Its new telephone-based random-quota sample cut that to 18 points.

ECONOMIST: Why the polls got it wrong last time

The monthly Consumer Confidence Survey, based on a probability-design random sample, is conducted for The Conference Board by Nielsen.

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They partnered with Modern Survey, which sends out a survey to a random sample of full-time, adult US workers to learn how they feel about their relationship with their managers.

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Beckman said Boston Chicken -- which operates restaurants called Boston Market -- voluntarily performs four random sample tests for the bacteria.

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This year, however, saw a decline in the percentage of tweens and tens in the social networking universe, with a rise in the 18 to 24 year old segment, 25 to 34 year olds, 35-44 and 45-55 age brackets, New Jersey-based Edison Research found in their national random sample of 2, 020 telephone interviews conducted in February 2011.

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To do this, he and his team took a random sample from the corpus, checked what proportion were non-words and extrapolated that to the whole lot.

ECONOMIST: Science invades the humanities

From a random sample of 1, 006 admissions, 324 patient safety incidents were found - 136 (42%) resulting in patient harm.

BBC: NEWS | Health | Drive to improve patient safety

This comes after weeks of spotty polling, in which wide-scale power outages and destruction made it difficult to find a truly random opinion sample.

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