Blogging the election/1

Maurizio Pessato, CEO of SWG, introducing the job

Creating, analyzing and publishing polls has become more difficult in these last years, due to growing attention – and, therefore, pressure: just think of how many times, during the last weeks, we scanned the home page of online newspapers, looking for results of the latest poll, compared them with the ones we read a few days before, wondered about the impact of minimal differences in the way questions were asked and so on.

But, as attention is higher and tools are more sophisticated, the more we ("the public", but media operators as well) should be educated about understanding how statistics work.

Whoa, I’m already wondering about education opportunities in this. Information design, the quest for a way to graphically represent complex relations between numbers, series, proportions – and, most of all, margins of errors…

UPDATE – I’m liveblogging the event here.