Why were the opinion polls so wrong in predicting the result of the British General Election of May 2015?
January 20th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
This week, a report by Professor John Curtice for research agency NatCen was published which essentially concluded that the pollsters failed to obtain a genuinely random sample. As a result, they underestimated support for the Conservative Party.
The problem is that some voters are easier to contact than others.
Those who are easier to contact are:
- those with a landline
- those who answer a phone call from a stranger
- those who have an Internet connection
- those who are willing to sign up to online polling
- those who are at home and not too busy
- those who are politically engaged
Polling is becoming more difficult because fewer homes have a landline, many people do not like to answer unsolicited calls, not everyone is on the Net, volunteers for online polling are somewhat self-selecting, older people are less likely to be contacted by pollsters but more likely to vote, and those who are busy with work are less likely to be available but often more conservative.
You can read the BBC coverage of the report here and the text of the full report here.
I would make two observations:
- The problems for UK political pollsters in obtaining a genuinely random sample is one faced by such organisations in most developed nations. We have seen political pollsters get it wrong in cases in the USA and Israel and I fear that the practical and statistical problems are only going to become greater and the accuracy of political polling is going to become weaker.
- The difficulty that pollsters have in engaging with harder to reach citizens and consumers affects the reliability of polling more generally including that by companies and campaigns. Citizens and consumers who are older, poorer, have a disability, live in isolated circumstances, or do not have the vernacular as a spoken language tend to be under-represented in such polling.
Posted in American current affairs, British current affairs, Consumer matters | Comments (0)
A review of the new movie “Creed”
January 19th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
This is the seventh film in the “Rocky” franchise but it’s not called “Rocky VII” for a reason. Stallone is far too old to portray a top-class boxer so we have a re-invention of the franchise with a new young, African-American star in the eponymous role. It is surprisingly good and you can read my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
How many of the world’s richest people have the same wealth as half of the globe’s total population?
January 18th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Oxfam has calculated that:
- In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people – the bottom half of humanity. This figure is down from 388 individuals as recently as 2010.
- The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44% in the five years since 2010 – that’s an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ($542bn), to $1.76 trillion.
- Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars in the same period – a drop of 41%.
- Since the turn of the century, the poorest half of the world’s population has received just 1% of the total increase in global wealth, while half of that increase has gone to the top 1%.
- The average annual income of the poorest 10% of people in the world has risen by less than $3 each year in almost a quarter of a century. Their daily income has risen by less than a single cent every year.
These figures are contained in a new Oxfam report entitled “An Economy For the 1%: How privilege and power in the economy drive extreme inequality and how this can be stopped” which you can access here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
My review of an excellent new book on international politics
January 17th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
I’m a bit of a news junkie and am fascinated by national and international politics. However, so much reporting of current affairs lacks context. One needs to know something of the history and geography of a nation or region to make real sense of what is happening today.
British journalist Tim Marshall has written an excellent overview of geo-politics. It has the main title “Prisoners Of Geography” and the sub-title “Ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics”.
It is an easy read and immensely informative. I strongly recommend it and you can see my review here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (2)
How good is the quality of your water?
January 16th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
This week, in my capacity as Chair of the South East Water Customer Panel, together with other Panel colleagues, I visited one of the company’s water treatment works at Bewl in Kent to learn more about how water is treated before it is of the right quality for customers.
Many customers think that running a water company is simply a matter of collecting rainfall and distributing it through pipes but, as we learned and saw, water in the UK goes through a whole series of stages before it becomes amongst the highest quality water in the world.
At Bewl, the stages are called aeration & flocculation, flotation, ozonisation, filtration, granular activated carbon, disinfection, de-chlorination, and distribution. You can learn a little more about each of these stages here and you can learn a little more about water quality in this short video.
You might think that good quality water in an industrialised country is no big deal. But then you may not have heard of the current situation in Flint, Michigan in the richest nation on earth. Here an entire city of 100,000 is barred from drinking its own water – even cooking with it – because of poisonously high levels of lead.
Posted in Consumer matters, My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Is Wikipedia the best site on the web?
January 15th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
This was the title of a column that I wrote eight years ago. At the time, Wikipedia had 8 million articles in more than 250 languages.
