Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources

Nate Silver’s Iowa Caucus Predictions

Political season is data science season! Here is some more on Nate Silver’s forecasting methods. If you are reading this in real time (Sunday January 31), by tomorrow night we will find out what actually happens. I will reproduce some graphics here – these are all from the FiveThirtyEight site, so please thank me for the free advertising and don’t send me to copyright jail.

For Clinton vs. Sanders, here is Nate’s average of polls as of today. He gives more recent polls greater weighting, and also adjusts somehow for bias shown in the same polls in the past.

Average of polls: Clinton 48.0% vs. Sanders 42.7%

Now, this is within the 4-6% “margin of error” reported by most polls. (I find this easier to find on the RealClearPolitics site, although curiously it lists margins of error for Democratic polls but not Republican ones. RealClearPolitics does a straight-up poll average without all the corrections that today is Clinton 47.3% vs. Sanders 44%. So all the corrections don’t make an enormous difference.) I can’t easily and quickly find information on whether the “margin of error” is a standard error or a confidence interval or what, but generally when the polls are within the margin of error the media tends to report it as a “statistical tie” or dead heat. And that is exactly what they are saying in this case.

Nate Silver does a set of simulations – it sounds very complicated, but in essence I assume he takes his adjusted poll average for each candidate, some measure of spread like standard error, then runs a whole bunch of simulations. Which leads to results like this:

Clinton-Sanders Simulation

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/primary-forecast/iowa-democratic/

Based on this, Nate Silver gives Clinton an 80% chance of winning Iowa and Sanders only a 20% chance.

So what’s interesting is that you have the average of polls (48-43 or 47-44 depending on source), which everyone says is a statistical tie. You have Silver’s predicted result (50-43) based on a large number of simulations, and then you have the resulting odds considering both the predicted result and the spread in the predictions (80-20). In other words, the computer is generating random numbers and 80% of simulations end up favoring Clinton. Of course in real life the dice get rolled only once, but these odds seem pretty good for Clinton.

Meanwhile, the Trump-Cruz contest is similarly close in the polls (30-25 in favor of Trump), but the predicted result (26-25 in favor of Trump) and odds (48-41 in favor of Trump) are much closer. From a quick glance, this appears to be because the spreads are much wider. I don’t know why that would be the case – presence of more viable candidates on the Republican side? Or maybe there is just more variability in the polls and nobody actually knows why.

Republican Iowa Caucus simulation

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/primary-forecast/iowa-republican/

 

 

where are the refugees from?

Here’s a pretty awesome data analysis on where (legal) refugees who enter the U.S. come from, and where they go. It’s great both for the information, and for the presentation of the information, which is simple yet highly effective. Click on the link, but here are a few facts to whet your appetite:

  • The country of origin for the most refugees to the U.S. in 2014 was Iraq, at 19.651.
  • Surprisingly (to me at least), next is Burma at 14,577.
  • Rounding out the top five are Somalia (9,011), Bhutan (8,316), and D.R. Congo (4,502).
  • After Cuba (4,063), the next highest country from Central or South America is Columbia at 243.

I might have guessed Iraq, but I don’t think I would have guessed anything else on this list. In a number of cases, there are groups of essentially stateless people living in various places (Bhutan and Burma, for example) that the U.S. has agreed to resettle in fairly large groups. In other cases, there are just a handful of people from a given country granted refugee status in a given year. It is a little hard to make sense of why one group is allowed and the next is not.

Raspberry Pi

Here are a bunch of resources for learning Raspberry Pi:

To make it easier to find the kind of resource you want, we’ve grouped our resources under the headings of Teach, Learn and Make. In our Teach resources you’ll find individual lesson plans, complete schemes of work and teachers’ guides, including a teachers’ guide to using Raspberry Pi in the classroom to give educators who are new to the device the information they need to get started.

