Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for April 29, 2015

To all the deliberately biased poll-takers out there: Go skew yourselves.

I did polls once. Literature forum I used to visit all the time, the questions I came up with were serious and not skewed like Rat’s are. Basically since the polls would be on a set of books the questions were kinda what you would expect. Favorite character, favorite novel, least favorite character, least favorite novel, etc. Kinda wished I had someone helping me out tallying things up. I mean when you have fifteen to twenty questions and a hundred or more people filling out the questionnaire it gets to be a real pain to be the only one tallying everything.

But you really learn something when you do the same questions in multiple polls, if you didn’t already understand that something to begin with. And that is that polls are subject to change based on the sample group polled. If I asked concerning the same set of books in each poll I could expect the results to change

when did you stop beating your wife?

i remember on fox news they told us that a poll showed that about 77%(it was a pretty high number, something like this) of americans they asked favored a hike on income tax for the middle class. when i researched the mall they asked this, it was a mall in new york where wealthy people go to shop

Rat’s got a point……muscatel is at an all time high.

Survey says…..!

The best example I have of a real, and really biased poll, was when my wife was asked “Should we continue funding the the bicycle safety program, or should we allow kids’ head injuries to increase dramatically?”

Another way to skew poll results: poll only a carefully selected demographic.

i took a phone poll once about 8 years or so ago on political voting issues. after the third question i asked the poll taker what she was doing. she asked me what i meant and i said read those three question(out of 20 they were intending to ask me) back to me without waiting for my answers – she did – i asked her if they made any sense to her and she said absolutely i then said i was done taking the poll and hung up. she had asked three questions that you could only answer by agreeing with a certain political situation/outcome. there was no alternative answer/reply to the answer/reply the poll taker wanted. i figure they got their ‘poll’ for their ‘story’ on how the public felt about the issues but they didn’t get the truth even remotely.

i somehow got sent a survey about gun control, which was clearly against it, very conservative. i thought i was doing my bit by sending it back with my pro gun control opinion. but no. it just got me on a conservative mailing list till i went nuclear on the computer and cleared everything out so it would stop.

Appearance says it all.

xxx

I dated a pole once, but her father said I was an outlier and discounted me.

“Ahh, but for the grace of God…”

Exactly…….and like you say it’s cheap, 16% alcohol (32 proof), so one could really get plastered if they downed a pint.