#FF00FF 2012 – An FAQ for the 2012 US Presidential Election by Peter Norvig.
From the webpage:
This is an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for the 2012 United States Presidential Election. I need to disclose up front that I support President Obama. However, with the exception of the very last question, this FAQ is designed as a collection of factual information (such as the latest poll results) and of analysis that is as objective as possible. Why did I do this? To educate interested readers. My ambitions are not as grandiose as Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium, who wrote ” When I started doing the Meta-Analysis of State Polls in 2004, I thought it would be a useful tool to get rid of media noise about individual polls. … Space would be opened up for discussion of what really mattered in the campaign – or even discussion of policies. To my disappointment, this has not happened. Maybe it just takes time. Or perhaps polling nerds need to get a few more races right. Let’s see if we move the ball forward for Team Geek on Tuesday.”
Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google.
This being the election week in the United States, I thought it might be of general interest.
But I posted it for another reason as well. Even if you like the “presentation” of data in this document, is this the best way to store the data in this document?
If you instinctively say yes, how do I point to the line for Vermont in the State-by-State Forecasts table?
Surely if you are going to store data you had some notion of how to get parts of it out again. Yes? Or do I have to get the entire data store, this document, out again to find that information?
That sounds remarkably lame.
I am not questioning the use of a document to present information, +1! to that.
My question is the suitability of a document for storing data? Storage implying some means of retrieval.