It is perhaps best to stick to what you know, and cut out the politicking that infects some of your writing. You quite rightly criticise News Ltd journalists for allowing ideology to overcome their news sense - although this is generally an issue with subeditors replying to editorial directives, not the journos themselves - so perhaps you should take some of your own advice. You are a blogger and therefore not held to the standards one would expect of a journalist, but you are doing yourself no favours in criticising bias in one sphere, and indulging your own prejudices in another.

I weally weally feel your pain, mark twain
Irrelevance,thy name is limited news

It is perhaps best to stick to what you know, and cut out the politicking that infects some of your writing. You quite rightly criticise News Ltd journalists for allowing ideology to overcome their news sense – although this is generally an issue with subeditors replying to editorial directives, not the journos themselves – so perhaps you should take some of your own advice. You are a blogger and therefore not held to the standards one would expect of a journalist, but you are doing yourself no favours in criticising bias in one sphere, and indulging your own prejudices in another.

Take a look at Nate Silver and what he does on FiveThirtyEight. Certainly his politics are there for all to see, and I note that you make no bones about yours, but his ideology does not infect his writing. William Bowe is good at this as well. You have the ability to be a very good analyst and you do have a talent for writing, punctuation issues aside. Just leave off the bullshit and your value will rise exponentially. Surely a statistician can see the value in this?

I suppose what I’m getting that is that while I try to write for the widest possible audience, the potential width of that audience outside of election campaigns is limited to those that give a really big shit about politics – and since such folks are mostly highly intelligent, I try to treat them that way.

I can see how sometimes that might come across as paternal, or even treating people like they’re mentally deficient by trying to hold their hands to walk them through some stats ditty – but I do that not because I think they’re dopes (after all, they’re on a blog that uses the term ‘polynomial regression’ as often as some blogs use the term TomKat…ugh) but to explain to as wider audience as possible the complexities of some of the stuff I do.

I know, Possum, I’m just having you on.

It’s sometimes hard to tell with these things – although I should have known with you

Monte carlo sims are a bit information dense – anyone going “wot” is an entirely fair call. It also hooks into something else you said:

surely you are going to have to admit that what you do is very valuable but very niche, and that try as you might, the non-nerdy end of town is still not gunna get it.

Of course – it always was that way, and always will be. But that said, while what goes on here is ostensibly aimed at the pointy end of electoral politics that is by nature stats heavy, not everyone has maths running through their veins. I try (to varying degrees of success!) to be aware of that, and try to bring the non-maths folk along for the ride in terms of whatever point I’m trying to get across.

Hence the copious use of charts and data visualisation tools generally (wank term of the week!)

Sometimes I’m just not very good at, sometimes it seems to work (the inbox seems to be the ultimate judge of that) – but I am sensitive to the fact that posts that are information dense often generate questions that I need to answer, usually because I didnt do a good enough job at explaining them to begin with – hence my treating your piss taking as an honest WTF. Questions are encouraged as a way for people to get their heads around some of this if it’s new to them – the very first “non-stating the obvious point” in the moderation policy of this place says “Dont be a smart arse to people asking honest questions”.

So it might be an idea not to dismiss these people as mentally deficient, which is wot you do, eh.

I apologise to all and sundry if anyone thinks I’m treating them as mentally deficient (the funny thing is it’s actually the opposite) – I certainly don’t mean to come across that way. I realise that what goes on here is complicated at times, and that you could have an IQ of 180, but if you don’t have a maths background, some of this stuff could be a hard slog.

However the readership here isnt ordinary – it’s simply not the general public. To even stumble across this place you would have to have a particularly pointed interest in politics – certainly to the point where the average reader is far more intellectually curious than, say, the average reader of The Oz – let alone The Daily Terror or things like The Punch.

Because of this I tend to treat everyone as if they know what I’m talking about because on any given thing, they not only probably do, but half of them know more about it that I do!

I see that with 0.0125% certainty, there is a chance for labor to get the magical 110.

at least truffles can sleep easy on that one then.

Anyway, I’ve been pondering a post you did a while back, and my brain has been having issues with this pondering situation ever since. This should come as no surprise, considering how slowly my brain works, being a Queenslander and all.

The post I’m referring to is this one: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/06/05/when-analysts-are-no-longer-enough/ where you make the point that statisticians have to be able to speak to the public.

One bit really caught my eye: you were banging on about how “public demand continues to grow for what was only recently very specialised fields” and then said something about how you now have to be a storyteller.

Apart from the horrifying vision of the general public storming the streets demanding more statistical analysis – What do we want? Polynomial regression! When do we want it? In the second percentile! – surely you are going to have to admit that what you do is very valuable but very niche, and that try as you might, the non-nerdy end of town is still not gunna get it. So it might be an idea not to dismiss these people as mentally deficient, which is wot you do, eh.

Just glad to see you can spell ‘erudite'

I had to look it up. I’m sure I had a rr in there originally.

This is a post for the nerdy end of town – but the link in the article to how the mechanics work was written to help non-stats folks to get their head around it.

Basically, we can run 20,000 simulated elections based on the state by state results of the last 3 months worth of federal polling from Newspoll and Nielsen. With any election, we hear about a uniform swing of X% – but that uniform swing also has a standard deviation of Y attached to it (or the variation around that uniform swing).With these simulations, we take into account the historical variation of each state at federal elections, as well as the extra uncertainty caused by the margins of error from the polling.

When we tally up the outcomes of those 20K simulated elections, we can work out the implied probabilities of an election result delivering any number of seats based on the polling – which are the charts above.

That’s not a bad idea on the post-election Pollytrend – I’ll get onto that over the weekend.

I can forecast out the regression lines for Pollytrend, but the vote estimates on the polling wobble around according to the events of the day – so forecasting out short term movements will just be nothing but pure luck if they’re ever found to be right in hindsight.

What Pollytrend does is just show us where current poll numbers sit in the context of the last 12 months worth of polling trends, and can be ramped up to try and determine whether a couple of poll results have changed whatever trend might have been in recent action – it’s not really built for forecasting unfortunately.