A statistical project bleg (urgent-ish)

We all know that politicians can play it a little fast and loose with the truth. This is particularly true in debates, where politicians have to think on their feet and respond to questions from the audience or from each other. 

Usually, we find out about how truthful politicians are in the “post-game show”. The discussion of the veracity of the claims is usually based on independent fact checkers such as PolitiFact. Some of these fact checkers (Politifact in particular) live-tweet their reports on many of the issues discussed during the debate. This is possible, since both candidates have a pretty fixed set of talking points they use, so it is near real time fact-checking. 

What would be awesome is if someone could write an R script that would scrape the live data off of Politifact’s Twitter account and create a truthfullness meter that looks something like CNN’s instant reaction graph (see #7) for independent voters. The line would show the moving average of how honest each politician was being. How cool would it be to show the two candidates and how truthful they are being? If you did this, tell me it wouldn’t be a feature one of the major news networks would pick up…

Sunday Data/Statistics Link Roundup (10/21/12)

1. This is scientific variant on the #whatshouldwecallme meme isn’t exclusive to statistics, but it is hilarious. 
2. This is a really interesting post that is a follow-up to the XKCD password security comic. The thing I find most interesting about this is that researchers realized the key problem with passwords was that we were looking at them purely from a computer science perspective. But _people _use passwords, so we need a person-focused approach to maximize security. This is a very similar idea to our previous post on an experimental foundation for statistics. Looks like Di Cook and others are already way ahead of us on this idea. It would be interesting to redefine optimality incorporating the knowledge that most of the time it is a person running the statistics. 
3. This is another fascinating article about the math education wars. It starts off as the typical dueling schools issue in academia - two different schools of thought who routinely go after the other side. But the interesting thing here is it sounds like one side of this math debate is being waged by a person collecting data and the other is being waged by a side that isn’t. It is interesting how many areas are being touched by data - including what kind of math we should teach. 
4. I’m going to visit Minnesota in a couple of weeks. I was so pumped up to be an outlaw. Looks like I’m just a regular law abiding citizen though….
5. Here are outstanding summaries of what went on at the Carl Morris Big Data conference this last week. Tons of interesting stuff there. Parts one, two, and three. 

Minnesota clarifies: Free online ed is OK

Minnesota clarifies: Free online ed is OK

Free Online Education Is Now Illegal in Minnesota

Free Online Education Is Now Illegal in Minnesota

Simply Statistics Podcast #4: Interview with Rebecca Nugent

Interview with Rebecca Nugent of Carnegie Mellon University.

In this episode Jeff and I talk with Rebecca Nugent, Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk with her about her work with the Census and the growing interest in statistics among undergraduates.