Brother, can you spare a sec to help a boy with his science fair project? (Pimping a poll.)

[liz_marcs]

H/T to ponders_life.

szandara's son is doing a survey on how different age groups use the Internet over at his brand-spankin' new LJ son_of_a_mother. It's part of his science fair project. He's testing the hypothesis that different age groups interact with the Internet in different ways.

This is a very timely science fair project given the current U.S. national fight over net neutrality that could potentially close off large swarths of the Web and Internet to the average U.S. citizen.

PublicKnowlege has an excellent flash animation that succinctly explains the issue and what we all stand to lose if the telecoms begin reserving the right to wall off their section of the Internet here.

It's an issue that's got the most right-wing and left-wing blogs out there actually working together to stop the attempt. Nothing like a common enemy to bring people together, says I.

Go and fill out son_of_a_mother's LJ survey and help a kid with his science project today. A few moments of your time could result in big karma.

Comments

[midnightsjane.livejournal.com]

Done. Always happy to help a kid do his homework.

[eve11]

Done and pimped to my flist. With this kind of propagation his results might be biased toward the null hypothesis, though. Despite age, people that interact with me on lj might be more likely to use the internet the same way I do. [/statnerd]

[szandara.livejournal.com]

Hi, thanks for filling out my son's poll and pimping it.

After we posted it, I figured out that the sample would be skewed because only logged-on LJ users can respond. So it's really looking at "how bloggers use the internet." But for his purposes, he's gathering data that he can then chart and analyze and present. I do plan to talk to him about sampling methods and why this site is not giving him a truly representative sample, and make him write a paragraph about it for his final report.

As long as he learns something, we're good.

Mother-of-a-Son, and Not a statnerd!

[eve11]

Mother-of-a-Son, and Not a statnerd!

Wow, you could've fooled me! Seriously, most students don't learn that kind of statistics until they get to college -- the idea of sampling frames and bias and sampling methods; it's such a simple concept, but because it's so hard to deal with it is often ignored. That you and he are mentioning it at all puts him above most of the students in our incoming statistics 101 classes here :)

[szandara.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I know just enough to know how much I don't know. I don't know enough to put together a truly good survey, but I know enough to recognize a bad one when I see (or create) it.

I'm figuring he can chart the data he gets, while still understanding that he's only getting responses from a self-selecting, non-representative group.