Nate Silver

Paul Wells on how Harper’s winning issue is losing its kick

Colby Cosh on the Sports Guy and the Witch

Psy and a Jay-Z’s baby topped music charts, while a blogger and Kim Jong Un also earned the world’s attention.

Sonia Sotomayor hits Sesame Street, Robert Mugabe is the new Cecil Rhodes, plus a king-in-not-waiting

Obama’s odds, no-money-down tuition, Halo 4 & a drug bust

Colby Cosh works to extract a signal from the noise while offering a lesson from the Alberta election

Jamie Weinman on the gap between trusting your gut and stats

Nate Silver’s attackers don’t know what they’re talking about. (Nor do his defenders)

Colby Cosh finds out what subsets, modelling assumptions and ‘non-probability samples’ have to do with polling these days

Nate Silver measures the impact of campaign advertising.

In lavish detail, Nate Silver explains how Washington might create its own Question Time. Meanwhile, former McCain campaign strategist Mark McKinnon posits that a regular QT might help leach “partisan poison” from Capitol Hill.

I hope, though I doubt, that Nate Silver’s performance during the stretch drive of the Massachusetts special Senate election will finally lead to him being downgraded from “All-seeing HAL-9000-esque quantitative wizard” to “Just another guy with a computer”. Armed only with the traditional maxims of psephological interpretation, which teach that a late polling break away from the incumbent party is a very unfavourable omen, one could have figured out ten days ago that repulsive Democratic candidate Martha Coakley was in a heap of trouble. Silver, with his revolutionary disregard for everything but the polling numbers, was still arguing as late as Thursday afternoon that Coakley was the clear favourite; he changed his mind at midnight that evening and acknowledged that Scott Brown had a puncher’s chance.