I’ve used up another 15 seconds of fame, this time in the Monday, September 29, Vitebski Kurier: Translation: Did expectations come true?.. Our attempt to have a conversation with one of the long-time observers of OSCE, coordinator Gary Ouellet from Canada were not successful. He providently refused by phone or other means to make any [...]

I saw the logo of the Conservative Democrats of Slovakia (KDS) for the first time today (apparently I live a sheltered life; or maybe it’s the party). My first thought was that it was a surprisingly attractive and iconic design for a party that seemed to take so long to get its act together.  My [...]

John Cleese speaks:

Also available in Slovak, here I have occasionally expressed concern about the recent numbers coming out of UVVM, particularly those for the Party of the Hungarian Coalition.  Something is wrong there. In the spirit of my heroes at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com, I decided to take a look at the data.  The chart below calculates the total month-to-month [...]

UVVM Monthly Report: October 2008 Also available in Slovak, here UVVM reverted to the mean this month, its poll numbers pulling back from extremes for most of the major parties and toward the results obtained by other pollsters.  There are gains to be made from a comparative analysis of various polls, but as usual the [...]

Amid constant news of contraction and decline this week, there is (slightly old) news of yet another small but significant expansion: machine translation to and from Slovak.   Machine translation is old news these days (though it is no less remarkable for our acceptance of it) and is no panacea (it is still bad enough [...]

It has occurred to me that it might be useful for me (and maybe for others) to keep track of articles in the Slovak press that are interesting or in some way provocative and that the easiest way to do this through the social-bookmarking service called del.icio.us I’ve therefore begun to use the tag ‘pozorblog’ [...]

I returned two days ago from Belarus where I was an observer in the 2008 parliamentary elections. OSCE rules request that we leave assessments to the organization’s main report and remain silent.  Fortunately, in this instance, the OSCE judgement so closely corresponds to my own experience that I can refrain from my own judgments and [...]

Trends and comparisons monthly report Inside the averages are multiple polls using slightly different methods and samples.  When put together these yield a surprisingly smooth and consistent picture that is the most useful for assessing levels and trends, but it is useful to take them apart from time to time to discern any internal shifts [...]

Overall Monthly Report Both FOCUS and MVK released their numbers in the last 48 hours, and while it is difficult to talk about bad news for a coalition with over 60% of the likely vote, September was not a particularly good month. As the overall graph below shows, Smer dropped slightly from its plateau, though [...]