---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <nlefaa$t1l$1@panix2.panix.com> Date: 4 Jul 2016 16:01:14 -0400 From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Are telephone surveys statistically valid? John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote: >>Are *any* telephone surveys statistically valid? I see a number >>of problems (even if they call land lines and cell phones): > >Probably not. Apparently back when phone surveys were new, everyone >was happy to talk to surveys. These days, they're lucky to get >responses from 5% of the people who answer. No doubt a lot of this is >due as you say to the vast increase in junk calling, making people >much less likely to talk to any stranger on the phone, and distrustful >of anyone who claims to be taking a survey. ("If I told you that >you'd won a free cruise to the Bahamas, would you be a) amazed, >b) thilled, or c) excited?") The question is what 5% do they get to answer? If they can get a good cross-section of the population worked out from that 5%, that's one thing. If, as I suspect, mostly people who have nothing else to do tend to answer, then it's very difficult to weight your sample accurately. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ Message-ID: <nlefmc$85n$1@panix2.panix.com> Date: 4 Jul 2016 16:07:40 -0400 From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Are telephone surveys statistically valid? Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> wrote: >In article <nkmg1f$pof$1@grapevine.csail.mit.edu>, > wollman@bimajority.org (Garrett Wollman) wrote: > >> Of course you could argue it another way: they are "statistically >> valid" by construction, the only question is whether the population >> being sampled is sufficiently similar to the population of interest to >> allow for generalization. > >If I were them, I'd compare the surveyed population with the US census, >which is about as accurate a description of the US population as likely >exists. That's what they do. They make categories of people, put individual callers into those categories based on where they live and how they answer some demographic questions, then they weight the answers in each category based on the number of people in that category in the census (or similar population description). Several problems come in: first of all you may have people with very different voting patterns that wind up in the same category. Secondly, if you have very few people in one category responding then each vote in that category counts for a lot and the noise floor rises. Thirdly, the actual population may not be the same as the census population. Now, for election predictions it gets even more fun because the people who go out to vote are not an even cross-section of the population, so the first thing that the election prognosticators need to do is to figure out just who is going to vote and who is not so they can figure out what the population weights need to be. This turns out to be more difficult than expected sometimes. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ Message-ID: <1tqxlg3b4txn5.z2m414xn4rcu.dlg@40tude.net> Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2016 01:34:13 -0400 From: tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> Subject: Re: The WRT54GL: A 54Mbps router from 2005 still makes millions for Linksys On Sat, 2 Jul 2016 19:30:43 -0400, Monty Solomon wrote: > You can buy a new router - for less money - and get > the benefit of modern standards, expansion into the 5GHz band, and > data rates more than 20 times higher. I suppose Europeans or Koreans can benefit from those speeds, but us poor US Frontier customers in former SNET-land, who pay for 6 Mbps DSL service but receive throughput, at best, of maybe 600 Kbps, can't even begin to take advantage of the WRT54GL's speeds, let alone any "20 times higher." Cheers from the unexpected 3rd world of SNET-land, USA, -- tlvp --- Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP. ***** Moderator's Note ***** There is something in the techie soul - at least in my soul - that abhors people who rob me with a fountain pen. Everything from the disk manufacturers' changing the meaning of "Megabyte" to distort the capacity of their products, to ISP's that claim speeds that could only be obtained by their very first customer at 5:30 AM, to the bold-faced lies spewed out by cellular salesmen. When I'm in charge, this will change. Bill Horne Moderator ------------------------------ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Thu, 07 Jul 2016