The folks over at the Washington Post must have needed copy desperately for Monday’s opinion page if they were willing to publish a piece titled, “How Twitter can help predict an election.” In the column, Indiana University Sociologist Fabio Rojas asserts: “Twitter discussions are an unusually good predictor of U.S. […] Read more »
For Sports Fans, Before the Internet, There Were the Complete Handbooks
… From 1971 to 1997, [Zander] Hollander edited sports yearbooks, brick-like tomes known as Complete Handbooks, which in the pre-Internet era were almost holy objects to a certain type of sports-crazed youngster. Here, in one glorious place, was information — statistics, team rosters, records, schedules, predictions for the coming season and […] Read more »
Nate Silver addresses assembled statisticians at this year’s JSM
Nate Silver of 538 fame gave the President’s invited address this year at the Joint Statistical Meeting in Montreal. Nate began his talk by pointing out that because of his efforts to bring statistical rigor to topics usually covered by journalists he is often portrayed as a kind of statistical […] Read more »
Silver’s switch may not succeed
Nate Silver’s move to the ESPN mother ship may be the best thing for all concerned. … I started pondering this many years ago, probably before [Nate] Silver was born, about the marketability of polls, the kind that Silver enjoys bundling. I wanted to be able to syndicate poll results […] Read more »
‘Big Data’ threatens poll standards
Campaign polling is crossing over into dangerous territory as it meets “Big Data,” the latest craze in campaigning. … The hitch for political pollsters is that these new methods threaten to trample on privacy and confidentiality, as traditionally practiced by survey researchers. [cont.] David Hill (Hill Research Consultants), The Hill Read more »
There’s a Fly in My Tweets
… The millions of people posting to sites like Twitter and Facebook can be viewed as a vast organic sensor network, providing a real-time stream of data about the social, biological and physical worlds. While people use social media to build and maintain their social ties, the “data exhaust” of […] Read more »