FYI: This week we have a special statistical election edition of Masters in Business radio podcast, speaking with Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com. Silver received his Bachelors in Economics in 2000 from University of Chicago, and is the author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail–but Some Don’t.
Silver first came to the public attention’s with his shockingly accurate forecasts of political elections, from U.S. Senate to the President. He “ran the table” in 2010, 2012, and 2014 using a statistical methodology adopted in part from baseball. Eschewing the anecdote driven approach the mainstream media embraces, Silver takes a statistical average of all surveys and polls, adjusting for know tendencies and biases. The result has been a stunningly accurate run of predictions in the U.S. (the method has not worked as well in the UK, where election cycles are so much shorter).
He began publishing under a pen name at Daily Kos, before the editors at the New York Times made fivethirtyeight.com part of the Times site. During the 2012 electoral peak, fivethirtyeight was 20% of the NYT’s web traffic.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/08/masters-in-business-nate-silver-of-fivethirtyeight-com/print/fivethirtyeight.com:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/
