QOTD: Can polls get stupider than this?

CNN-IBN is conducting a poll (here we go again, back to my pet peeve), that will identify India’s sports icon.
And I wanted to vote for Vijay Amritraj, but he wasn’t on the list of nominees. Neither was his brother Anand.
And I wanted to vote for Sania Mirza, but she wasn’t on the list of nominees.
No sign of Wilson Jones or Michael Fereira, though Geet Sethi is there.
Three cricketers are nominated, but not Bedi, Prasanna, Venkat or Chandra.
No Ramesh Krishnan, nor his father.

And get this one: Not a single hockey player. Zilch.

And the poll is completely ridiculous at the moment of writing (click here to see current status), with Sachin Tendulkar a runaway leader, with 84% of the votes cast. Currently Gavaskar brings up the rear, with a mind-boggling 0.29% (yes, that’s zero point two nine per cent) of ibnlive’s visitors opting for him.

Here’s my Question of the Day: Can polls get stupider than this?

Of sobriety and text messages and the real wonder of the world

You cannot make a man sober by act of Parliament, goes the old adage.
Governments, over the decades, have failed to accept this simple truth.

And you cannot make a wonder of the world by totting up text messages.
You cannot make Shilpa Shetty a great actor by totting up text messages.
You cannot make Sanjaya a great singer by totting up text messages.

Consumers, over the next few decades, will fail to learn these simple truths.

And media houses and telecom companies, over the next few decades, will make fortunes because, as Barnum might have said a few decades ago, a sucker is born every minute.

And that, my friends, is a wonder of the world.

Why I’m not saving the Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal’s pride of place as one of the wonders of the world is under threat because of people like me. I haven’t voted for it to be included in the new, improved, list of wonders. Millions of Indians need to vote to keep the Taj hanging in there, and now people are getting upset with my irresponsibility.

On CNN IBN, India’s Joint Secretary , Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Leena Nandan exhorts me to vote: "There is time, so vote for the Taj and your vote is going to be the deciding factor. So each of us needs to think that way and that will really bring a momentum to the efforts of so many people."
Continues the CNN IBN report: “Among the few celebrities who have pitched in is AR Rahman, who has composed a song for the India Unites campaign to vote for the Taj Mahal, but that's not enough.”
Says lawyer and conservationist MC Mehta, "The apathy on the part of the Government of India and the state government is visible when you see that the Agra city itself is stinking today."

All I have to do is to SMS “TAJ” to a short code number. But I won’t.

Because the fine print in the ads in something like 4pt size tells me that premium rates apply.
And we have India’s Joint Secretary urging you to send a premium priced message, you have AR Rahman doing so, and you have a conservationist doing so. All making you feel guilty as sin that you haven’t done your little bit.
When you mugs out there have voted to save the Taj, do ponder on this for a moment: who’s raking in the moolah?
The larger worry is the Government supporting what, surely, is private enterprise.

TV Polls stink, that's my opinion

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's...

And when one thinks of all the polls done by all the news channels, newspapers, magazines and websites to arrive at amazing "opinions", I start believing that decision makers in media would greatly benefit from reading this article from the Onion.

That's my opinion. And after reading the Onion piece, I have no clue whether I am actually entitled to one.

Go on, click the link.

What is it that pollsters do, please?

Yogendra Yadav, quoted in ibnlive.com, explaining why the pollsters went horribly wrong in the UP elections.

"There are three reasons why the polls were so off the mark. First, there was a sampling error, especially in the exit polls. In an exit poll, you don’t choose the person you wish to interview. The voter chooses to walk to or walk away from the investigator stationed outside the polling station. Unless systematic precautions are taken, chances are that any exit poll will over-represent the well-off and upper caste and under-represent the poor and lower caste. This has resulted in systematic under-estimation of the BSP and over-estimation of the BJP over the last decade.

Secondly, there was a response bias. Those who voted for the BSP were less likely to say so to an outsider. Non-dalits who voted for the BSP may have been unwilling to admit it to themselves. This very unusual situation led to an over-reporting for the SP and BJP.

Finally, the vote-seats equation in UP turned out to be very skewed this time. For every one per cent of its votes, the BSP won 6.8 seats, compared to 3.8 for the SP and 3.0 for the BJP. This meant that the BSP won a large number of seats with very small margins. Even if you could foresee the exact vote share of the BSP, it was difficult to forecast the number of its seats."

First, sampling error. Second, response bias. Third, vote-seat equation skew.

And silly me. I thought these were the parameters pollsters took care of.

At least CNN IBN has admitted that they goofed. No one else has, till now.

