L’Affaire Burnham: Ten Years Later

I just gave this presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) in Toronto. The title of the talk is taken from Richard Kulka's Presidential Address to AAPOR.  Back in 2009 AAPOR censured Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins University for refusing to disclose basic information about his methodology for …

Fake Data and the War in Iraq

Here are the slides from a talk I gave yesterday at RHUL's PIR department. It pulls together many threads that I've developed on the blog but I won't give the links here since they are embedded in the document.

Open the Door to all the Hidden Election Polling Data

The UK House of Lords has issued a call for evidence on the effects of political polling and digital digital media on politics.  Submissions are due next week so maybe someone out there wants to dash something off....or maybe someone would be so kind as to give me feedback on my proposal.  Below I give a …

Secret Data Sunday – BBC Edition Part 2 – Data Journalism without Data

Last week I described my initial attempt to obtain some Iraq survey data from the BBC. You can skip the long back story that explains my interest in these data sets if you want.  In short, though, these award-winning polls played an important role in establishing the historical record for the latest Iraq war but they …

Secret Data Sunday – BBC Edition Part 1

If you have spent any time on this blog you know that D3 Systems, together with KA Research Limited, fielded a lot of polls in Iraq during the occupation and that the ones I've managed to analyze show extensive evidence of containing fabricated data. Some such polls were commissioned by ABC news and won big awards. …

Secret Data Sunday – Gary Langer Edition

Last Sunday I shared an unanswered email I had sent to the Senior Vice President for Editorial Quality at ABC news.  The email gives a self-contained account of the overall context behind my data request, but I'll take another pass here just to be as clear as possible. There were a remarkable number of opinion polls …

Secret Data Sunday – ABC News (in the US) Stonewalls over their Dubious Iraq Public Opinion Polls

Below is an email that I sent to Kerry Smith, the Senior Vice President for Editorial Quality at ABC news, back in November of 2016. She did not reply..   Dear Ms. Smith, I am a professor of economics specialized in the quantitative analysis of armed conflict.  I have a big body of work focused on …

Secret Data Sunday – International Rescue Committee Edition

I haven't posted for a while on this subject so here's some background. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) did a series of surveys in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  The final installment summed up the IRC findings as follows: Based on the results of the five IRC studies, we now estimate that 5.4 million excess …

Secret Data Sunday – Nassim Nicholas Taleb Edition

When data are central to scientific discussions, as is typically the case, then the relevant data should be open to all. OK, we don't have to be totally rigid about this.  People may sink a lot of effort into building a data set so it's reasonable for data builders to milk their data monopoly for …

Secret Data Sunday – AAPOR Investigates the Trump-Clinton Polling Miss Using Data you Can’t See

The long-awaited report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) on the performance of polling in the Trump-Clinton race is out.  You will see that this material is less of a stretch for the blog than it might seem to be at first glance and I plan a second post on it. Today …