End of Year Update

As we end 2017 (thank God, some of you are saying), it's time to look at the state of the blog. The earliest stats I have for the blog are from May 2010, though I know it's been around longer than that. Anyway, here are some key stats from 2010 on.

• Number of total visits: 262,065. About what a good site gets in a day.
• Of those, 4,429 were for a single post about the infamous The Red & Black staff walkout. Of my top five posts, traffic-wise, three were about the walkout. I can go and on about it, but let's not. Read the posts.
• Google, no surprise, was the #1 URL referral. Lots of people searching for research stuff land on my blog, especially "cognitive mobilization," a major topic in Europe and something I wrote about a time or two based on one journal article I published, no doubt by sheer dumb luck or lack of editorial due diligence.
• In fact, the #1 keyword search for folks who landed on my blog was indeed "cognitive mobilization," followed by "political knowledge and political partisanship" and in third place, I'm not making this up, "titular colonicity."
• Most visitors were from the U.S., followed by Russia (spooky), Germany, and the U.K.
• Chrome was by far the leading browser, and Windows edged out Mac as the most popular operating system.

And that's it. The blog has been slow of late as I deal with health issues and try not to die. So far, thanks to the magic of modern medicine, I've been successful. How long the docs can be so is up in the air as I move from med to med. Right now I'm on immunotherapy, the next great thing. Will know how great the thing is in a few weeks when we do a scan to see whether it's doing the voodoo it's supposed to do.

Grand Funk Railroad. Just Because.

My blog is usually about media or political knowledge or polling or local politics. Today, because it's my blog dammit and I can do what I want, I turn to Grand Funk Railroad and the big question -- why is the band not in the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame?

I was messing around on YouTube and came across a bunch of Grand Funk videos and a documentary about them. I was a huge fan in middle and high school. For those of you drawing a blank, the band is probably best known for this hit:


As a kid I loved Grand Funk. Had all their albums, then 8-tracks, then cassettes. I also had stuff by the Rolling Stones and The Who and even back then my uneducated musical brain knew there was a huge difference between, say The Who, and Grand Funk Railroad. But you still find people steaming over the band never being inducted into the rock Hall of Fame. There are even sites out there that list the Top 10 acts not in the Hall but should be, and nearly all of them mention my boys from Michigan who I so dearly loved, but who honestly do not belong. Why? Yeah, maybe the critics were lukewarm toward them, favoring East and West Coast acts, but the critics were looking for musicians who broke new ground. As much as I loved Grand Funk Railroad, even back in my youth I could see this was not the case.

Thus ends a blog post about a musical act from my youth.  It's my blog. So there.

And if you've still never heard of them, listen to this live album. It kicks ass, except for the mangling of Gimme Shelter.

Is UGA Inching Closer?

I've written far too many times in the past about UGA's chances of being invited to the grownup table of universities -- the Association of American Universities (AAU). My 2016 post here includes some analysis.

Why am I bringing this up now? A recent The Red & Black story reminded me of it. The article notes UGA jumped seven spots in a national research ranking in one year, which is significant. And by invited in the earlier graf, I mean just that. You don't apply to join the AAU, you have to be invited, kinda like getting into tapped into a secret club and learning the secret handshake.

In previous posts I tried to estimate when UGA might possibly get an invitation based on the organization's timeline of adding new members and improvement over time in UGA's research productivity. It was a lost cause, making sense of the numbers, as I'm sure politics plays a role. And really, you expect Georgia Tech to vote in our favor?  Emory, maybe, but Tech?

The AAU can go several years between invitations, then add maybe one or two worthy additions. There's no consistency is what I'm trying to say, no easily predictive outcome. They may go another 10 years. They may invite 10 schools tomorrow.

Finally, it's difficult to generate the kind of research dollars the top schools brag about unless they boast an engineering and medical school on campus. That puts UGA at a disadvantage, though that's changing somewhat due to local initiatives on both fronts. Despite all this, UGA does rate higher on the National Science Foundation research table than some existing AAU members so maybe there's a chance we'll join the 62-school group soon. It would be a major feather in the cap of a certain provost looking to move up to president at a university.

