February 23, 2009

Nate Silver’s Computer Only Works On Politics

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It’s actually kind of nice to know that the guy is fallible. After correctly predicting just about every aspect of the 2008 elections, if statistical superhero Nate Silver had gotten the Oscars right too, he might have been burned as a witch by an angry, frightened populace. But as Kevin mentioned last night, Silver got two of his six predictions wrong: Penelope Cruz beat Taraji P. Henson for Best Supporting Actress, while Sean Penn prevailed over Mickey Rourke. Silver has posted a lengthy bit of navel-gazing over at 538.com, and while he attributes his supercomputer’s error on the Supporting Actress call to the “unusual circumstance” surrounding the shift of Kate Winslett’s Reader role to the lead category, his explanation of the Penn win is a little less, well, technical:

In the Best Actor category, we might also have learned a thing or two last night. Namely, it probably doesn’t help to be a huge jackass (like Mickey Rourke) to all of your peers when those peers are responsible for deciding whether you receive a major, life-altering award.

Darn those jackasses: they’re always screwing up the computer models! Well, we forgive you, Nate, and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb if I say that if you had to get something wrong, we’re glad it was the Oscars and not the election.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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