LetsRun "Clean or Dirty" Poll Discussion Thread

"Without further ado, we present to you the results of our world record doping poll."

---four paragraphs of ado---

results

I was stunned by the naivete of the younger voters. They overwhelmingly were biased on "clean" votes even when it was proven many years ago that some of the athletes were dirty beyond any doubt. Perhaps they were unfamiliar with the names, and just marked them as "clean" because they had never heard of them. (Are these the same people who carried Obama into office? Is today's youth that out to lunch?) When I see them marking clean votes for Jarmila K. and Marita Koch, I question their intelligence levels.

photofinish wrote:

I was stunned by the naivete of the younger voters. They overwhelmingly were biased on "clean" votes even when it was proven many years ago that some of the athletes were dirty beyond any doubt. Perhaps they were unfamiliar with the names, and just marked them as "clean" because they had never heard of them. (Are these the same people who carried Obama into office? Is today's youth that out to lunch?) When I see them marking clean votes for Jarmila K. and Marita Koch, I question their intelligence levels.

Was there a "not sure" option? This could be those not in-the-know giving athletes they haven't heard of the benefit of doubt. You know, cause 47.60 leaves some doubt as to whether it's legit, right?!

My impression from the polling results is that the ones still active (not retired yet) get lower suspect from the letsrun crowd.

That's actually not reasonable considering that the records these athletes broke were made about the time of those older "dopers" (those with higher suspect percentages).

A big part of the polling proves it is based off of people's naive perception (their own liking).

what I meant to say is it's all imaginary. Not of any scientific or meaning support from the people actually participated in the polling.

Soprano wrote:

The poll did disallow repeated voting. If you go to the individual tabs page and click on "About/Methods" It says the following (check out the "data integrity" section):

Demographic Data

Respondents were given the option to provide demographic data. Country data were augmented by matching respondents' IP addresses to a country using a geo-location IP database. This procedure allowed us to identify countries for over 99% of respondents. The frequency of which visitors read LetsRun.com was measured using a Google Analytics cookie which counts sessions by device.

Data Integrity

We aimed to allow readers to vote only once and to ensure all votes actually came from a human being. Readers were only allowed to submit one vote from a single IP address and/or browser. We threw out votes which were from spam-bots.

Dynamic IP addresses.

Mobile devices.

Wtfunny wrote:

Dynamic IP addresses.

Mobile devices.

You need to get a life dude. They literally say: "THIS IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC POLL."

Next time everyone will have to travel to Baltimore and give rojo their votes by hand, in a sealed envelope, and sign an affidavit that they didn't vote twice.

txRUNNERgirl wrote:

The results of the poll were what I expected. It was also interesting the ratio of males to females on LetsRun. There were at least 300 females who voted. Not just xenonscreams and me.

An eye-opening result for sure. I was wondering if you two just voted that many times but I guess not. Of course, if the rule of thumb is true that only 10% of frequent visitors to a website read the discussion regularly, and only 10% of readers post regularly, then there should be about 3 female regular posters on LetsRun. Maybe there's another?

PS, erik or any other employee, nice job with the web-based cross-tabs thing, but is there any chance you'll release the raw data? It would be interesting to see for example of those who thought Bekele was a cheater, how many also thought Haile was a cheater.

photofinish wrote:

I was stunned by the naivete of the younger voters. They overwhelmingly were biased on "clean" votes even when it was proven many years ago that some of the athletes were dirty beyond any doubt. Perhaps they were unfamiliar with the names, and just marked them as "clean" because they had never heard of them. (Are these the same people who carried Obama into office? Is today's youth that out to lunch?) When I see them marking clean votes for Jarmila K. and Marita Koch, I question their intelligence levels.

I'm surprised by your naivete to think young voters voted particular runners clean because they were naive. The youngest generation is also the most likely to troll and vote every runner clean to intentionally skew results, because it's funny to intentionally skew results for stupid polls held by stupid people. For example, I voted every runner clean and I completed the poll 5 or 6 times, representing the youngest group too. I also lie to people who poll me by phone when election season gets rolling. It might be sophomoric but it is not naive.

R U KIDDING ME ?? wrote:

You need to get a life dude. They literally say: "THIS IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC POLL."

Next time everyone will have to travel to Baltimore and give rojo their votes by hand, in a sealed envelope, and sign an affidavit that they didn't vote twice.

So why pretend the poll represents anything at all, other than link bait and trolling for page views? Why post a page,long pre-emotive explanation of what the poll is about in nothing more than a stupid attempt to justify it? Why come on here and tell us that they DID stop people voting repeatedly when they clearly did not?

As for getting a life, you may be right. But why not offer that comment to the folks who are interested in trolling a bunch of anonymous visitors on who they think, with no evidence whatsoever, is cheating? Seems to me if anyone should "get a life" it's the people who construct and promote this kind of rot.

Wtfunny wrote:

So why pretend the poll represents anything at all, other than link bait and trolling for page views? Why post a page,long pre-emotive explanation of what the poll is about in nothing more than a stupid attempt to justify it? Why come on here and tell us that they DID stop people voting repeatedly when they clearly did not?

Say what you want about the poll and LRC's aims in conducting it. Your mind is clearly set there.

I can tell you how the poll prevents multiple votes. I implemented three layers to try to stop multiple votes:

1. One vote per IP.

So you need a new IP, a proxy server, etc. to vote.

2. A cookie is set on user's browsers to hide the form after they vote.

3. If this cookie is removed, a unique session ID provided by Google is also collected and checked.

So you can only vote if you have a unique IP and unique Google Analytics session ID. So, yes, you could vote from your mobile phone (provided you are not on the same IP you voted for on another computer). Or you could go to a different IP, clear your cookies/use a separate browser and vote again. There's no way I know of to stop that.

That's the best I can do and we don't claim to do more than that. I certainly did what is technologically possible to stop repeat voting. That said, I'm sure a handful of people voted "early and often" but there's no evidence of that in the data (i.e., unlikely repeated voting patterns) -- not enough to really pull the data one way or another.

The only thing further we could have done was either 1) require a unique email address, but that's pretty easily beatable too and puts a too high entry to voting; or 2) send out unique invitations to vote (which would require an email address, which again could be faked).

Erik,

I accept there's (a) no way to completely stop people from voting again and again, and (b) you guys did make some effort to curtail repeat voting. But given (a), do you really think the "poll" then is meaningful? At all? Given the weight of the subject, don't you think LRC at least owe it the sport and athletes to not discredit them like this, without at least SOME kind of verifiable and measurable information? These are world class, pro athletes, world record holders in this "poll". If you guys want LRC to be taken seriously by the pro T 'n' F community, why do this to them? It's simply smears a lot of people for no reason, with absolutely NO substantiation of anything at all. What value does that have for the sport or the fans beyond mere gossip?

You have no way of verifying anything about the people in the poll, at all ..... So how can you honestly call it "data" in the first place?

Email addresses can be faked, sure. But if you're going to post this stuff about these people, some of who are still trying to make a living with their sport, you at least owe it to them (IMO) to have some kind of method of verifying the incoming info. Most newspapers now, for example, require a Facebook profile to leave comments, just as one example. That's hardly peer reviewed, for sure, but it's a far, far cry from simple allowing anonymous "votes". Maybe a couple of people will vote twice that way, at most ... but I doubt you'd see much more than that with voting via email or Facebook, etc.

"Hide the form after they vote". On my iPad, and a DSL connection, the form came up every time I visited the homepage. Even when I clicked "hide and don't show me again" .... All on the same browser. Not ONCE did it fail to show up.

My guess is not that you'd see repeat voting patterns, but that you'd see completely different voting patterns from folks simply screwing with the poll. Which is really what makes the entire thing so ridiculous.

You said already that you think that making people at least somehow register would make a huge difference to the information and the number of votes. Which is exactly what it should do.

