Langer Research Associates, Brooklyn Greenway Initiative and the Horticultural Society of New York today announced the start of a research project studying the potential impact of a new natural urban open space on the nature-related attitudes and experiences of nearby residents. See details here.

We’ve seen extensive pickup of our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll the past week, in news outlets including Time magazine, CNN (here and here), The New York Times, the Huffington Post (here, here and here), The Wall Street Journal, PBS NewsHour, The New Yorker, Forbes,Politico, MSNBC (here and here), Bloomberg News, Reuters, The Hill (here and here), RealClearPolitics, the Washington Examiner, The Christian Science Monitor and Yahoo News.

Gary Langer and Matthew Warshaw of D3 Systems and the Afghan Center for Socio-economic and Opinion Research presented polling on the upcoming Afghan election today at the Pakistan Afghanistan Federation Forum, a weekly briefing hosted by the U.S. Department of Defense at the Pentagon. See the slides here.

Langer Research Associates produces public opinion polls for the ABC News television network, including representing ABC in its partnership in the ongoing ABC News/Washington Post poll. Please click here for a newly updated summary of the methodology used in these surveys and our survey reporting standards.

We maintain an ABC-based e-mail distribution list providing notification of new ABC News/Washington Post poll analyses. To join it, please contact info@langerresearch.com.

Bloomberg News today reported a national survey on customer reaction to the data breach at Target stores. The survey, conducted for Bloomberg by Langer Research Associates, received additional coverage from several other news outlets, including the Detroit News, The Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Pioneer Press (in St. Paul, Minnesota), the Austin American-Statesman, The Hill, The Columbian (in Clark County, Washington), Business Times, Finance & Commerce and multifarious financial news websites.

Langer Research Associates today presented a study evaluating the predictive validity of the weekly Bloomberg® Consumer Comfort Index™ in relation to personal expenditures and stock market values. The paper found that the CCI improves the traditional model for predicting personal expenditures, and substantially outperforms a buy-and-hold strategy in a variety of hypothetical stock investments for the period tested.

The paper, presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Anaheim, California, is available here, the presentation slides are here and details on the CCI are here.

A national survey in Afghanistan finds a virtual dead heat in the presidential runoff election between Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, with sharp ethnic and regional differences among likely voters. But the poll also finds opportunity for substantial acceptance of the eventual outcome, with more than seven in 10 Afghans saying they’ll see whichever candidates wins as the country’s legitimate leader.

The survey was conducted by ACSOR-Surveys in Kabul, with analysis by Langer Research Associates. Details are available here, and the study will be presented this afternoon at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Anaheim, California.

We’re in the midst of providing a two-day seminar on applied research methods for the United Nations Department of Social and Economic Affairs at U.N. headquarters in New York. Christopher Weiss led a daylong session Tuesday introducing key concepts and research techniques. He’s returned today to cover effective communication with data, while Damla Ergun leads a concurrent short course on statistical analysis techniques. Gary Langer will close the session this afternoon with a presentation, “Dealing with Data,” on the goals, pitfalls and possibilities of data analysis.

Bloomberg Briefs published a p.1 report Tuesday on a study we’ve produced evaluating the utility of the Consumer Comfort Index in predicting personal expenditures and stock market changes. Our report, prepared for presentation at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research next week, is available here.

Our weekly Consumer Comfort Index with Bloomberg nicely anticipated this week’s improved employment data; in advance of those numbers the CCI this week reached its second-highest since early 2008. We’ve shown a very high long-term correlation of the CCI and employment, at .80, and at .84 with the CCI on a six-month lead. This week also marked our shift of the CCI to a rebased scale of 0-100 for greater ease of interpretation.