Oh, by the way, you see the survey results here for yourself, which The R&B shoulda linked to in its story so readers could see it themselves.

New

Forgot to include a page that outlines the many criteria for being asked to join. Some day I'll break them all down and see where UGA stands, but that's a lot of work.

Baffled

OK, I admit to being a bit baffled by the abstract of this study. Skim it yourself, or I'll paste below the key part that has me confused. Basically the study examines the difference between what people know (knowledge) and what people think they know. To explain, they're not the same but they're often correlated. Knowledgeable people also think, correctly so, that they're knowledgeable. But a lot of folks think they know a lot -- and they don't. Imagine your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving. That person.

So here's part of the abstract. I'll explain, best I can, below.

An online experiment reveals that cognitive style moderates the assumed relationship. Participants with a high need for cognition (NFC) feel more competent when confronted with a comprehensible news item; for participants with a low NFC, reading a less comprehensible news item resulted in a more pronounced sense of competence.

NFC just measures how much you enjoy thinking about stuff. It's a common variable in social science research, it's roots in persuasion studies. Anyway, those high in NFC feel more competent after a news story that makes sense. OK, we all get that. But those low in NFC feel more competent after reading a news story that makes no sense. WTF? What's wrong with these people? The study suggests they build this from peripheral cues in the story itself, such as technical terms and abbreviations.

Simply put, low NFC people grasp at straws to make themselves feel competent when they're not.

Yeah, your uncle.

Boosting My Ragged Self Esteem

Sometimes to boost my ragged self esteem I like to go online and look at who's citing my work. It requires some effort, mind you, but if I did hard enough via the magic of Google Scholar I can often find a few suckers scholars who pointed to my work while building their own theoretical arguments.

Examples, you ask?

This 2017 study includes a cite of one of my older studies from, wow, 1995. The study here is about need for cognition and political knowledge.

And this 2017 study is about knowledge of nanotechnology and cites my 1995 and 1996 papers.

I could go on, but I'm bored and you're bored and it's a holiday week. I will take a second to point out my most cited works, which when compared to colleagues the numbers are not that great, but I'm the top cited person in my household. So there.

1. By far #1 cited is my study of young people learning from late-night comedies. It's from 2005 and has triple the cites of my #2.
2. So, #2 is that 1995 "new news" and knowledge piece discussed above.
3. Close behind with only two fewer cites than the one above is another piece with a good title and data over time, which helped get it attention.

Fourth and fifth places are talk radio studies. I did a lot of those and they got me tenure. Sixth is maybe my favorite piece, a study of why people believe Obama is Muslim and one of the first of its kind. If I'd published it in a bigger journal is would have gotten a lot more attention, but that's the way it goes.

Slow Going

Due to health issues, I've fallen behind in posting here. Apologies to my tens of readers worldwide. Hopefully I will pick up the pace soon.

I do point to this study that says basically the greater an individual's news literacy, the less likely they are to believe in conspiracy theories. It's main flaw is it doesn't cite me.

Also there's this brilliant piece of research that everyone should read, memorize, and recite to random strangers on the street.

About that Alabama Poll

A new poll on the Alabama U.S. Senate race has it a tie between Roy Moore the Republican and Doug Jones the Democratic, both at 42 percent.

Don't believe it.

I'm not raising doubt because it's a Fox News poll. Their shop does good work. It's just that previous polls had Moore with a steady lead. Now maybe that lead has faded. Maybe news about some questionable charity monies or a bejillion Russian bots following him on Twitter have eroded Moore's lead, or maybe it dissipated because some folks realize he's kinda nuts.

Or maybe this poll is an outlier. These happen. Statistically speaking every poll has a 5 percent (1-in-20) chance of just being wrong. That doesn't mean it takes 20 polls for one to be wrong. The first could be outlier. I think it may be an outlier because all the other polls show Moore with a lead. For example, one earlier this month had Moore with a solid 8 percentage point lead.  Every public poll previous to this latest one had Moore ahead by 6 to 8 percentage points.