News Channels play Clue-Duh

It wasn’t Colonel Mustard with the lead piping in the conservatory that did in the news channels, it was Mayawati with the Dalit-Brahmin vote bank in Uttar Pradesh.
All the Hindi and English news channels (yes, all) got the results of the just completed UP elections horribly wrong, despite most of them claiming error margins of just a few percentage points during their final exit poll programming before the official numbers started coming in.
They all predicted a dead heat, when Mayawati romped home by a few lengths, making the BJP and the SP look like also rans when the channels tipped them to be joint favourites.
What went wrong with the fortune gazing? To go back to Cluedo, perhaps they were asking the wrong questions of the wrong people in the wrong rooms.
If the news channels were tipsters, the viewers were the punters – and now the viewers look like mugs.
And that’s something the channels need to worry about. Because it’ll be a snowy day in Mumbai before I take the shirt off my back to back a winner predicted by ANY of the Hindi and English news channel.

Why India will rule football

I’ve written about this before.
And Shilpa Shetty wins the Big Brother 100,000 pound jackpot and I’m reminded of it again.
To me, this was a no-brainer. Jade Goody or Jackson against an Indian? Notice, I didn’t say against Shilpa Shetty, I said Indian.
And we’re not racist.
But we are mobile phone junkies, and we are suckers for any SMS vote-in announced by any two-bit channel for any two-bit show.
And, Indians are a formidable percentage of the population of virtually any country in the world, except China.
And while we’re not racist, we love our own. And when one of the candidates is a fellow Indian, we vote like crazy. As Indians have done for Shilpa Shetty.
And, not so far in the future, an Indian will be in the squad (and will start once in a while, and play a few minutes in a few games) of Manchester United and Liverpool and Arsenal and Chelsea.
Because these clubs will not be able to ignore a simple truth: Indians will buy season tickets, and SMS packages and T-Shirts and other merchandise because an Indian is playing for the team.
Not because we’re racist; only because we love our own.

And, one day in the next couple of seasons, when one of the top four football teams in the English Premier League announces an Indian in the team, I will say, “I told you so.”

SRK and KBC vs STAR TV

While the media and media watchers get their knickers in a twist on the situation at STAR India and link it to the performance and non-performance of KBC with Shah Rukh Khan, one wonders: which viewer cares about Peter Mukerjea and Sameer Nair and Paul Aiello? Which viewer has even heard about these worthies?

The viewer cares only about what he/ she sees on the telly: that’s KBC.
And how will it fare? Let’s have collective wisdom. Please cast your vote.

And a disclaimer: the FREE poll is in beta, and will not allow a second vote from the same IP address. And if you have a poor connection, you loser, you will be left staring at a thingy that goes round and round.



Pigsandwings will revisit the results when 4 weeks of KBC are up. Cheers. And thanks for rocking the vote.

And the Time Waster of the Year Award goes to…

Take your pick. Any of the media houses that have announced Indian of the Year Awards.
And that’s a shame.
Because there’s so much that they could have done, being powerful media entities.
To prove my point, I’ll do a poll that asks readers on this site who the Indian of the Year as decided by three major media houses one month from now, and results WILL prove little or no recall.
Yet, most respondents will remember the Time Person of the Year.
Because of the attention to detail, because of the importance they attach to the award, because the process is transparent.
Living in India as we do, it should be easy to figure out how to make people respect and believe in elections.

1.You need an impartial arbiter
2.You need a transparent process
3.The public needs to know when the elections are being held
4.The public needs to know who the candidates are
5.The public needs to know who is eligible to vote
6.The public needs to “see” the elections being held
7.The public needs to be informed who won

All the Indian of the Year awards fail on one or more of these fundamentals. Because the owners of the award, brashly, decide that the rules that they think of are the rules that matter.

And they institute awards that no one remembers.

Sad.

Are TV channel polls irresponsible?

Back to one of my pet peeves.
News channels and their polls.
1.They never tell you how many people voted.
2.They only give you a choice of Yes or No.

And these two issues, combined, get on my nerves. And I would like to believe, get on the nerves of a lot of people.
For example, I surely want to know how many people think, say, a minister should resign. NOT a figure in per cent without an idea of the polling population, which might be only 10 viewers. Similarly, I would respect people who weren’t sure, not force them to say yes or no.
Today, providence gave me an opportunity to underline my point. As I was surfing, I came across a poll on a blog, powered by magikwidget. I went there, signed in and got the right to try out 25 widgets, absolutely FREE!
Here’s the first use I make of these widgets. A poll that will tell anyone how many people voted, and a poll that factors in people who have an opinion other than Yes and No
Since the traffic on my blog is not too hot, and since I post fairly regularly, I’ll cheat a bit with this one, and keep changing the date stamp so that the story stays on top for a few days.

