It was a rough night for number crunchers. And for the faith that people in every field — business, politics, sports and academia — have increasingly placed in the power of data. Donald J. Trump’s victory ran counter to almost every major forecast — undercutting the belief that analyzing reams […] Read more »
The Election Polls That Matter
… “Big data” is a buzzword, but that concept is outdated. Campaigns have entered the era of “little data.” Huge data sets are often less helpful in understanding an electorate than one or two key data points — for instance, what issue is most important to a particular undecided voter. […] Read more »
If They Google You, Do You Win?
Are voters misleading pollsters? Are there hidden Donald Trump supporters who could throw the election his way? Over the past few years, we have both become interested in how data from the internet, particularly Google searches, might be used to predict events. People also tell Google things — a lot […] Read more »
The Age of Post-Truth Politics
… It is possible to live in a world of data but no facts. Think of how we employ weather forecasts: We understand that it is not a fact that it will be 75 degrees on Thursday, and that figure will fluctuate all the time. Weather forecasting works in a […] Read more »
Fifty States of Anxiety
Feeling worried? These days, much of America is. Over the past eight years, Google search rates for anxiety have more than doubled. They are higher this year than they have been in any year since Google searches were first tracked in 2004. … Over the past few weeks, I’ve taken […] Read more »
Automatic polling using Computational Linguistics: More reliable than traditional polling?
The outcome of the 2016 EU referendum did not only spell disaster for the incumbent prime minister and the Remain campaign. It also amounted to a PR disaster for the commercial pollsters, with YouGov, Populus, ComRes, ORB Ipsos-Mori and Survation all failing to correctly predict the outcome. … By contrast, […] Read more »