Ahrgh, if only everyone was running TDT…

Or UDT. Or CDT. Or EDT.

Not really -- if you check out the wiki page this type of poll is meant for discrete options, not for numbers or probabilities. For probabilities the "poll:probability" type should be used, which does automatically compute averages and medians.

awk is made for this, but it took me a few minutes to whip this up in java. I figured if numeric polls are used in the future, this can be used as a code-base. The indentation isn't coming through, but any IDE will fix that for you.

This doesn't work on arbitrary numeric entry polls, but for those, you can gather the statistics as you go along, putting it in the GATHER loop

EDITED to fix serious bug.

usage: paste this into PollStat.java, compile it. then run

java PollStat < poll.csv.txt

So far, the winners are endoself and army1987. I wasn't far off.

~~~~~~~~~

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
public class PollStat {
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
String line = br.readLine();
int[] counts = new int[12]; // PUT NUMBER OF POLL OPTIONS HERE
int end, begin;
int linen = 0;
while (line != null && line.charAt(0) == '#') {
line = br.readLine();
linen++;
}
while (line != null) { // GATHER LOOP
linen++;
end = line.lastIndexOf("\",\"");
begin = line.lastIndexOf("\",\"", end-1);
try {
line = line.substring(begin+3, end);
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("At line number "+linen+":");
e.printStackTrace();
System.exit(1);
}
Integer c = Integer.parseInt(line);
counts[c]++;
// For arbitrary numeric responses, don't use counts.
// just continuously gather your statistics. Alternately, make a list of Doubles or something.
line = br.readLine();
}
br.close();
int total = 0;
int resp = 0;
int[] numbers = new int[]{100, 64, 41, 26, 17, 11, 7, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0}; // PUT POLL OPTIONS HERE
for (int i = 0; i < c.length; i++) {
System.out.println(numbers[i]+": "+counts[i]);
total += numbers[i] * counts[i];
resp += counts[i];
}
System.out.println("total: "+total);
System.out.println("average: "+((double)total)/resp);
} catch (IOException ioe) {
ioe.printStackTrace();
System.exit(2);
}
}
}

Total 139, chart shows 0 votes...

Of course that's what you'd say...

Total:25, but adding up the votes for each option gives 24.

What if you then create the poll?

Well, no one's voting for her anyway.

You jocks have been too cocky - I'm staging a Twilight Sparkle coup!

It's a trick question, Twilight Sparkle is a unicorn.

She's intellectual, but she reacts irrationally to the Pinkie Sense.

Also, poor Rarity.

I love what this poll reveals about LW readers. Many sympathise with Batman, because of his tech/intellectual angle. The same with Iron Man, but he's a bit less cool. Then two have heard of superman, and most LWers are male. And most of us don't care.

Spiderman! Why isn't Spiderman on there? I bet he'd be way more popular than that Flash guy whoever he is.

Excluding the ponies (which I didn't vote on, because I am one of sixteen people remaining on the Internet who doesn't pony yet), this is the earliest radio poll where the sum of the numbers in the column matches the "Total" number at the bottom.

The "no total" part is independent of the bug -- it seems that scale polls just don't report totals or percentages. (They probably should.)

Looking at the raw data, it seems that at some point the True and False counts got reset, but then kept increasing as normal. The same thing happened in this poll and this one but not others.

I used a Nokia 3330 until last year.

As well it shouldn't?

Which is too bad, as all incorrect options should have the same rights (for moral reasons).

See my example poll in answer to wedifrid. Hopefully nobody thinks I was being serious about the poll.

Here's one: What if someone takes a poll asking if they should kill themselves? People could write "yes" in the comments, but they can select "yes" in a poll anonymously.

This may lead to more brutal answers to questions. The questions will be limited to whatever the poll creator types in, but that doesn't mean everyone will use common sense while creating their polls.

You may argue "they can already use comments as a polling system using karma" but I would then argue "okay, MaoShan still has a point, and it applies to karma, too."

Also

Cue in choice blindness dark arts for Fun and Updates!

(also for evil experiments and control groups, if someone figures those out)

I used the least significant digit on my time-remaining-to-full-charge. And ended up propping up the most populated entry.

I wish I could see a doctor-statistician. Or at least a doctor who understood statistics.

Looks like we're better at randomness than the rest of the population. If I asked random people for a random number from 1 to 10, I wouldn't be surprised to see substantially less than 3.322 bits of entropy per number (e.g., many more than 10% of the people choosing 7).

The most likely range. I'd rather this wasn't skewed by people putting down "more" just because they anticipate a tiny probability of a vast lifetime, but failing that expect to be dead as usual before very long.