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Nate Silver Talks FiveThirtyEight.Com, ESPN At USC

Published by USC Bedrosian Center on

Marc Sallinger for Neon Tommy reported on the recent Holt Lecture featuring statistician Nate Silver.

Although Silver is an innovator leading the charge to change the world we live in, he is also very adamant on the negatives his work may portray. The social media revolution has caused vast amounts of data to become readily available to people all over the globe. Silver was resolute in the fact that big data creates big problems. News travels so fast that one single tweet can send off chain reactions of panic all across the globe. Silver agrees that although the abundance of information has its downsides, it can also be used to reshape projections and statistics we rely on today to make predictions.

“The digital revolution has forced everyone to leave a digital trail everywhere they go,” Silver said. “I still don’t think there’s a way to correlate the amount of tweets a minute about a topic into anything in specific. I think it changes the metabolism of campaigns. If someone puts out an ad that is inaccurate, people on social media are immediately critiquing it.”

Read the full post (Neon Tommy is now at uscannenbergmedia.com but the archive is still hosted on neontommy.com) at Neon Tommy.

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