Our Learn resources guide learners through independent activities. One of the newest is Gravity Simulator, in which students learn about the effects of gravity and how to simulate them in Scratch with Mooncake, the official Raspberry Pi Foundation Cat. It’s one of a number of resources that support activities linked to British ESA Astronaut Tim Peake’s upcoming mission aboard the International Space Station.

Our Make resources support physical computing projects. They range from “getting started” activities for beginners and more in-depth standalone projects to fairly substantial, satisfying builds that you might complete over several sessions. One of these resources is a guide to making a Raspberry Pi marble maze using aSense HAT. A Sense HAT is at the heart of each of the two Astro Pi flight units that will soon be flying to the International Space Station; on board the ISS its gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer will be able to detect how the station is moving, and this activity uses the same sensors to work out which way a virtual marble will roll.

 

 

Givewell

GiveWell is an organization that claims it has found the charities that do the most good, and also need the most funding. They have concluded that “serving the global poor” is the way to do the most good and alleviate the most human suffering today.

GiveWell is a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give.

Unlike charity evaluators that focus solely on financials, assessing administrative or fundraising costs, we conduct in-depth research aiming to determine how much good a given program accomplishes (in terms of lives saved, lives improved, etc.) per dollar spent. Rather than try to rate as many charities as possible, we focus on the few charities that stand out most (by our criteria) in order to find and confidently recommend the best giving opportunities possible (our list of top charities).

Our top charities are (in alphabetical order):

We have recommended all four of these charities in the past.

We have also included four additional organizations on our top charities page as standout charities. They are (in alphabetical order):

seafood

National Geographic has put together an online seafood app. It uses information available elsewhere (Monterey Aquarium, etc.), but what is innovative is that you can easily filter the most sustainable, nutritious and low-mercury species using a tool bar. The only problem being that, if you pick all those options at once, there are only a couple choices left.

risk and investing

This blog is about looking at possible futures, not necessarily profiting from them. But of course, who doesn’t want to do that if they can? It’s not just about short-term profit, it’s about building a nest egg which is your personal resilience against whatever events the future holds. A nest egg is also about your personal choice to defer some happiness now for the possibility of greater happiness later.

This book looks promising to me. The author breaks risks into “inflation, deflation, confiscation, and devastation”. I haven’t read the book, but presumably he offers portfolio suggestions to deal with these risks.

Since I’m on personal finance today, here is a grab bag of other related topics and links.

One thing everyone can and should do right away is minimize how much the financial industry steals from us in the form of fees. Index funds are one way to do this. The case to go all-index is incredibly strong, but in case you don’t want to take my word for it, Vanguard makes the case every year. If you are the type to dig into numbers yourself, S&P has a free online data set here. Finally, this Economist column mentions a number of smaller startup companies that are providing some competition to the big banks and their ridiculous fees. Among them is TransferWise which says it allows people to transfer money abroad much cheaper than they have been able to in the past. I haven’t tried it yet.

Stellarium

Stellarium is free, open source software that simulates the night sky as it would appear from anywhere anytime (no foolin’ I promise). It’s used by professional planetariums, but you can download it to your Windows, Apple, Linux or Ubuntu machine.

Here’s one more fun thing – a simulation where you can change the mass of the Sun, Earth, or Moon and see how it affects the orbits of all three. If you make the Sun too big, the Earth gets sucked into it, but if you make it too small, the Earth just flies out into space. It just reminds us that we are lucky to be here. There’s also a similar simulation where you can make up your own planets and see how they would orbit a star and each other.

new grocery delivery services

This article is about some new subscription-based grocery delivery services. This could make it even easier to live in car-free walkable communities for those who want to do that. You can shop for fresh food at a market when you want to do that, but have a steady stream of basic staples delivered on a reliable basis. Combine this with smart appliances – meaning your refrigerator and cabinets know what is in them – and you should never have to run out for an item in the middle of the night again. The only possible concern I have is whether this will push us even more towards processed, packaged food.