App Stats: Weissman on "From Fourier to Forensics" 

 We hope you can join us this Wednesday, October 12, 2011 for the  Applied Statistics Workshop .  Michael Weissman , a Professor Emeritus from the  Physics Department  at the University of Illinois, will give a presentation entitled "From Fourier to Forensics". A light lunch will be served at 12 pm and the talk will begin at 12.15. 

 "From Fourier to Forensics" 
Michael Weissman 
Government Department, Harvard University 
CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.)  
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 12.00 pm 

 Abstract: 
 Although the statistical and systematic problems of public opinion polls are fairly widely recognized, we tend to assume that published polling results reflect some sort of actual poll. In 2009 a prominent blog suggested that the pollster Strategic Vision might be fabricating data, based in part on surprising deviations from uniformity of the distribution of trailing digits of the results.(http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/search/label/strategic%20vision) Objections were raised to the assumed uniform distribution, but we were able to use Fourier analysis together with known polling statistics to show that the results were weird even if that assumption were dropped. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E1DA123AF930A25751C1A96F9C8B63 

 In 2010 we were contacted by a political consultant who had noticed anomalies in Research2000 poll reports. Using a variety of elementary statistical techniques, we showed that those results could not have accurately represented real polls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_2000 Unfortunately, we do not know if there are other bogus pollsters, disguising results via a random binary generator (cost $0.01).