Unless another poll validates the latest result by showing it a lead or within the margin of error, I wouldn't make much of it. I get why Alabama Dems like this poll result and how they'll probably use it to raise money and energize their base, but as an observer I just don't think it's right. I've lived and worked in Alabama and I know you'll never go broke betting on the Republican candidate, even the crazy Republican candidate.

As an aside I did take a few minutes to dig into the crosstabs to see if anything odd shows up in this latest poll to explain the tie. Sometimes you'll find something there, such as more respondents of a particular socio-demographic group included than you'd normally see, thus skewing the results one way or the other. For example, more educated respondents than normal would favor Jones and more white evangelical respondents than normal would favor Moore.  Nothing jumps out at me, but then again I don't have baseline numbers to work with. We'll just have to wait for another poll to see if Jones has indeed clawed into a tie with Moore.

Journalism 101 -- We are NOT the story

I'm a journalism guy, but I firmly believe we should go out of our way to not be the story. It was pounded into me in j-school, it was pounded into me by my first editor at a small but really good Mississippi daily newspaper. I still believe it, I still preach it. Yes, there are exceptions, but our audience wants to know about the story, not about us. Plus it makes us look like snowflakes.

So we have this Atlanta TV station story about the bonding out of three students who protested the Georgia Tech police shooting of a troubled student. Watch the video yourself. I don't think the hed on the web site seen to the left about protester curses the media is really the story here. It's a basic making bail story, the kind we do all the time, but him tossing a few expletives in a journalist's direction is hardly news. Jeez, if I made a story about every time I'd been cursed at as a reporter I'd never have time for real news.

Watch the story, decide for yourself if this is the hed that really deserves to be on there. I suppose it is clickbaity because, face it, we all love seeing those damn journalists getting cursed at. But I'm not a clickbaity guy.

Strange Alabama. Tell me Moore

As political junkies know, there's a fascinating U.S. Senate race going on next door in Alabama between Roy "Ten Commandments Everywhere" Moore and Luther "Trump Likes Me Best" Moore. The election itself is Sept. 26, but there's been a spate of polls showing either Moore winning big or the race a statistical tie. No polls seem to show Strange ahead. This bodes well for Moore and, of course, poorly for Strange.

A poll out today suggests the race is tightening. Here's the opening grafs. Keep in mind that tightening in this case still has Moore thumping Strange.

U.S. Sen. Luther Strange has made significant cuts into Roy Moore's lead in a Republican primary runoff poll but still has a lot of ground to make up over the next eight days. 

In a poll released Monday by Louisiana-based JMC Analytics and Polling, Alabama's former chief justice holds an eight-point lead over Strange. 

The same polling firm last month had Moore with a 19-point lead.

It's helpful when the same firm, using the same method, shows change. It's more difficult to compare across polls, especially when they use very different sampling or weighting methods, and that assumes they report any of these details at all.

A few days earlier a different poll essentially said it's too close to call. Keep in mind this particular poll has ties to those supporting Strange, but I'm certain it's a mere coincidence they call it a tie.

A summary of polls by Real Clear Politics paints a pretty picture for Moore.

President Donald Trump and the GOP establishment have all endorsed Strange, as Moore infamous for his on-again, off-again career on the state supreme court. In this case, Trump's endorsement doesn't seem to matter.

Maybe it will tighten some before the election. That's what usually happens in most races as undecideds, well, decide. Those may break more for Strange but it's hard to imagine enough of them remain out there to change the outcome.

More First Names

I wrote yesterday about the incoming UGA freshman class and the most popular first names. This is Part II in which I provide the data of the top five names since 2008. See the table below. A few years have ties for a spot.

