Is online polling now more accurate than the old fashioned land line telephone poll?

To read an interesting article in the March, 2013 issue of the Atlantic Monthly entitled "A More Perfect Poll" click here.http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/a-more-perfect-poll/309219/

Here is part of what is written in the article:

"When it came to the general election, online-poll results were quite a bit more accurate, on average, than their offline competitors. When Silver compared polls in the final weeks of the presidential campaign with the outcome, Internet polls had an average error of 2.1 points, while telephone polls by live interviewers had an average error of 3.5 points. Might the polling traditionalists finally come around?"

The Brockporter polls make no claim to scientific accuracy. They merely make a snap shot of what The Brockporter readers' views are. How representative the Brockporter readers are of the general Brockport area population has not been determined.

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Weekly poll

A new feature of The Brockporter Online News Magazine will be a weekly poll. Polls will last one week from Sunday through Saturday night at 11:59 PM. The  poll question appears in the right hand column of the front page of the site. This week's poll has to do with a question of whether you would vote for Mayor Castaneda if she were to run for a third term?

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Frack Free Genesee to present at Clarkson Historical Society, Wednesday, March 6th, 7:00 PM

Editor's note: Bob Thompson and his group from Frack Free Genesee presented at the Brockport Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at the Historic Garland Church on Sunday, January 10th, 2013 and did an excellent job. It is very informative presentation which coves multiple perspectives on the topic. I highly recommend this presentation.

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Reading the minutes - Trustee Blackman cleans up parking ticket mess

From the Brockport Village board meeting minutes of 01/08/13:

Parking Tickets - Trustee Blackman shared that she had a phone conversation with Dennis Farrell of FBS, the company recently contracted to assist with enhancing collection of Village parking ticket fines. The Village of Brockport and the Town of Sweden each approved and signed off on the MOU and FBS turned it over to NYS DMV. FBS is awaiting a secure password to be able to access DMV. This has been a slow moving process, but we are getting closer and closer to implementation. 

Editor's note: Brockport's parking tickets have been very poorly managed by the Town of Sweden justice courts. In 2012 boxes of park tickets were lost from the Town of Sweden offices. The poor management of pursuing offenders who have not paid their parking tickets has been a source of contention between the Village and the Town. It is reassuring to read that Trustee Blackman has designed a plan to better manage the adjudication of parking tickets and is implementing it.

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The Brockporter Book Review Of The Week - Life After Death by Damien Echols

by Monica Beck

In Life After Death Damien Echols writes an account of his life as a boy growing up in Arkansas during the 1970’s. Raised in a dysfunctional family in debilitating poverty.  The house he grew up in was so cold that the water in the toilet would freeze.  With his background it’s amazing that he never got into much trouble.  Since he wasn’t an avid student and received little encouragement from home, he didn’t graduate from high school.  He wasn’t an average teenager, and at the age of 18, he and his three friends were charged and convicted of the murder of three young boys.  Law enforcement decided the murders were related to some sort of a Satanist ritual because bite marks were found on the bodies (years later forensics decided the bites were due to animal predation). 

Unfortunately for Echols, he fit their profile to a tee.  While in his teens, he wore black almost exclusively, listened to heavy metal, and therefore was considered the ring leader of the group.  For this reason he was the only one to receive the death penalty.  All three were considered social outcasts, and poor as well, making them perfect prey for backwoods justice.  The courts had little definitive evidence in the case, but nevertheless all three were railroaded and convicted of murder.  For more information about the case, labeled by the media the West Memphis Three, you can see several HBO documentaries made about them.  Media attention including celebrity support by Johnny Depp, Harry Rollins and Eddie Vedder helped to popularize their cause which eventually led to their release.  The latest documentary, produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Fran Walsh, was aired at the Sundance and Toronto film festivals this year.  It’s titled West of Memphis see http://www.sonyclassics.com/westofmemphis/   

The book begins as an auto-biographical look at Echols’ life from birth till the age of 18 when his legal troubles began.  The second half of the book is written like a journal with regular entries.  When all he could see from his tiny concrete cell was death, despair, and insanity he decided that he could no longer abide in a state of ‘hope’.  Like Henry Miller asserts in The Cosmological Eye: “Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you.”  Echols embraced this attitude and learned how to survive and even thrive on Death Row, intellectually and spiritually for many years, creating an identity for himself.  Minus the illusion of hope, he spent his days and nights transcending the abysmal environment he was trapped in.  He is an inspiration to all.

However, towards the end of his time on Death Row his tone changes.  Desperation oozes out of the text.  After 18 years on death row, and 19 birthdays, fatigue was setting in.  Who wouldn’t become despondent under these conditions?  In 2011 he and the West Memphis Three were released, but not exonerated.  Echols is a free man today.  He lives with his wife in the northeast.  Echols’ well written narrative will keep your attention.  It is a testament to the strength of the human spirit against all odds, and includes a scathing look at how law enforcement, the corrections system, and the legal system in this country are twisted and in need of serious overhaul.

 Editor's note: Life After Death is available at the Lift Bridge Book Shop at 45 Main St. in Brockport, NY and on The Brockporter Amazon Book Carousel in the right hand column. The Brockporter book of the week is a regular feature of the Brockporter Online News Magazine which appears most Fridays. If you have a book review you would like published as part of this feature please send it to davidgmarkham@gmail.com.

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The Brockporter Thought For The Day - Thank penicillin for the sexual revolution

From The Week, 02/22/13:

Americans should stop thanking—or blaming—the birth-control pill for ushering in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. New research suggests it was actually the use of penicillin to treat syphilis that opened a new era of promiscuity, which started a decade earlier than previously thought. In studying data about sexually transmitted diseases, Emory University economist Andrew Francis noticed that gonorrhea infections began soaring in the early 1950s, years before the birth-control pill went on the market, in 1960. He then found that teen pregnancies and extramarital births also rose steeply in that decade. What was prompting the behavior change? Doctors began using penicillin to treat syphilis in the mid-1940s; up to then, fear of the disease loomed almost as large as AIDS did in 1990, because it could be fatal. Penicillin cut infection rates by 95 percent. And as soon as that danger was removed, Francis says, there was a lot of extramarital sex going on in the backseats of lots of finned cars.

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Chinese third graders are falling behind U.S. higher schoolers in Math and Science.

Chinese third graders are falling behind U.S. higher schoolers in Math and Science. For more, click here.

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