LookIt

Possible exit poll explanation

Here is a good summary of the exit poll problem. The article re-asks the questions being bounced around the lefty end of the blogosphere (and the realosphere, at least here in lefty Santa Cruz): how could the exit polls have been so wrong, more this year than in previous elections?

One thing that folks don't seem to want to face is that, in a highly polarized (and somewhat poisoned) environment, people will lie to pollsters about anything that they find embarrassing. Maybe many folks who voted for Bush, particularly in the "swing states" were embarrassed about doing so.

If so, that is more of a statement about the election environment than about the people who felt compelled to lie to the pollsters. And I'm as responsible for the yucky polarization as most folks.

Great quote

A nice, short, non-polemical description of why open-source software is catching on: "Secret-source software probably isn’t going away, but in an increasingly open world, it looks weirder and weirder."

We're not smarter than they are

One of the few eloquent and compassionate statements from my side (the left side) in the past 36 hours:

I can't count how many times in the last two days I've heard self-righteous "liberals" call the entire middle of the country "stupid". Kerry voters, we need to get over ourselves...we're not special.

There's much more good stuff here. Thank you, Jason.

To my non-US readers

Please don't go vote today. The same is true for my US readers who are ineligible to vote.

There. Maybe I have now made up for the dozens if web sites and mailing lists I have seen yesterday and today that tell everyone to go vote, as if everyone is a registered voter in the US.

Man, Americans can be really egocentric, can't we?

The difficulty of translation

A lot of my recent technical work deals with internationalization, mostly of written languages. It is still amazingly difficult to get written languages to work on computers without even trying to translate what is being said. The fact that I can only get about half of the web forms from commerce sites I purchase from to accept that my street name is really Segré, not Segre, shows how far we have to go on even dirt-simple things.

This comparison of the translations of Osama bin Laden's recent video shows that translating spoken communication is fraught with even more difficulty. Every error can mean a major misunderstanding that can be amplified by the press.