AimsPoll

Author: Flywheel

Craig Simon, Ph.D. -- Dania Beach, Florida -- @gitis

First Draft of Sygnol Top-Level Namespace

Sygnol top-level candidates.

  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…

Scott Walker Leaves the Ranks

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…

Lots of Stuff Happened

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.…

The Campaign Finance Heresies of Jeff Link and the ACLU

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…

Hilvetica and Marshall McLuhan

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…

Pairwise Pain vs. Ranked-Choice Relief

Pairwise_Pain

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…