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WSJ.com: The Numbers Guy

Carl Bialik examines the way numbers are used, and abused.

Split Decision for Biden v. PalinToday

Before either of the two major-party vice-presidential candidates had answered a question in the debate last Thursday, Republican Sarah Palin was leading Democrat Joe Biden, 1-0, on two CNN analysts’ scorecards, which are being displayed to HD viewers during this election’s debates. “I gave Gov. Palin a plus for asking Biden, ‘May I call ya Joe?’ ” Democratic strategist Paul Begala told me, via a CNN spokeswoman, about the pre-debate meet-and-greet on stage. “We now know that was to set up her ‘Say It Ain’t So, Joe’ zinger, but what the heck — it was a smart move.”

David Bohrman, executive producer of CNN’s election programming, had the idea for the scorecards, which I wrote about after the first presidential debate. And he approved of the early scoring by Begala and Republican strategist Ed Rollins. “That seemed like a pretty straightforward reason to go ahead and give her a plus,” Bohrman told me. “It made sense to me.”

The CNN analysts are still getting the hang of the scoring system. Rollins, who was scoring the debate for the first time, during one response gave Palin nearly a half-dozen pluses — nearly as many as she received from Begala

The Wisdom of Political CrowdsToday

In a national Gallup poll conducted over the weekend, Barack Obama led John McCain by eight percentage points. The seven-day rolling average of predictions from the Iowa Electronic Markets corresponds with a seven-point Obama lead. However, Utah Valley University researchers recently released a quantitative model, based on polls and historical voting patterns, predicting a narrower victory for Obama, by 3.6 percentage points. And a new poll by a Democratic polling firm called Democracy Corps gives Obama a lead of three percentage points.

Faced with conflicting data from a wide variety of sources, one election-forecasting Web site co-founded by a Wharton forecasting specialist, PollyVote, simply averages all the available numbers. The latest reading from PollyVote is that Obama leads by 4.4 percentage points. The same technique predicted in 2004 that George W. Bush would win 51.5% of all two-party votes; his actual

Is Internet Search Really Declining?October 3

The rapid growth in search, as an Internet activity and as a medium for advertising, has fueled Google Inc.’s evolution to a company with a market capitalization of nearly $130 billion. So it was surprising to see a press release from Nielsen Online last week claiming that the number of Internet searches in the U.S. had declined by 7.7% in August from a year earlier. Numbers from other sources — and different numbers from Nielsen itself — show an increase instead, in another example of the fuzziness of online measurement.

According to Nielsen Online, Google’s searches increased by 3.1% in August from a year earlier, while Google’s competitors took a tumble: Yahoo Inc. by 16%, Microsoft Corp. by 24% and AOL by 14%. Last August, by contrast, Microsoft searches jumped 69.8% from a year earlier, and overall searches rose 31%.

Nielsen competitor comScore Inc. had very different numbers for August 2008: Overall searches increased by 20% from a year earlier, Google searches surged by 33%, Yahoo’s were flat, Microsoft’s fell by 12% and AOL’s rose by 14%.

To get a picture of overall Web activity, both Nielsen and comScore recruit Internet users to join their panels and submit to being tracked online. To measure audience size for popular Web sites, Nielsen uses a panel of nearly 30,0

The Day Stocks Rose but the Dow PlungedOctober 1

The Dow Jones Industrial Average’s plunge of 777.68 points Monday represented a 7% decline in the index, far from a record in percentage terms. But there is some confusion about which trading session did set the record for percentage decline.

Several sources point to December 12, 1914, when the New York Stock Exchange reopened after a four-and-a-half-month closure at the outset of World War I. Historical data show that the industrials closed at 54 that day, after having closed at 71.42 on July 30, the previous session. That’s a percentage decline of 24.39%, greater than runner-up Black Monday’s 22.61% in 1987. The 1914 drop topped a list on the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer two weeks ago and a similar list published in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on Tuesday. It gets top billing among biggest one-day declines on several Wikipedia

Monday’s Stock-Market Decline: For the RecordSeptember 30

When reporting on price changes in individual stocks, financial reporters generally include percentage drops, which is as it should be: A $2 drop in a $4 stock is very different from one in a $40 stock.

But many reports about Monday’s 777-point decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a composite of stock prices, called it a record decline. That’s true in absolute terms, but not in percentage points. The drop was 6.98%, which doesn’t even crack the 10 worst days, on a percentage basis, in the industrials’ history. The Dow dropped 508 points, or 22.6%, on Black Monday (Oct. 19, 1987). Those three one-day declines of 13%, 12% and 10% over 10 days in 1929? None of them were more than 39 points.

Monday was a very bad day on Wall Street, but not the worst ever in percentage terms. Readers scanning the front pages of many newspapers this morning wouldn’t know that, though, from all the references to record declines, with qualifiers about the percentage decline de-emphasized. That’s partly because records make for more-dramatic headlines, and partly because many papers rely for their financial coverage on the Associated Press, which