One casualty of the election: people’s faith in surveys. We relied on polls to help us understand the election and they seemingly failed us. Although pre-election polls came within 1-2% of predicting the national popular vote, state polls that were the basis for Electoral College predictions were far less accurate. Whether and how to use…
The semi-serious data-driven magazine Improbable Research has released a study empirically assessing (with tongue firmly in cheek) just how famous Donald Trump is. The verdict? He’s bigger than Jesus. In “Measuring Fame Quantitatively V: Who’s the Most Famous of Them All (Part 2),” Dr. Eric Schulman, an astrophysicist and science humorist, used Google searches and…
(JTA) — Fittingly, Harvey Pollack was the one who scribbled the number 100 on the most famous photograph in basketball history: Wilt Chamberlain holding the piece of paper signifying his astounding point total in a 1962 game for the then Philadelphia Warriors. After all, Pollack is basketball’s ultimate numbers and public relations man. But the…
More than 1.7 million people in Israel were living in poverty in 2012 — some 23.5 percent of the population — marking a slight dip over the previous year. The annual poverty report, released this week by Israel’s National Insurance Institute and the Central Bureau of Statistics, noted that 817,000 children were among those living…
Nate SIlver is taking his stats and going to ESPN. The geeky numbers guy who turned the electoral vote counting into a national obsession with his FIveThirtyEight blog is leaving the New York Times for the sports network, the Times reported. He will be on staff at a new late night show run by Keith…
So much for gut feeling. After correctly predicting the results in 49 of the 50 states that have been called in the U.S. election (Florida remains too close to call), Nate Silver, the statistician behind the popular FiveThirtyEight blog, woke on Wednesday to find himself the poster child of what is sure to be a…
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