The American Presidency Project
by Billy Joe Mills • Jun 1st, 2007 at 8:19 am • 7 comments
Today I ran across an interesting and comprehensive site: The American Presidency Project.
It contains data, documents, polls and virtually any resource needed to satiate your lust for information on the American Presidents.
One of the more interesting pages tracks Presidential approval ratings through their term. Note that Truman’s popularity was at times lower than GW Bush’s, yet surveys of scholars rank Truman as the 7th all-time greatest president. At the moment, it’s hard to imagine Bush being similarly revitalized, but Truman proves that it’s possible.
If any of you faithful readers have an interesting, data-filled or informative site to share, please do so under this thread.
Comment by tet on 1 June 2007 at 8:33 am:
OMFG, what a wonderful site.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Tom
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 1 June 2007 at 8:39 am:
hahahaha, Tom is that the first time you’ve ever been sincere in your life…or is that more sarcasm?
Either way, you’re welcome.
Comment by tet on 1 June 2007 at 8:56 am:
Nope, real enthusiam, Billy Joe. Raw data is like finding sourdough yeast that you can mold into the finest bread possible. Yum.
Sites I use on a monthly or more basis:
Death tolls, with rated sources, for many historical wars:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatx.htm
Early Christian writings, including the New Testament, apocrypha and Church Fathers:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/
International Dialects of English (useful when tracing cultural influences on history):
http://web.ku.edu/idea/index.htm
Celestia–best freeware planetarium software available:
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
Predictions Market from StrategyPage (a market in which real investors invest play-money on possible events and the resulting “Darwinian evolution” makes their predictions more and more valuable over the next couple decades.) They’re up to about 90% accuracy now:
http://tinyurl.com/jyh8n
Site with comparative versions of the Christian Bible available with search function:
http://www.biblegateway.com/
Altavista’s Babelfish translation software–often shoddy, but sometimes enough to give you a bit of an idea what someone has written if you don’t have time to get a native speaker….
http://babel.altavista.com/tr
Online Etymology Dictionary for word origins:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=a
The Inflation Calculator:
http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
Fallacies:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
Warfare timeline for last 5000 years:
http://www.warscholar.com/Timeline.html
Tom
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 1 June 2007 at 11:44 am:
“Predictions Market from StrategyPage (a market in which real investors invest play-money on possible events and the resulting “Darwinian evolution” makes their predictions more and more valuable over the next couple decades.) They’re up to about 90% accuracy now.”
This statistical method is actually a fallacy. Mutual Funds, when presenting data on the past performance of their funds, use the same little trick. They essentially bury any funds or fund managers who perform poorly, so then their statistics say that, for example, “98% of our funds outperformed the S&P 500″ (In reality about 70% of fund managers underperform the S&P 500). But in fact, if you started off with 100 people making predictions, but then eliminated the ones who performed poorly, you would be left with seemingly successful predictors. However, it is impossible to tell who among the “survivors” is genuinely skilled at making predictions and who has simply been lucky thusfar (not a word, Kofi) in the game. Since it is impossible to make that distinction, any future predictions becomes worthless.
I didn’t describe this concept too well, but hopefully I’ve sufficiently raised it…I think it’s an interesting statistical trap.
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 1 June 2007 at 11:58 am:
oh…but I could also be completely wrong about my understanding of that StrategyPage…which would render my entire comment moot, or as Kofi prefers, mute.
Comment by tet on 1 June 2007 at 11:58 am:
Well, I can understand that short-term, Billy Joe–you’re right. However, can it be reasonably expected that anyone could be that lucky for ten or twenty years?
I mean, hell, if there were no practical explanations for the success in this case but luck, I’d begin from empirical data to start believing in precognition.
In addition, unlike the markets, where (as Mark Buchanan explained and the numbers for the last 80 years show) the absolute value of stock changes follow a power law at all scales, the people involved in the political futures market here can actually examine the factors causing the change.
Can you explain to me why the luck factor would not eventually be factored out? After all, the current success rate is much better than the 50% one would expect from pure luck.
Take a look at the past questions on the market. There are a lot of them that seemed like a complete toss-up to me–little or no bias.
I don’t have any stake in this being right or wrong. Jim Dunnigan is one of the few people that I’ve ever known who actually predicted the fall of the Soviet Union within a decade and successfully explained why (and did it in 1982, in an earlier edition of his 1991’s Quick and Dirty Guide to War.)
This means that he sees a bit further into the possible futures than the average guy you meet on the street. I admire him from his past performance and in-depth analysis.
Tell ya what–watch the site for a year or two and then tell me what you think. The luck factor has to be allowed for, of course, but sooner or later everyone’s luck runs out.
Tom
Comment by tet on 1 June 2007 at 12:09 pm:
Ah, the methodology of the Futures Market?
You start out with 1000 imaginary dollars when you buy in.
You buy a certain number of futures, either pro or con at the market value. The cost of a future depends on how many shares have already been sold of that type. If half the people involved believe in a given answer, the two share values would be identical. Once you buy either a pro or con, you can only buy further shares of the same type.
At the maturity date of the prediction, you get the final value of the share back into your account. This means you can make a lot of money by backing unpopular results that pay off. You can also play it safe by investing a lot of money in “sure-things”.
When you run out of play money, you’re out of the game. This weeds out the dumbasses (or the unlucky.) Unfortunately, it’s now closed to the general public, since the beta is about over, so you can’t join in.
Tom