Polls, polls and damned statistics. Or The demise of Malcolm Turnbull

I still remain committed to the idea that Malcolm Turnbull will tire of the political game playing. In reality it takes too much energy to master the polls and the statistics and this constantly detracts from the important stuff. Yesterday's polls in The Australian (see full article here) show only slight improvement in his standing as preferred Prime Minister. Coming off a very low base it would be hard to get any worse.
What is perhaps more disconcerting is that Peter Costello is still seen by more Liberals as a preferable leader despite the fact that he has disqualified himself and is on the way out. Similarly laughing Joe Hockey, who also says he is not in the running. The desperate cries (or perhaps "sighs") of the Abbots and the Pynes become less and less convincing; they two are very ambitious people and I swear I will scream if I hear Pyne say yet one more time "All I want to do is to serve the electorate of Sturt"
I guess Malcolm is a big boy and will know when enough is enough. Till then it is all a bit sad.

Lies, lies and damned......

It's often said that you can make statistics say anything, and it's fairly true. The Advertiser's ludicrous daily "VOTE LINE" gives people an almost random question (yesterday's was 'Do computer games dull the imagination?') 91% voted yes and 9 % No.
There is a certain sense of irony about this since said paper is flogging CD roms of various games at the moment in order to increase paper sales.
But the totally ludicrous thing is that the paper reports there were only 20 callers. Now, these figures therefore must at some point or other be wrong. Because if there were only 20 callers then each call repesents 5 percentage points. Therefore if 18 people voted YES it would be 90%, or 17 would be 85%, 19 would be 95....No way can 91% happen.
Even allowing for stuff ups, and dither dathering (and because the phone system only allows you to answer Yes or No I can't see how that could be the case) all percentages would still have to bemultiples of 5.
Of course the real issue is that the sample is nonsense...it is too small and is self-selected.
The result is therefore meaningless on this count also.

What is perhaps as disconcerting is the question for today which is "Do you support the Liberal Party's plan to rebuild the Royal Adelaide Hospital?"
The qualitative difference in importance is striking.
Now I will guarantee that there will be 10 times more votes in the sample at least, which may signify that the result is more meaningful. But of course it will be fuelled on both sides by the political interests, and the process of self-selection (that is you decide yourself if you want to ring up) which means that essentially the self-interested and the politically-inspired are likely to respond vigorously (no way of checking if they ring twice, or more even)
Truth is it's a bit of a waste of time!

PS. There were over 600 calls about the RAH question...I sunsequently penned a letter to the paper

Anyone who has been inside the RAH surely cannot believe that more than 80%
of South Australians prefer that rabbit warren to be redeveloped in preference
to a state of the art new hospital.

Some, of course, may; and
clearly the Opposition is using this as a point of difference in the lead up to
next year's election.

Yesterday's phone poll would have us believe
that more than three quarters of South Australians think that it's better to
rework the tired old buildings; , but it makes us suspect (what we already
know) that phone-in polls are subject to blatant flooding by interested
parties and thus statistically irrelevant.

good, better, best

Ruth Gledhill has a naughty article with a little web poll...Who is the better Christian? McCain, Obama, Palin or Biden
I have mused before (here) about the inadequacy of phone in and online polls since they are uncontrolled exercises and there is no way of stopping interested parties from trying to skew the results, and when we neutralise them by making them into percentages they all look the same (50% of 2500 is 1250, but 50% of 12 is 6...there is a lot of difference between over 1000 people who bother to ring in and a handful... you know lies, lies and damn statistics)
So the issue might not be...are the results meaningful? But is the question meaningful?
I indeed rankled, because there is much in Christian teaching that goes against this sort of religious self-promotion (you know the first shall be last), and some of Ruth's commentators rightly asked what does better mean. The usual suspects immediately jump on to the pro-life issues, but I want to hear what they say about caring for the poor and the broken, about the sick and the enslaved...it seems to me that there is more of Jesus' teaching about this than about anything else.
Of course it is an amusing bit of fluff!

On demand

The Victorian Parliament plans to put the question of decriminalising abortion to the Parliament in order to remove it from the area of Common Law to Statute Law. One of the interesting facts about the discussion is that the assertion is frequently made that there are no accurate statistics of how many abortions are performed in Australia.
This seems incredible in a country which works well bureaucratically and has a sophisticated health system.
Only in our own state of South Australia are providers required to report abortions, and by projecting these to a national level the extrapolation is that there are about 50 to 80 thousand each year. [Though some more conservative groups quote figures in excess of 100,000...]
What this exposes, I suspect, is that it serves the purposes of certain interests to not accurately report abortion.
One can speculate why this might be so; but given that these sort of approximations indicate that abortion is the most commonly performed medical procedure surely there needs to be some accurate information gathering . Then certain other questions might be more accurately answered like:

• is 'proper counselling' actually being offered to those who seek abortion? Given that this is a major premise on which abortion-on-demand is offered, surely we need to know whether it is taking place effectively
• is there good follow-up to those who have had to endure the trauma of abortion? There is a lot of evidence to suggest that abortion is simply not the sort of thing where you pop into the surgery one day in between the other events in your rather hectic life
• do we know how many people have multiple abortions? And what that means for an individual, but also for social health.

Hmmmmm! yes these questions (and others) are rather hard. One might begin to see why it is easier not to ask them!

Last chance to shop

Yesterday's Advertiser phone poll asked the question of whether or not the shops in SA should remain closed on Boxing Day. 75% of those who bothered to contact the poll said that shops should be closed.
While there is an argument to be had about whether these sort of phone-in polls are in any way statistically valid (probably not...only 108 callers of people who chose to ring in of their own volition... no randomness and no standard interviewing technique). It might at least add some further weight to the suggestion that some proper research be done about thi emotive sort of area.
Personally I have never been swayed by the argument that visitors will think we are a backwater unless shops ar open absolutely all the time.
I notice that some areas are too sensitive, no one at all suggests that sacred Christmas Day, hangover New Years' Day or the morning of ANZAC Day should be so freed up as to allow shopping. The unremitting logic of the 'backwater argument' would see everything be a potential target for unfettered shopping.
Already the walls around Good Friday are tumbling, and (as I say) the second half of ANZAC Day is probably gone...what of Australia Day and Easter Monday and any of the other public holidays.
The issue is not about the sacredness of such days, in my opinion, the issue is about how we as a community might encourage shared community life. If we do not engineer times when most people are free how on earth do we all get together. I readily recognise that most people do not want or need religious holidays....but we all should be encouraged to celebrate family and community links.
The commercial dollar will always demand, and falsely I believe, that everything be sacrificed to it lest we become a "backwater".
It's just rubbish, and we should start to articulate the positive ideas and concepts that we want to put in place...surely a couple of days when families can get together, a period when there is a more extended break and a couple of nominated days of particular import.....is not too much to ask.