Online polls?
Go ahead now and take a simple online poll, it's so simple, it will only take a moment and you'll be able to see real-time results. There's three polls in the sidebar, and I hope you take all three. If you don't know the day you were born on, just click the birth day link in the question to find out.
Yes, it's almost a given that people love to take online polls. However, you should always be wary of their outcomes, especially so when the questions warrant a reactive response. Anyway, I hope you took these short polls, but please be aware that whatever online poll I design, it will be biased because I'm not taking a random sample. As you're already aware, someone might try to vote early and often (I try to prevent this, just try to vote twice in the same day and you'll hopefully be blocked from doing so.). Of course, if I could get the complete sample, that is everyone to fork over the requested information, I'd get an unbiased picture . So let's ask everyone in the USA with a birth-year of 1978, what date they were born on.
Now of course we'll need some real data on actual birthday distributions, that is, what I'd like to know (and I hope you do too) is if each day has a similar number of births. So please download the actual distribution of birthdays for births in the U.S. in 1978. The data was obtained from an article written by Geoffrey Berresford ("The uniformity assumption in the birthday problem, Math. Mag. 53 1980, no. 5, 286-288.)
What are you going to do with the data --- do Worksheet #1, it's in the sidebar. In this worksheet you'll create a time series graph to see how births fluctuate throughout the year. Please post your initial feelings or questions about this data.
Yes, it's almost a given that people love to take online polls. However, you should always be wary of their outcomes, especially so when the questions warrant a reactive response. Anyway, I hope you took these short polls, but please be aware that whatever online poll I design, it will be biased because I'm not taking a random sample. As you're already aware, someone might try to vote early and often (I try to prevent this, just try to vote twice in the same day and you'll hopefully be blocked from doing so.). Of course, if I could get the complete sample, that is everyone to fork over the requested information, I'd get an unbiased picture . So let's ask everyone in the USA with a birth-year of 1978, what date they were born on.
Now of course we'll need some real data on actual birthday distributions, that is, what I'd like to know (and I hope you do too) is if each day has a similar number of births. So please download the actual distribution of birthdays for births in the U.S. in 1978. The data was obtained from an article written by Geoffrey Berresford ("The uniformity assumption in the birthday problem, Math. Mag. 53 1980, no. 5, 286-288.)
What are you going to do with the data --- do Worksheet #1, it's in the sidebar. In this worksheet you'll create a time series graph to see how births fluctuate throughout the year. Please post your initial feelings or questions about this data.
posted by Ron Bannon at 6:06 PM
1 Comments:
Birth dates are commonly referred to as being uniformly distributed, and that really doesn't appear to be the case here. The first pass looks very bumpy.
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