Justin Savoie came across this webpage on “Abacus Data MRP: A Game-Changer for GR, Advocacy, and Advertising”:
We should get these people to write our grant proposals! Seriously, we should tap them for funding. They’re using MRP, we’re developing improvements to MRP . . . it would be a good investment.
After noticing this bit:
Abacus Data collaborated closely with the Association to design, execute, and analyze a comprehensive national survey of at least 3,000 Canadian adults. The survey results were meticulously broken down by vital demographics, political variables, and geographical locations in a easy to read, story-telling driven report. Something we are known for – ask around!
The real innovation, however, lay in Abacus Data MRP’s unique capability. Beyond the general survey analysis, it generated 338 individual reports, each tailored for a specific Member of Parliament.
Savoie commented:
Cool! But 3000/338 = 9 … so I don’t know about the tailoring.
Good point. Let’s not oversell.
Off comment: I don’t know if you’re aware of this but apparently your RSS is busted (“We do not have the permission to download this feed (403 Forbidden).”) Hadn’t received an update since May 1.
Will:
The RSS was broken but then we fixed it last week. Can you refresh your page and try again?
Huh, works in Feedly but not Netvibes. Weird. Guess I’ll email Netvibes and see what the deal is on their end, thanks.
I like the claim that their process is “like a crystal ball.” Chrystal balls have a spectacular record of yielding information rivaled only by palmistry, tarot cards, and tea leaves.
I’m not derogating Abacus Data. Just having some fun with their self identification. BTW, an abacus is not advanced technology either.
“BTW, an abacus is not advanced technology either.”
I read the abacus was common bcz
a) roman numbers are not a place-holding nubmer system, so the abucus was necessary to compensate for this problem ; and
b) Catholic orthodoxy was that there was no such thing as zero (aka void, meaning absence of god), which made the arabic numbering system non-grata in Europe until well into the 16th century.
Apparently, though, to follow an infamous NPR usage, “some say” [without saying who or how many ‘some’ are] that zero was rejected in Europe bcz switching costs [modern economist usage] of leaving the Roman number system for the arabic system were so high. My own off-the-cuff view is the 16th century – when most of Europe switched to the Arabic number system – is the age of the reformation, so yeah, “some say” meaning “I say”, it looks like the arabic system was supressed until Protestants threw off the yoke of Catholocism and embraced a beneficial technology that was, in their time, already ancient in other parts of the world.
It’s probably worth mentioning that, like in Islam, there had always been a strong opposiition in catholocism to the charging of interest, which was viewed as a sin or “usury” in Catholocism until about the same time that arabic numbers started worming their way into Europe (in mathematics, that started in the ealry 12th century, but was not embraced by the hoi pleloi until the 16th century). Wikipedia says “In 1545 England fixed a legal maximum interest, and any amount in excess of the maximum was usury. ” That’s interesting! Again, that’s during the reformation! So England, even though it was fixing a particular rate of interest as “usury”, was effectively throwing off the yoke of Catholocism, because it was disposing of the idea that *all* interest is usury, and instead recognizing that there is a cost of capital.
It’s interesting that so much of what modern “Progressivism” believes really has its roots in the medevil Catholic church. So is “Progressivism” actually just a rehash of medieval belief? Apparently, yes.
OTOH, it’s also interesting to observe historically the effects of culture on the well-being of the people participating in a given culture. Culture can retard their success – as Catholocism has done for southern Europe – or propell it, as Protestantism did for northern Europe, and as similar cultural views have propelled Asian success in modern times.
Tragically, for many people around the world, culture – no matter how backward – is destiny.
“a) roman numbers are not a place-holding nubmer system, so the abucus was necessary to compensate for this problem”
From wikipedia: “The Sumerian abacus appeared between 2700 and 2300 BC. It held a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal (base 60) number system.”
So it was in fact developed in a place holding number system. And while the Sumerians did not consider zero a number in its own right, it was one of their digits (empty space — no strikes in clay).
It’s fun to see where the discussions in comments can go! Not what I was expecting when writing the above post.
> spot-on in predicting elections like the 2017 & 2019 UK general elections, and the **2016 US presidential election**
The famously well-predicted 2016 presidential election :P
Ethan:
The erroneous predictions for 2016 did not come from MRP. There was an MRP estimate for that election that did well.
Yes, for Americans, there are about seven times as many ridings in Canada as states in the USA, almost all those ridings have three or more parties get 10% or more of the vote, and we have less money for polls (oh, and two different media ecosystems in two languages). So predicting which party will form the next government in Ottawa is much harder than predicting who will be the next POTUS.