on Campaign ’08
February 5th, 2009, 3:36pm by Sam Wang
For locals – next Wednesday the 11th at noon, I’ll be giving a talk on a polling geek’s view of Campaign ’08. It’s part of our Office of Information Technology’s Lunch ‘n’ Learn Series. Come on by! Update: here’s the podcast. And here are my slides (PDF).
Tags: 2008 Election
Amazing Inauguration photo – 1.5 gigapixels
January 25th, 2009, 11:00am by Sam Wang
Taken by David Bergman. Check it out here.
Tags: 2008 Election
