Cheating at UGA

Here's the tweet, and then the headline, from our local paper's story on cheating at UGA:

Cheating stats on the rise at #UGA https://t.co/YJpOklNLpj pic.twitter.com/fFuu1tByvs

— Athens Banner-Herald (@onlineathens) October 21, 2015

Let's put this into perspective.

These data are a measure of students caught cheating, not of how much cheating is going on at the UGA campus. You get weird blips in the data, like a bunch of students in one chem lab who cheated on the same assignment and got caught -- thus inflating the numbers.

The ABH's story kinda admits this -- in graf #5.

The one-year increase may not be quite as dramatic as it appears. More than 100 of the cases appear to come from a fall semester 2014 management information systems class in UGA’s Terry College of Business.

In other words, it's not unlike the rape story last week reported by both The Red & Black and, in a follow-up, the ABH, that noted the rise in reported rapes from six to 71. In both stories, the explanation was buried several grafs below -- the measurement system changed. Sigh.

Don't get me wrong. Students cheat at UGA, far more than are caught, but the "caught" numbers signify only that, how many were caught, not how much cheating is taking place. Has cheating increased? Find a good way to measure that and then get back to me.

Note: You can find various academic honesty reports here. Haven't found the one referenced in the news story yet. The paper should link to such stuff. That's how it's done on the InterWebs, folks.

Who Is UGA's New VP of Marketing and Communications?

UGA has announced it's new VP of (sorry, but it's their title) Marketing and Communications. So who is Karri Hobson-Pape? You can read the official press release here, but I had a few minutes to kill so I did a quick-and-dirty check on her.

Here's her Pinterest page. Not a lot of pinning going on here. Her Facebook page is equally as interesting. And Twitter, that powerful marketing and communications tool? There are two possibilities.

Here's one. It's the most likely.

Here's the other.

Neither bode well for a marketing expert. The more likely of the two has no tweets. None. Zero. In marketing and communications.

But don't worry. She's on MySpace.

Yeah, I feel a lot better now.

Basically it seems she's created lots of accounts on every possible social media outlet, and done little or nothing with any of them. Then again, that's why you have interns. And here's my favorite (so far). She's mentioned in a book entitled Supercharge Your Social Media Strategies. I'll just let that one slide. Too easy. And in fairness, she has a much fuller LinkedIn page, which makes sense in the business world.

So what's a VP of Marketing and Communications pay? No idea of her salary. Her predecessor, Tom Jackson, made $187,761, but Jackson was here forever. Then again, she's coming out of the private sector, so there's no way to say. What's more interesting is how the communications folks will change, if at all, with a "marketing" theme to the department. It's a more modern, which isn't necessarily better, approach to pushing the University's message. We'll see.

Not so Libertarian after all

In the 2012 election, Clarke County (where I live, in Georgia) ranked #1 among all 159 counties in the percentage of votes for a Libertarian candidate (2.4 percent). The second highest was at 2 percent.

My how times change.

In the 2014 election, Clarke County ranked only in a tie for 67th place with 2.4 percent of all votes cast being cast for a Libertarian candidate. Essentially the same percentage as in 2012, but everyone else moved up. Tops was Whitfield County at 4.6 percent.

What do we make of this? Nothing, really. We're talking a handful of percentage points, a semi-random bit of data, but I do admit I'm surprised to see Clarke tumble so far down the list in the 2014 data. Whitfield, for example, was tied for 44th in 2012, so clearly some local aspect to the elections can affect this.

Gallup Away

If you're into polling, read this summary of Gallup getting out of the "horserace poll" business. Fascinating stuff, especially the comments from other pollsters.

Been Around a While

I started this blog in May 2007, so it's been around a while. It's original mission was to focus on research about media and politics but over the years it's morphed into commentary about current events, media coverage, polls, and criticism of journalism. It's also played a minor supporting role in a student newspaper walkout and earned me criticism from that very same student newspaper. Heh, maybe I'll sit out the next student walkout. My response to their response, here.

See the graphic below for the most popular posts, at least in terms of traffic.

Dominating the list is stuff about the Great R&B Walkout, which also resulted in me being interviewed supporting the students in various national media outlets. It was an odd time as many faculty either sat it out or were more quiet in their student support.

I'm rarely quiet. Plus I have the advantage of rank (full professor) and tenure.

Some of the others below have other explanations. The fourth and fifth place ones are about popular areas of research, so a lot of scholars end up here reading the material, or at least scoffing at it. Then there's one about a local gag order I bitched about, and then yet more R&B stuff.  On a normal day I'm read by ones of people, maybe tens of people. So check it out below.

I've written a total of 1,625 posts (counting this one) from May 2007 to Oct. 7, 2015, when I posted this one. I want to hit 2,000 before I hit the 10-year mark. I figure the election year will help.

I've also blogged good story ideas that are often, eventually, picked up by student or local media. And sometimes I reveal the innards of Grady's politics, but not as often as I'd like.

Poll Support x Twitter Followers

In the GOP race we all know Trump is ahead (though perhaps slipping), so I decided to examine all the candidates by their national poll numbers and number of Twitter followers. First off, there is a high correlation between the two (r = .80), in large part thanks to Trump's lead in both polls and Twitter followers. Still, remove Trump and the correlation is still .71, so we got something here.

See the scatterplot below. Yeah, that's Trump all alone in the top right corner. If we drew a regression line here, it'd be running up from 0,0 to Trumpland, a nice linear fit. As I tell my students over and over, however, correlation is not causality. You cannot argue lots of Trump followers equals poll popularity, nor the other way around.

Raw data is below.

	Poll	Twitter
Bush	8.3	326,000
Carson	17.3	705,000
Christie	2.6	55,600
Cruz	6.1	519,000
Fiorina	11	581,000
Graham	0.3	27,800
Huckabee	2.8	411,000
Jindal	0.5	20,900
Kasich	3.1	111,000
Pataki	0.3	54,600
Paul	2.4	693,000
Rubio	9.5	888,000
Santorum	0.4	245,000
Trump	22.8	4,036,000

Millage Rates

I teach journalism, but I'm also a bit of a nerd when it comes to statistics, math, and especially public opinion polls. Today let's look at an "explainer" produced by our Newsource students down stairs. You can watch it here for context. Go ahead. It's fast. Then come back. Oh, and I love the clever bit about what's a millage rate? It's not Milledge Avenue. Nice job on that.




OK, done? Good.

At the 1:27 point we get to my point. Here's a screenshot:

So what's the problem? Not the math. The issue is the "If your assessed property value is $100,000 ..."

That's not quite how it works. Here's a nice, simple description, but I'll save you the visit off site and summarize it for you.

1. You have the assessed value of your home. In our example above, $100,000.
2. You then take 40 percent of that value.
3. And then you remove various exemptions, like homestead exemption. Let's say $10,000
4. This gives you the taxable value.

So in the example above, a $100,000 assessed value would become a tax on $30,000. So instead of a $1,913.10 tax bill, you'd see more like a $765.24.

How'd I catch this? I own a home in Clarke County -- with higher taxes than Jackson -- assessed at more than $100k, and I know my tax bill is below $1,913.

So there's commercial value, assessed value, and taxable value.