The Last Accurate Poll?

A recent study by the Pew Research Center confirmed what professional pollsters have known since 1997:  the traditional political poll, conducted by telephone, is becoming irrelevant.  In fact, the most accurate result to come from telephone surveys, is the statistics on the efficacy of telephone-based polls.  It turns out that less than 9% of people pollsters attempt to contact by phone actually participate in their surveys.

At Keirsey Research we first suspected the accuracy of telephone-based surveys 4 years ago when we noticed the wild fluctuation in the national polls during the 3 months prior to the November 2008 election.  The variance in these polls is now so great that pollsters have taken to running “polls of polls” – that is, they average all the different polls hoping to get to an accurate result.  What they end up with is a “poll” that shows narrower gaps between the candidates than actually exist.  Most pollsters are currently showing the race between President Barack Obama and presumptive Republican candidate Mitt Romney  as statistically tied (National popular vote).  Keirsey Research shows that this is quite inaccurate, and Mitt Romney has major concerns.

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The Contenders

‘The Putin regime, like all such regimes, is a pyramid. And what the protests are doing is dismantling the bottom rungs of this pyramid…..I have thought of leaving, and I have even made plans to leave. The truth is, I don’t want to. I love my home, my friends, my job, my life. And if Putin doesn’t like me, he can leave.’

There is a contention here.  Who is going to win in the end?

Well, it depends on the time frame.

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Diplomat’s Sanctity

Marvel’s The Avengers crushed it at the box office it’s opening weekend and is now the highest grossing domestic movie weekend of all time at just over $207 million.  The previous record holder had been our dear friend Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows- Part 2 at about $169 million who just got owned.  The superhero ensemble film was the fastest movie ever to reach $100 million, $150 million and $200 million at the box office, enjoyed the highest per-theater average ever for a nationwide release with $46,057 per theater, and is currently rocking a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.  It’s almost as if these people knew that I was going to start blogging about the four basic personality types so they went ahead and made a huge blockbuster movie about it and decided to break a bunch of box-office records with it.  Thanks guys.  ‘Ppreciate it.  Earth’s Mightiest Hero’s will not be the only nerd-gasm to behold on the big-screen this summer, as the film’s debut came with fresh new trailers for The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider ManWeb-head’s “origin-story-reboot” will be looking for cinematic redemption after Spiderman 3 cast Eric Foreman as Venom and was just generally epic failThe movie stars Andrew Garfield as the titular webslinger while Emma Stone plays Petey’s main squeeze Gwen Stacy.  Australian actor Rhys Ifans will be playing primary villain The Lizard.  WHO IS your friendly neighborhood spidermanA devoted Idealist.

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The Death of Reading? Not so fast…

Link:  We mistakenly included the incorrect link in the July Personalityzone newsletter  Click here to go to the article:   Keirsey Research 2012 Election Tracking Poll: The Temperament Gap Holds Steady

Good news!  Despite conventional wisdom, and many alarmist essays to the contrary, reading for pleasure is still a popular pastime both in the U.S. and the rest of the world. (For a taste of the “alarmist essays to the contrary”, google “death of reading” and wade through more than 1.3 million results.)

Keirsey Research recently surveyed 3,311 people who had completed the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II at Keirsey.com to first find out if “the death of reading” is in fact imminent, and to see if there are significant differences in the reading habits of the 4 Temperaments.  We were specifically interested in peoples’ reading habits when it comes to books, as opposed to other media such as magazines, newspapers, websites, etc.

As noted in the opening paragraph, the answer to our first question is an emphatic “No!”  Almost 80% of our respondents tell us they enjoy reading books, and almost three quarters of them like to read for the pleasure of it.  Less than 20% consider book reading to be “unimportant” to them, more than 55% have read a complete book in the past month, and more than half are currently reading a book.  It seems that, even with the proliferation of screens in the world, there is still a lot of book reading going on.

The second of our objectives – to see if there are significant differences between the 4 Temperaments when it comes to reading habits – found that the answer is yes.  However, gender also plays a big part: women are much more avid readers as a gender than are men.  Perhaps this is not a surprise – it does seem that most book clubs (Oprah’s being the most famous) are comprised predominantly of women.  A guardian friend of mine, a male, pointed out to me, “They need something to do while I’m watching football / baseball / basketball / hockey / MMA / (ad infinitum) on TV.”

After the jump, we get into specifics:  which Temperament reads the most?  Which is the most likely to be found at a public library?   Do the different Temperaments prefer different genres?  Who is more likely to go to a bookstore and buy a book?  Given a choice of books or TV, who would be more likely to choose books?  Who would be more likely to choose TV?  Make your guesses and read on.

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Wandering towards the Enlightenment

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.

Nomad – synonym – wanderer.

She titled her book, “Nomad.”

For that was her ancestral origins — misleadingly put as “her genetics”  —  supposedly her “inheritance” and her culture.

But she was different.  Something deep inside was different.

She had always read books, from the beginning as a child.

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Tactician’s Cataclysm

The final trailer has dropped for The Dark Knight Rises and I literally just got goosebumps.  Ya.  I’m a nerd.  Christian Bale will be reprising his role as the caped crusader while bloody brit actor Tom Hardy will be playing primary villain Bane.  Other newcomers include: Anne Hathaway as a mysterious Selina Kyle a.k.a. Catwoman, while Joseph Gordon Levitt plays John Blake or a possible Robin, and finally the beautiful Marion Cotillard plays Miranda Tate or a potential Talia Al Ghul.  Big Boss Man Christopher Nolan has indeed done a good job keeping most of this stuff underwraps, as the film is his swan song to the Batman franchise.  The film’s reportedly epic ending is on the utmost of DL, to the point that only Nolan and four other people know what it is.  Why does this movie look so frikkin cool you ask?  Because it’s about a good ol’ fashioned Artisan dogfight.

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Assembly Required

The day of reckoning is nearly upon us my dear friends as The Avengers drops this Friday and can be seen in 3D and IMAX at a theater near you.  Pre-release tracking on the film projects Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to have the biggest domestic box-office opening of all time.  Why all this huss and fuss, jibber-jabb, and riggamaroo over a silly film about a couple of guys in leotards you ask?  Because the core concept of the story is that there are four basic kinds of people.

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