Times Picayune Poll with the Actual Election Data

Times Picayune Poll with the Actual Election Data Submission Guidelines: You may work in groups of 2-3 for this assignment, but groups should be no more than 3 people. You may also work on your own if you choose.

Times Picayune Poll with the Actual Election Data
Times Picayune Poll with the Actual Election Data

To receive full credit, this written assignment must be at least three pages long. It must be typed, double spaced, and written in 12 points or smaller font. All margins should be one inch. You must submit an electronic copy on Canvas by the beginning of class on the due date. You do not need to hand in a hard copy. I will not accept late essays for any reason. If you have not submitted an electronic copy by the beginning of class on the due date, you will earn 0 points for this assignment.

Times Picayune Poll with the Actual Election Data References

You must include a works-cited section at the end of your essay. Any standard works cited format is fine. If you choose to work on your own, you may still discuss the assignment with others in the class, but you should add a note at the end of the paper indicating whom you spoke with. If you work in groups, you should each turn in an electronic copy of the assignment into Canvas, but each group member should include a brief summary of what they and their group members contributed to the assignment. You may decide how you want to split up the work, but each group member should contribute equally. If a group member contributes little to no work, then this will be considered plagiarism, since they are taking ownership of someone else’s writing. You must produce at least three pages of your own content; in other words, quotations and the works-cited do not count towards the page limit.

One of the major uses of normal distributions which we didn’t cover in full detail is predictive polling. For politics in particular, predictive polling presents a proportion of the population’s perspectives which pundits produce as proof of a politician’s popularity. (And with that potpourri of “p”s to punctuate the point, we can progress with the prompt.)For example, during the 2016 US presidential election, Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com used data from1106 national polls to try and predict the results of the election. The last of these polls, conducted by The Times-Picayune week before the election, estimated that

  • 45% of votes would go to Hillary Clinton

,•40% of votes would go to Donald Trump, and

  • 5% of votes would go to Gary Johnson.

Times Picayune Poll with the Actual Election Data Written Assignment #2 Instructions MATH 203 SPRING 2019

Grading: This essay will be graded out of 25 points, primarily on mathematical correctness and quality of presentation and discussion, with content, grammar, punctuation, and style all being considered. A rubric for this assignment can be found on Canvas.

Submission Guidelines: You may work in groups of 2-3 for this assignment, but groups should be no more than 3 people. You may also work on your own if you choose. To receive full credit, this written assignment must be at least three pages long. It must be typed, double spaced, and written in 12 points or smaller font. All margins should be one inch. You must submit an electronic copy on Canvas by the beginning of class on the due date. You do not need to hand in a hard copy. I will not accept late essays for any reason. If you have not submitted an electronic copy by the beginning of class on the due date, you will earn 0 points for this assignment.

References: You must include a works-cited section at the end of your essay. Any standard works cited format is fine. If you choose to work on your own, you may still discuss the assignment with others in the class, but you should add a note at the end of the paper indicating whom you spoke with.

If you work in groups, you should each turn in an electronic copy of the assignment into Canvas, but each group member should include a brief summary of what they and their group members contributed to the assignment. You may decide how you want to split up the work, but each group member should contribute equally. If a group member contributes little to no work, then this will be considered plagiarism, since they are taking ownership of someone else’s writing. You must produce at least three pages of your own content; in other words, quotations and the works-cited do not count towards the page limit.

Times Picayune Poll with the Actual Election Data Measuring “Close Enough”

One of the major uses of normal distributions which we didn’t cover in full detail is predictive polling.

For politics in particular, predictive polling presents a proportion of the population’s perspectives which pundits produce as proof of a politician’s popularity. (And with that potpourri of “p”s to punctuate the point, we can progress with the prompt.)

For example, during the 2016 US presidential election, Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com used data from 1106 national polls to try and predict the results of the election. The last of these polls, conducted by The

Times-Picayune a week before the election, estimated that

  • 45% of votes would go to Hillary Clinton,
  • 40% of votes would go to Donald Trump, and
  • 5% of votes would go to Gary Johnson.

In the actual election, however, Clinton received 48% while Trump received 46%, a much smaller difference between the two. There are many things that can lead to inaccurate estimates, but we can address one —bad luck in our sample — using statistics.

You’ll be using two new pieces of math in this assignment: confidence intervals, and margins of error.

A confidence interval is a range of values that the actual outcome of an experiment is likely to fall into; for example, if a 95% confidence interval for the proportion of votes candidate A receives is from 49%

to 52%, then there is a 95% chance that candidate A will receive between 49% and 52% of the votes.

A margin of error is the difference between a population mean (that is, the actual percentage preferring a candidate in this case) and a sample mean (the percentage preferring that candidate in our poll)

Written Assignment #2 Instructions MATH 203 SPRING 2019 that corresponds to our confidence interval of choice. For example, if we have a 95% confidence interval,

52% of people in our poll prefer candidate A, and our margin of error is 3 percentage points, then our confidence interval is from 52 – 3 = 49% to 52 + 3 = 55%.

Your instructor will post a tutorial for calculating margin of error, which will be helpful for this assignment.

In this assignment, you will write about two polls: first, the poll from The Times-Picayune; and second, a poll from an election of your choice. You should discuss the margin of error in each poll and what it means in terms of the actual election. In particular, you should:

  • Explain confidence intervals and margins of error in your own words.
  • Calculate the 95% confidence interval and margin of error in The Times-Picayune’s poll, from the perspective of Donald Trump. (Note that the tutorial calculates this from Hillary Clinton’s perspective, so you will not use the same calculations.) Describe your calculations and results in the paper.
  • Briefly describe the 95% confidence interval and margin of error for the percentage of votes Clinton will receive based on The Times-Picayune.
  • Compare The Times-Picayune’s poll with the actual election data. If this poll was the only information you had about the election, would you be surprised by the outcome (taking only the popular vote into account, not the Electoral College).
  • Find some other poll of your choice and calculate the 95% confidence interval and margin of error for at least one of the candidates of the poll. If the election has already happened, analyze the results and how well the poll predicted the outcome. If the election hasn’t happened yet, describe some outcomes you think would be reasonable based on your calculations.
  • Include some thoughts on the 95% confidence interval. It’s possible to use other confidence intervals, such as 90% or 99%. Do you think the 95% confidence interval is reasonable for each of the polls you are discussing? Are there circumstances where you might expect to use a different interval?

As a general note, you should focus primarily on interpreting the math for this assignment, not on the politics.

The Intended Audience and Writing Style

The intended audience for your essay is someone who has a basic understanding of probability but not necessarily normal distributions, confidence intervals, or margins of error. Be sure to give context when addressing the questions in this assignment. The list of questions is intended to structure your discussion but should not be copied verbatim into your essay. Although you should clearly address them all, your paper should not be in question-and-answer format. Instead, the different components of the essay should be crafted in your own voice and style. Your essay should have an introduction and conclusion paragraph, and should be organized in a way that makes the essay flow and is easy for the reader to follow

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