	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
1	Sarah	Sarah	Emily	Emily	Sarah	Emily	Emily	Emily & John	William	William
2	Emily	William	Elizabeth	John	Emily	Sarah	Sarah		Emily	Sarah
3	Lauren	Emily	Michael	Sarah	John	John	John	Hannah	Sarah	Madison
4	William	Elizabeth	Taylor	Andrew	William	Anna	William	William	Caroline	Emily
5	Michael	John	William	Michael	Rachel	Hannah	Rachel	Anna & Caroline	John	Caroline

As you can see, for a long time Emily and Sarah dominated and even in 2017 they're in the top five, but William stepped up. Why is that? Good question, as UGA tends to have more female than male students. Keep in mind the differences in raw numbers are slight. See below for the top five in 2017 and the numbers of students who share that first name.

1. William (67)
2. Sarah (64)
3. Madison (59)
4. Emily (57)
5. Caroline (56)

Think about those numbers above, as they're out of 5,482 or so freshman in this year's class. So all it takes is a statistical quirk of a few more students who share a name to bump it up the list. You really can't make too much out of this, though that doesn't stop me from trying every year, just for fun.

Most Popular First Names

Every year since 2008 I've collected the first names of UGA's freshman class and have then written about it. Why? I have too much time on my hands, that's one. Two, it's a fun exercise to show students, to demonstrate you can find story ideas in odd places.

Well, it's time for the 2017 update.

First, a bit of history. Since 2008, the most popular UGA freshman name has been either Sarah or Emily, but in 2016 we saw a shift to a new leader -- William. And William is also the most popular freshman name in 2017, at least at UGA, at least among freshmen. Here's a quick wordcloud of the 2017 names:

Here are the Top 10 for 2017, with the 2008 rank in parentheses

1. William (3)
2. Sarah (1)
3.  Madison (235, wow)
4. Emily (2)
5. Caroline (23)
6. Hannah (27)
7. (tie) John (15) and Anna (33)
10. (tie) Matthew (6) Jacob (39) and Andrew (21)

The big move up is obvious -- Madison. Ranked only #235 in 2008, now it's #3. That said, you have to keep in mind the actual numbers here are relatively small between names. Number 1 in 2017 was William, with 67 of them. Sarah had 64, Madison 59. Back in 2008, there were only three named Madison, so that's something. 

To really have fun with this, I'd need to dip into the Social Security baby name data for the year these students were likely born, see if there was a burst nationally or even in Georgia of kids named Madison compared to earlier years. I can say, based on a cursory look, William was the most popular boy name in Georgia in 1999, roughly when these students were born, and Madison was the 4th most popular name. If we go back 10 years, Madison is the #1 Georgia girl's name, so I can't really explain the boomlet in Madison at UGA. It will take some more data digging.

UGA vs Notre Dame

The Dawgs play the Irish this Saturday. Notre Dame is a hair under a touchdown favorite, last I looked. So how else do the schools match up? We'll hear or read sportspouters saying this is a clash of traditions and so on, but is it really?

Movies Made About the Football Team

Notre Dame: 2
UGA: 0

(if you don't tear up at the end of Rudy, check yourself for a pulse)
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National Football Championships (shared or solo)

Notre Dame: 11 (consensus, 8 more some mention)
UGA:  5 (claimed, consensus? Not sure)

It gets messy, those earlier "championships"
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USNWR Rankings National Universities

Notre Dame is #15
UGA is #56
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Admissions Selectivity

Notre Dame: most selective
UGA: more selective (most is higher than more)
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Student to Faculty Ratio

Notre Dame 10:1
UGA 18:1
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Best Mascot

Notre Dame:  Creepy green guy, not even close
UGA:  Damn good dog, yes by a landslide
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Tuition and Fees (by one site)

Notre Dame:  $49,685
UGA:  $11,634 (in state)
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Student Brainpower (this site)

Notre Dame, tied for #11
UGA, tied for #153 (let that sink in a bit)
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Weather

Notre Dame: It's in Indiana. Lose
UGA: It's not in Indiana. Win
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Religion

Notre Dame: Catholic (win)
UGA (not, so lose)

(Yeah, I'm Catholic. It's my blog, so pffffft.)
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Georgia's "Red"

What's Georgia's colors?