The amazing site is 15 years old this week and now has over 38 million articles, over 5 million articles in English alone. I use it all the time as a starting point for many inquiries and I contribute small sums to its funding.
You can read how Wikipedia changed the world here.
Posted in Internet | Comments (0)
How to remember things
January 15th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
After a break for the Christmas/New Year period, I return to my Friday postings of advice from the Life Skills section of my web site.
Do you ever have trouble remembering things? If so, you might like to learn about some techniques for remembering different information.
You can check out the various techniques here.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
This year’s Academy Award nominations and the films that I have seen
January 14th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
America’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced this year’s nominations for what are popularly known as the Oscars. As usual, a small number of films has attracted a large number of nominations, so the top eight movies have garnered no less than 57 of the nominations.
I have seen five of these eight works (the other three have not yet opened in the UK), as you’ll see here:
- “The Revenant” – 12
- “Mad Max: Fury Road” – 10 : my review here
- “The Martian” – 7 : my review here
- “Spotlight” – 6
- “Bridge of Spies” – 6 : my review here
- “Carol” – 6: my review here
- “The Big Short” – 5
- “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” – 5 : my review here
You can see the full list of nominations here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
“Keep calm and carry on” – the true story of this wartime campaign
January 14th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
For years now that very British exhortation “Keep calm and carry on”, in its original wartime text or in multifarious variations, has been ubiquitous – on posters, mugs, tea towels and so on. But just how commonplace was the advice in the Second World War when it originated? A letter in today’s “Guardian” newspaper has the answer:
In Owen Hatherley’s article (Let them eat cupcakes, 9 January), it was stated that “the Keep Calm and Carry On poster was not mass produced until 2008”, and that only “a handful were printed on a test basis”. This is not true. As our research project on the communication history of the Ministry of Information has established, some 2.45m copies of the poster had been passed to local distribution centres by early autumn 1939.
However, a number of those involved in the campaign had already begun to express their doubts: “the population might well resent having this poster crammed down their throats at every turn”; it was “too commonplace to be inspiring”; and “it may even annoy people that we should seem to doubt the steadiness of their nerves”.
The entire campaign was scrapped after just four weeks. Stocks of “Keep Calm” were retained until April 1940, after which they were pulped as part of a government effort to recycle paper. Only a few copies survived, including the one discovered in Alnwick in 2000. Links to a version of the full story, written by Dr Henry Irving, can be found on the MOI project’s website.
Professor Simon Eliot
Institute of English Studies, University of London
Posted in History | Comments (0)
U.S. presidential election (16): is Ted Cruz eligible to be America’s president?
January 13th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Oh, the irony of it: after all those stupid Republican birther claims that Barack Obama was not eligible to become President of the United States, there is now a discussion – mainly in Republican circles – about whether Ted Cruz, a serious candidate for the Republican nomination, is actually a US citizen and therefore eligible to serve in the White House.
Cruz’s was born in 1970 in Canada and his Cuban-born father was not a US citizen, but his mother was born in the US and his parents were married at the time of his birth. So that, should be that.
But Cruz did not give up his Canadian citizenship until 2014 which makes him politically suspect in some quarters and, much more seriously, there is some question that his mother became a Canadian citizen and may have ceased to be a US citizen.
At its most amusing and/or absurd, one commentator has speculated as follows:
“If it turns out that Cruz’s mother had ceased having US citizenship at the time he was born in Canada, then Cruz would not be a US citizen at all. That would make him an undocumented immigrant and a candidate for deportation, something that he and many other Republicans strongly favor for people in that situation.
Since he has renounced his Canadian citizenship, he would also be a stateless person. Perhaps he could apply to for refugee status though then he would have to undergo rigorous screening to ensure that he was not an ISIS agent.
It is not clear which country would be willing to take him in as a refugee, given that he is such an unpleasant person. The Canadian government of former prime minister Stephen Harper would have done so but I am not sure about the Justin Trudeau administration. They have been very welcoming to refugees but Cruz may be a bit too much to stomach.”
If you can bear to enter into the detail of this debate, check out this blog posting.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (1)