It’s right there in the encyclopedia. It’s in Wikipedia, in the article about Vermont, where it says, “A 2007 survey claimed that Vermonters were the least satisfied with their job in the nation and were the most likely to be making plans to leave.”

Nor is this a mere assertion. Not on your tintype. This sentence ends with a footnote. Footnote number 70, just in case you’re interested, which provides the source of the information.

The source of the information is something called Salary.com . Salary.com, a company in the Boston area, “builds on-demand software around a deep domain knowledge in the area of compensation to help customers win the war for talent by simplifying the connections between people, pay and performance,” whatever that means.

The company’s press contact is a friendly fellow named Rob Halpin, of a Boston firm called Version 2.0 Communications, who readily acknowledged something about the Salary.com poll.

It isn’t a poll.

OK, Halpin didn’t say that in so many words. What he did say is that it was not a random sample survey. It was one of those on-line displays that asked a question to be answered by any computer-user who stumbled onto it. It had, Halpin said, “no methodology” to speak of, and was not “terribly scientific.”

It isn’t a poll.

A poll-if it’s a real poll-must be a survey of a “random sample,” defined as a “set of items that have been drawn from a population in such a way that each time an item was selected, every item in the population had an equal opportunity to appear in the sample.”  (from the Internet Glossary of Statistical terms).

If respondents choose to be respondents, then every item (in this case, employed Vermonter) in the population (in this case, all employed Vermonters) does not have an equal opportunity to appear in the sample.

Not to mention that there are employed Vermonters who don’t use computers to begin with, meaning they would have no opportunity at all to appear in the sample.

It isn’t a poll.

What is it then? It is nothing. Nada. Rien de tout. Bupkiss. Gornish. A nullity.

At least as far as its conclusion meaning anything. It might serve as a promotional device for the company. It might be fun for the folks who click their answers to the questions.

It isn’t a poll.

There are two problems illustrated here, one cosmic and one local. The cosmic relates to but transcends Wikipedia, which, to its credit, has been trying to police the (mis-)information its readers/contributors often insert. Just the other day one of them inserted an obituary of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, saying that he “died shortly after” his Inauguration Day collapse.

Kennedy is, of course, alive, and Wikipedia is re-examining its free-wheeling ways as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” The whole “anyone can edit” outlook is essential to the  on-line-world philosophy which disdains “gate-keepers” and other elites as relics of another day.

Perhaps. But sometimes a “gatekeeper” is someone who knows what he is talking about. Or who has standards of intellectual honesty which will prevent her from approving a sentence saying Vermonters are more dissatisfied with their jobs than workers elsewhere, an assertion for which there is not a scintilla of evidence.

The local problem is that several Vermont news organizations, including the three major newspapers-Burlington Free Press, Rutland Herald, Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus—put these pseudo-polls into their on-line versions. Currently, the Herald and the T/A are asking whether students should be allowed to carry backpacks or bags during the school day. The Free Press question asks whether the state should cut spending more, raise taxes, or do some of both.

At about 8PM last night, “cut more” had a big lead, 64 percent, to 28 percent for some of both and eight percent for raise taxes.

Sounds like a blow-out, but only 272 votes had been cast, not enough of a sample had it been a random sample, which it was not.

It’s not a poll.

Which did not stop the editorial writer at St. Johnsbury’s Caledonian Record from proclaiming the other day that most Vermonters must agree with Gov. Jim Douglas about cutting school spending, because such was the result of what the writer called a “poll” in the on-line version of the Herald and Times-Argus.

It was not a poll, which might have embarrassed the editorial writer, who, however, seems unembarassable.

Just because these on-line devices are not polls, does not mean they are nothing.  They are something. From the perspective of the bean-counters at the newspapers, they are no doubt part of their marketing and promotion campaigns. And at least somebody at the newspaper understands that they are not real polls. “This is not intended to be a scientific sample of local and national opinion,” the Free Press acknowledges under its “poll question.” The other papers use similar disclaimers.

In short, the newspapers are admitting that these are not polls. They are lies. Really, news organizations shouldn’t do that.

First, it does not seem likely that the Department of Health could have successfully kept secret the controversial report that found a statistical “association” between living near the abandoned mine and getting asbestosis.

According to state officials, the report based on the Health Department study was going to be attached to the federal bankruptcy case against GAF Corporation, the successor to the company that last operated the mine. So it would have been available on the Internet to any reporter competent enough (or lucky enough) to find it, or to any one of a number of lawyers who would be happy to tell a reporter about it.

In that case, the story might have been not just the results of the study but the Department’s attempt to cover it up. One way or another, the study was going to get into the public domain.

Next, just to clear up any confusion about what description was intended for whom, the mention of people who “don’t know what they’re talking about”  did not refer to the two people quoted near the start of yesterday’s post-Rob Naramore of Lowell and Mary Walz of Hyde Park.

They may have been a little confused about the scientific rigor of statistics, but so are most of us. The folks who “don’t know what they’re talking about “are the ones who said they ate asbestos for breakfast every day for 50 years and it never did them any harm.

OK, I lied about the breakfast part. But several speakers at the community forums in Eden and Lowell said asbestos couldn’t do much harm because it hadn’t hurt them or their friends who’d been exposed to it.

Perhaps it had not. Some people can smoke two packs of cigarettes a day for 60 years and suffer few ill effects from it, too. But others get sick and die. Same with asbestos. The evidence that it is a health hazard is abundant. The evidence that it was found in greater-than-expected proportions in the area around the mine is significant, if tentative. Denial in such circumstances is ignorance.

Despite all the rancor, there was some evidence near week’s end that state officials and the local residents who were so angry at them might…well, not exactly kiss and make up, but at least talk civilly to one another about the situation.

Howard Manosh of Morrisville, who once operated the mine, suggested that the 13 towns in the area select representatives to consult regularly with officials of the Health and Environmental Conservation Departments. Both sides greeted the suggestion positively, and Manosh said Thursday he is getting together some local  people who are  “pretty diligent about what they’re doing” to meet from time to time with state officials.

There were two small mistakes on Tuesday, in the first of two posts about this controversy. The statistical study conducted by the Health Department covered a ten year period that ended six-not ten-years ago. And the report’s conclusions were based on a small number of occurrences of deaths and hospitalization, not on a small “sample.”  This was not a poll. “Sample” was the wrong word.

And a typo in yesterday’s post, in which “contracted the disease” came out “contacted…” I knew the right word, but typed the wrong one.

Expect more mistakes and less news in Vermont in the future. The jointly owned Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus announced Wednesday they will be laying off 14 workers, including one reporter and one editor.

Inside baseball of importance only to news junkies and folks in the business? Maybe not. Whoever Seth Godin is, he had a good point when he wrote in his blog: “I worry about the quality of a democracy when the state government or the local government can do what it wants without intelligent coverage. I worry about the abuse of power when the only thing a corrupt official needs to worry about is the TV news. I worry about the quality of legislation when there isn’t a passionate, unbiased reporter there to explain it to us.”

As Godin pointed out, this “intelligent coverage” by an “unbiased reporter” need not be in newspapers. In the future, more of it will be on web sites like this one. But this one is being done by one person, who is not a superman. One non-superman can help offset-but can not entirely compensate for-the cutbacks at several other news organizations.

That’s why I’m especially grateful to those of you who emailed me news tips, to those who sent donations (more of you are welcome to do that), and to Mark Johnson for once again having me on his radio program on WDEV.

Next week: From the Legislature.