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- President: Democrats (72%), - Senate (76%) and House (>95%): Republicans
Is this a good outcome for a democracy? And if so, why? Wouldn't this mean that the system is effectively gridlocked?
There is a proliferation of predictive models and their outcomes vary widely. LA Times consistently predicted a Trump win, FiveThirtyEight was down to a coin toss a few times, while The New York Times was persistently pro-Hillary. While those models were meant to help people make sense of the large number of individual polls, now we need models to make sense of the models.
It is better than what we do, informally. We all use models (of some sort) when we process information; e.g. I discount certain publications and value others. But few people actually make their models explicit and ask others to critique them.
Making a model public and explicit is a great first step. Building more models on top is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Why is voting actually hard to do? Even though we're so encouraged to vote, there is a lot of red tape. For example, depending on your street address, you may have to vote at a garden variety pick of a building. At my university, I couldn't vote in building A because my apartment was on street X. I ultimately was not able to vote today because it was actually _hard_ to vote.
According to the nytimes it looks like the following right now: - President: Democrats (72%), - Senate (76%) and House (>95%): Republicans Is this a good outcome for a democracy? And if so, why? Wouldn't this mean that the system is effectively gridlocked?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just checked. They gauges moving around is definitely random. The updates are done with a "president.json" file, fetched every 15 seconds, but the timestamp in the json data only changes every 30-180 seconds. So all of the movement is just random jitter to make it engaging. Maybe a bit disingenuous. (Note: I first thought they might be using websockets, but no WS connection is made on the page. Only a ajax fetch of…
I'd venture further to say it's a perversion of "news" for a news site to be injecting garbage into the data for entertainment purposes.
It's only misleading developers, who will think that data is being streamed rather than fetched once. Other than that it's a clever (and yes, entertaining) way of displaying margins of error.
Can I offer that, of all the things in news and dataviz to shit on, this isn't one of them? I mean, really, an "abuse of our attention" - what?
Watch live streaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y60wDzZt8yg
Off topic, but I might as well say it here: I just tuned in to CNN: I think the way they cover the results is ridiculous. They just babble off random, pointless numbers without pause, with their fancy interactive maps in the background. They announce small changes with a sensationalism that's almost pathetic (KEY RACE ALERT! ALL OFF A SUDDEN Clinton takes the lead in Florida!! (by 20k votes... with a vote count of 30…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd venture further to say it's a perversion of "news" for a news site to be injecting garbage into the data for entertainment purposes.
Yes, it is an abuse of our attention and a poor choice in information presentation. Who can we contact at NYT to complain?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disable jitter by running the following in console: require('forecast/jitter').get = function(){return 0;}
Haha, awesome find. Did you just dig through the code or are you a NYT dev?
According to the nytimes it looks like the following right now: - President: Democrats (72%), - Senate (76%) and House (>95%): Republicans Is this a good outcome for a democracy? And if so, why? Wouldn't this mean that the system is effectively gridlocked?