nate mcguire

I know we’ve been pretty heavy on the serious stuff lately, but it is timely and necessary.  It’s official - Obama spanked McCain last night and will be the 44th President of the United States.

In an attempt to stay unbiased (I’m really not) and out of the touchy issues of this campaign, I give you a really interesting statistical site: FiveThirtyEight.com.  This guy has a pretty interesting story, Nate Silver used to be a baseball statistician and is now pretty much the up and coming name in political statistics reporting. Anybody that developed the most accurate polling data in polling history in his spare time is pretty impressive to me. His projection: 348.6 Obama, 189 McCain. Real life: 349 Obama, 159 McCain - with about 30 more coming his way.

He uses his baseball experience to balance out the polls using demographic data and using historical data of each poll to determine outcomes of political races. His site simulates elections a staggering 10,000 times a day in order to give a continuous up to date probability of the outcome. Oh, and if you didn’t know, 538 is the number of electors in the electoral college.

Look forward to some hope and optimism injected into our country, predicted by Nate Silver. Maybe he can give me stats on lotto numbers next. Or maybe wants to go to Vegas.