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[xmedia2004]

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PuckSR couldnt find his own arse in an arse kicking competition.


Dude, i admitted you were right, and that i was far from an expert on the subject of economics, and you shit on me. I will stay away from economics, and you leave anything else involving math alone.

Dude I am sorry I couldnt help myself from making that comment seeing as how daman mentioned you name.

But you got to admit it was pretty funny, beside statecowboy has recieved most of my sarcasm.

Forgive me.

[xmedia2004]

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Now lets get down something on the elections
You say the electoral college is bullshit
You say the popular vote is too close
What do you recommend oh wise one?

Electoral college is from slave mentality days when the New British thought that
no one could make an educated decision as well as they could. So we make electoral college. They elect the Pres & VP not the people. Electoral college is not obligated to cast there vote in accordance with popular vote. And most of the time they conform to popular vote. Hence the lack of concern from the flock.

I believe the popular vote is all that matters hence DEMOCRACY, elected by people with mandatory electronic ballots nationwide.

Mathematically you can win a few key states with a large number of electoral votes and lose in 40 states and still win election.

THIS IS WHY POLITCIANS ONLY VISIT CERTAIN STATES. Fla, Cali

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What friends do you have that cannot count a bag of M&Ms properly?
Your explanantion of a deviation is somewhat right, but your forgetting something, first your assuming that people cannot count properly. A deviation example is more properly applied to an experiment or a random sequence. Polls often use this since they are based on a sample. And since samples are not accurate representation of the true population, they will vary.

1) People make mistakes, if you dont believe me read the Newbie section for an
    hour or two.

2) A poll is an experiment. An attempt to determine some outcome based
    upon assumptions and numerical analysis. (i.e. Let me see all white people
    are republicans live in suburbs and watch friends, basically an educated guess
    based upon sterortypes.
   
3) An election is an documented event, with a basis in fact. Rudy goes to poll and
    votes for A. The collection and interpretation of election data is in some states
    an experiment.

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This was an election, and it was open to everyone. Basically they surveyed the entire population. You do not have deviation when you sample the entire population.

The vast majority of the US does not vote 2004 had the highest turnout in recent history. And still like on 50 - 60% of US voted.

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122, 295,345 individuals voted.
62,040,610 voted for Bush
59,028,444 voted for Kerry

There are like 240 million people in US

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Not to shit bricks on your parade, but your analogy is well.. shit.

You Sounds like your buddy in other thread with " Prisons are full of BLACK people" comment when prison poplulation is 2x population of negroes in US.
Evidently it is not filled with only black people

MATH is not REPUBLICAN or DEMOCRAT it is truth.

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You are comparing standard deviation, to sample error, when neither should be used.

Standard deviation is math term used to describe the accuracy of a process whether mechanical (i.e are all holes 3 inches), or statistical(noise in data collection from error) within some acceptable limit.

Ideally 100% of votes are counted mistake free but that is impossible. You do realize people actually count ballots by hand and eye in most states.

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You are trying to say that the vote count on the election has some error. This would mean that a sample of the entire population was used.

We know that there were errors and there will always be errors because we are only human.

Engineers have a saying that "if you design something fool proof nature will
design a better fool"

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If it is a blind sample, then the error should be universal for all sides. Statistics says that even if there existed error in the polling process, that error would effect all possible outcomes equally. All you could argue is that the error changes the total effective participants, but should not change the ratio of difference significantly.

Tell you what take a quarter flip it into the air Heads or Tails 50/50 right.
Do it 2x then 10x then 50x then 1000x then 10000000x. Graph the occurance of tails vs heads for the given number of attempts.  Will it always be 50 %??? Only two possible outcomes.

P.S.  WTF??

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If it is a blind sample, then the error should be universal for all sides. Statistics says that even if there existed error in the polling process, that error would effect all possible outcomes equally. All you could argue is that the error changes the total effective participants, but should not change the ratio of difference significantly.

[xmedia2004]

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True, but my point, which you completely missed, is that unless there was a 3 million vote biased error, and instead only an error of 3 million, then the numbers are still good. Error would occur on both sides, thus balancing each other out. Your trying to make the claim that 3 million votes were incorrectly given to Bush, while 0 were incorrectly given to Kerry.

122 million votes, if you assume 3 % noise from whatever in the poll results it
is a statistical dead heat  3*1.2 = 3.6 million or about the election margin of victory.  3 % is probably a little conservative.

(+/-) who cares Bush is president.

Read all the politics you want into it I am just stating a mthematical fact.

