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 | The Golden Gate Bridge. San Francisco, California June 10, 2008 |
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« More On The DCA Preview Center | Main | I May Love Roller Coasters, But... » October 16, 2008Meet Nate Silver, Statistics GodAs anyone close to me will tell you (read: Elaine), I've been consumed with the Presidential election. Part of this consumption involves checking FiveThirtyEight.com on an regular (read: hourly) basis. Run by statistics god Nate Silver (you've probably seen him on Countdown or Colbert in the last week or so), FiveThirtyEight weights various state and national polls, applies Monte Carlo simulation, and then uses the results to forecast how they think the election will turn out. (At the moment, he's giving Obama a 95.1% chance to win the election, and is forecasting 353.9 Electoral Votes for 'Bama, and 184.1 for McCain.) New York Magazine has an interview/profile of Silver, and it's a must-read: Silver’s site now gets about 600,000 visits daily. And as more and more people started wondering who he was, in May, Silver decided to unmask himself. To most people, the fact that Poblano turned out to be a guy named Nate Silver meant nothing. But to anyone who follows baseball seriously, this was like finding out that a guy anonymously running a high-fashion Website turned out to be Howard Cosell. At his day job, Silver works for Baseball Prospectus, a loosely organized think tank that, in the last ten years, has revolutionized the interpretation of baseball stats. Furthermore, Silver himself invented a system called PECOTA, an algorithm for predicting future performance by baseball players and teams. (It stands for “player empirical comparison and optimization test algorithm,” but is named, with a wink, after the mediocre Kansas City Royals infielder Bill Pecota.) Baseball Prospectus has a reputation in sports-media circles for being unfailingly rigorous, occasionally arrogant, and almost always correct. 95.1%, huh? Fingers crossed. Posted by Gavin Shearer at October 16, 2008 11:59 AM. Posted to Politics. Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsPost a commentThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)« More On The DCA Preview Center | Main | I May Love Roller Coasters, But... » |