http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/harrys-guide-to-2016-election-polls/?ex_cid=538twitter

"Margin of error and sample size matter less than who’s in the sample. Good polling costs a lot of money, so many times the best polls have a smaller sample size (the more people you call, the costlier the survey). That raises the statistical margin of error, but the margin of error for a sample of 400 is less than double that for a sample size of 1,000. What you don’t want is coverage error, in which you’re polling people who won’t even vote or ignoring people who will."

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/23/americans-are-in-the-middle-of-the-pack-globally-when-it-comes-to-importance-of-religion/

"Overall, people in wealthier nations tend to place less importance on religion than those in poorer nations. However, the United States – the wealthiest nation included in the 2015 global survey based on gross domestic product per capita – is a notable exception to this trend."

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/22/15-striking-findings-from-2015/

"Every year, we look back at our research to select the most memorable facts that illustrate important trends shaping our world. At Pew Research Center, the topics we analyze range from the specific subjects of video gaming and family caregivers to broader areas like political attitudes, global climate change and religious affiliation."

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2015/12/how-socioeconomic-status-impacts-online-learning.html

"The takeaway is that MOOCs have not yet solved SES-related disparities in educational outcomes…"

http://chronicle.com/article/Welcome-to-Campus-Here-Is/234613?

Georgia Tech’s online master’s program is not about lifting up the downtrodden or reaching out to the disempowered. Unlike other MOOC-related experiments, such as San Jose State University’s failed attempt to use Udacity courses to teach community-college and high-school students, the Georgia Tech program took aim at successful professionals in their prime who wanted to become even more successful. Almost all of the applicants already had jobs, often at tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and AT&T.

The first graduating class was full of students who already held enviable positions in the industry. For them, the low price of tuition was not as valuable as the ability to take the courses without quitting their well-paying jobs and relocating to Atlanta.

"This is not proof-of-concept of education for the masses," says Joshua S. Goodman, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard who has studied the program. "What this is proof-of-concept for is that there are groups of Americans for whom the on

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/12/14/the-elsewhere-effect/

"Why the “elsewhere effect”? One suspect is the media bias towards trouble. Good news is no news. News editors don’t give us many stories about good race relations, or about the 25-year drop in crime, or about the decrease in divorce. Instead, we get crime and conflict and a variety of other problems. Add to this the perpetual political campaign with opposition candidates tirelessly telling us what’s wrong. Given this balance of information, we can easily picture the larger society as a world in decline, a perilous world so different from the one we walk through every day."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/campaign-stops/all-politicians-lie-some-lie-more-than-others.html?src=me&ref=general

"Today’s TV journalists — anchors like Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper and George Stephanopoulos — have picked up the torch of fact-checking and now grill candidates on issues of accuracy during live interviews. Most voters don’t think it’s biased to question people about whether their seemingly fact-based statements are accurate. Research published earlier this year by the American Press Institute showed that more than eight in 10 Americans have a positive view of political fact-checking."

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2015/12/contractions-in-formal-writing-whats-allowed-whats-not.html

A few interesting numbers here, bug the last item (below) is certainly true in the local area (food deserts).

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/significant-digits-for-tuesday-dec-8-2015/?ex_cid=538twitter

"Food deserts — areas without supermarkets where fresh, healthy food is scarce — were a major target of first lady Michelle Obama’s nutrition initiatives. Still, in the past four years, only 1.4 million of the 18 million people living in a food desert got a new supermarket."

Interesting terms: zombie and cockroach (as related to ideas).

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/obamacare-and-the-cockroaches/?smid=tw-nytimeskrugman&smtyp=cur&_r=0

"Zombie ideas are claims that should have been killed by evidence, but just keep shambling along, like the notion that vast numbers of Canadians, frustrated by socialized medicine, come to America in search of treatment. (It was in a paper about that and other myths that I first encountered the zombie terminology.) Cockroaches are claims that disappear for a while when proved ludicrously wrong, but just keep on coming back."