Dichotomy...

If you're interested in Politics and numbers (or really just numbers), I suggest you have a look at Five Thirty Eight (so named because there are 538 electoral votes). Rather than looking at a single poll and saying that so-an-so is ahead by X points, Nate Silver's algorithms compile massive amounts of poll data and analyze it all, weighting the more historically accurate, more recent, and larger sample-size polls heavier. Of all places to see something like this, I read about this in my Sports Illustrated, because Mr. Silver is also a writer/analyst for Baseball Prospectus. He's after basically the same thing I am with Chaos Rankings, in that he wants to accumulate the largest sample sizes possible because it negates outliers. As someone who literally has dreams about how to put together this kind of thing, all the different plots and graphs on the page made my mouth water. Certainly, 538 isn't for everyone, most people will likely just zone out due to information overload once the page comes up, but I thought it was fascinating and well worth some further investigation this weekend.

Posted by Rev. Adam on Friday, October 10, 2008 at 4:24 PM | Permalink