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TIME: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?

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Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus9/17/2009 4:06:21 pm PDT

I see that PJM is still pushing the huge-crowd meme for the Beck rally on 912, in another article. Suppsedly by a computer scientist.

Yet it is still flawed, seriously. They link to the USA Today article of a map the Park service used before to estimate crowds. But what the writer ignores is that there are different maps for different algorithms of the density of people. While the writer does briefly mention that density of people is important, he seems ignorant of the other map available (which was published by the WaPo.)

He also links to the Metrorail ridership figures… and quotes a supposed Heritage Foundation analysis (ha!) that says the ridership shows that ridership was about 235,000 more than the previous weekend. Well, duh, how many days are there in a weekend? The actual number for 912 is here:
wmata.com
Which shows that there were about… 70,000 more riders than the previous year on that day.

Finally, they link to a FreedomWorks photo that supposedly shows how big the audience was (and we’ve seen it before.) Yet, as pointed out here with that picture of the large speedway crowd, estimating crowds, especially using wide angle images at low angles, is notoriously bad.

Bottom line: Second rate analyses are bred from second rate thinking.