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This election proved you're only as good as your data
As you've probably heard, while Hillary Clinton won the majority of the popular vote, Donald Trump was awarded more than 270 votes in the Electoral College. Many, particularly on social media, were incredulous, partly at the candidates but also at the pollsters -- in particular, famous polling analysts like Nate Silver from Disney's FiveThirtyEight blog. Silver rose to fame as the guy who successfully predicted the past few presidential elections. In 2008, he correctly predicted 49 of 50 states, and in 2012 he nailed all 50. With that, plus an impressive showing in the midterms, a legend was born. The 2016 presidential election was not so kind to FiveThirtyEight, with misses in the battlegrounds of Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin turning the odds quickly in favor of Trump. But throughout nearly the entire general election campaign, Mrs. Clinton was an overwhelming favorite. So the question is: What went wrong? There are explanations all over the internet this week, but there's one that should not be overlooked: Polling ...
The first presidential debate broke multiple internet records
It won't shock you to hear that the first US presidential debate shattered TV viewing records -- Nielsen says the broadcast was the most-watched debate ever with an average of 84 million viewers. However, it also pushed boundaries of the internet, too. For starters, YouTube reports that Clinton-versus-Trump was the biggest political live stream "of all time," with almost 2 million concurrent viewers spread across six major news outlets. It was also one of the largest streams in the site's history, and had 14 times more live viewers than during the 2012 debate.
The 2016 presidential race according to Facebook 'likes'
The data-minded folks over at FiveThirtyEight have teamed up with Facebook to find out what parts of the country support which candidate via an interactive map. While FiveThirtyEight stresses that this is in no way a representative sample (Facebook users skew heavily younger, low-income and female, for instance), it's still interesting to see where candidates stack up in terms of page likes.
ESPN investigates the historic Kasparov vs. IBM chess games
The battle of wits between IBM and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov is one of the biggest moments in the history of artificial intelligence. After conceding defeat, the Russian suggested that the IBM team had cheated their way to a victory, something that the company, to this day, refutes. A new film, from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, seeks to shed some light on the accusation and what prompted his allegations. Directed by Hollywood uber-producer Frank Marshall, the documentary examines the controversial 44th move and how a simple computer error proved to be Kasparov's undoing.
