Monday, March 28, 2005

Value of Higher Education Still Growing [From NPR] Listen to this story from NPR about the growing wage-gap between high school and college grads. People with Bachelor's degress earn an averge of twice as much as people with diplomas. The gap gets bigger. 10:22:52 PM  permanent link  Reader Comments []  Google It! Dewey Defeats Truman Quota Sampling [posted by Troy] In the 1948 presidential election the Chicago Tribune (and others) predicted that Thomas Dewey had defeated Harry Truman, when in fact Truman ended up winning. This is because the Gallup Poll (among others) used "quota sampling" to collect its statistics. This method favored data collection from Republicans, because the wealthier Republicans were more likely to have phones and permanent addresses. They were easier to find and interview, so the data was skewed toward Dewey. Today they use a more accurate method (multistage cluster sampling), which divides the country into geographic segments and pulls random samples from within these segments. Many polls got the 2004 election wrong (see this Slate analysis of the polls). The general belief is that they didn't expect the high turnout, nor did they expect the fear factor of Bush. 10:18:32 PM  permanent link  Reader Comments []  Google It!

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