Not allowed to vote? Magikwidget tells you why:

Chances are you have already voted in your poll. Security features built-in to MajikWidget polls will remember that your IP address has voted and will not allow you to vote more than once in a single poll. Therefore, it defaults to the poll results when it recognizes your visit as a previous voter.

This causes issues with some corporate environments where many different people have the same IP address. Our developers are working on ways to combine other methods with the IP address method to address this specific issue.

Snappy answers to stupid QsOTD

With the Sanjay Dutt judgement due, one expected the media, especially the news TV channels, to go overboard.
But CNN-IBN’s Question of the Day (QOTD, plural QsOTD), asked by the channel after the verdict was delivered, took the cake:
“Is this the best that Sanjay Dutt could have hoped for?” the channel asked.
And thousands of poor suckers will send in their SMS opinions, and watch the graphs on the screen go up and down as if their individual votes have caused the movement.
My QOTD to CNN-IBN: How on earth can I know whether this is the best Sanjay Dutt could have hoped for?
I can have an opinion on what I had hoped for, or what I had anticipated, or what I had expected, or what Bejan Daruwala might have predicted in a newspaper I might have read.
But how the blazes can I know what Sanjay Dutt had hoped for?
How?!
Reminds me of a Mad magazine column called snappy answers to stupid questions.
So, here’s the question again, followed by a few answers of mine. Please send in your suggestions for the channel, too.

“Is this the best that Sanjay Dutt could have hoped for?”

No, he wanted a life sentence, so he’s deeply disappointed.
No, he was hoping he would hang, because Afzal is getting all the publicity.
No, he was hoping for a guilty verdict on all counts, because he prefers the jail environment to his Pali Hill residence.

Please, please send in your suggestions!

pigsandwings questions for TV channels

On live programming, you run interactive exercises that ask viewers to send you text messages.
When these programmes are repeated, the announcements (often through anchors, sometimes through supers) calling attention to the SMS polls or contests or whatever cannot be erased from the video or the audio.

What happens to these messages?
Are they still charged at premium rates to the viewers?
Can you overlay another super asking viewers NOT to vote as the text messages would be wasted?

Hello?

pigsandwings impact: CNN IBN -- Well begun is half done

CNN IBN is currently conducting a poll to identify icons of the four states which form the Golden South.
A welcome addition is the Disclaimer at the bottom of the relevant page on ibnlive.com, which states:
"The results reflect the views of internet/mobile users who have chosen to participate in the poll."
This is something pigsandwings had requested of news organisations earlier.
Thanks. Can we have the same transparency on the TV channel, please?

Needed: An Election Commission for Media

You’re watching a show on any of the news channels that we have access to at the depression of a remote control button. There’s a burning issue being debated, and the channel seeks to get a finger on the pulse of the country by conducting an SMS and/or e-mail poll.
So far, so good.
Within minutes of the programme starting, out pops a graphic showing the current status of the poll.
Let’s say it shows 87% for and 13% against the motion being discussed. The anchor draws attention to the graphic, and the panel discussion is now sidetracked by the “finding”.
How many people have actually seen the programme? No one knows. Hindsight and the Peoplemeter and aMap will prove it to register 1 or 2 TRPs.
How many people have voted at all? No one tells us.
How many people watched the programme and chose not to vote at all? No one tells us.
It wouldn’t matter too much if the question being asked was along the lines of “What’s your preferred colour… black or white?”
It does matter if the question being asked is “Should Afzal hang?” or “Is the Prime Minister soft on terrorists?” and such like.
It’s not TV alone that conducts these polls; newspapers, magazines and internet sites use similar polls, with a similar lack of transparency.
Maybe I don’t want Afzal to hang. But when I watch TV and discover that an astonishing 87% want him to go to the gallows, I stop and think: am I in such a minority?
I’m not. Because only a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand, would have bothered to send an SMS registering their “opinion”. And in a country as large as India, with one billion people as Pepsi and Standard Chartered Bank remind us, a few thousand is but a droplet in a an oceanling.
And since we’re so good at aping the West and at remixes, perhaps Indian media houses could take a leaf out of what western media houses do when conducting such polls.

They add a caveat that the poll reflects the opinion of only those who chose to poll and they clearly tell you the number of people who voted. Take a look at what CNN does on cnn.com.