Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: election

  • Panda and Vince – Googles latest updates

    And… there was also a caffeine update.  Well, mid October there was an update to Panda – somewhere in there was a Vince update and then caffeine saw an update in early November.  Did you notice a change in the search results?  Do you feel like they’re better or worse?

    Panda Gao Gao in San Diego Zoo, USA
    Image via Wikipedia

    I’ve had several sites that have “fluctuated” through these updates, some better, some worse.  One or two were dramatically worse.

    I don’t seem to be alone in seeing some impact and here’s a summary of what the issue is and what to do about it.

    Panda is about lowering the importance of sites that are thin in content.  It has been easy to rank sites without much content for some time.  Just throwing a few back links (in many cases also thin on content) and you could do quite well.

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  • Voting for Self Interest? or National Interest?

    I usually try to avoid talking about politics here really because I don’t want this to be a political blog. I am going to make an exception right now to talk about a concept. I’m going to try to stay out of the party/candidate discussion, but just want to make a question on this idea. I’ve been bothered though the last few weeks about some things I’ve heard said that no one, NO one I’m hearing on EITHER side disputing. It bothers me because I think it runs contrary to just WHAT we should be voting for and what elections are about. Now, I’m trying to make this discussion not about one candidate or the other, but to the concept behind this argument.

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  • Polls, politics, elections, turnout and sampling, or Why polls really don’t make a bit of difference

    I’ve stayed away from politics on this site, the main reason is I figure the surest way to offend visitors is politically, these days so many people seem so starkly divided into one political camp or the other, that it seems very easy to step on peoples political sensibilities. I am, however going to talk about politics, but mainly in the general sense to illustrate something I’ve thought about for quite a while and something that is grossly absent in most news coverage of polls and elections. With all science there are assumptions, things that you “assume” to be true so you can proceed with evaluating everything. In the science of polling, the words Sampling and turnout are quite relevant. (What?) In regards to polls, sampling is deciding what the makeup of your poll sample is, (percentage makeup by party affiliation) and trying to match that to expected turnout. But how do you predict turnout? Let’s take the following example of cartoonia….

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  • Diebold Voting machine vulnerabilities

    Freedom to tinker brings us this BIG problem. I guess what concerns me most about this, is the way I see it, voter fraud has pretty much gone on since there have been elections. Let’s face it, there is always someone, acting officially or not that will jockey for the best advantage for their candidate. If that means “helping” someone cast a ballot, or contesting a hanging chad… it cuts both ways, no party has clean hands in this. (Even if it’s something that is done by someone acting on their own, I would say it reflects back on the party.) Anyway… up until know I’ve seen voter fraud as something that is hard to really successfully accomplish on a VERY large scale, AND with assurance of results. With electronic voting machines, I’m afraid there may be a revolution in MASS voter fraud.

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