Nate Silver's Five-Thirty-Eight Blog now a regular feature at the NYT

[quiet.american]

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/welcome-and-welcome-back/">NYT - Nate Silver: Welcome (and Welcome Back to Five-Thirty-Eight)

....FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts performed quite well in 2008, predicting 49 of 50 states correctly in the presidential election, as well as all 35 Senate races. Nevertheless, I have re-engineered our Senate model to improve it. It is now much smarter, for instance, in how it estimates the amount of error associated with each forecast. The more the polling tends to diverge in a given race, or the more undecided voters there are, the less confident it is in its projections.

Our new House forecasting model, meanwhile, which we plan to release next week, uses a multiplicity of indicators (national and local polls, forecasts from experts like Cook Political, fund-raising data, and so forth) to project the outcome of each seat, a calibration that is based on the amount of predictive power that each indicator has had in the past. Although polling is a key input in each of our models, we do not use it verbatim: we adjust our analysis to account for polls that show a consistent partisan bias, for instance, and give more weight to polls that have been more accurate in the past.

....Of course, this is now all going to be done under the auspices of a mainstream media partner: The New York Times, which is not only hosting the blog but is enlisting its team of interactive journalists and graphics experts to deepen and enhance it. While I hope this move broadens FiveThirtyEight’s audience, I welcome to the new venue the many loyal readers who have followed the blog over the past two and a half years.

Fundamentally, I’ve always seen FiveThirtyEight’s mission as being parallel to journalism: objectivity and accuracy have been core values of the blog, but it has also prized clarity of thought and of written and visual communication. Therefore, this is a pretty natural partnership. But I also recognize that this will lead to greater criticism and scrutiny. For the most part, we welcome it: many of the biggest improvements to FiveThirtyEight’s forecasting products have come in response to points raised by our critics, and the blog would never have existed in the first place if I had been more satisfied with the way the press covers politics. We hope to hear frequently from our readers, and we hope that you’ll join us from now until November and in the months and years ahead.

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Glad to see this!

[Cha]

1. HA!

".. and the blog would never have existed in the first place if I had been more satisfied with the way the press covers politics. We hope to hear frequently from our readers, and we hope that you’ll join us from now until November and in the months and years ahead."

Nate goes mainstream..may he have a long and successful career with his mission ".. as being parallel to journalism: objectivity and accuracy have been core values of the blog, but it has also prized clarity of thought and of written and visual communication." So Lacking.. :fistbump: