Nate Silver

• began career as an economic consultant
• created  a system on the side called PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) that projected the performance and careers of baseball players
• system was very accurate and successful
• before the 2008 elections he created the blog FiveThirtyEight.com (named after the number of votes in the Electoral College)
• predicted primary election results around the country with stunning success
• Silver used demographics to track and predict
• created a model that took voting patterns from previous primaries and applied them to upcoming contests 

George Gallup

• introduced probability sampling
• founded the Institute of American Public Opinion in 1935

A.C. Nielsen

• Founder of broadcast survey firm bearing his name
• In the 1940s Nielsen divided listernship into demographic breakdowns (gender, age) so advertisers would know what to try and sell
• In the 1950s Nielsen moved into television monitoring and expanded into even more demographic breakdowns
• Today breakdowns include income, education, religion, occupation, neighborhood and even which products the viewers of certain programs use frequently

Probability Sampling

• everyone in the population being surveyed has an equal chance to be sampled
• Four factors are key to accurate surveying: sample size, sample selection, margin of error and confidence level
• sample size: number of people surveyed
• sample selection: process for choosing individuals to be interviewed 
• margin of error: percentage that a survey may be off mark
• confidence level: degree of certainty that a survey is accurate

Statistical Extrapolation

• Drawing conclusions from a segment of the whole

• Checks newspaper and magazine circulation 
• formed in 1914 to remove the temptation for publishers to inflate thier claims to attract advertisers and hike ad rates

• next-morning reports on network viewership
• measures broadcast audiences 

• small groups interviewed in loosely structured ways for opinions and reactions
• an interview crew goes into a public place (i.e. shopping center), chooses about a dozen people based on gender and age, and offers them some sort of incentive to sit and watch a local newscast
• a moderator then asks them questions, sometimes leading or loaded, to open them up
• tricky research message because info can become easily skewed/biased if the moderator is biased

• Psychographics: breaking down a population by lifestyle characteristics
• VALS: pyschographic analysis by values, lifestyle and life stage