As the US Republicans deal with the apparent rebuke from the American people and the US Democrats get to work on bridging a divided country under President Barack Obama's renewed four-year lease after the 2012 Presidential Elections, the story that caught my attention is that of a statistician, Nate Silver.

Nate Silver does not work for either party. He is a statistician who accurately predicted the election, and re-election, of President Obama, by aggregating poll data from various sources to find relationships among them, and then determining, based on his own methodology, what the likely outcome is.

Pictured right: Morris Sim

Beyond elections Silver has also analysed future performance of baseball hitters and pitchers. His blog, FiveThirtyEight.com (538 being the number of electorates in the United States Presidential Elections) currently sits at website of The New York Times.

Silver, who is 34, is a new breed of analyst needed for Big Data to realise its potential.  He's someone who understands the essence of sound statistical methods, but is able to apply/reject practices in the imperfect world that data lives in outside of academia.

The lack of ability to do so leads to the wrong conclusions, as the traditional US Republican statisticians saw in the last 24 hours.

Full story:

www.webintravel.com//blog/data-nerds-are-the-new-oracles_3444