Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Psychology, Polls on
Oct 29, 2008
It is election day and you do your civic duty by going to your designated polling place, standing in line, chatting with a couple of nice people, drawing the curtain and pulling the lever. Do you notice where you have voted? Of course, it's at your local school (or church or firehouse). Did that have any influence on how you voted? Of course not, right? Not so fast. New research (by Jonah Berger, Marc Meredith and Christian Wheeler) indicates that the type of polling place can have a subtle effect on how people vote. The impact is small but it is there in both a controlled lab experiment and in a noisy real-world environment.
OK, so Jeopardy! cannot possibly explain all the differences between the genders, but it helps quite a bit in understanding financial risk taking because of its unique format. Researchers studying gender differences in risk taking have known that men and women are different in several ways. For example, in general men are more willing to take risks, single women allocate less wealth to risky assets compared to single men, women have lower risk tolerance on health and retirement issues, women prefer broader insurance coverage than men, and men are more active in stock trading. But is it just gender or are there other factors mixed in with gender that influence financial risk taking? For example, would competence have an impact and how does that vary by gender? This was the issue studied by three researchers using data from the game show Jeopardy!
The Bradley Effect is quite often mentioned in the media as we approach the Presidential election. It refers to the under-performance of a black candidate as compared to poll numbers. A good summary of various issues can be found here. A lot of the information about this effect is speculative or based on sparse polling numbers from other races which have led to questions of whether the effect really existed, whether it was seen in other races and whether in 2008 it is still likely to be seen. Perhaps the best study on this issue was conducted by Anthony Greenwald and Bethany Albertson the University of Washington. They used data from the Clinton-Obama primary, the most comprehensive source available and studied it using regression analysis to explore the existence of the Bradley effect.
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Polls, Politics, Markets on
Oct 12, 2008
To read the first part of this post click here. In that we discussed how to use the available information to predict a winner in the current presidential race. While the polls (including the poll average) gave a small edge to McCain at that time, the other measures gave a mixed picture with the combined measure giving Obama a slight edge. Since that post a month ago the race has changed quite a bit. In this post I will revisit those numbers to see where they stand, how they have changed and what that means when you track such numbers. In the next one we will look at the impact of race on the race, or the so called Bradley Effect.
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by
Peter L. Bernstein Given what has been happening in the economy recently, this book (written ten years ago) provides an excellent foundation for understanding how we ended up here. In telling the story of risk, Bernstein focuses on how much people believe the past determines the future. The more we believe we understand the past, the more certain we are of what will happen in the future. Quantifying the past helps enormously in bringing certainty to the future. But risk lurks in the shadows surrounding certainty and underestimating it because of our blind faith in numbers and computers can lead, he says, to disaster. But what makes this book a wonderful read is that it really does tell a story stretching back millennia and is populated with exotic places and interesting characters. For someone interested in this topic it is time well spent.
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Science on
Oct 02, 2008
You wear eye glasses and have misplaced them and can't see anything. What do you do? The science educator Robert Krampf is coming to your aid with a simple solution.
Emergency eyeglasses
For more videos on simple science experiments check out his website.
Insightology