The Silver Standard
Here at Bedrosian Center headquarters, hearts and calculators are aflutter with the news that Nate Silver is paying the U.S.C. campus a visit on Friday as part of the Holt Distinguished Lecture series. Silver is the statistics wunderkind whose uncannily accurate political predictions as a New York Times blogger earned him widespread popularity and created a new awareness about opportunities for analytics in popular culture.
With appearances at the TED and SXSW conferences, Silver is perhaps as close as anyone in the field of analytics gets to rock-star status. He also authored the 2012 New York Times bestseller The Signal and The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t.
Before he became a popular name in the political world, Silver was a celebrated analyst of baseball statistics, developing a statistical tool still in wide use in Major League Baseball. On Friday, he will connect the dots between a couple of his passions in a lecture entitled “Baseball and Politics are Data Driven.”
The talk is part of the Dennis F. and Brooks Holt Distinguished Lecture Series, which was established by longtime Price School board of councilors member Dennis Holt (founding chairman and CEO of U.S. International Media) and his wife, Brooks. Working in concert with the Bedrosian Center, the Holt Lecture Series invites prominent practitioners, influential policy makers, and visiting scholars to discuss issues, curricula, and research regarding communication and public policy.
To get (free) tickets for the Silver lecture, visit the event page. In celebration of Nate Silver and data-driven analysis, we’ll also be taking a look at the way big data is making an impact on governance thisweek. Stay tuned to the Bedrosian Center website for more updates.