Search The Measurement Standard
So I'm reading a NY Times article just now about American Idol voting-by-telephone, and about how sometimes voters misdial their calls. The bulk of the article is about the various hapless people who have phone numbers similar to the American Idol number.
And I was thinking that this sort of voting is a very direct variety of measurement, and I'm wondering what it says about the process that some amount of the measurement is in error. Any research or data collection or measurement has some error associated with it, and the misdialed calls could be a way to develop a "margin of error" for American Idol.
Thought about in this light, the final paragraph of the article is very interesting:
"In the 2003 finale 130,000 votes separated the winner, Ruben Studdard, from the runner-up, Clay Aiken. Days later a Midwest phone company said it had received 240,000 misdialed calls during voting."
Does this mean that Studdard and Aiken were not really separated by enough votes to count? (And, hey, I'm not really a big Idol fan, so if this is a way old news controversy that I'm clueless about, please let me know.) --Bill Paarlberg
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