Three major polling houses published their polls this week: MDA, Ibope, and Vox Populi. The following numbers incorporate these data. With current data, a runoff between Dilma and Marina seems to be inevitable (.87), though its certainty has decreased from the previous week as the following chart indicates. How to understand ... [Read more...]

Tweet Yesterday, more Scots than ever since universal suffrage was introduced cast a ballot on the matter of independence. The turnout was itself phenomenal and that implicating a series of questions for the government authorities and citizens, but for the time being the sole question was: would this benefit one ... [Read more...]

Just few hours before Scots head to the polls, there is not an overwhelming advantage of the anti-independence vote. Actually, the margin is shorter than last time I looked at it, but despite such a growing trend in favor of the "Yes" campaign in the last weeks, the "NO" side ... [Read more...]

The following figure shows the probability distributions of vote intentions for the main candidates after distributing the stock of undecided voters. As Marina (PSB) is getting back to her track, a question that comes to light is whether Dilma will get more votes than the sum of the others, and ... [Read more...]

It’s more difficult than ever to tell who is going to continue in the runoff after the October 5th. After Marina’s campaign mate’s death, a big chunk of the electorate have been persuaded towards the alternative between PT and PSDB. The values I used to start the ... [Read more...]

“For things to remain the same, everything must change.” (Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa) In less than a month, Scots will decide if they want Scotland tied or apart of UK. Over the last days, I’ve noticed a variety of projections in the British press about this, but ... [Read more...]

I’m finalizing a paper presentation for the ABCP meeting, where I explore poor polling forecast in local elections in Brazil. I drew upon the Jackman (2005)’s paper “Pooling the Polls” to explore a bit about “house effects” in the Brazilian context. However, during the analysis I found myself extending ... [Read more...]

Roughly a year ago I published an article about parallel computing in R here, in which I compared computation performance among 4 packages that provide R with parallel features once R is essentially a single-thread task package. Parallel computing is incredibly useful, but not every thing worths distribute across as many ... [Read more...]

If you believe in supernatural causality, you will love what the numbers of the World Cup have to say which team is going to win this Cup in Brazil. According to this numerology approach neither Brazil nor Germany or Netherlands will be the winner, but Uruguay. The table below shows ... [Read more...]

I started writing in Portuguese (á, é, í, ó, ú, ç, etc.) inside R for MAC, but I receive some encoding issues, so I managed to fix it at once by simply typing the following command in the terminal: defaults write org.R-project.R force.LANG en_US.UTF-8 [Read more...]

In my last post, I was telling about the Brazilian influential incentives for parties to coalesce based on the share of TV advertising a party holds. I just played around with those data I have gathered to produce the following chart. It's not colors-representative of the parties, which would take ... [Read more...]

Election is coming soon in Brazil and this is told to be The Election for both the ruling party and the opposition. However, I don't believe to see any surprise in the reelection plans of the incumbent president, Dilma Rousseff, though all past demonstrations, poorly on economic scorecard, and the ... [Read more...]