Thursday, November 08, 2012

Statistician Crush



So, I have a confession. I am a numbers nerd! For those of you that know me, this probably not a surprise. However, to the blogosphere this may be :)

Anyways, during election season I was seriously addicted to polls. But I would totally ignore all the national poll mumbo jumbo, because if I learned anything from the worst election ever (hellooo 2000. nightmare) it's that national polls mean nada. So instead I relied on my favorite statistician in the world -- Nate silver over at five thirty eight blog on nytimes.com. I first started following him last election in 2008 and was seriously impressed by his ability to translate complex polls, numbers, etc in a readable and interesting blog. Oh and he was insanely accurate. He thus became my 'go to' guy whenever I needed to know what was really going on in this election. Just take a look at the graphic below to see how accurate he was....
Impressive, right? (OK, maybe I'm the only one getting giddy about data). Secretly, whenever I was freaking out over how close this election was, I knew in the back of my mind that nate silver said there was a 91.9% chance Obama was going to win on election day. And when working with the numbers, that is a seriously good chance of winning. As one of my favorite blogs said when they read a statistic that Romney was maybe going to win Pennsylvania..... "Nate silver please hold me and tell me everything's going to be ok." Everything was okay and I thank him for helping me sleep soundly on tuesday night when I knew most of North America was glued to the TV watching the battle royale.

Anywho, this will be the last political post from me for a while. Phewwwww. I did appreciate the few congrats I got in the office on wed. It was all me! (although, Both Barack and Michelle congratulated and thanked me via email, so I can understand their confusion). :)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I am obsessed with the idea that the scholastic grade school pools are generally spot on in selecting the president...but frankly, I kinda trust that some 8 year olds will make more valid decisions than a lot of my peers

Natalie Corinne said...

have you seen the maps people have created that represent the population vs the size of states? I'm really nerdy about those.