Numbers are our specialty

If there's one thing that finance professionals and computer science professionals have in common, it's that everything in both fields is built on math (or maths - it's not mathematic - as they say in New Zealand but that's another issue). I'm interested in both and because of my interest in finance, I regularly find myself on Yahoo! Finance, in my opinion the best general finance site on the web. I enjoy the polls that are almost always at the bottom right of the front page, mostly because my opinion has been so much more bearish than average over the past couple of years. I feel pretty strongly that not only are we headed for a weak economy for the rest of the year and into 2008, but that a recession has already started. Needless to say my interest was piqued by the following poll:



I selected 'slam dunk' and was shown these results as of about 4:15 pm EST on 9/27. I immediately saw that effectively 49% of the respondents think that a recession is more likely than not and 54% think that the opposite is true. Unless my addition skills are seriously lacking or I have completely forgotten how rounding is done, this is an impossible result. Calculating these percentages couldn't be simpler and this incompetence certainly does not put a good face forward for a website that is essentially about numbers. Tighten this yesterday.