HoCo Rising recently highlighted a new poll on the Howard County executive race. This occasioned much comment among HCR’s readers on the political implications of the polling numbers. Rather than add to that discussion (fun though it may be) I want to address a different issue, namely how confident can we be that these or any other poll numbers are actually correct, or at least close to the truth? For example, the stated “margin of error” on the county executive polling is 5%; what does that actually mean? Also, even in the full results no margin of error was stated for the results broken down by county council district; can we mere mortals figure that out ourselves? I thought it would be fun to explore these questions, and in the process rediscover a bit of the statistics knowledge I had lost since college. If anyone else is interested in this topic so much the better. ...

Continuing my series of posts related to my political beliefs, today I thought I’d look at the issue of independent voters and what their “independence” actually entails. One of HoCo Rising’s comments to me was regarding whether the concept of a “partisan moderate” actually made sense. Whether the label actually applies to me is a separate question, and one which after thinking about it I’ll likely end up answering in the negative. However I did think it was interesting that the concept of being a political moderate seems to be getting conflated with the idea of being relatively nonpartisan and independent in one’s political views. ...

Saturday I went down to downtown Ellicott City for the fall festival, which turned out to be a much more popular event than I thought it would be. (I had to park on Rogers Avenue a couple of hundred yards up from Main Street.) If I were a normal person I’d be posting about the events and including some photos; however I couldn’t help filtering my experiences through the perspective of my previous post on government and public goods (not to mention private goods and club goods—I skipped discussing common goods for reasons noted in a comment to the post). ...

A while back in the course of a comment thread for a HoCo Rising post I promised to write more about my political views, so that people could decide whether I was a rabid lefty or just a wimpy lefty. Rather than do this in an organized way (“these are the things I believe,” “this is my position on the Nolan chart,” and so on), I thought it would be more fun to expose my beliefs in a more informal and indirect way by commenting on various issues that have come up on local blogs. (Warning: This is to a large degree me “thinking out loud,” so don’t expect it to be either totally comprehensive or totally coherent, just expect it to be long.) ...

Last week HoCo Rising did a post on a supposed $72M of Federal grant money being awarded to Howard County for a broadband network. Unfortunately HCR was led astray by some basic errors of fact in the Columbia Flier story he used as a source. A more accurate (though still not 100% correct) story was published by the Baltimore Sun. The bottom line is that (contrary to what’s implied by the Columbia Flier story) Howard County is not getting $72M in funding for its own use, Howard County is simply receiving the money on behalf of other Maryland counties and cities. To quote from the Sun story: ...

After posting about the Howard County Democratic Central Committee candidates I’d be remiss if I didn’t post the DCC election results. So without further ado here’s the list in decreasing order of votes; this is from the unofficial election results as of 12:32 am on September 15, with 113 of 116 precincts reporting: Candidate Votes % of Total Votes % of Democrats Voting Kathy Macfarlane 10,146 7.84% 46.6% Carol J Chase 9,144 7.07% 42.0% Ethel B Hill 9,127 7.05% 42.0% Kristen M Neville 8,661 6.69% 39.8% Diane Banner 8,290 6.41% 38.1% Deanna Peel 8,159 6.31% 37.5% Catherine Zomlefer 7,957 6.15% 36.6% Abby R Hendrix 7,751 5.99% 35.6% Michael C McPherson 7,702 5.95% 35.4% Clarence Lam 7,054 5.45% 32.4% Ethan Moore 6,994 5.41% 32.2% Jonathan K Branch 6,613 5.11% 30.4% (following not elected) Willis E Gay 6,145 4.75% 28.3% Daniel Besseck 6,037 4.67% 27.8% Bill Adams 5,924 4.58% 27.2% Rich Corkran 5,363 4.15% 24.7% Kevin Treine 4,177 3.23% 19.2% Jerome S Lozupone 4,140 3.20% 15.2% The second column is the percentage each candidate got out of the total of 129,384 votes cast for DCC candidates, while the third (and I think more informative) column is the percentage of votes for each candidate relative to the total number of Democrats who turned out to vote (21,752). (As an aside, 14,653 Republicans and 1,399 independents also voted.) ...

Now that the polls have closed in Howard County I thought I’d post a few random comments on the primary election. Since I don’t know all that much about Howard County politics and the people involved in it, don’t expect anything that incisive or interesting, especially when it comes to “horse race” coverage. For that sort of thing I head over to Hoco Rising, Tales of Two Cities, 53 beers on tap, and other local blogs, and you should too. But if you’re sticking around . . . ...

Those few of you who read this blog regularly will recall that I’m a registered Democrat, and therefore one of my missions (should I choose to accept it) is voting for members of the Howard County Democratic Central Committee. I normally pass on this, as in the past I’ve had no idea who any of these people are. However since I’ve been reading a number of local blogs focused on politics and have been doing a fair amount of Howard County blogging myself, I thought it was incumbent on me to bone up on the Central Committee candidates, especially if any of them are especially good (or bad) people to have on the committee. ...

In part 1 of this series I essayed some initial (negative) answers to the question of whether Howard County could ever become the “Silicon Valley of cybersecurity.” In part 2 I delved a bit more into the question of whether and how the success of Silicon Valley might be replicable elsewhere, relying heavily on the opinions of Paul Graham and Bradford Cross and Russell Jurney. Again my answer was in the negative. Can the third time (well, actually the fourth time) be the charm? I don’t want to keep you in suspense, so . . . ...

In part 1 of this article I addressed the question (originally raised by HoCo Rising), could Howard County be the Silicon Valley of cybersecurity? My initial answers were no and, yet again, no. But, Frank, I hear you say, that’s just the way things are now. Couldn’t we do something about this? So it’s on to . . . Answer #3: It’s complicated . . . but expert opinion suggests that the answer is still no. ...