Mr. Jagdeo ascension to the Presidency is based on a basic fact of Guyana’s elections, namely, race. Jagdeo is heading an Indo-ethnic party and Indians are in the majority. And, every last man there votes race.

So, what is this thing about Jagdeo being an inspirational leader?

If President Jagdeo wants to change Guyana for the better and create a legacy for himself, he should move quickly to help his party evolve into a genuine multiracial party – and doing so would also help Guyana to evolve into a genuine multiracial democracy.

I have said a hundred times the PPP is an ethnic party. It has an unwritten rule that says only an Indian can be leader of the party. (Except for a brief interlude when it was led by Janet Jagan). Almost the whole Central Committee are Indians. Also 95% of its electoral mandate come from Indians.

Change NAFTA? in his entire term he will not even think about reviwing NAFTA.

As per racial devide he did not bridge on racila divide 55% of the whites did not vote for him. That goes to show that the balcks were not voting in previous elections.

Firstly, I thing that Urling was wrong on many fronts and comes across as dogmatic….a little bit of knowledge is sometimes not enough to make a valid argument.

His summations on whether America was ready for a Barak Obama victory were purely unscientific and based on ‘gut feeling’. The dribble about what constitute qualitative investigation is also uninformed.

Polls are tools use to explain how social agents would react to a stimulus by way of opinions representative of a population. It stands to reason that a sample constitutes a representative group and we extrapolate the results from that sample to represent the population position within a confidence interval or alternatively within a margin of error. We talk about 96% of the time the result would be replicated in the said population or that 4% of the time we are likely to get different results.

Unlike the physical sciences, social science methods are not exact and experiments cannot be controlled with precision because of bias, sampling errors and over generalization. What is important then, is the adherence to professional standards which have been developed to reflect a consistent approach to the activity of polling. Because polling and other forms of survey methods are used to collect qualitative data about matters in a population, in the said case, about voting for Obama, statistical techniques are used to provide and validate information from the gathered data. The process of extracting information from data is highly specialized and requires a very good understanding and being technically equip to deal with such complex issues; you have to know what you are about and importantly adhere to extablished professional standards. This is Bisram’s failure as a pollster; he introduces significant bias, sample error and he over-generalises. I have never seen him publish his statistical indicators to ensure validity, reliability and the significance of his conclusions.

This brings me back to Urling. Your suppositions on your hypothesis was basically not tested statistically and therefore you cannot claim that it is an acceptable outcome; your arguements are as weak as the ones you criticise. I guess this was why the other guy mentioned the fact about being educated in university mathematics, he was pointing that your exploration of history, culture and the mood of Afro-americans did not justify your hypothesis whether or not America was ready for a President Obama.

While polls represent an efficient way of collecting information from a large sample, extrapulating to the whole is problematic and we use statictical methods to explain reliability and validity at a level of signifance….. we sometimes ‘massage’ the data.

Unfortunately, the intrepretation of the results to the public as information depends on the motivation of the interesting party and the respondents, mainly their honesty. For intrepretation by pollster, check out Bisram, Dick Morris, you may want to question their honesty and certain bias in the questions they ask. And from a technical point of view, while the samples are random, non-responsiveness and vague responses introduces bias errors. Non-responses would surely dislocate the representativeness of the sample. Vague responses lead to abstractions which allows for over-generalization…..remember the CNN commontators were worried whether the respondents were honest and referring to ‘the Bradley effect’. And remember they were worried about how much of the undecided McCain or Obama would get in the voting booth…their abstractions which invariably would lead them down the road of over-generalizing.

Gentlemen, I think if you educate yourself on the principles on which to argue then you would have helped the debate with you analysis. Hope I have done so.

Nonetheless, I too have my doubts about Mr. Bisram, especially when he opined that the majority of Guyanese in NY were not in Bam’s corner. I thought that was preposterous. Who was this guy polling? Beside being rudderless, he seemed bias to some degree.