11.27.08
Posted in news, politics, web at 11:57 am by danvk
Today is the 30th anniversary of the Moscone-Milk assassinations and, fueled by the upcoming release of the movie Milk, they’ve been all over the local airways.
For those not familiar with the basic story (I wasn’t before I moved to SF), City Supervisor Dan White quit his job, then asked to be reinstated. When Mayor George Moscone refused, White returned to city hall with a gun and murdered Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, who happened also be the first openly-gay elected official in the country. Another Supervisor, now-Senator Dianne Feinstein became mayor as a result of these killings.
An NPR show yesterday included a clip of Feinstein giving a dramatic press conference announcing the deaths. Much to my surprise, an original copy of that night’s newcast has found its way online.
The Feinstein press conference is at 2:10. Listen to the gasps. The 70′s production is jarring to look at now though, except for the cars, the shots of San Francisco could have been taken yesterday.
I couldn’t figure out whether this is an isolated clip or part of a larger collection. How cool would it be if all of NBC’s old newscasts were online?
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11.14.08
Posted in politics at 7:35 pm by danvk
Here’s a list of presidents and the changes in the S&P 500 during their term. Since I don’t know the future of the markets, I put today’s close in for our current president.
Not to suggest that presidents have any impact on the stock market…
| President |
End Date |
Close |
Change |
% Change |
Annual |
| G.W. Bush |
14-Nov-08 |
$873.29 |
-$469.25 |
-34.95% |
-5.35% |
| Clinton |
20-Jan-01 |
$1342.54 |
$909.17 |
209.79% |
15.18% |
| G.H.W. Bush |
20-Jan-93 |
$433.37 |
$146.74 |
51.19% |
10.89% |
| Reagan |
20-Jan-89 |
$286.63 |
$154.98 |
117.72% |
10.21% |
| Carter |
20-Jan-81 |
$131.65 |
$28.68 |
27.85% |
6.34% |
| Ford |
20-Jan-77 |
$102.97 |
$22.11 |
27.34% |
10.37% |
| Nixon |
9-Aug-74 |
$80.86 |
-$20.83 |
-20.48% |
-4.05% |
| Johnson |
20-Jan-69 |
$101.69 |
$32.08 |
46.09% |
7.62% |
| JFK |
22-Nov-63 |
$69.61 |
$9.65 |
16.09% |
5.40% |
| Eisenhower |
20-Jan-61 |
$59.96 |
$33.82 |
129.38% |
10.94% |
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11.07.08
Posted in politics at 8:26 pm by danvk
One of the least understood features of Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com was his list of “tipping point states”.
I thought that, for each simulation of the election, Nate sorted the states by margin of victory for the overall winner. Then he’d start adding up electoral votes. The state that tipped the winner over 270 would be the “tipping point state” for that simulation.
While writing this blog post, I discovered that I had completely misunderstood this list! Nate describes the actual calculation of his list in this post. It’s quite involved, but better captures the intuition of a “tipping point state”.
Just for fun, I figured out what the 2008 Election’s tipping point state was using the methodology I’d originally thought Nate did. And it was… Colorado! Obama took Colorado with 54.40% of the vote, the 23rd most lopsided total. It takes him from 262 to 271 Electoral Votes.
Full list of states, margins of victory and electoral votes below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »
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10.21.08
Posted in politics, tv at 9:18 am by danvk
I wrote a few months back about my mixed reactions to this season’s episodes of FRONTLINE. The latest is their quadrennial biography of the two presidential candidates, The Choice 2008 (also free on iTunes). It’s well worth watching.
The first half of the show, which covers McCain and Obama’s early lives, is the more interesting, or at least less familiar. Frontline did a great job of digging up old videos. There’s a recording of McCain in the POW camp. There’s a recording of Obama giving a speech at Harvard Law in 1990. He looks different, but the cadence of his speech is eerily familiar. It’s also interesting to see speeches that McCain gave in the past. He’s noticeably more relaxed than he has been in the debates. A particular standout is his exchange with John Stewart in 2006.
My main problem with the episode was its lack of depth. This was more of a problem with the latter half, where I could see the gaps in their coverage of stories with which I was already familiar. The biggest questions they asked but left unresolved related to Reverend Wright. They said it was shocking that the Clinton campaign didn’t use him against Obama until after Super Tuesday, but never offered an explanation of why. I’ve often wondered this as well. If the Reverend Wright controversy had struck before Obama was ahead in delegates, Hillary might well be the nominee.
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09.25.08
Posted in math, politics at 3:45 pm by danvk
On September 15, SurveyUSA released this poll of likely voters in Virginia:
McCain (R) 46%
Obama (D) 50%
Margin of Error: +/-3.7%
Tables like this appear on TV and in newspapers all the time. But they’re never accompanied by any explanation of how to interpret the margin of error. Commentators usually interpret it in one of two ways:
- Obama is ahead by more than the margin of error, hence his lead is statistically significant.
- That “+/-” means either number could be off by that amount. If you added 3.7% to McCain’s 46% and subtracted 3.7% from Obama’s 50%, McCain would actually be ahead. So Obama’s lead is not statistically significant; it is less than twice the margin of error.
In either case, they are wrong.
So what’s the right way to interpret the margin of error? A lead is significant if it is 1.6 times the margin of error or greater. That’s 5.9% for our poll, so Obama’s lead is not significant.
This is a strange, non-intuitive rule, which explains why commentators don’t use it. The derivation is more revealing than the rule itself.
Read the rest of this entry »
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