Liberty Egg

Polls and normalization of samples

Do you think the common man knows that when Gallup says someone has 54% support that the figure does NOT mean that 54% of respondents supported that candidate? With the degree to which the coverage of an election is about the horse race and not the issues, this is one item that the press should do a better job of describing...Of course, the common man doesn't know the difference between a poll of registered voters and one of likely voters...

Did you know that pollsters don't call cell phones? How many people only have a cell phone these days?

I could go on...

Conspiracy Theories

Someone told me about this rumor regarding the 911 Pentagon attack being a missile or small plane...but seeing this very well done Flash Movie really makes it seem more plausible. Has anyone in the serious media covered this?

See freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon.php#Main

Champagne for 2nd?

The Red Sox clinched the wild card last night and celebrated by soaking the clubhouse with moet...Does this seem a bit premature when you're chasing the Divisional title...

Burton Malkiel meet Adwords.

We have just started an affiliate marketing program at Transparent. One of the interesting things to come up is the number of affiliates in the provider's network that join your program and then try to shift traffic to your site. Actually, that is the basic premise of affiliate marketing. What is interesting about some of these affiliates though is that they go beyond funneling their own site traffic and attempt to make a living at squeezing out every last drop of search traffic, etc. for your goods and services. I even saw one that had a model to capture the traffic of people who miss-spell your product names when searching for them...talk about an efficient market...people are arbitraging the spelling mistakes...

What I haven't figured out yet is whether the efficiency of these surrogate SEM masters adds more income than the potential competition for adwords takes away...

I guess the example of the efficient financial market that prices instruments so as to remove the easy dual transaction premiums works here. In the money options would be the same as CPC rates moving toward the affiliate commission divided by the conversion rate...

Redefine this campaign in 30 seconds

1. Captain Ahab was not a strong leader - he was unwaivering - but he was wrong.
2. The world is complex - evolving your positions with nuances is NOT flip-flopping, it is intelligent leadership.
3. Don't lie about WMD because you need an excuse to get the American people to go along with a war.
4. There are more terrorists in Iraq today than before the war - Iraq was NOT part of the war on terror, but it was the best possible recruiting poster Osama could have asked for...
5. We took our eye off the ball in Afganistan - Osama got away, and the Taliban are not yet defeated.
6. Fiscal conservatives? Democrats balanced the budget, W has created the largest budget deficit EVER, all while giving millionaires tens of thousands of dollars EACH in tax cuts.
7. Stem cell research can save countless lives. Religion has no place in stoping that.
8. We support Arab dictatorships because we are depenedent on foreign oil. Why then did Dick Cheney and Haliburton decide our energy policy in secret...so we could DO NOTHING about this dependance...

Are you better off now than four years ago?
Are we safer?
Are we in better shape fiscally?
Have we fixed social security?

I could go on...why aren't the democrats?

When you can't run on your record...

Is it just me or is Karl Rove channeling Lee Atwater? Actually, what's more scary is the Dukakis-like response of the Kerry campaign these days. They say that you either fight the facts or the semantics depending on whether you can win on the facts...Why hasn't the Kerry campaign done more to refute the swifties? It hasn't been a choice between talking about vietnam vs. talking about the important issues of 2004. It has been radio silence. When you allow your opponent to define you negatively and don't effectively refute those charges, you lose. What's more, when you don't fight back more forcefully, you allow him to define the debate on unfavorable grounds...