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Robert Winner

TEDCRED 50+

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Are you a beliver in Nate Silver

In the last two elections Nate Silver has been right on target. Gallop Polls which have been the standard for years came in behind IPSOS, google, and way behind Silver.

This year Silver and his magic formula predicted every out come with one error a Senate seat in North Dakota.

To view the future of polling read his book "The Signal and the Noise".

What do you think the significance of Silvers polls are in the future of elections?

What will this mean to Gallop and Harris and the other old guards?

How could this effect the primaries and even the nomination selections?

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    Theodore A. Hoppe 200+

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    Nov 13 2012: Let's look at the title of Silver's book, "The Signal and the Noise" since it is a description of what Silver is addressing. In scientific terms, "the noise" is the sea of information that is generated on a specific topic. Sliver is merely improving upon the way "the signal," a specific bit of information, is teased out of the noise, by refining how the noise is measured. It might be baseball player performances or an election performance of a candidate.
    The way this will change political primaries is that we will no longer allow small states like Iowa, with its small caucus group format that represent a very narrow populous, to pick the front runner in national elections

    “Projection, prediction, assumption, trepidation, anticipation, expectation, estimation… we wouldn’t have 80 words like this in the English language if it wasn’t central to our lives. We tend not to take prediction seriously because, on some level, we know that we don’t know. Silver shows us how this inevitable part of life goes awry when projected on a grand scale into the murky worlds of politics, science and economics. Dancing through chess, sports, snowstorms, global warming and the McLaughlin Group, he makes a serious and systematic effort to show us how to clean the noise off the signal.”
    —Bill James, author of The Bill James Baseball Abstracts

    In an age of "Big Data" what Silver is doing is necessary and will improve our lives.

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