Red and Black, you'd immediately answer, probably with a sneer or at least a rolling of the eyes at a journalism professor incapable of remembering such a basic school factoid or at least the name of the student newspaper. But you see, there's red, and then there's red. According to one site that compiles all the school colors from around the country, UGA's red is technically #DA291C (if you're fluent in the good old hex color chart). That's fine except the UGA marketing folks insist on this official page that it's #BA0C2F. The UGA version of the code is a tad darker and richer than the one offered by the site that compiles all team colors. Below I provide them again on bold face to emphasize the differences.

UGA's RED | Online Site's UGA RED

So you can see, in some browsers, it's kinda obvious. Oh, and Alabama's "crimson" is slightly different at #990000, which is actually quite a generic red. I thought they'd tweak it a bit, but apparently not.

Just think of the fun we can have distinguishing among the various oranges of Auburn, Tennessee, etc. OK, it's not that much fun, about as much fun as watching Fun with Flags, so I'm not gonna do it.

Me vs Google

For years I've pestered Google about a problem with its map, mainly because I have far too much time on my hands, but also because I live on the street that Google Maps refuses to correctly name.

So below, here's how Google Maps shows the intersection of Whit Davis Road and Pettit Lane on Athens scenic eastside. You see Google insists it's Pettits Lane (you may have to click on the image to see it well).

Google can't be wrong, right? Of course not, unless of course you use street view on Google Maps and see the following with the street sign, via street view, spelling the name correctly.

Still using Google Maps, here's another bit of evidence below. The lake is spelled correctly on Google Maps, but the street is not. So Pettits Lane leads to Pettit Lake.

Why do I care? I live on Greenbrier Way, the first left after you get onto PETTIT LANE. So multiple times a day I see the correct street spelling and every time I'm home and load Google Maps I see the incorrect street spelling, and this kind of stuff drives me batty.

So, maybe the street sign is wrong?

If you look at the Athens-Clarke County online property rolls, it's clearly Pettit Lane. See below.

There is no Pettits Lane. Except, as far as Zillow is concerned, it's PETTITS LANE. So let's look up that first address listed above via the black magic of Zillow.

So in some databases it's Pettits, but as far as the city-county is concerned, it's Pettit. So let's try one more test and use something I rarely use, Bing Maps.

Turns out, Bing > Google

What's this all mean? That maybe I need something better to do with my time, and yes I've used Google Map's report feature to ask them to fix the street name, but nothing. Nada. I figured by including the Bing Map it may embarrass them enough to do something about it.

Open Records, UGA Style

Every so often I make an open records request for all open records requests from UGA (where I work as a journalism prof). It's a great teaching tool for students, showing them the kind of things that get requested. I just finished using it in one class and will use it in another class later this week, but I thought I'd share some of the findings. Yes, I've written about previous searches. Go look for them if you like.

First, these are all open records requests this calendar year, ending with (obviously) my request for these records. There were 296 request so far this year. That's a lot of requests. The winner, yet again, are those pesky sports reporters. Out of 296 total requests, 127 (42.9 percent) involved athletics. Here are the Top 5 in terms of where the requests were funneled.

1. Athletics (127)
2. Procurement (22)
3. Legal affairs (19)
4. CAES (18)
5. Registrar (17)

Notice the huge drop from #1 to #2, and after #5 we hit the single digits. By the way, The R&B is high on the list as well. Now let's look at the top folks keeping our open records people busy (a good thing, in my book, as I teach a class in finding and using public documents). As you'd expect, sports dominates the list, usually requests for coaches contracts, stuff like that.

1. Marc Weiszer (29 requests, sports)
2. Seth Emerson (18 requests, sports)
3. Jason Butt (15 requests, sports)
4. Anthondy Dasher (6 requests, sports)
5. North American Procurement Council (6 requests, no idea).

OK, that last one. What the hell, right?  It's a real thing, has a web page and all. What kind of stuff are they asking for? A copy of "plan-holders for the Chillder replacement at Terrell Hall at UGA" and a copy of "the list of plan-holders of the Blueberry Reserach Building at UGA" and stuff like that. No, I don't have a clue, but ever request asks for the "plan holders" and I don't even know what that means.

