The quadrennial bovinoid-analytic inversion

"New Hampshire College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts" (NHC) opened in 1868 with no campus and one teacher. It's now the University of New Hampshire; a "land-, sea-, and space-grant university" and is actually reasonably well-ranked both as an acedemic institution and as a hard core party school.

Er, let me start over.

Some professors at UNH recently created an Annual Top Ten “Dubious Polling” Award. "These awards are intended to mark for posterity some of the most risible and outrageous pronouncements by the major media polls during the previous year."

It's of special local note because NH has the first-in-the-nation primary election , and that leads to what one might call a quadrennial bovinoid-analytic inversion.

In plainer terms: Every four years, we end up with more pollsters than cows.

The polls gets lots of play, and many of them are utter crap.

The contenders for the Dubious Polling Awards are ranked by the authors not using a thubs-up or -down scale, but by using a scale of one to five sets of crossed fingers, like so:

"Each award is ranked, from a low of one set of crossed fingers to a high of five sets. Pollsters generally know in their hearts when all is not right with their polls, but they (figuratively) cross their fingers and hope that no one notices anything amiss. The five crossed-fingers icon is the ultimate in wishful thinking, perhaps the equivalent of football’s “Hail Mary pass” for the truly untrustworthy poll."

Interesting reading, and something to remember next time you see polls quoted in the news--- which is to say, every freaking day.

http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-journalism-news-updates-144.php

(And yes, that URL is correct. http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/ is a site devoted to uncovering egregious examples of bad journalism.)