State of the University

In UGA President Jere Morehead's "State of the University" address, what were the most used words? Glad you asked. Below, the top words, the number of mentions in parentheses:

1. University (60)
2. Research (40)
3. Georgia (37)
4. Year (28)
5. (tie) Students (27)
5. (tie) Faculty (27)
7. New (22)
8. Learning (20)
9. State (19)
10. Campus (18)

What's this mean? Not much, really. Oddly, "million" was mentioned 13 times, every time tied to some dollar amount.

Georgia and Transportation

Transportation in Georgia is important, but paying more taxes to improve roads and the like? Less support. A new poll, however, found Georgians are willing to dicker and compromise. You'll find the crosstabs here, and look especially at Questions 2 and 3.

This Landmark poll of 800 Georgians has a 3.5 percent margin of error. What I can't find, just breezing through it, is more on how the poll was conducted. Odds are it's a robo-poll (landline only), given Landmark's history, or a robo and some online polling aimed at cell phone users -- as you cannot have a computer call cell phones, at least legally, to conduct a robo-poll.

Summing Up Obama

So Pew asked survey respondents to sum up President Obama in one word. The graphic below illustrates the results:

What's fun for me is the A**hole/Jacka** category provided by five people (these are numbers, not percentages). Charming.

Also fascinating is the table below in terms of change over time. Keep in mind the changes are small, despite their ordering, but look how "Intelligent" led at first and then dropped, while "Good" moved up. "Socialist" was high in 2009 but kinda dropped to be replaced by "Incompetent." Not sure which is worse.

Out of Sorts

For my tens of readers worldwide I apologize for not writing much lately. Various health issues have intruded to sap my motivation. I will return to something resembling regularity once I get a couple more doc visits out of the way and my mind can focus.