And there are odd requests, sometimes good enough to be a story, but most not, like a list of all pecan growers in Georgia. 

UGA's Collegiate Readership Program

So I was leaving the journalism building a week or so ago and noticed this.

That blank spot is where the newspaper rack sat that gave students access to the NYTimes, the Athens Banner-Herald, etc., through the Collegiate Readership Program paid for, at UGA, by the SGA via student fees. You could swipe your card, get a paper, or often as not just open the rack as it was often busted. In full disclosure, I already get the papers on my iPad, so I didn't take the physical copies. Anyway, the rack is gone, and I looked at Tate and it's gone from there as well. So, me being me, I asked what's up. By email, to the SGA. Here's the response I got today:

Hi Barry,

The physical boxes around campus are gone, but we have an exciting new update about the readership program coming soon (hopefully early next week). Stay tuned on our social media to get the fastest update!

Thanks,

Student Government Association
The University of Georgia
102 Tate Student Center
ugasgaexec@gmail.com
www.uga.edu/sga

Odds are it's part of some app or online rather than physical paper. Some of that can be done now, as you can tell from the SGA's info about the program, lifted and pasted below.

For nearly 10 years, SGA has sponsored the New York Times/USA Today Collegiate Readership program, which provides students with free access to several national and local newspapers, including the New York Times, USA Today and the Athens-Banner Herald. Paper bins are in convenient locations across campus and in residence halls. In order to access the bins, students need only to insert their UGA ID card into the reader display, opening the door and allowing them to take a paper. 

Since 2012, students have also been granted access to free web and app passes. Students go towww.nytimes.com/passes and sign up and then they are able to log in as often as every 24 hours to claim a pass. The number of passes allocated to the University is based on the number of physical papers students pick up out of the bins around campus, so as the Collegiate Readership Program increases in popularity, online access increases for all UGA students. 

Guns

I'm working with the 2016 ANES data on something completely different and came across a question asking respondents:

How many guns do you or anyone else living here own?

For the same of full transparency, I'd answer one. I've had it for years.

The data is fascinating. Nearly two-thirds of 3,468 respondents who answered the question answered zero (actually, 65.7 percent). That means everyone else has a gun, but how many? Like me, more answered one gun than any other response (10.2 percent), followed by two guns (7.3 percent), and so on. Like a lot of surveys, you get weird answers as well. Two people said they own 50 guns and one person reported owning 99 guns. That's a lot of guns, except I'm willing to bet it was a survey response tossed off with little or no thought. I suspect they own a lot, but even to me 99 seems unlikely. Twenty, yeah. Ninety-nine? Not so much.

For fun, let's treat this question as an interval-level variable and correlate it with certain other variables. You know, stuff like age, education, and political ideology. Below are some results.

• Education: unrelated to how many guns you own
• Slight positive relationship, older equals more guns. Barely.
• Same as above for income. There, but not strong.
• The more you identify with the GOP, the more guns ya own.
• Ditto to above for being more conservative.

We could go on and on with this, correlating this with a jillion variables available in the data, but I doubt we'd be surprised by the basic results. There was also a slight positive relationship with how many guns you own and how satisfied you are with democracy (r = .04, p<.01) and how fair you felt the 2016 election was (r = .07, p<.001). That's comforting, knowing the gun fans are happy.

From a media standpoint, it's no surprise that there's a small but significant correlation between how many guns you own and watching Fox News hosts Sean Hannity (r=.08, p<.001) and Bill O'Reilly (still on the air in '16, r = .09, p<.001). No relationship with watching Anderson Cooper or Chris Matthews.

A more useful analysis, to be honest, is recoding that gun question so it has two levels -- don't own a gun, or do. Really the number of guns measures those who hunt, in which it's not unusual to have several guns depending on the kind of hunting you're doing at that time.

