http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=axt7Qr7cOyVo#

I’d like to see all the Intrade two-cornered political contest data you have, as of the day before the relevant election, sorted into 10% (or 5%, if there’s enough) bins like in the recent Intrade Mondayish post. For each bin, calculate the percentage of those elections that the candidate actually won and plot it, along with a line of best fit. (You’d only need to plot probabilities of 50% and higher, since for each election you can just pick the candidate that had a higher-than-50% probability).

If Intrade probability matches real probability, we’d expect a linear relationship. How the relationship deviates from that should give us a way of exactly accounting for long-shot bias (and similar effects) in future.

I’ve been wondering about an analysis for some time, and your Requestathon has prompted me to email you. I’d be keen for some kind of analysis of the average sentence and word length used by Rudd through time, and to see whether this corresponds with his approval/satisfaction rating, PPM of even primary/TPP vote for Labor. The hypothesis would be that his approval/PPM/Labor vote is higher when he speaks clearly and directly than when we get a barrage of bureaucratese.

My observation is that he has had periods (e.g. AWB as Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister; Opposition Leader; the financial crisis) when he speaks much more clearly and more directly, than other times such as climate change details when we get huge sentences and complex words or jargon. I suspect that as he resorts to bureaucratese people switch off and his ratings decline. While this might seem a bit trivial and probably a time consuming analysis to do, my gut feeling is that it might affect the government’s re-election chances. Turnbull seems to be targeting it a bit, which might suggest they’re trying to reinforce it in voters minds.

So things will resume tomorrow, and you’ve got a very good point Spam.

This place will be returning more to what it was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIdIqbv7SPo

Lately, not so much