Damn this is cool

Chris Zorn writes, http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/politics/20080603_MARGINS_GRAPHIC/margins.swf

He’s clearly a man of few words. I’ll give it as a link. You can play with it, click on things, see all sorts of fun stuff.

What I’d really like to do is pipe this through a hierarchical model to smooth out the inevitable survey fluctuations. Also, it would be good to subtract off main effects. For example, in the graph below, are well-educated Arkansans particularly strong Clinton supporters, or is this just a combination of Arkansas being a Clinton state and small-sample fluctuation?

pretty.png

Anyway, I’m not complainin, just suggesting even more things that could be done with these data and this software. The first thing to do is to run it with the 2000 and 2004 exit polls. This app would go great with our Red State, Blue State book.

4 thoughts on “Damn this is cool

  1. This is great. I'd love to use this for teaching undergrads, but I'm worried that the link will expire by the time I get to that material. Does anyone know an easy way to save this thing to my hard drive? I was playing around with it and couldn't find a way to make that work.

Comments are closed.