Well, that was something. Somehow, though, the rental service managed to give me the wrong color hood (white instead of dark blue)... a problem rectified after the ceremony by swapping hoods with someone who didn’t plan on attending the commencement exercises in the morning.

Plus, I got to catch up with a couple of people I’d met in other departments along the way who finished this past year. And, I learned that Brock missed out on getting the coolest looking regalia on display by far ☺.

Josh Chafetz asks the $64,000 question in American public opinion polling:

[W]hat, exactly, is the point of continually doing nationwide polls when all that matters are the states? I mean, I know nationwide polls are a lot cheaper, but just making up the results would be cheaper still, and only marginally more relevant.

Well, I don’t know that nationwide polling is truly irrelevant; the state-level poll results would be close to a simple linear function of the national polling number, although the effects of campaign advertising—concentrated in the “battleground states”—will cause divergence from linearity.

But due to statistical theory, and the closeness of presidential elections, you’d have to survey a lot more people to get accurate state-level data… realistically, a sample less than 500 per state is useless, which means polling 25,500 people (including D.C.) per survey—and you’re still getting a sampling error of ±4.5% per state. So the best that you can do is pretty much what’s done in practice—you do national surveys augmented by state-level surveys in states that are a priori believed to be close.