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Have you ever heard of the "law of large numbers". The more times you do this experiment, the closer the results will be to the actual probability. If you do it 10 times, i would actually be suprised if you got 50%, if you do it 10^9 times, you should have something very close to 50%, else your experiment is flawed.

Actually its the law of averages in that example, the law of large numbers says that if a know x number of things about a random process I can predict an probable outcome of this process if I take a very large number of guesses, The convergeance of the end result based upon the standard deviation is based upon the number of guesses, i.e more geusses smaller standard dev therefore less error in my calculation.

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Math is my game, and engineers have an even better saying. "It only needs to be close enough for all practical purposes"

If you are an engineer I hope none of my loved ones never set foot near anything
you and your school/Company designed with that attitude.

You must be an alumini of the New Orleans school of levy design, because you going to get a lot of people dead.

[puckSR]

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If you are an engineer I hope none of my loved ones never set foot near anything
you and your school/Company designed with that attitude.

You must be an alumini of the New Orleans school of levy design, because you going to get a lot of people dead.

That "attitude" deals with the fact that mathematics deals with absolutes, while engineers have to deal with real values.  I would love to see you design anything that was ideal.
And what is this about the dykes, they were designed properly.  They had fallen into disrepair/needed to be upgraded.  Your blaming the engineer when the end-user didnt properly maintain the product. WOW

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122 million votes, if you assume 3 % noise from whatever in the poll results it
is a statistical dead heat 3*1.2 = 3.6 million or about the election margin of victory. 3 % is probably a little conservative.

(+/-) who cares Bush is president.

Read all the politics you want into it I am just stating a mthematical fact.

Im not claiming politics on this
Im claiming that for your assumption to be correct, you would have to either assume a much larger error, or your assuming that all of the error was in favor of one outcome.  

The error could be massive, but as long as it was reasonably unbiased, the outcome would still be valid.  

Let us go back to your heads/tails argument.  IF you flip a coin millions of times, one side will actually come back favored.  It is by a small margin, but it will come back as the favored side. (this isnt true, since it would be near impossible to create an unbiased coin flip experiment, but for the purposes of our argument it will work).  You are saying that the small difference is negligible, since people cannot count, and they probably just missed a few.  I am saying that it is applicable, and that there must be some reason that the coin is slightly favoring one side.  You are using error to explain bias, and not including that error should be balanced to some degree, and therefore the bias is still probably a valid statistic.

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Actually its the law of averages in that example, the law of large numbers says that if a know x number of things about a random process I can predict an probable outcome of this process if I take a very large number of guesses, The convergeance of the end result based upon the standard deviation is based upon the number of guesses, i.e more geusses smaller standard dev therefore less error in my calculation.

? No
Go look it up, i will give you time


Sorry, im a math minor, and an EE. Communication systems frequently make use of statistics and probability.  Your definition seems somewhat twisted.  You may be trying to restate what i said previously, or you were not clear with how i defined the law.  Anyways, your definition is somewhat crap.  After the first statement it kind of gets weird.

[xmedia2004]

QUOTE(puckSR @ Sep 21 2005, 06:30 PM)

Oh, and im using the word bias to describe a skew in the results.

[xmedia2004]

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You think they dominate because of all the electoral votes that they have, but the electoral votes are given to them based on population. The same states would dominate if we went with popular vote or electoral college

If you win California, Fla, Tx by a total of three votes thats nearly 100 electoral
votes secured with a whopping 3 vote margin of victory. I believe 238 needed
to win thats nearly 50 %.

Which in theory means you could win and not get popular vote. Which has happened once before.

You dont see this as a problem.

Comparing a footbal game an event with 200-300 participants to an election with 122 Million participants seems a little lacking dont you think.

[xmedia2004]

QUOTE(puckSR @ Sep 21 2005, 09:28 PM)

no i think the football analogy is good

[xmedia2004]

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If your suggesting splitting the electoral college votes to more adequately represent the votes of the people, then some states have already beaten you to it.

No get rid of the electoral college

The point is still that no matter how you do it, Fl, Tx, Ny, and Cal are going to be HUGE factors in an election, and south dakota wont matter.

You still don get it. No electoral college means my vote in wherever is the same as your vote in wherever periodd poin blank.

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538 electoral votes, so 116 is not half

It is nearly half of what is needed to win 200 and something

I Said math doesnt lie. But people make mistakes in there interpretation of imperical/scientific data.

If 5 people live in Tx with 20 electoral votes, A gets 3 and B gets 2, A gets 20 votes, and essentially 2 votes are thrown out it.  I cant make it more simplier than that for you.

