Fixations

The cable-television news station CNN has an explanation for all those people examining the way in which the 2004 presidential election was conducted, and looking at discrepancies in the counting of votes: apparently, academia is "fixated on November 2."

What they are talking about is research reports from MIT, Cal Tech and Berkeley in which statistical methods are applied to the vote count to calculate the effect of technologies such as those fascinating Diebold machines on the election results.

So why describe it in psychological language? Unless they want to make the case that a concern as to whether elections are free and fair is really just a sign of needing therapy.

[Full disclosure: Many years ago, I took a statistics course from Michael Hout, who is the main author of the Berkeley report. He's a nice fellow.]