292 research outputs found
Worcester's blog â polls hopelessly out of date: a myth?
The blogs are at it again, even letter writers to newspapers. A headline in the Standard the other day caught my eye. âElection polling is too uncertain.â It would, wouldnât it
The Liberal Democrat eruption is not finished yet
Sir Robert Worcester is a Visiting Professor of Government at LSE and an Honorary Fellow. He founded MORI in 1969. The following post first appeared in the Observer on 25 April. When the earthâs plates move, earthquakes and volcanoes follow. This seems to be happening in the wake of the decision to hold, 50 years after their invention in the United States, debates between party leaders
BPC/MRS enquiry into election polling 2015: Ipsos MORI response and perspective
This Forum article considers the unsatisfactory results of pre-election opinion
polling in the 2015 British general election and the BPC/MRS enquiry report into
polling by Sturgis et al., providing a response from Ipsos MORI and associated
researchers at Kingâs College London and Cranfield Universities Whilst Sturgis
et al. (2016) consider how to perfect opinion poll forecasting, why the 2015
prediction was inaccurate when the same methodology returned satisfactory
results in 2005 and 2010 at Ipsos MORI is considered here instead We agree
with Sturgis et al. that the inaccurate results were not due to late swing or the
âshy Toryâ problem and with Taylor (2016) that the underlying problem is a
response rate bias However, Sturgis et al. critique pollsters in their report for
systematically under-representing Conservative voters but the Ipsos MORI final
poll had too many Conservatives, too many Labour voters and not enough nonvoters
The Sturgis et al. conclusion is convincing that the politically disengaged
were under-represented due to quotas and weighting mechanisms designed to
correct for response bias Nevertheless, for Ipsos MORI, this explanation does
not account for why the polling methodology was inaccurate in 2015 when it
had performed accurately in 2005 and 2010 For Ipsos MORI, a more likely
explanation is that Labour voters in 2015 became more prone to exaggerate their
voting likelihood We offer various postulations on why this might have been so,
concluding that to account for the inaccuracy requires a two-fold response, to
improve: (i) sample representativeness and (ii) the projection of voting behaviour
from the data Unfortunately, the BPC/MRS report offers no blueprint for how to
solve the problem of sampling the politically disengaged Whilst Ipsos MORI have
redesigned their quotas to take account of education levels, to represent those
better with no formal educational qualifications and reduce overrepresentation of
graduates, polling in the referendum on EU membership suggests that the problem
of drawing a representative sample has been solved but difficulties in how best to
allow for turnout persist
The Right Rotation For Your Farm
One rotation gives most grain, another most total feed. Here are principles for choosing the best rotation for you
Crossing Cultures: Guides and Models for Development, Selection, and Application
Despite many calls for it, there has been little action toward an all-inclusive manuscript that is practical, empirically verified, and provides guidelines for becoming and remaining strategically culturally adaptive. Further, a tremendous number of current articles and books emphasize managing or leading in an era of globalization. To meet these calls to work, learn, and innovate across cultures, the goal must be to move from the mass of unrelated assertions to the weaving of co-created, manageable models that are useful in learning, teaching, and practice
Polls and the political process: the use of opinion polls by political parties and mass media organizations in European postâcommunist societies (1990â95)
Opinion polling occupies a significant role within the political process of most liberal-capitalist societies, where it is used by governments, parties and the mass media alike. This paper examines the extent to which polls are used for the same purposes in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and in particular, for bringing political elites and citizens together. It argues that these political elites are more concerned with using opinion polls for gaining competitive advantage over their rivals and for reaffirming their political power, than for devolving political power to citizens and improving the general processes of democratization
Long-term Observations in Acoustics - the Ocean Acoustic Observatory Federation
The Ocean Acoustic Observatory Federation (OAOF)
includes several laboratories and universities: the
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) and
the Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) at the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, the Pacific Meteorological
and Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) of NOAA, the
Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), and the Applied
Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington
(UW/APL)
A test of basin-scale acoustic thermometry using a large-aperture vertical array at 3250-km range in the eastern North Pacific Ocean
Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 1999. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 105 (1999): 3185, doi:10.1121/1.424649.Broadband acoustic signals were transmitted during November 1994 from a 75-Hz source suspended near the depth of the sound-channel axis to a 700-m long vertical receiving array approximately 3250 km distant in the eastern North Pacific Ocean. The early part of the arrival pattern consists of raylike wave fronts that are resolvable, identifiable, and stable. The later part of the arrival pattern does not contain identifiable raylike arrivals, due to scattering from internal-wave-induced sound-speed fluctuations. The observed ray travel times differ from ray predictions based on the sound-speed field constructed using nearly concurrent temperature and salinity measurements by more than a priori variability estimates, suggesting that the equation used to compute sound speed requires refinement. The range-averaged oceansound speed can be determined with an uncertainty of about 0.05 m/s from the observed ray travel times together with the time at which the near-axial acoustic reception ends, used as a surrogate for the group delay of adiabatic mode 1. The change in temperature over six days can be estimated with an uncertainty of about 0.006â°C. The sensitivity of the travel times to ocean variability is concentrated near the ocean surface and at the corresponding conjugate depths, because all of the resolved ray arrivals have upper turning depths within a few hundred meters of the surface.This work was
supported largely by the Strategic Environmental Research
and Development Program through Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency ~DARPA! Grant No. MDA972-93-
1-0003. Additional support was provided at SIO by the Office
of Naval Research ~ONR! through Grant No. N00014-
97-1-0258. J. Colosi wishes to acknowledge support from an
ONR Young Investigator Award, from the J. Lamar Worzel
Assistant Scientist Fund, and from the Penzance Endowed
Fund in support of scientific staff at WHOI
The bitter taste of payback: the pathologising effect of TV revengendas
The thirst for vengeance is a timeless subject in popular entertainment. One need only think of Old Testament scripture; Shakespeare\u27s Hamlet; Quentin Tarantino\u27s Kill Bill or the TV series Revenge, and we immediately conjure up images of a protagonist striving to seek justice to avenge a heinous wrong committed against them. These texts, and others like it, speak to that which is ingrained in our human spirit about not only holding others responsible for their actions, but also about retaliation as payback. This article seeks to problematise the way the popular revenge narrative effectively constructs the vendetta as a guilty pleasure through which the audience can vicariously gain satisfaction, while at the same time perpetuates law\u27s rhetoric that personal desires for vengeance are to be repressed and denied. In particular, the article will demonstrate the way such popular revenge narratives contribute to the pathologising of human desire for payback
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