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Tag: poll

More Crap Public Policy Polling

According to a recent survey, only 21% of those polled supports “net neutrality”, which really doesn’t make much sense until you read past the headline find more than a little crap in this so-called “research”.

The worst part was that the poll really didn’t ask about net neutrality in the first place.  Instead the polling company asked “Should the Federal Communications Commission regulate the Internet like it does radio and television?”

Neutrality is NOT about the government regulating the net in the same way they do with scarce spectrum used in traditional over-the-air communications.

It’s about preventing big media companies from controlling traffic and making sure everyone gets equal access to any and all resources they choose to use.

However, it’s not surprising the survey was phrased in a way that would benefit the corporations that own the wires, not the content producers.

The poll was conducted by Rasmussen, whose work is widely known in the industry as being “biased and inaccurate“, and is a favorite of Republican candidates and their pet cable channel.

Of course, too many of our congress critters (not to mention most of their constituents) are totally clueless when it comes to public polling, and rarely look even this deep into the statistics before accepting the findings and making their policy decisions.

As always, research of any kind should be approached with a large degree of skepticism and some understanding of basic statistics, two skills kids do not learn in most schools.

The Third of the Population With No Clue

With today being the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, Gallup did a poll in which they asked people if they believe in the theory of evolution.

A more valid question would ask if they understood the concept, but the study types at Gallup went with belief.

Anyway, in the results 39% of the respondents said they “believed”, 25% did not, and 36% had no opinion.

While I would have expected more than 25% to say no, I think the more than one-third of the pool that made no choice is more significant.

That response probably means most of them had no clue what the interviewer was talking about.

We really need to do a better job of science education in this country.

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