Friday, November 14, 2008

One more fivethirtyeight.com post

I swear this is the last post about Nate Silver and Sean Quinn's very accurate and impressive website and blog that ruled the presidential election (fivethirtyeight.com).

Here is a link to an article from the Nov. 10th New York Times you can read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10silver.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Well, not the absolute last post. Just wait until 2010...

Sunday, November 9, 2008

538 Continued

Since I mentioned how I strangely followed up on watching the website fivethirtyeight.com throughout the last few months of the campaigns by creating a chart that shows how well Nate Silver and Sean Quinn did state by state in the Presidential election, I thought at least I should share some of my data.
(Isn't this another strange thing to be doing, considering that very few people are reading this?)

Here are some brief results. I thought of copying the WHOLE CHART but that would just be busy work, I think. By the way, my husband's wise answer to why I did this chart thing was that I was just really interested in it. A boring reason, but probably true.

According to fivethirtyeight.com's creators, every state that they predicted would go to Obama went to Obama and every state that they predicted would go to McCain went to McCain. Now that is pretty impressive in itself! More impressive were stats like this...they predicted that Maryland would go Democratic by 23 points, which it did. They predicted the exact number of points (decimals were rounded up at .5) for New Hampshire, Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Minnesota, Montana, and New Jersey. There were also another four states in which their prediction was only one point off! They also predicted the states that would be too close to call.
I'm sorry but this is just too amazing. My readers might want to take a look at this website if Nate Silver and Sean Quinn decide to continue it for the next election cycle. I know I will be watching it carefully. Oh, I should tell you that my hair stylist, Jan Xeno, was the one who told me about 538 because Sean is her nephew (cousin?). Thanks, Jan.

And why am I doing this blog when I have little time and not much to say? I guess it's because I always thought I might have some writing ability. Maybe people who should write should just write. Hello out there!