I don't mean this as simply an attack on the controls you, as the tech guy, set in place. I simply think the entire concept of a group of anonymous people voting on whether a world record holder is/was "dirty" or not is beyond disrespectful to the very people this site is largely about.

As I said above, the fact that LRC preface the results and their interp with a commentary trying to justify the very concept of the poll should be a sign of how lame it is. If they have to start their article with a written attempted justification for it, they probably shouldn't really be doing it in the first place. IMO.

This poll was complete garbage and the results don't show anything meaningful. There is not much else to discuss about it.

Hopefully erik learned some IT skills that he can use for something more useful in the future.

photofinish wrote:

I was stunned by the naivete of the younger voters. They overwhelmingly were biased on "clean" votes even when it was proven many years ago that some of the athletes were dirty beyond any doubt. Perhaps they were unfamiliar with the names, and just marked them as "clean" because they had never heard of them. (Are these the same people who carried Obama into office? Is today's youth that out to lunch?) When I see them marking clean votes for Jarmila K. and Marita Koch, I question their intelligence levels.

Tee hee! He said Koch.

The poll can show what people SUPPOSE, which is very far from the reality.

It's like to ask if UFO exists or not. Everybody can have an opinion, but only few people have the real knowledge for a correct answer.

Who is in professional athletics from long time, perfectly knows there were athletes completely clean, and there were athletes completely dirty.

When I see more than 50% supposing Shaheen dirty, when Shaheen NEVER took any supplement in his life, this means that the mentality of many people looks at the fact he WAS ABLE RUNNING FAST, AND HE WAS KENYAN.

There are athletes I know 200% they were clean, because or I worked with them, or I know them very well also if their coach is somebody else : I speak about Shaheen, Wilson Kipsang, David Rudisha and Mary Keitany (and I can add Florence Kiplagat, after the astonishing WR of Yesterday).

At the same time, there are athletes ALL THE ATHLETIC WORLD knows were under PEDS : I don't want to give some name here, but it's enough to see at the year of their WR (every WR before 1988 in sprint, hurdles, jumps and throws was illegally aided).

And there is a part of WR professional coaches in athletics know were helped, but we don't know if with something legal or illegal. This is the case of many records from great American and Jamaican sprinters, who used a lot of different supplement, probably legal, but at the limit of the illegality (also without going to see BALCO case).

The bad thing is that too many people don't think possible running fast, if athletes are not aided, and in illegal way. Two days before I had a talk with Makhloufi, and he told me "when I was at the beginning of my career, I Always look at the best milers as athletes using doping. When I started to improve my training, without taking anything, I understand how possible is to run fast, is you have full motivation, good talent and continuity. The best doping is the passion and the will to reach your maximal personal level".

Antidoping continues to progress, the same about doping.

But we can see continuous records in middle and long distances, from athletes without any professional structure in their Country, while to use some doping requires money and specific knowledge for having real advantages and reducing risks.

I was surprised by the WR of Florence Kiplagat in HM, since 1:05:12 is at the level of records on track, but she worked in right way, with the right motivation, following the program I gave with continuity, without using any supplement (while prepare Marathon we use maltodextrines for long run, in this case nothing because never there was real long run). So, every time one my athlete is able to better a WR (completely clean), I move higher the bar of the human limits in my mind, because I well know that Always is possible to run faster.

This is the real doping : the self convinction that everything is possible, if you have talent and motivation in training.

Cthdnajmskt wrote:

rumblings wrote:

let's try again.

FloJo

_______________%______________# votes clean

Under 18______38.5%_____________49

18-24_________21.36%____________226

25-34_________9.61%_____________220

35-44_________4.18%_____________54

45-54_________5.75%_____________52

55-64_________4.12%_____________17

65 and Older__8.33%_____________10

What's the excuse for the 133 voters that are 35 years+?

Those are the r&tards you mentioned.

The polls are distasteful. Pure and simple. Pronouncing guilt on people without any evidence is repulsive.

The best thing about the poll is that it proves once and for all that this site is run by morons