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USADA to Strip Lance Armstrong of 7 Tour De France Titles

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Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus8/23/2012 10:56:53 pm PDT

re: #191 palomino

I’m not saying that other polls show a close race.

That said, such “polling” really is highly questionable, for at least two reasons:

(1) the feed back loop effect - polls themselves are marketing tools, which is why the Fox Poll is what it is;

(2) measurement uncertainty - this is where innumeracy comes in. Note how polls sneak in wording about “plus or minus n%”. What the heck does that mean? This is nothing less than confusing by statistical mumbo jumbo. The reality that uncertainty has definitions in science and statistics, and the polling done by these political publicity machines have very large uncertainties - much larger than the wording implies.