Now this is heroic data analysis

Speaking of old pictures of Titan, this group was able to pick out a piece of "Xanadu" and the dark loop just east of "Dragon's Head" by processing the hell out of the featureless-looking Voyager 1 visible light images.

Varieties of bias

Eugene "Professor Pollkatz" Thiel recently discovered something that surprised him, and may surprise you too:

Pollingreport.com posts several "approval" polls from Bill Clinton's second term. I used this data to construct a "Clinton Index," similar to my Bush Index. To my wonder and amazement, I discovered that the rankings of the individual pollsters were not much different: Fox and Zogby at the extremes, everybody else clustered around one or two points. Most important, none of the ten pollsters in the database exhibited a significant, or even conspicuous, swing from Clinton low to Bush high (or vice versa). I'm convinced. The pollsters are honest, or at least deserving of the benefit of a doubt.

Like Thiel, I figured that Fox News, which in other ways is pretty much a Republican Party propaganda organ, probably was doing something deliberate to produce the undeniably real systematic separation between their poll results and most others. But this finding suggests that it's a simple result of differences in polling methods that have the same result whether a Republican or a Democrat is president. It's still prudent to keep these systematic differences in mind, especially when trying to plot trends, but they're probably unintentional.

I'd say it also speaks against Ruy Texeira's party ID weighting hypothesis, since Democrats also had a significant though dwindling advantage in party identification during the Clinton years.

Many innocent things could produce such a systematic bias, such as the wording and order of questions. The negative bias in Zogby's job-approval polls is often blamed on the fact that they ask people to rate performance as "excellent/good/fair/poor", and the latter two categories are usually ranked as disapproval. But, then again, Harris does something similar and is closer to the mean of other polls, so it might be something else.