The electoral colloge is out dated.

[puckSR]

Im not completely opposed to the idea of the popular vote

Im saying that
1) it wouldnt change much
2) the past popular vote doesnt matter
3) You have twisted your stuff way too much to be constructive
  a)I didnt say the vote had error, you did
  b)You "corrected" my usage of the Law of large numbers, I WAS RIGHT
  c)You accused me of claiming that the "math was political", i didnt say anything like that


This all started from you claiming that Bush hadnt really won the popular vote; he did.  You claimed that error nullified the results, it doesnt.  You claimed that the only reason that Halliburton got the La job was cronyism, it isnt.

Quit making claims and then changing them
The one that pissed me off the most was your claim about error in elections, and then trying to insult me for using your claim to justify my answer.

[xmedia2004]

  Numbers dont lie.


  We have a saying at Bechtel.

 " Minds are like concrete, very much mixed up and set in. "

[xmedia2004]

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No numbers dont lie, and neither do words

But if someone puts them in the wrong order, then a lie exists.
Besides, why do you keep mentioning numbers. You havent even used many numbers

All you guys do on this forum is repeat sterotypes and propaganda. For which there is no practical or statistical proof. For instance white women are kidnapped more than asian women, may or may not be true but you can look up the figures at the DOJ and find the NUMBERS.

The Law of Averages is a lay term used to express the view that eventually, everything "evens out." This principle is supported by the Law of large numbers

In probability and statistics, the Standard Deviation is the most commonly used measure of statistical dispersion. Simply put, it measures how spread out the values in a data set are.

The importance of the standard deviation arises from Chebyshev's theorem, which asserts that in any data set, nearly all of the values will be close to the mean value, where the meaning of "close to" is specified by the standard deviation (i.e although you and your friends may not get same number of M&M's in the 1lb bag the accuracy of each individual count is reflected in S.D. )  

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All in all, you have claimed that the popular election results are misleading several times, and then chastised me for using error in my argument.

The Case Against the Electoral College
By Steven Hill and Rob Richie
November 9, 2000

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But the simplicity of the Florida drama is far different from our bizarre rules to elect the president. Democrat Al Gore won more votes than Republican George Bush in the national popular vote. But Bush may be on his way to the White House.

The Electoral College is a clumsy device that never would be imitated by a state for electing its governor -- or by a town electing its dogcatcher. It has been the subject of more proposed amendments than any other part of our constitution, but like an appendix, we keep it because it hasn't ruptured... yet

The perverse incentives created by the Electoral College are painfully obvious from this year's campaign. Most states are effectively ignored by the candidates, as they are seen as non- competitive.

The Electoral College's democratic deficit is compounded by the use of plurality elections -- ones where the candidate with the most votes wins, even if less than a majority. Plurality elections mean that a popular majority can be fractured by the presence of a third party candidate

USA Today

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Some senators propose awarding electoral votes in states in proportion to the candidates' share of the vote. Others support amendments to ensure that if no candidate wins an electoral-vote majority, voters would pick the winners in a second-round runoff election.

But direct election is the only viable solution. Any intellectual arguments in favor of the Electoral College collapse in the face of most people's visceral reaction against the presidency going to a candidate whom they understandably regard as having lost the contest.

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One aspect of the electoral system that is not mandated in the constitution is the fact that the winner takes all the votes in the state. Therefore it makes no difference if you win a state by 50.1% or by 80% of the vote you receive the same number of electoral votes. This can be a receipe for one individual to win some states by large pluralities and lose others by small number of votes, and thus this is an easy scenario for one candidate winning the popular vote while another winning the electoral vote.This winner take all methods used in picking electors has been decided by the states themselves. This trend took place over the course of the 19th century.

Hamiltons Logic for Electoral College

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It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.

Basically he thinks IDIOTS like yourself's vote shouldn't matter. Becuase you cant be trusted to make an educated decision.

If he only knew..

[xmedia2004]

QUOTE(puckSR @ Sep 22 2005, 06:06 AM)

No numbers dont lie, and neither do words

[xmedia2004]

QUOTE(damam @ Sep 19 2005, 05:38 PM)

Any way you put it, cheney has no financial interest in halliburton.  The Feds define a conflict of interest as an employee being able to gain or lose money based on their position.  Cheney can neither gain nor lose.  He has either insured himself from it or given it away.

[reidtheweed03]

bill clinton

[Ween311]

Your information on Cheney and Halliburton is just plain wrong.  I suggest you do a little research.  I'll make it easy for you.

Fact Check