With the recent talk about sailing demographics from Octagon (see here), I thought it would be interesting to do the same amongst us at catsailor. Get as many people to vote as you can! (and give me a little while to get all these polls working).

Octagon's demographics:

Age 25-54 65%
Male 75%
Female 25%
Median Net Worth $1,013,986
Net Worth $1 Million+ 51%
Net Worth $3 Million+ 11%
Professional/Managerial 53%
CEOs 26%
College Graduate or More 75%

http://www.acurasorc.com/octagon/index.html

Net Woth is basically if you sold everything you owned, and paid all the debt you have, what's left over? If there are too many 1m+, we'll re-examine that.

I had a hard time figuring out the job categories - email me if you have any better ideas.

Someone pointed out that I should have added self-employed to the poll (good one)...however, I can't edit the poll once it's started. If you're self-employed, post a reply here and I will add it to the final tally.

Someone else made a good suggestion to add "professional" to cover the likes of engineers and IT folks (I should have thought of that one since I'm an engineer!...it was early). Sooooo...if you're self-employed or a professional, put it in a reply here.

Self employed

I assumed "business owner" meant self-employed.

Educator (Adult Basic Education)

Sorry! I'd already punched the button for "Administrative/Clerical" for lack of a better category, and then I read this post.

Ok...I selected "Management", but I could just as easily be classified "Professional"....Engineer leading engineers....

Can we further confuse things!!

Joe

I'm a tradesperson, and there's nothing like that in the list. How about including trades, which would include carpentry, auto repair, plumbing, construction, printing, typesetting/graphics (me!) ;-) craftsmen of all sorts, including SAILMAKERS...

It's interesting. I've found that most polls don't include trades...

sea ya
tami

I think there is a max limit on the number of items you can put in a poll. Plus, the results would probably be so widely scattered that it'd be difficult to interpolate any sort of useful information from the data.
(I'm in Data Management, )

Jake,
I know that not many women frequent the sailing forums, including this one, but I'm sure there are more than two of us.

One minor problem with doing polls on the forum is that only one person can vote from any given ISP address. For instance, if Rick had gotten to the polls first, I would not have been able to vote, and you would have only ONE woman on there instead of two.

On the other hand, if more than one sailor lives in a household, if both WERE able to vote (or if they vote from different computer locations), only one of them should do the "Net Worth" category; otherwise, those particular statistics would be badly skewed -- like this smile.

(Actually, I don't know whether the one-vote-per-computer thing is true for everybody. Our ISP is the same all the time for both Rick's computer and mine. But if someone uses a big server like Yahoo or AOL, is it possible for one person to log off and another to log on so both can vote from the same location because a different ISP address is being assigned each time? I'm sure somebody knows the answer to this.)

delete your cookies and try to vote again

its how we skew all the online polls... heh.

Maugan,
A college education is a wonderful thing. Next time I need to figure out a way to "beat the system," I will know whom to ask.

But (cookies aside) I still want to know whether some people are able to vote twice and others aren't, depending upon their type of server.

It all has to do with your IP address which is essentially your street address on the super information highway. High speed providers usually give you a static IP address (your's is 216.89.227.196). Dial up providers usually use a set of rotating IP addresses since users are more likely to connect and disconnect frequently. This way they need fewer available IP address since they can just assign one that's not being used to a connecting user.

I believe the poll looks at your IP address and determines if you've voted or not and if it's already seen a response from that IP, it denies the user. So if you are using a dial up and your IP address is dynamic (not static) you can vote multiple times.

I agree that any results obtained through forum will be a bit skewed because there's probably a limited range of folks that participate online...how else could we go about it?

Thanks, Jake. That's kind of what I thought.

How else to go about it? Well, I have always done my polls in the magazine, about every three years, so I think it is time for me to do another one. I'll put one together for the March issue.

I know that my highspeed provider is DHCP.

Start->run->cmd->ipconfig /renew

in fact, theres some script I have stored away somewhere that skews polls. I wouldn't use it here, I used it on the suzuki heisman site to inflate Philip Rivers' lead. To bad he wasn't even invited despite my best efforts

I thought my Cable ISP was DHCP, or some sort of dynamic IP, since they said it changed every 30 minutes... The literature said they could give you a static IP if you wanted to pay more.

Let me try that skewing software, Maughn - I've always wanted to win a Heisman!

do you have python/lynx installed on your machine?
:P