Wednesday, 28 November 2012
Today in Toastmasters, I was called up to give a speech during the Table Topics portion of the meeting. In case you don’t know, Table Topics is the part of the meeting, lasting about ten minutes, where someone gets up with their prepared list or bag of options and calls on people to speak on a certain subject. The speeches are impromptu, but they only have to last a minute. While part of me thinks I really shouldn’t have any trouble speaking for a mere 60 seconds, it’s really is tough to speak on a topic that someone else selects for you.
The Table Topics master today selected the topic of Thanksgiving. i was the first person called up – and I knew I would be the first one called up as I had no roles in today’s meeting – and my question was something like: “What dishes can people make with their leftover Thanksgiving food?”
Man, I had no idea. I pretty much just said to make a sandwich with your turkey or just reheat stuff.
The next person had to answer the question of how they participated in Black Friday, and I would have had something to say about that. That seems to happen to me a lot, where I get a question completely out of my league, and then the other questions all seem like things I could speak about for 5 minutes.
Thursday, 29 November 2012
Here’s an interesting article about how well pollsters did in predicting the Presidential election results: CLICK HERE.
I heard a lot about polls having a Democratic, or liberal, bias. That is, they were overestimating the percentage by which Obama would win. To me, this seems like a dangerous thing to do. First, if your overestimation is too high, then you’ll look inaccurate in retrospect. Say you were reporting that a candidate would win by 10%, and then he only won by 5%…that’d be a 5% difference and not reflect very well on your techniques.
A more serious problem might be that if voters think their candidate is ahead by an even more comfortable margin than he really is, they might not go vote, figuring their vote isn’t really needed.
As you can read in that article….
…all the comments from right-wing pundits that the pollsters were biased toward Obama were nonsense. Of the 14 major pollsters in our study, 11 had a Republican bias. Only three small pollsters had a Democratic bias.
Friday, 30 November 2012
I’ve now reached the point in the semester where there’s a lot of work to do, and a short time to get it done. It’s feeling overwhelming.
Specifically, I have an 8-10 page paper due on December 19th. While that is a while from now, I need to have the draft ready to turn in on December 4th (this coming Tuesday). Also, a week after that, I need to deliver a presentation based on my paper.
So, today, I stole as many minutes as I could working on the paper. My whole lunch break, for one thing, and several small gaps of “down time.” This evening, I gave a concerted effort to work on the thing, but I didn’t get much accomplished. My hope is to dedicate an hour or so to it both days this coming weekend. Wish me luck!