<story><title>Live Presidential Forecast</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/elections/forecast/president?1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Rexxar</author><text>Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the_duke</author><text>I just checked.&lt;p&gt;They gauges moving around is definitely random.&lt;p&gt;The updates are done with a &amp;quot;president.json&amp;quot; file, fetched every 15 seconds, but the timestamp in the json data only changes every 30-180 seconds.&lt;p&gt;So all of the movement is just random jitter to make it engaging.&lt;p&gt;Maybe a bit disingenuous.&lt;p&gt;(Note: I first thought they might be using websockets, but no WS connection is made on the page. Only a ajax fetch of president.json)</text></comment>
<story><title>Live Presidential Forecast</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/elections/forecast/president?1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Rexxar</author><text>Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tinyyy</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s an interesting way to represent uncertainty; it seems pretty intuitive to me.</text></comment>