UGA Vendor Payments

Friday afternoons are for doing stuff I shouldn't be doing and not doing the stuff I should be doing. In other words, I'm playing around with data -- this time UGA data on payments it made to various vendors. And by various, I mean 27,196 vendors listed in the 2016 fiscal year (data for the 2017 fiscal year, which ended in June, isn't available yet). There's not much here, just the name of the vendor, the total payment for the fiscal year, and the number of payments made. With no explanation whatsoever, here are the Top Ten and their amounts. I'll comment briefly below the list. Numbers are rounded to preserve my sanity.

1. UGA Payroll ($931.9 million)
2. Bank of America ($27.0 million)
3. Georgia Power Company ($19.2 million)
4. Office of the State Treasurer ($13.0 million)
5. UGA Research Foundation ($12.3 million)
6. UGAREF O'Malley's Building LLC ($11.9 million)
7. AJAX Building Corporation of Georgia ($8.1 million)
8. EBSCO Media ($8.0 million)
9. Fisher Scientific Co. LLC ($7.5 million)
10. UGAREF East Campus Housing LLC ($7.0 million)

A few notes about above. Payroll is #1, that's no surprise, and a lot of the others appear to be construction costs or payments to to the research foundation or for the electricity that keeps me cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

Fun things I found. Jittery Joe's received a $68,799.86 payment. I'm a fan. You can't pay them enough. Chick-fil-A got $112,157.36. Oh, and for you chip lovers out there, $155,956.76 was paid to Frito Lay. With so many payments, a lot of them are weird looking but normal stuff for a university this size. Here's one -- Versus Spa. That one got my journalism spidey senses tingling but it turns out that $114,864.90 went to a routine company that has nothing to do with spas. Oh, and Homeland Security received $110,235 from us. No idea why. 

Yes, I checked for myself. I'm not in there, though there are a lot of individuals listed, mostly small amounts.

News and Trust

There's a survey report out today about news trust and credibility, and there's a better look at the results here, if you're so inclined. It's a weird study, in a way. Here's why:

Data were collected in the February and March 2017 using an online survey made available to users (N = 8,728) of the digital media platforms of twenty-eight different newsrooms across the United States.

In other words, it's a SLOP. A really big SLOP, with some statistical weighting done to correct for different sized news organizations that participated, but a SLOP nonetheless. Participants came from the websites of news orgs, so you can't really generalize it to the population as a whole, just those who happened to visit those news sites and who happened to feel like participating in an online survey.

That said, there's some good information here and it's worth your time. At least some. This graphic is interesting, though I suspect due to the sample, a bit flawed. You can see it and others on the report itself.

So what makes a news source credible? The survey had an open-ended question that allowed up to three words as a response (seen at the end of the report). Here are the top five.

1. other news sources
2. both sides issue
3. both sides story
4. check multiple sources
5. present both sides

It doesn't take a social scientist to figure out what's going on above. Presenting more than one side of a story is directly tied to perceptions of credibility. Of course this is exactly what talk radio and certain cable television talking heads never do, or if they do it, it's a straw man argument for the other side that's easy for them to knock down. Rarely will you hear a talk radio host provide a fair representation of the other side's position. By the way, the list continues with lots of references to checking multiple sources and similar answers.

Keep in mind these are the responses of people who visit legitimate news sites, not the general public or even the general news consuming public. It's a big, but biased, sample. That said, there's something you can glean from a quick read.

Who Won the Popular Prez Vote?

As most folks know, Donald Trump won the 2016 Electoral College but Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million. Turns out, Trump fans believe he won the 2016 popular vote. He didn't, but let's forget the facts.

In that poll linked above, here are the poll's topline results and here are the more interesting crosstabs. Let's focus on the latter. By the way, if you're searching for the question, it's POL18.

The question asked: Based on what you know, who received the most votes from the general population in the 2016 presidential election?

Overall, 28 percent of respondents said incorrectly that Trump won the popular vote and among Trump voters, 49 percent incorrectly said he received more votes. Men and women were about equally incorrect on this question. As you'd expect, education plays a role. Among the lowest education group, 31 percent said Trump won while in the highest education group, 21 percent said he received the most popular votes.