Mirabile Dictu

Mirabile dictu–this is Latin for “wonderful to relate, miraculous”. And those were the words that sprang into my head last week when listening to NPR’s All Things Considered on the way home.

Robert Siegel was interviewing Mark Blumenthal on the historical accuracy of pollsters as reported on his web site, www.pollster.com.

Siegel: “..a website that does for political polling what MLB.com does for baseball statistics. Let’s start with the national popular vote. It was 52% Obama 46% for McCain. Which pre-election day poll or couple of polls came the closest? “
Blumenthal: “Well, let me answer it two ways. If the margin ends up being six points, there were two national surveys that had that exactly right. The one from the Pew Research Center, on one extreme, a highly regarded traditional polling method and on the other extreme, the Rasmussen Reports automated survey.”
Siegel: “That is a robo poll, right?”
Blumenthal: “Some call a robo poll.”
…
Siegel: “What does it say if two of the very best polls getting it right in the end are, on the one hand, as you say, the Pew Research Center, a gold plated poll that we hear about very often on this program and on the other hand, the Rasmussen automated telephone surveys which people might look very skeptically at. Are there questions to be raised about methodology?”
…
Blumenthal: “I think it says that we have been maybe a little too hard on the researchers that don’t use a live interviewer. I think that the automated surveys have proved themselves to give us as good a picture of the horse race at the end as those that use live interviewers.”

To hear the entire interview, follow this link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96670546

What an astonishing endorsement from a professional statistician—that an automated survey compares not only favorably, but is described as being as accurate as a live survey!

At MTI, we have seen a lot of positive response to virtual agents, virtual nurses, and even virtual fund raisers. But this is the first time that I have heard a “civilian” tout the evidence that we have seen in our analysis: in the right circumstances, virtual is as good as real.

It makes a designer proud.

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