Consumer confidence in current economic conditions

For NYT Opinion, Nate Silver compares consumer confidence between two surveys. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment focuses more on personal spending, whereas the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey. Usually, the estimates follow each other, but there’s been a split the past few years, as shown in the difference chart above.

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FiveThirtyEight layoffs

Disney began more layoffs, and data-centric FiveThirtyEight, which is owned by Disney, was part of the round. Nate Silver, founder and editor-in-chief of the site, also announced he is likely to be leaving soon:

Disney layoffs have substantially impacted FiveThirtyEight. I am sad and disappointed to a degree that’s kind of hard to express right now. We’ve been at Disney almost 10 years. My contract is up soon and I expect that I’ll be leaving at the end of it.

I had been worried about an outcome like this and so have had some great initial conversations about opportunities elsewhere. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. I am so proud of the work of FiveThirtyEight staff. It has never been easy. I’m so sorry to the people impacted by this.

Feels like a shift in data and stories.

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✚ Less Time With Methods, More Time With Questions and Context (The Process #61)

Data represents the real world, and visualization represents data. But sometimes data and the real world disagree with each other. Read More

Concussion, TBI, human evolution, Neanderthal DNA, blogging news

Concussion, traumatic brain injury, and life’s hard knocks Search “concussion” in the media and you’ll come away thinking hard knocks to the head are chiefly a problem for kids and football players (or kid football players.) Last fall the blog … Continue reading »

The post Concussion, TBI, human evolution, Neanderthal DNA, blogging news appeared first on PLOS Blogs Network.

Math always wins

In the wake of Obama‘s re-election, people are going to spend a lot of time first crowing over the success of Nate Silver‘s election forecasting at FiveThirtyEight.com, then telling us all why he didn’t do that good of a job. The point is not that Nate Silver is a genius. The point is that these methodologies can be tested. We can see how they perform. Then we can tweak them and see if they perform better. As a whole, they are not going to get worse. And, these statistical methodologies are slowly creeping into the public view.

The pundits don’t want this to happen. They make a killing saying things that can’t get checked. They don’t have to update their methods. Accountability is anathema to pundits. One’s “gut” is not amenable to validation.

We can see this in baseball. We all know (among the set of people who care about baseball) that the “Moneyball” or sabermetrics approach is more effective than traditional methods of evaluating talent, which is more effective than the random citing of statistics used by play-by-play analysts.

Nate Silver’s forecasting was not the only coherent system for analyzing the election, nor was it the most accurate. The publicity afforded by his association with The New York Times made his predictions the test case for legitimate math and reason. Math won. It always wins.

*Paul Raeburn says essentially the same thing first, here.